CHAPTER XVIII
Dr. Turnbull was the doctor who, it will be remembered, lived in the square near the church. There was another doctor in Eastthorpe, Mr. Butcher, of whom we have heard, but Dr. Turnbull’s reputation as a doctor was far higher than Mr. Butcher’s. What Eastthorpe thought of Dr. Turnbull as a man is another matter. Mr. Butcher was married, church-going, polite, smiling to everybody, and when he called he always said, “Well, and how are we?” in such a nice way, identifying himself with his patient. But even Eastthorpe had not much faith in him, and in very serious cases always preferred Dr. Turnbull. Eastthorpe had remarked that Mr. Butcher’s medicines had a curious similarity. He believed in two classes of diseases—sthenic and asthenic. For the former he prescribed bleeding and purgatives; for the latter he “threw in” bark and iron, and ordered port wine. Eastthorpe thought him very fair for colds, measles, chicken-pox, and for rashes of all sorts, and so did all the country round. He generally attended everybody for such complaints, but as Mr. Gosford said after his recovery from a dangerous attack, “when it come to a stoppage, I thought I’d better have Turnbull,” and Mr. Gosford sent for him promptly.
Dr. Turnbull was born three or four years before the outbreak of the French Revolution. He was consequently a little older than the great Dr. Elliotson, whose memory some of us still piously cherish, and Dr. Elliotson and he were devoted friends. Dr. Turnbull was tall, thin, upright, with undimmed grey eyes and dark hair, which had hardly yet begun to turn in colour, but was a little worn off his forehead. He had a curiously piercing look in his face, so that it was impossible if you told him an untruth not to feel that you were detected. He never joked or laughed in the sickroom or in his consulting-room, and his words were few. But what was most striking in him was his mute power of command, so that everybody in contact with him did his bidding without any effort on his part. He kept three servants—two women and a man. They were very good servants, but all three had been pronounced utterly intractable before they went to him. Master and mistress dared not speak to them; but with Dr. Turnbull they were suppressed as completely as if he had been Napoleon and they had been privates. He was kind to them, it is true, but at times very severe, and they could neither reply to him nor leave him. He did not affect the dress nor the manners of the doctors who preceded him. He wore a simple, black necktie, a shirt with no frill, and a black frock-coat. The poor worshipped him, as well they might, for his generosity to them was unexampled, and he took as much pains with them and was as kind to them as if they were the first people in Eastthorpe. He was perhaps even gentler with the poor than with the rich. He was very apt to be contemptuous, and to snarl when called to a rich man suffering from some trifling disorder who thought that his wealth justified a second opinion, but he watched the whole night through with the tenderness of a woman by the bedside of poor Phœbe Crowhurst when she had congestion of the lungs before she lived with Mrs. Furze. He saved that girl and would not take a sixpence, and when the mother, overcome with gratitude, actually fell on her knees before him and clung to him and sobbed and could not speak, he lifted her up with a “Nonsense, my good woman!” and quickly departed. He was a materialist, and described himself as one: he disbelieved in what he called the soap-bubble theory, that somewhere in us there is something like a bubble, which controls everything, and is everything, and escapes invisible and gaseous to some other place after death. Consequently he never went to church. He was not openly combative, but Eastthorpe knew his heresies, and was taught to shudder at them. His professionally religious neighbours of course put him in hell in the future, but the common people did not go so far as that, although they could not believe him saved. They somehow confounded his denial of immortality with his own mortality, and imagined he would be at an end when he was put into the grave. As time wore on the attitude, even of the clergy, towards the doctor was gradually changed. They hastened to recognise him on week-days as he walked in his rapid, stately manner through the streets, although if they saw him on Sundays they considered it more becoming to avoid him. He was, as we have seen, a materialist, but yet he was the most spiritual person in the whole district. He took the keenest interest in science; he was generous, and a believer in a spiritualism infinitely beyond that of most of his neighbours, for they had not a single spiritual interest. He was spiritual in his treatment of disease. He was before his age by half a century, and instead of “throwing in” drugs after the fashion of Butcher, he prescribed fresh air, rest, and change, and, above everything, administered his own powerful individuality. He did not follow his friend Elliotson into mesmerism, but he had a mesmerism of his own, subduing all terror and sanative like light. Mr. Gosford was not capable of great expression, but he was always as expressive as he could be when he told the story of that dreadful illness.
“He come into the room and ordered all the physic away, and then he sat down beside me, and it was just afore hay-harvest, and I was in mortal fright, and I said to him, ‘Oh, doctor, I shall die.’ Never shall I forget what I had gone through that night, for I’d done nothing but see the grave afore me, and I was lying in it a-rotting. Well, he took my hand, and he said, ‘Why, for that matter, my friend, I must die too; but there’s nothing in it; you won’t complain when you find out what death is. You won’t die yet, though, and you’ll get this lot of hay in at any rate; what a heavy crop it is!’ and he opened the winder and looked out. The way he spoke was wonderful, and what it was which come into me when he said, ‘I must die too,’ I don’t know, but all my terrors went away, and I lay as calm as a child. ’Fore God I did, as calm as a child, and I felt the wind upon me across the meadow while he stood looking at it, and I could almost have got up that minute. I warn’t out of bed for a fortnight, but I did go out into the hayfield, as he said.”
Why did Dr. Turnbull come to Eastthorpe? Nobody ever knew while he lived. The question had been put at least some thousands of times, and all kinds of inquiries made, but with no result. The real reason, discovered afterwards, was simply that he had bad health, and that he had fled from temptation in the shape of a woman whom he loved, but whom duty, as he interpreted it, forbade him to marry, because he considered it wicked to run the risk of bringing diseased children into the world.
This was the man to whom Catharine went. Mrs. Furze went with her. He was perfectly acquainted with Mrs. Furze, and had seen Catharine, but had never spoken to her. Mrs. Furze told her story, which was that Catharine had no appetite, and was wasting from no assignable cause. The doctor sounded her carefully, and then sat down without speaking. There was undoubtedly a weakness in one lung, but he was not satisfied. He knew how difficult it is to get people to tell the real truth to a physician, and that if a third person is present, it is impossible. He therefore asked Mrs. Furze if she would step into the next room. “A girl,” he said, “will not say all she has to say even to her mother.” Mrs. Furze did not quite like it, but obeyed.
“Miss Furze,” said the doctor, “I imagine you are a person who would not like to be deceived: you have a slight tenderness in the chest; there is no reasonable cause for alarm, but you will have to be careful.”
Catharine’s face lighted up a little when the last sentence was half finished, and the careful observer noticed it instantly.
“That, however, is not the cause of your troubles: there is something on your mind. I never make any inquiries in such cases, because I know if I did I should be met with evasions.”
Catharine’s eyes were on the floor. After a long pause she said—