الفصل الفصل 26 · Chapter XXVI

He beats me and I rail at him: O worthy satisfaction! would it were

otherwise—that I could beat him while he railed at me.—_Troilus and

Cressida_.

But Fred did not go to Stone Court the next day, for reasons that were

quite peremptory. From those visits to unsanitary Houndsley streets in

search of Diamond, he had brought back not only a bad bargain in

horse-flesh, but the further misfortune of some ailment which for a day

or two had deemed mere depression and headache, but which got so much

worse when he returned from his visit to Stone Court that, going into

the dining-room, he threw himself on the sofa, and in answer to his

mother’s anxious question, said, “I feel very ill: I think you must

send for Wrench.”

Wrench came, but did not apprehend anything serious, spoke of a “slight

derangement,” and did not speak of coming again on the morrow. He had a

due value for the Vincys’ house, but the wariest men are apt to be

dulled by routine, and on worried mornings will sometimes go through

their business with the zest of the daily bell-ringer. Mr. Wrench was a

small, neat, bilious man, with a well-dressed wig: he had a laborious

practice, an irascible temper, a lymphatic wife and seven children; and

he was already rather late before setting out on a four-miles drive to

meet Dr. Minchin on the other side of Tipton, the decease of Hicks, a

rural practitioner, having increased Middlemarch practice in that

direction. Great statesmen err, and why not small medical men? Mr.

Wrench did not neglect sending the usual white parcels, which this time

had black and drastic contents. Their effect was not alleviating to

poor Fred, who, however, unwilling as he said to believe that he was

“in for an illness,” rose at his usual easy hour the next morning and

went down-stairs meaning to breakfast, but succeeded in nothing but in

sitting and shivering by the fire. Mr. Wrench was again sent for, but

was gone on his rounds, and Mrs. Vincy seeing her darling’s changed

looks and general misery, began to cry and said she would send for Dr.

Sprague.

“Oh, nonsense, mother! It’s nothing,” said Fred, putting out his hot

dry hand to her, “I shall soon be all right. I must have taken cold in

that nasty damp ride.”

“Mamma!” said Rosamond, who was seated near the window (the dining-room

windows looked on that highly respectable street called Lowick Gate),

“there is Mr. Lydgate, stopping to speak to some one. If I were you I

would call him in. He has cured Ellen Bulstrode. They say he cures

every one.”

Mrs. Vincy sprang to the window and opened it in an instant, thinking

only of Fred and not of medical etiquette. Lydgate was only two yards

off on the other side of some iron palisading, and turned round at the

sudden sound of the sash, before she called to him. In two minutes he

was in the room, and Rosamond went out, after waiting just long enough

to show a pretty anxiety conflicting with her sense of what was

becoming.

Lydgate had to hear a narrative in which Mrs. Vincy’s mind insisted

with remarkable instinct on every point of minor importance, especially

on what Mr. Wrench had said and had not said about coming again. That

there might be an awkward affair with Wrench, Lydgate saw at once; but

the case was serious enough to make him dismiss that consideration: he

was convinced that Fred was in the pink-skinned stage of typhoid fever,

and that he had taken just the wrong medicines. He must go to bed

immediately, must have a regular nurse, and various appliances and

precautions must be used, about which Lydgate was particular. Poor Mrs.

Vincy’s terror at these indications of danger found vent in such words

as came most easily. She thought it “very ill usage on the part of Mr.

Wrench, who had attended their house so many years in preference to Mr.

Peacock, though Mr. Peacock was equally a friend. Why Mr. Wrench should

neglect her children more than others, she could not for the life of

her understand. He had not neglected Mrs. Larcher’s when they had the

measles, nor indeed would Mrs. Vincy have wished that he should. And if

anything should happen—”

Here poor Mrs. Vincy’s spirit quite broke down, and her Niobe throat

and good-humored face were sadly convulsed. This was in the hall out of

Fred’s hearing, but Rosamond had opened the drawing-room door, and now

came forward anxiously. Lydgate apologized for Mr. Wrench, said that

the symptoms yesterday might have been disguising, and that this form

of fever was very equivocal in its beginnings: he would go immediately

to the druggist’s and have a prescription made up in order to lose no

time, but he would write to Mr. Wrench and tell him what had been done.

“But you must come again—you must go on attending Fred. I can’t have my

boy left to anybody who may come or not. I bear nobody ill-will, thank

God, and Mr. Wrench saved me in the pleurisy, but he’d better have let

me die—if—if—”

“I will meet Mr. Wrench here, then, shall I?” said Lydgate, really

believing that Wrench was not well prepared to deal wisely with a case

of this kind.

“Pray make that arrangement, Mr. Lydgate,” said Rosamond, coming to her

mother’s aid, and supporting her arm to lead her away.

