CHAPTER V.WITHOUT THE WOLF.
“Father,”said Lola, “there are ever so many people in the village ill with fever. Isn’t it sad?”
Mr. and Mrs. Greswold, of Enderby Manor, had been submitting to a fortnight’s dissipation in London, and this was their first Sunday at home after that interval. They had returned late on the previous night, and house and gardens had all the sweetness and freshness of a scene to which one is restored after absence. They had spent the summer morning in the little village church with their daughter; and now they were enjoying the leisure interval between church and luncheon.
George Greswold sat in a lounging-chair under a cedar within twenty yards of the dining-room windows, and Lola was hanging about him as he read theAthenæum, caressing him with little touches of light hands upon his hair or his coat-collar, adoring him with all her might after the agony of severance.
She was his only child, and the love between them was passing the love of the father and daughter of every-day life. It was an almost romantic attachment.
Like most only daughters, Lola was precocious, far in advance of her years in thoughtfulness and emotion, though perhaps a little behind the average girl of twelve in the severities of feminine education. She had been her mother’s chief companion ever since she could speak, the confidante of all that mother’s thoughts and fancies, which were as innocent as those of childhood itself. She had read much more than most girls of her age, and had been made familiar with poets whose names are only known to the schoolgirl in a history of literature. She knew a good deal about the best books in European literature; but, most of all, she knew the hearts and minds of her father and mother, their loves and likings, their joys and sorrows. She had never been shut out from their confidence; she had never been told to go and play when they wanted to talk to each other. She had sat with them, and walked and ridden and driven with them ever since she wasold enough to dispense with her nurse’s arms. She had lived her young life with them, and had been a part of their lives.
George Greswold looked up from hisAthenæumin quick alarm.
“Fever!” he exclaimed, “fever at Enderby!”
“Strange, isn’t it, father? Everybody is wondering about it. Enderby has always been such a healthy village, and you have taken such pains to make it so.”
“Yes, love, I have done my best. I am a landlord for pleasure, and not for gain, as you and mother know.”
“And what seems strangest and worst of all,” continued Lola, “is that this dreadful fever has broken out among the people you and mother and I are fondest of—our old friends and pensioners—and the children we know most about. It seems so hard that those you and mother have helped the most should be the first to be ill.”
“Yes, love, that must seem very hard to my tender-hearted darling.”
Her father looked up at her fondly as she stoodbehind his chair, her white arm leaning upon his shoulder. The summer was in its zenith. It was strawberry-time, rose-time, haymaking-time—the season of nightingales and meadow-sweet and tall Mary lilies, and all those lovely things that cluster in the core of summer’s great warm heart. Lola was all in white—a loose muslin frock, straight from shoulder to instep. Her thick gold hair fell straight as her frock below her ungirdled waist, and, in her white and gold, she had the look of an angel in an early Italian picture. Her eyes were as blue as that cloudless sky of midsummer which took a deeper azure behind the black-green branches of the cedar.
“My pet, I take it this fever is some slight summer malady. Cottagers are such ravens. They always make the worst of an illness.”
“O, but they really have been very bad. Mary Martin has had the fever, but she is getting better. And there’s Johnny Giles; you know what a strong boyheis. He’s very bad, poor little chap—so delirious; and I do feel so sorry for his poor mother. And young Mrs. Peter has it, and two of her children.”
“It must be contagious,” cried Greswold, seizing his daughter’s round white arm with an agitated movement. “You have not been to see any of them, have you, Lola?” he asked, looking at her with unspeakable anxiety.
“No; Bell wouldn’t let me go to see any of them; but of course I have taken them things every day—wine and beef-tea and jelly, and everything we could think of; and they have had as much milk as they liked.”
“You should not have gone yourself with the things, darling. You should have sent them.”
“That would seem so unkind, as if one hardly cared; and Puck with nothing to do all the time but to drag me about. It was no trouble to go myself. I did not even go inside the cottages. Bell said I mustn’t.”
