‘Insulting prescription! I am surprised at such a word being applied to any prescription of mine—though, to be sure, patients are sometimes offended at being told the nature of their illnesses; and, I dare say, they may take offence at the medicines which their cases require.’
‘I did not ask you to prescribe for me.’
‘Oh, no! Then you were the Master Coxe who sent the note through Bethia! Let me tell you it has cost her her place, and was a very silly letter into the bargain.’
‘It was not the conduct of a gentleman, sir, to intercept it, and to open it, and to read words never addressed to you, sir.’
‘No!’ said Mr. Gibson, with a slight twinkle in his eye and a curl on his lips, not unnoticed by the indignant Mr. Coxe. ‘I believe I was once considered tolerably good-looking, and I dare say I was as great a coxcomb as any one at twenty; but I don’t think that even then I should quite have believed that all those pretty compliments were addressed to myself.’
‘It was not the conduct of a gentleman, sir,’ repeated Mr. Coxe, stammering over his words—he was going on to say something more, when Mr. Gibson broke in,—
‘And let me tell you, young man,’ replied Mr. Gibson, with a sudden sternness in his voice, ‘that what you have done is only excusable in consideration of your youth and extreme ignorance of what are considered the laws of domestic honour. I receive you into my house as a member of the family—you induce one of my servants—corrupting her with a bribe, I have no doubt—’
‘Indeed, sir! I never gave her a penny.’
‘Then you ought to have done. You should always pay those who do your dirty work.’
‘Just now, sir, you called it corrupting with a bribe,’ muttered Mr. Coxe.
Mr. Gibson took no notice of this speech, but went on—‘Inducing one of my servants to risk her place, without offering her the slightest equivalent, by begging her to convey a letter clandestinely to my daughter—a mere child.’
‘Miss Gibson, sir, is nearly seventeen! I heard you say so only the other day,’ said Mr. Coxe, aged twenty. Again Mr. Gibson ignored the remark.
‘A letter which you were unwilling to have seen by her father, who had tacitly trusted to your honour by receiving you as an inmate of his house. Your father’s son—I know Major Coxe well—ought to have come to me, and have said out openly, “Mr. Gibson I love—or I fancy that I love—your daughter; I do not think it right to conceal this from you, although unable to earn a penny; and with no prospect of an unassisted livelihood, even for myself, for several years, I shall not say a word about my feelings—or fancied feelings—to the very young lady herself.” That is what your father’s son ought to have said; if, indeed, a couple of grains of reticent silence would not have been better still.’
‘And if I had said it, sir—perhaps I ought to have said it,’ said Mr. Coxe, in a hurry of anxiety, ‘what would have been your answer? Would you have sanctioned my passion, sir?’
‘I would have said, most probably—I will not be certain of my exact words in a supposititious case—that you were a young fool, but not a dishonorable young fool, and I should have told you not to let your thoughts run upon a calf-love until you had magnified it into a passion. And I dare say, to make up for the mortification I should have given you, I should have prescribed your joining the Hollingford Cricket Club, and set you at liberty as often as I could on the Saturday afternoons. As it is, I must write to your father’s agent in London, and ask him to remove you out of my household, repaying the premium, of course, which will enable you to start afresh in some other doctor’s surgery.’
‘It will so grieve my father,’ said Mr. Coxe, startled into dismay, if not repentance.
‘I see no other course open. It will give Major Coxe some trouble (I shall take care that he is at no extra expense), but what I think will grieve him the most is the betrayal of confidence; for I trusted you, Edward, like a son of my own!’ There was something in Mr. Gibson’s voice when he spoke seriously, especially when he referred to any feeling of his own—he who so rarely betrayed what was passing in his heart—that was irresistible to most people: the change from joking and sarcasm to tender gravity.
Mr. Coxe hung his head a little, and meditated.
‘I do love Miss Gibson,’ said he, at length. ‘Who could help it?’
‘Mr. Wynne, I hope!’ said Mr. Gibson.
‘His heart is pre-engaged,’ replied Mr. Coxe. ‘Mine was free as air till I saw her.’
‘Would it tend to cure your—well! passion, we’ll say—if she wore blue spectacles at meal-times? I observe you dwell much on the beauty of her eyes.’
‘You are ridiculing my feelings, Mr. Gibson. Do you forget that you yourself were young once?’
‘Poor Jeanie’ rose before Mr. Gibson’s eyes; and he felt a little rebuked.
‘Come, Mr. Coxe, let us see if we can’t make a bargain,’ said he, after a minute or so of silence. ‘You have done a really wrong thing, and I hope you are convinced of it in your heart, or that you will be when the heat of this discussion is over and you come to think a little about it. But I won’t lose all respect for your father’s son. If you will give me your word that, as long as you remain a member of my family—pupil, apprentice, what you will—you won’t again try to disclose your passion—you see I am careful to take your view of what I should call a mere fancy—by word or writing, look or acts, in any manner whatever, to my daughter, or to talk about your feelings to any one else, you shall remain here. If you cannot give me your word, I must follow out the course I named, and write to your father’s agent.’
Mr. Coxe stood irresolute.
‘Mr. Wynne knows all I feel for Miss Gibson, sir. He and I have no secrets from each other.’
‘Well, I suppose he must represent the reeds. You know the story of King Midas’s barber, who found out that his royal master had the ears of an ass beneath his hyacinthine curls. So the barber, in default of a Mr. Wynne, went to the reeds that grew on the shores of a neighbouring lake, and whispered to them, “King Midas has the ears of an ass.” But he repeated it so often that the reeds learnt the words, and kept on saying them all day long, till at last the secret was no secret at all. If you keep on telling your tale to Mr. Wynne, are you sure he won’t repeat it in his turn?’
‘If I pledge my word as a gentleman, sir, I pledge it for Mr. Wynne as well.’
‘I suppose I must run the risk. But remember how soon a young girl’s name may be breathed upon, and sullied. Molly has no mother, and for that very reason she ought to move among you all as unharmed as Una herself.’v
‘Mr. Gibson, if you wish it, I’ll swear it on the Bible,’ cried the excitable young man.
‘Nonsense. As if your word, if it’s worth anything, was not enough! We’ll shake hands upon it, if you like.’
Mr. Coxe came forward eagerly, and almost squeezed Mr. Gibson’s ring into his finger.
As he was leaving the room, he said, a little uneasily, ‘May I give Bethia a crown-piece?’
‘No, indeed! Leave Bethia to me. I hope you won’t say another word to her while she is here. I shall see that she gets a respectable place when she goes away.’
Then Mr. Gibson rang for his horse, and went out on the last visits of the day. He used to reckon that he rode the world around in the course of the year. There were not many surgeons in the county who had so wide a range of practice as he; he went to lonely cottages on the borders of great commons; to farmhouses at the end of narrow country lanes that led to nowhere else, and were overshadowed by the elms and beeches overhead. He attended all the gentry within a circle of fifteen miles round Hollingford; and was the appointed doctor to the still greater families who went up to London every February—as the fashion then was—and returned to their acres in the early weeks of July. He was, of necessity, a great deal from home, and on this soft and pleasant summer evening he felt the absence as a great evil. He was startled into discovering that his little one was growing fast into a woman, and already the passive object of some of the strong interests that affect a woman’s life; and he—her mother as well as her father—so much away that he could not guard her as he would have wished. The end of his cogitations was that ride to Hamley the next morning, when he proposed to allow his daughter to accept Mrs. Hamley’s last invitation—an invitation that had been declined at the time.