When Mr. Vincy came home he was very angry with Wrench, and did not

care if he never came into his house again. Lydgate should go on now,

whether Wrench liked it or not. It was no joke to have fever in the

house. Everybody must be sent to now, not to come to dinner on

Thursday. And Pritchard needn’t get up any wine: brandy was the best

thing against infection. “I shall drink brandy,” added Mr. Vincy,

emphatically—as much as to say, this was not an occasion for firing

with blank-cartridges. “He’s an uncommonly unfortunate lad, is Fred.

He’d need have some luck by and by to make up for all this—else I don’t

know who’d have an eldest son.”

“Don’t say so, Vincy,” said the mother, with a quivering lip, “if you

don’t want him to be taken from me.”

“It will worret you to death, Lucy; _that_ I can see,” said Mr. Vincy,

more mildly. “However, Wrench shall know what I think of the matter.”

(What Mr. Vincy thought confusedly was, that the fever might somehow

have been hindered if Wrench had shown the proper solicitude about

his—the Mayor’s—family.) “I’m the last man to give in to the cry about

new doctors, or new parsons either—whether they’re Bulstrode’s men or

not. But Wrench shall know what I think, take it as he will.”

Wrench did not take it at all well. Lydgate was as polite as he could

be in his offhand way, but politeness in a man who has placed you at a

disadvantage is only an additional exasperation, especially if he

happens to have been an object of dislike beforehand. Country

practitioners used to be an irritable species, susceptible on the point

of honor; and Mr. Wrench was one of the most irritable among them. He

did not refuse to meet Lydgate in the evening, but his temper was

somewhat tried on the occasion. He had to hear Mrs. Vincy say—

“Oh, Mr. Wrench, what have I ever done that you should use me so?— To

go away, and never to come again! And my boy might have been stretched

a corpse!”

Mr. Vincy, who had been keeping up a sharp fire on the enemy Infection,

and was a good deal heated in consequence, started up when he heard

Wrench come in, and went into the hall to let him know what he thought.

“I’ll tell you what, Wrench, this is beyond a joke,” said the Mayor,

who of late had had to rebuke offenders with an official air, and now

broadened himself by putting his thumbs in his armholes. “To let fever

get unawares into a house like this. There are some things that ought

to be actionable, and are not so— that’s my opinion.”

But irrational reproaches were easier to bear than the sense of being

instructed, or rather the sense that a younger man, like Lydgate,

inwardly considered him in need of instruction, for “in point of fact,”

Mr. Wrench afterwards said, Lydgate paraded flighty, foreign notions,

which would not wear. He swallowed his ire for the moment, but he

afterwards wrote to decline further attendance in the case. The house

might be a good one, but Mr. Wrench was not going to truckle to anybody

on a professional matter. He reflected, with much probability on his

side, that Lydgate would by-and-by be caught tripping too, and that his

ungentlemanly attempts to discredit the sale of drugs by his

professional brethren, would by-and-by recoil on himself. He threw out

biting remarks on Lydgate’s tricks, worthy only of a quack, to get

himself a factitious reputation with credulous people. That cant about

cures was never got up by sound practitioners.

This was a point on which Lydgate smarted as much as Wrench could

desire. To be puffed by ignorance was not only humiliating, but

perilous, and not more enviable than the reputation of the

weather-prophet. He was impatient of the foolish expectations amidst

which all work must be carried on, and likely enough to damage himself

as much as Mr. Wrench could wish, by an unprofessional openness.

However, Lydgate was installed as medical attendant on the Vincys, and

the event was a subject of general conversation in Middlemarch. Some

said, that the Vincys had behaved scandalously, that Mr. Vincy had

threatened Wrench, and that Mrs. Vincy had accused him of poisoning her

son. Others were of opinion that Mr. Lydgate’s passing by was

providential, that he was wonderfully clever in fevers, and that

Bulstrode was in the right to bring him forward. Many people believed

that Lydgate’s coming to the town at all was really due to Bulstrode;

and Mrs. Taft, who was always counting stitches and gathered her

information in misleading fragments caught between the rows of her

knitting, had got it into her head that Mr. Lydgate was a natural son

of Bulstrode’s, a fact which seemed to justify her suspicions of

evangelical laymen.

She one day communicated this piece of knowledge to Mrs. Farebrother,

who did not fail to tell her son of it, observing—

“I should not be surprised at anything in Bulstrode, but I should be

sorry to think it of Mr. Lydgate.”

“Why, mother,” said Mr. Farebrother, after an explosive laugh, “you

know very well that Lydgate is of a good family in the North. He never

heard of Bulstrode before he came here.”

“That is satisfactory so far as Mr. Lydgate is concerned, Camden,” said

the old lady, with an air of precision.—“But as to Bulstrode—the report

may be true of some other son.”