The dwellings attached to turnpike gates are seldom so roomy and so abundantly provided with accommodation as to admit of an accidental visitor: but in the present case it so happened that there was an apartment unoccupied and not unfurnished. The gatekeeper’s wife, who was a notable and motherly kind of woman, said, that if the gentleman could put up with a very small apartment, and a coarse but clean bed, he might be accommodated, and he need not fear that the bed was damp, for it had been occupied for the last month, and had only been vacated the day before. Mr Primrose readily accepted the offer, not being very particular as to appearance.
“I suppose,” said he, “you keep a spare bed for the accommodation of those who may be overturned in coming down this hill? Your surgeon, I find, does not live far off. That is a good contrivance. Pray can you tell me, within a dozen or two, how many broken bones the stage coach supplies him with in the course of the year?”
At this speech the good woman laughed, for it was uttered in such a tone as intimated that the gentleman wished it to be laughed at; and as he was a respectable looking man, and carried in his aspect a promise to pay, the worthy wife of the gate-keeper laughed with right good will.
“Oh dear no, sir,” said she, “there is not an accident happens here hardly ever. The coachman what overturned you this morning, is one of the most carefullest men in the world, only he had a new horse as didn’t know the road.”
“A very great comfort is that,” said Mr Primrose, and he smiled, and the gate-keeper’s wife smiled, and she thought Mr Primrose a very funny man, that he should be able to joke when under the doctor’s hands. There are some people who are very facetious when they are sick, provided the sickness be not very acute; for it looks like heroism to laugh amidst pain and trouble.
Mr Primrose then proceeded; “So you will assure me that the person who occupied your spare bed last, was not an overturned coach passenger?”
The poor woman did not smile at this observation, but on the contrary looked very grave, and her eyes seemed to be filling with tears, when she compressed her lips and shook her head mournfully. With some effort, after a momentary silence, she said:
“No, sir, it was not any one that was overturned; but it was a coach passenger. It was a young lady, poor dear soul! that seemed almost dying of a broken heart. But had not you better go to bed, sir? The doctor said you wanted rest.”
Mr Primrose was a nervous man, and tales of sorrow inartificially told frequently depressed him, and excited his sympathy with greater force than was consistent with poetical enjoyment. He therefore took the considerate advice which the good woman gave him, and retired to rest. To a person of such temperament as Mr Primrose, the very mention of a young lady almost dying of a broken heart was quite sufficient to set his imagination most painfully at work. Rapidly did his thoughts run over the various causes of broken hearts. Very angry did he become with those hardened ones, by whose follies and vices so many of the gentler sex suffer the acutest pangs of the spirit. He thought of his own dear and only child, and he almost wrought himself up to a fever by the imagination that some villanous coxcomb might have trifled with her affections, and have left her to the mockery of the world. He then thought of the mother of his Penelope, and that she had died of a broken heart, and that his follies had brought her to an untimely grave. Then came there into his mind thoughts of retributive justice, and there was an indescribable apprehension in his soul that the sorrows which he had occasioned to another might fall also to his own lot. He wondered that there should be in the world so much cruelty, and such a wanton sporting with each others’ sufferings. The powerful emotions which had been raised in his mind from the first hour that he embarked for England, were of a nature so mingled, and in their movements so rapid, that he hardly knew whether they were pleasurable or painful. There was so much pleasure in the pain, and so much pain in the pleasure, that his mind was rendered quite unsteady by a constant whirl and vortex of emotions. He felt a kind of childish vivacity and womanly sensibility. His tears and his smiles were equally involuntary; he had no power over them, and he had scarcely notice of their approach. Something of this was natural to him; but present circumstances more strongly and powerfully developed this characteristic. The accident, from which he had received so sudden a shock, tended still farther to increase the excitability of his mind. When therefore he retired for the purpose of gaining a little rest, his solitude opened a wider door to imagination and recollection; and thereupon a confused multitude of images of the past, and of fancies for the future, came rushing in upon him, and his mind was like a feather in a storm.
The surgeon was very attentive to his patient, for he made a second visit not above four hours after the first. The people at the turnpike-house told him that the gentleman had, in pursuance of the advice given him, retired to take a little rest. The medical man commended that movement; but being desirous to see how his patient rested, he opened the door of the apartment very gently, and Mr Primrose, who was wide awake, and happy to see any one to whom he could talk, called aloud to the surgeon to walk in.