"See, I am strong enough to withstand any operation," she declared one day, holding out the babe at arm's length.
"Not yet," said Jeremy, "not yet. The child needs you."
The child was asleep. She felt with her foot for its cradle, and with marvellous certainty deposited him gently in the nest and covered him with the tiny coverlet. Then she turned to Jeremy.
"My husband, don't you wish me to have my sight restored?"
"How can you doubt it?" he cried. "I would have you undergo this operation were my life the fee."
She came close to him and put her hands about his maimed face. "Dear," she said, "do you think anything could change my love for you?"
It was the first hint that she had divined his fears; but he remained silent, every fibre of his being shrinking from the monstrous argument. For answer, he kissed her hands as she withdrew them.
At last the time came for the great adventure. Letters passed between Jeremy and Mr. Hattaway of St. Thomas' Hospital, who engaged lodgings in Cork Street, so that they should be near his own residence in Bond Street hard by. A great travelling chariot and post-horses were hired from Bullingford, two great horse-pistols, which Jeremy had never fired off in his life, were loaded and primed and put in the holsters, and one morning in early August Jeremy and Barbara and the nurse and the baby started on their perilous journey. They lay at Reading that night and arrived without misadventure at Cork Street on the following afternoon. Mr. Hattaway called in the evening with two lean and solemn young men, his apprentices—for even the great Mr. Hattaway was but a barber-surgeon practising a trade under the control of a City Guild—and made his preparations for the morrow.
In these days of anæsthetics and cocaine, sterilised instruments, trained nurses and scientific ventilation it is almost impossible to realise the conditions under which surgical operations were conducted in the first half of the eighteenth century. Yet they occasionally were successful, and patients sometimes did survive, and nobody complained, thinking, like Barbara Wendover, that all was for the best in this best of all possible worlds. For, as she lay in the close, darkened room the next day, after the operation was over, tended by a chattering beldame of a midwife, she took the burning pain in her bandaged eyes—after the dare-devil fashion of the time Mr. Hattaway had operated on both at once—as part of the cure, and thanked God she was born into so marvellous an epoch. Then Jeremy came and sat by her bed and held her hand, and she was very happy.
But Jeremy then, and in the slow, torturing days that followed, went about shrunken like a man doomed to worse than death. London increased his agony. At first a natural curiosity (for he had passed through the town but twice before, once as he set out for the grand tour with Doctor Tubbs, and once on his return thence) and a countryman's craving for air took him out into the busy streets. But he found the behaviour of the populace far different from that of the inhabitants of Bullingford, who passed him by respectfully, though with averted faces. Porters and lackeys openly jeered at him, ragged children summoned their congeners and followed hooting in his train; it was a cruel age, and elegant gentlemen in flowered silk coats and lace ruffles had no compunction in holding their cambric handkerchiefs before their eyes and vowing within his hearing that, stab their vitals, such a fellow should wear a mask or be put into the Royal Society's Museum; and in St. James's Street one fine lady, stepping out of her sedan-chair almost into his arms, fell back shrieking that she had seen a monster, and pretended to faint as the obsequious staymaker ran out of his shop to her assistance.