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
ease 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 ease 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 how 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."