“Bell was right. Well, I suppose there is no harm done if you didn’t go into any of the cottages; and it was very sweet of you to take the things yourself; like Red Riding Hood, only without the wolf. There goes the gong. I hope you are hungry.”
“Not very. The weather is too warm for eating anything but strawberries.”
He looked at her anxiously again, ready to take alarm at a word.
“Yes, it is too warm in this south-western country,” he said nervously. “We’ll go to Scotland next week.”
“So soon?”
“Why not a little sooner than usual, for once in a way?”
“I shall be sorry to go away while the people are ill,” she said gravely.
George Greswold forgot that the gong had sounded. He sat, leaning forward, in a despondent attitude. The very mention of sickness in the land had unhinged him. This child was so dear to him, his only one. He had done all that forethought, sense, and science could do to make the village which lay at his doors the perfection of health and purity. Famous sanitarians had been entertained at the Manor, and had held counsel with Mr. Greswold upon the progress of sanitation, and its latest developments. They had wondered with himover the blind ignorance of our forefathers. They had instructed him how to drain his house, and how to ventilate and purify his cottages. They had assured him that, so far as lay within the limits of human intelligence, perfection had been achieved in Enderby village and Enderby Manor House.
And now his idolised daughter hung over his chair and told him that there was fever raging in the land, his land; the land which he loved as if it were a living thing, and on which he had lavished care and money ever since he had owned it. Other men might consider their ancestral estates as something to be lived upon; George Greswold thought of his forefathers’ house and lands as something to be lived for. His cottages were model cottages, and he was known far and wide as a model landlord.
“George, are you quite forgetting luncheon?” asked a voice from one of the open windows, and he looked up to see a beautiful face looking out at him, framed in hair of Lola’s colour.
“My dear Mildred, come here for a moment?” he said, and his wife went to him, smiling still, but with a shade of uneasiness in her face.
“Go in, pet. We’ll follow you directly,” he said to his daughter; and then he rose slowly, with an air of being almost broken down by a great trouble, and put his hand through his wife’s arm, and led her along the velvet turf beyond the cedar.
“Mildred, have you heard of this fever?”
“Yes; Louisa told me this morning when she was doing my hair. It seems to be rather bad; but there cannot be any danger, surely, after all you have done to make the cottages perfect in every way?”
“One cannot tell. There may be a germ of evil brought from somewhere else. I am sorry Lola has been among the people.”
“O, but she has not been inside any of the cottages. Bell took care to prevent that.”
“Bell was wise, but she might have done better still. She should have telegraphed to us. Lola must not go about any more. You will see to that, won’t you, dearest? Before the end of the week I will take you both to Scotland.”
“Do you really suppose there can be danger?” she asked, growing very pale.
“No, no, I don’t apprehend danger. Only it is better to be over-cautious than over-bold. We cannot be too careful of our treasure.”
“No, no, indeed,” answered the mother, with a piteous look.
“Mother,” called Lola from the window, “are you ever coming? Pomfret will be late for church.”
Pomfret was the butler, whose convenience had to be studied upon Sundays. The servants dined while the family were at luncheon, and almost all the establishment went to afternoon service, leaving a footman and an under-housemaid in sole possession of the grave old manor-house, where the silence had a solemnity as in some monastic chapel. Lola was anxious that luncheon should begin, and Pomfret be dismissed to eat his dinner.
This child of twelve had more than a woman’s forethought. She spent her life in thinking about other people; but of all those whom she loved, and for whom she cared, her father was first and chief. For him her love was akin to worship.
She watched his face anxiously now, as she took her seat at his right hand, and was silent untilPomfret had served the soup and retired, leaving all the rest of the luncheon on the table, and the wine on a dumb-waiter by his master’s side.
There was always a cold lunch on Sundays, and the evening meal was also cold, a compromise between dinner and supper, served at nine o’clock, by which time the servants had gratified their various tastes for church or chapel, and had enjoyed an evening walk. There was no parsonage in England where the day of rest was held in more reverence than it was at Enderby Manor.
