The Surgeon's Daughter by Walter Scott (summer beach reads .txt) 📗

“My duty makes me so,” replied the General—“You know the sort of fellows that we are obliged to content ourselves with—they get drunk—grow pot-valiant—enlist over-night, and repent next morning. If I am to dismiss all those who pretend to have been trepanned, we should have few volunteers remain behind. Every one has some idle story of the promises of a swaggering sergeant Kite—It is impossible to attend to them. But let me hear yours, however.”

“Mine is a very singular case. The party has been robbed of a thousand pounds.”

“A recruit for this service possessing a thousand pounds! My dear Doctor, depend upon it, the fellow has gulled you. Bless my heart, would a man who had a thousand pounds think of enlisting as a private sentinel?”

“He had no such thoughts,” answered Hartley. “He was persuaded by the rogue whom he trusted, that he was to have a commission.”

“Then his friend must have been Tom Hillary, or the devil; for no other could possess so much cunning and impudence. He will certainly find his way to the gallows at last. Still this story of the thousand pounds seems a touch even beyond Tom Hillary. What reason have you to think that this fellow ever had such a sum of money?”

“I have the best reason to know it for certain,” answered Hartley; “he and I served our time together, under the same excellent master; and when he came of age, not liking the profession which he had studied, and obtaining possession of his little fortune, he was deceived by the promises of this same Hillary.”

“Who has had him locked up in our well-ordered hospital yonder?” said the General.

“Even so, please your Excellency,” replied Hartley; “not, I think, to cure him of any complaint, but to give him the opportunity of catching one, which would silence all enquiries.”

“The matter shall be closely looked into. But how miserably careless the young man's friends must have been to let a raw lad go into the world with such a companion and guide as Tom Hillary, and such a sum as a thousand pounds in his pocket. His parents had better have knocked him on the head. It certainly was not done like canny Northumberland, as my servant Winter calls it.”

“The youth must indeed have had strangely hard-hearted, or careless parents,” said Mrs. Witherington, in accents of pity.

“He never knew them, madam,” said Hartley; “there was a mystery on the score of his birth. A cold, unwilling, and almost unknown hand, dealt him out his portion when he came of lawful age, and he was pushed into the world like a bark forced from shore, without rudder, compass, or pilot.”

Here General Witherington involuntarily looked to his lady, while, guided by a similar impulse, her looks were turned upon him. They exchanged a momentary glance of deep and peculiar meaning, and then the eyes of both were fixed on the ground.

“Were you brought up in Scotland?” said the lady, addressing herself, in a faltering voice, to Hartley—“And what was your master's name?”

“I served my apprenticeship with Mr. Gideon Gray of the town of Middlemas,” said Hartley.

“Middlemas! Gray?” repeated the lady, and fainted away.

Hartley offered the succours of his profession; the husband flew to support her head, and the instant that Mrs. Witherington began to recover, he whispered to her, in a tone betwixt entreaty and warning, “Zilia, beware—beware!”

Some imperfect sounds which she had begun to frame, died away upon her tongue.

“Let me assist you to your dressing-room, my love,” said her obviously anxious husband.

She arose with the action of an automaton, which moves at a touch of a spring, and half hanging upon her husband, half dragging herself on by her own efforts, had nearly reached the door of the room, when Hartley following, asked if he could be of any service.

“No, sir,” said the General, sternly; “this is no case for a stranger's interference; when you are wanted I will send for you.”

Hartley stepped back on receiving a rebuff in a tone so different from that which General Witherington had used towards him in their previous intercourse, and felt disposed for the first time, to give credit to public report, which assigned to that gentleman, with several good qualities, the character of a very proud and haughty man. Hitherto, he thought, I have seen him tamed by sorrow and anxiety, now the mind is regaining its natural tension. But he must in decency interest himself for this unhappy Middlemas.

The General returned into the apartment a minute or two afterwards, and addressed Hartley in his usual tone of politeness, though apparently still under great embarrassment, which he in vain endeavoured to conceal.

“Mrs. Witherington is better,” he said, “and will be glad to see you before dinner. You dine with us, I hope?”

Hartley bowed.

“Mrs. Witherington is rather subject to this sort of nervous fits, and she has been much harassed of late by grief and apprehension. When she recovers from them it is a few minutes before she can collect her ideas, and during such intervals—to speak very confidentially to you, my dear Doctor Hartley—she speaks sometimes about imaginary events which have never happened, and sometimes about distressing occurrences in an early period of life. I am not, therefore, willing that any one but myself, or her old attendant Mrs. Lopez, should be with her on such occasions.”

Hartley admitted that a certain degree of light-headedness was often the consequence of nervous fits.

The General proceeded. “As to this young man—this friend of yours—this Richard Middlemas—did you not call him so?”

“Not that I recollect,” answered Hartley; “but your Excellency has hit upon his name.”

“That is odd enough—Certainly you said something about Middlemas?” replied General Witherington.

“I mentioned the name of the town,” said Hartley.

“Ay, and I caught it up as the name of the recruit—I was indeed occupied at the moment by my anxiety about my wife. But this Middlemas, since such is his name, is a wild young fellow, I suppose?”

“I should do him wrong to say so, your Excellency. He may have had his follies like other young men; but his conduct has, so far as I know, been respectable; but, considering we lived in the same house, we were not very intimate.”

“That is bad—I should have liked him—that is—it would have been happy for him to have had a friend like you. But I suppose you studied too hard for him. He would be a soldier, ha?—Is he good-looking?”

“Remarkably so,” replied Hartley; “and has a very prepossessing manner.”

“Is his complexion dark or fair?” asked the General.

“Rather uncommonly dark,” said Hartley,—“darker, if I may use the freedom, than your Excellency's.”