Middlemarch

e 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.”