Mr. Greswold was no bigot, his religion in no wise savoured of the over-good school; but he was a man of deep religious convictions; and he had been brought up to honour Sunday as a day set apart.
The Sunday parties and Sunday amusements of fashionable London were an abomination to him, though he was far too liberal-minded to wish to shut museums and picture-galleries against the people.
“Father,” said Lola, when they were alone, “I’m afraid you had your bad dream last night.”
Greswold looked at her curiously.
“No, love, my dreams were colourless, and have left not even a remembrance.”
“And yet you look sorrowful, just as you always look after your bad dream.”
“Your father is anxious about the cottagers who are ill, dearest,” said Mrs. Greswold. “That is all.”
“But you must not be unhappy about them, father dear. You don’t think that any of them will die, do you?” asked Lola, drawing very near him, and looking up at him with awe-stricken eyes.
“Indeed, my love, I hope not. They shall not die, if care can save them. I will walk round the village with Porter this afternoon, and find out all about the trouble. If there is anything that he cannot understand, we’ll have Dr. Hutchinson over from Southampton, or a physician from London if necessary. My people shall not be neglected.”
“May I go with you this afternoon, father?”
“No, dearest, neither you nor mother must leave the grounds till we go away. I will have no needless risks run by my dear ones.”
Neither mother nor daughter disputed his willupon this point. He was the sole arbiter of their lives. It seemed almost as if they lived only to please him. Both would have liked to go with him; both thought him over-cautious; yet neither attempted to argue the point. Happy household in which there are no arguments upon domestic trifles, no bickerings about the infinitesimals of life!
Enderby Manor was one of those ideal homes which adorn the face of England and sustain its reputation as the native soil of domestic virtues, the country in which good wives and good mothers are indigenous.
There are many such ideal homes in the land as to outward aspect, seen from the high-road, across park or pasture, shrubbery or flower-garden; but only a few of these sustain the idea upon intimate knowledge of the interior.
Here, within as well as without, the atmosphere was peace. Those velvet lawns and brilliant flower-beds were not more perfect than the love between husband and wife, child and parents. No cloud had ever shadowed that serene heaven of domestic peace.George Greswold had married at thirty a girl of eighteen who adored him; and those two had lived for each other and for their only child ever since. All outside the narrow circle of family love counted only as the margin or the framework of life. All the deepest and sweetest elements of life were within the veil. Mildred Greswold could not conceive a fashionable woman’s existence—a life given up to frivolous occupations and futile excitements—a life of empty pleasure faintly flavoured with art, literature, science, philanthropy, and politics, and fancying itself eminently useful and eminently progressive. She had seen such an existence in her childhood, and had wondered that any reasoning creature could so live. She had turned her back upon the modish world when she married George Greswold, and had surrendered most of the delights of society to lead quiet days in her husband’s ancestral home, loving that old house for his sake, as he loved it for the sake of the dead.
They were not in outer darkness, however, as to the movement of the world. They spent a fortnight at Limmers occasionally, when the fancy movedthem. They saw all the pictures worth seeing, heard a good deal of the best music, mixed just enough in society to distinguish gold from tinsel, and to make a happy choice of friends.
They occasionally treated themselves to a week in Paris, and their autumn holidays were mostly spent in a shooting-box twenty miles beyond Inverness. They came back to the Manor in time for the pheasant-shooting, and the New Year generally began with a house-party which lasted with variations until the hunting was all over, and the young leaves were green in the neighbouring forest. No lives could have been happier, or fuller of interest; but the interest all centred in home. Farmers and cottagers on the estate were cared for as a part of home; and the estate itself was loved almost as a living thing by husband and wife, and the fair child who had been born to them in the old-fashioned house.
