The Rector and The Doctor’s Family · The Doctor’s Family · Chapter 2 17 (2/2)

“I am not crying now,” she said, waking into sudden strength. “Do you want to get them killed before they go away, all you people? Susan, go in, and never mind. I was not⁠—not quite well out of doors; but I don’t mean to suffer this, you know, as long as I am beside them. Dr. Edward, come in. I have something to say to you. We have nowhere to speak to each other but here,” said Nettie, pausing in the little hall, from which that childish tumult had died away in sudden awe of her presence; “but we have spoken to each other here before now. I did not mean to vex you then⁠—at least, I did mean to vex you, but nothing more.” Here she paused with a sob, the echo of her past trouble breaking upon her words, as happened from time to time, like the passion of a child; then burst forth again a moment after in a sudden question. “Will you let me have Freddy?” she cried, surrendering at discretion, and looking eagerly up in the doctor’s face; “if they will leave him, may I keep him with me?”

It is unnecessary to record the doctor’s answer. He would have swallowed not Fred only, but Mrs. Fred and the entire family, had that gulp been needful to satisfy Nettie, but was not sufficiently blinded to his own interests to grant this except under certain conditions satisfactory to himself. When the doctor mounted the drag again he drove away into Elysium, with a smiling Cupid behind him, instead of the little groom who had been his unconscious master’s confidant so long, and had watched the fluctuations of his wooing with such lively curiosity. Those patients who had paid for Dr. Rider’s disappointments in many a violent prescription, got compensation today in honeyed draughts and hopeful prognostications. Wherever the doctor went he saw a vision of that little drooping head, reposing, after all the agitation of the morning, in the silence and rest he had enjoined, with brilliant eyes, half-veiled, shining with thoughts in which he had the greatest share; and, with that picture before his eyes, went flashing along the wintry road with secret smiles, and carried hope wherever he went. Of course it was the merest fallacy, so far as Nettie’s immediate occupation was concerned. That restless little woman had twenty times too much to do to think of rest⁠—more to do than ever in all the suddenly-changed preparations which fell upon her busy hands. But the doctor kept his imagination all the same, and pleased himself with thoughts of her reposing in a visionary tranquillity, which, wherever it was to be found, certainly did not exist in St. Roque’s Cottage, in that sudden tumult of new events and hopes.