The grave red-brick manor-house had been built when William III. was King; and there were some Dutch innovations in the Old English architecture, notably a turret or pavilion at the end of each wing,and a long bowling-green on the western side of the garden. The walls had that deep glowing red which is only seen in old brickwork, and the black glazed tiles upon the hopper roof glittered in the sunlight with the prismatic hues of antique Rhodian glass. The chief characteristic of the interior was the oak-panelling, which clothed the rooms and corridors as in a garment of sober brown, and would have been suggestive of gloom but for the pictures and porcelain which brightened every wall, and the rich colouring of brocaded curtains and tapestryportières. The chief charm of the house was the aspect of home life, the books and musical instruments, the art treasures, and flowers, and domestic trifles to be seen everywhere; the air which every room and every nook and corner had of being lived in by home-loving and home-keeping people.
The pavilion at the end of the south-west wing was Lola’s special domain, that and the room communicating with it. That pretty sitting-room, with dwarf book-shelves, water-colour pictures, and Wedgwood china, was never called a schoolroom. It was Lola’s study.
“There shall be no suggestion of school in our home,” said George Greswold.
It was he who chose his daughter’s masters, and it was often he who attended during the lesson, listening intently to the progress of the work, and as keenly interested in the pupil’s progress as the pupil herself. Latin he himself taught her, and she already knew by heart those noblest of Horace’s odes which are fittest for young lips. Their philosophy saddened her a little.
“Is life always changing?” she asked her father; “must one never venture to be quite happy?”
The Latin poet’s pervading idea of mutability, inevitable death, and inevitable change impressed her with a flavour of sadness, child as she was.
“My dearest, had Horace been a Christian, as you are, and had he lived for others, as you do, he would not have been afraid to call himself happy,” answered George Greswold. “He was a Pagan, and he put on the armour of philosophy for want of the armour of faith.”
These lessons in the classics, taking a dead language not as a dry study of grammar and dictionary,but as the gate to new worlds of poetry and philosophy, had been Lola’s delight. She was in no wise unpleasantly precocious; but she was far in advance of the conventional schoolroom child, trained into characterless uniformity by a superior governess. Lola had never been under governess rule. Her life at the Manor had been as free as that of the butterflies. There was only Bell to lecture her—white-haired Mrs. Bell, thin and spare, straight as an arrow, at seventy-four years of age, the embodiment of servants’-hall gentility, in her black silk afternoon gown and neat cambric cap—Bell, who looked after Lola’s health, and Lola’s rooms, and was for ever tidying the drawers and tables, and lecturing upon the degeneracy of girlhood. It was her boast to have nursed Lola’s grandmother, as well as Lola’s mother, which seemed going back to the remoteness of the dark ages.
Enderby Manor was three miles from Romsey, and within riding or driving distance of the New Forest and of Salisbury Cathedral. It lay in the heart of a pastoral district watered by the Test, andwas altogether one of the most enjoyable estates in that part of the country.
Before luncheon was finished a messenger was on his way to the village to summon Mr. Porter, more commonly Dr. Porter, the parish and everybody’s doctor, an elderly man of burly figure, close-cropped gray hair, and yeoman-like bearing—a man born on the soil, whose father and grandfather and great-grandfather had cured or killed the inhabitants of Enderby parish from time immemorial. Judging from the tombstones in the pretty old churchyard, they must have cured more than they killed; for those crumbling moss-grown stones bore the record of patriarchal lives, and the union near Enderby was a museum of incipient centenarians.
Mr. Porter came into the grave old library at the Manor looking more serious than his wont, perhaps in sympathy with George Greswold’s anxious face, turned towards the door as the footman opened it.
“Well, Porter, what does it all mean, this fever?” asked Greswold abruptly.
Mr. Porter had a manner of discussing a case which was all his own. He always appealed to hispatient with a professional air, as if consulting another medical authority, and a higher one than himself. It was flattering, perhaps, but not always satisfactory.
“Well, you see, there’s the high temperature—104 in some cases—and there’s the inflamed throat, and there’s headache. What doyousay?”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Porter; you must know whether it is an infectious fever or not. If you don’t know, we’ll send to Southampton for Hutchinson.”
“Of course, you can have him if you like. I judge more by temperature than anything—the thermometer is a safer guide than the pulse, as you know. I took their temperatures this morning before I went to church: only one case in which there was improvement—all the others decidedly worse; very strongly developed cases of malignant fever—typhus or typhoid—which, as you know, by Jenner’s differentiation of the two forms—”
“For God’s sake, man, don’t talk to me as if I were a doctor, and had your ghoulish relish ofdisease! If you have the slightest doubt as to treatment, send for Hutchinson.”
He took a sheaf of telegraph-forms from the stand in front of him, and began to write his message while he was talking. He had made up his mind that Dr. Hutchinson must come to see these humble sufferers, and to investigate the cause of evil. He had taken such pains to create a healthy settlement, had spared no expense; and for fifteen years, from the hour of his succession until now, all had gone well with him. And now there was fever in the land, fever in the air breathed by those two beloved ones, daughter and wife.
“I have been so happy; my life has been cloudless, save for one dark memory,” he said to himself, covering his face with his hands as he leaned with his elbows on the table, while Mr. Porter expatiated upon the cases in the village, and on fever in general.
“I have tested the water in all the wells—perfectly pure. There can be nothing amiss with the milk, for all my patients are on Mrs. Greswold’s list, and are getting their milk from your own dairy. The drainage is perfection—yet here wehave an outbreak of fever, which looks remarkably like typhoid?”
“Why not say at once that it is typhoid?”
“The symptoms all point that way.”
“You say there can be nothing amiss with the milk. You have not analysed it, I suppose?”
“Why should I? Out of your own dairy, where everything is managed in the very best way—the perfection of cleanliness in every detail.”
“You ought to have analysed the milk, all the same,” said Greswold thoughtfully. “The strength of a chain is its weakest link. There may be some weak link here, though we cannot put our fingers upon it—yet. Are there many cases?”
“Let me see. There’s Johnny Giles, and Mrs. Peter and her children, and Janet Dawson, and there’s Andrew Rogers, and there’s Mary Rainbow,” began Mr. Porter, counting on his fingers as he went on, until the list of sufferers came to eleven. “Mostly youngsters,” he said in conclusion.
“They ought to have been isolated,” said Greswold. “I will get out plans for an infirmary to-morrow. There is the willow-field, on the otherside of the village, a ridge of high ground sloping down towards the parish drain, with a southern exposure, a capital site for a hospital. It is dreadful to think of fever-poison spreading from half-a-dozen different cottages. Which was the first case?”
“Little Rainbow.”
“That fair-haired child whom I used to see from my dressing-room window every morning as she went away from the dairy, tottering under a pitcher of milk? Poor little Polly! She was a favourite with us all. Is she very ill?”
“Yes, I think hers is about the best case,” answered the doctor unctuously; “the others are a little vague; but there’s no doubt abouther, all the symptoms strongly marked—a very clear case.”
“Is there any danger of a fatal termination?”
“I’m afraid there is.”
“Poor little Polly—poor pretty little girl! I used to know it was seven o’clock when I saw that bright little flaxen head flit by the yew hedge yonder. Polly was as good a timekeeper as any clock in the village. And you think she may die? You have not told Lola, I hope?”
“No, I have not let out anything about danger. Lola is only too anxious already.”
“I will put the infirmary in hand to-morrow; and I will take my wife and daughter to Scotland on Tuesday.”
“Upon my word, it will be a very good thing to get them away. These fever cases are so mysterious. There’s no knowing what shape infection may take. I have the strongest belief in your system of drainage—”
“Nothing is perfect,” said Greswold impatiently. “The science of sanitation is still in its infancy. I sometimes think we have not advanced very far from the knowledge of our ancestors, whose homes were desolated by the Black Death. However, don’t let us talk, Porter. Let us act, if we can. Come and look at the dairy.”
“You don’t apprehend evil there?”
“There are three sources of typhoid poison—drainage, water, milk. You say the drains and the water are good, and that the milk comes from my own dairy. If you are right as to the first andsecond, the third must be wrong, no matter whose dairy it may come from.”
He took up his hat, and went out of the house with the doctor. Gardens and shrubberies stretched before them in all their luxuriance of summer verdure, gardens and shrubberies which had been the delight and pride of many generations of Greswolds, but loved more dearly by none than by George Greswold and his wife. In Mildred’s mind the old family house was a part of her husband’s individuality, an attribute rather than a mere possession. Every tree and every shrub was sacred. These, his mother’s own hands had cropped and tended; those, grandfathers and great-grandfathers andarrièregreat-grandfathers had planted in epochs that distance has made romantic.
On the right of the hall-door a broad gravel path led in a serpentine sweep towards the stables, a long, low building spread over a considerable area, and hidden by shrubberies. The dairy was a little further off, approached by a winding walk through thickets of laurel and arbutus. It had been originally a barn, and was used as a receptacle for allmanner of out-of-door lumber when Mildred came to the Manor. She had converted the old stone building into a model dairy, with outside gallery and staircase of solid woodwork, and with a Swiss roof. Other buildings had been added. There were low cowhouses, and tall pigeon-houses, and a picturesque variety of gables and elevations which was delightful to the eye, seen on a summer afternoon such as this June Sunday, amidst the perfume of clove carnations and old English roses, and the cooing of doves.
Mrs. Greswold’s Channel Island cows were her delight—creatures with cream-coloured coats, black noses, and wistful brown eyes. Scarcely a day passed on which she did not waste an hour or so in the cowhouses or in the meadows caressing these favourites. Each cow had her name painted in blue and white above her stall, and the chief, or duchess of the herd, was very severe in the maintenance of cowhouse precedence, and knew how to resent the insolence of a new-comer who should presume to cross the threshold in advance of her.
The dairy itself had a solemn and shadowy air,like a shrine, and was as pretty as the dairy at Frogmore. The walls were lined with Minton tiles, the shallow milk-pans were of Doulton pottery, and quaintly-shaped pitchers of bright colours were ranged on china brackets along the walls. The windows were latticed, and a pane of ruby, rose, or amethyst appeared here and there among the old bottle-green glass, and cast a patch of coloured light upon the cool marble slab below.
The chief dairy-woman lived at an old-fashioned cottage on the premises, with her husband, the cowkeeper; and their garden, which lay at the back of the cowhouses and dairy, was the ideal old English garden, in which flowers and fruit strive for the mastery. In a corner of this garden, close to the outer offices of the cottage, among rows of peas, and summer cabbages, and great overgrown lavender-bushes and moss-roses, stood the old well, with its crumbling brick border and ancient spindle, a well that had been dug when the old manor-house was new.
There were other water arrangements for Mrs. Greswold’s dairy, a new artesian well, on a hill aquarter of a mile from the kitchen-garden, a well that went deep down into the chalk, and was famous for the purity of its water. All the drinking-water of the house was supplied from this well, and the water was laid on in iron pipes to dairy and cowhouses. All the vessels used for milk or cream were washed in this water; at least, such were Mr. Greswold’s strict orders—orders supposed to be carried out under the supervision of his bailiff and housekeeper.
Mr. Porter looked at a reeking heap of stable manure that sprawled within twenty feet of the old well with suspicion in his eye, and from the manure-heap he looked at the back premises of the old cob-walled cottage.
“I’m afraid there may have been soakage from that manure-heap into the well,” he said; “and if your dairy vessels are washed in that water—”
“But they never are,” interrupted Mr. Greswold; “that water is used only for the garden—eh, Mrs. Wadman?”
The dairy-woman was standing on the threshold of her neat little kitchen, curtseying to her master,resplendent in her Sunday gown of bright blue merino, and her Sunday brooch, containing her husband’s photograph, coloured out of knowledge.
“No, of course not, sir; leastways, never except when there was something wrong with the pipes from the artesian.”
“Something wrong; when was that? I never heard of anything wrong.”
“Well, sir, my husband didn’t want to be troublesome, and Mr. Thomas he gave the order for the men from Romsey, that was on the Saturday after working-hours, and they was to come as it might be on the Monday morning, and they never come near; and Mr. Thomas he wrote and wrote, and my husband he says it ain’t no use writing, and he takes the pony and rides over to Romsey in his overtime, and he complains about the men not coming, and they tells him there’s a big job on at Broadlands and not a plumber to be had for love or money; but the pipes is all rightnow, sir.”
“Now? Since when have they been in working order?”
“Since yesterday, sir. Mr. Thomas was determined he’d have everything right before you came back.”
“And how long have you been using that water,” pointing to the well, with its moss-grown brickwork and flaunting margin of yellow stonecrop, “for dairy purposes?”
“Well, you see, sir, we was obliged to use water of some kind; and there ain’t purer or better water than that for twenty mile round. I always use it for my kettle every time I make tea for me or my master, and never found no harm from it in the last fifteen years.”
“How long have you used it for the dairy?” repeated George Greswold angrily; “can’t you give a straight answer, woman?”
Mrs. Wadman could not: had never achieved a direct reply to a plain question within the memory of man.
“The men was to have come on the Monday morning, first thing,” she said, “and they didn’t come till the Tuesday week after that, and then they was that slow——”
George Greswold walked up and down the garden path, raging.
“She won’t answer!” he cried. “Was it a week—a fortnight—three weeks ago that you began to use that water for your dairy?” he asked sternly; and gradually he and the doctor induced her to acknowledge that the garden well had been in use for the dairy nearly three weeks before yesterday.
“Then that is enough to account for everything,” said Dr. Porter. “First there is filtration of manure through a gravelly soil—inevitable—and next there is something worse. She had her sister here from Salisbury—six weeks ago—down with typhoid fever three days after she came—brought it from Salisbury.”
“Yes, yes—I remember. You told me there was no danger of infection.”
“There need have been none. I made her use all precautions possible in an old-fashioned cottage; but however careful she might be, there would be always the risk of a well—close at hand like that one—getting tainted. I asked her if she ever usedthat water for anything but the garden, and she said no, the artesian well supplied every want. And now she talks about her kettle, and tells us coolly that she has been using that polluted water for the last three weeks—and poisoning a whole village.”
“Me poisoning the village! O Dr. Porter, how can you say such a cruel thing? Me, that wouldn’t hurt a fly if I knew it!”
“Perhaps not, Mrs. Wadman; but I’m afraid you’ve hurt a good many of your neighbours without knowing it.”
George Greswold stood in the pathway silent and deadly pale. He had been so happy for the last thirteen years—a sky without a cloud—and now in a moment the clouds were closing round him, and again all might be darkness, as it had been once before in his life. Calamity for which he felt himself unaccountable had come upon him before—swift as an arrow from the bow—and now again he stood helpless, smitten by the hand of Fate.
He thought of the little village child, with her guileless face, looking up at his window as she tripped by with her pitcher. His dole of milk hadbeen fatal to the simple souls who had looked up to him as a Providence. He had taken such pains that all should be sweet and wholesome in his people’s cottages; he had spent money like water, and had lectured them and taught them; and lo! from his own luxurious home the evil had gone forth. Careless servants, hushing up a difficulty, loth to approach him with plain facts lest they should be considered troublesome, had wrought this evil, had spread disease and death in the land.
And his own and only child, the delight of his life, the apple of his eye—that tainted milk had been served at her table! Amidst all that grace of porcelain and flowers the poison had lurked, as at the cottagers’ board. What if she, too, should suffer?
He meant to take her away in a day or two—now—now when the cause of evil was at work no longer. The thought that it might be too late, that the germ of poison might lurk in the heart of that fair flower, filled him with despair.
Mrs. Wadman had run into her cottage, shedding indignant tears at Dr. Porter’s cruelty. She cameout again, with a triumphant air, carrying a tumbler of water.
“Just look at it, sir,” she said; “look how bright and clear it is. There never was better water.”
“My good woman, in this case brightness and clearness mean corruption,” said the doctor. “If you’ll give me a pint of that water in a bottle I’ll take it home with me, and test it before I sleep to-night.”