“Mr. Wynne, I hope!” said Mr. Gibson.
“His heart is pre-engaged,” replied Mr. Coxe. “Mine was free as air till I saw her.”
“Would it tend to cure your—well! passion, we’ll say— if she wore blue spectacles at meal-times? I observe you dwell much on the beauty of her eyes.”
“You are ridiculing my feelings, Mr. Gibson. Do you forget that you yourself were young once?”
“Poor Jeanie” rose before Mr. Gibson’s eyes; and he felt a little rebuked.
“Come, Mr. Coxe, let us see if we can’t make a bargain,” said he, after a minute or so of silence. “You have done a really wrong thing; and I hope you are convinced of it in your heart, or that you will be, when the heat of this discussion is over, and you come to think a little about it. But I won’t lose all respect for your father’s son. If you will give me your word that, as long as you remain a member of my family—pupil, apprentice, what you will—you won’t again try to disclose your passion—you see I am careful to take your view of what I should call a mere fancy—by word or writing, looks or acts, in any manner whatever, to my daughter, or to talk about your feelings to any one else, you shall remain here. If you cannot give me your word, I must follow out the course I named, and write to your father’s agent.”
Mr. Coxe stood irresolute.
“Mr. Wynne knows all I feel for Miss Gibson, sir. He and I have no secrets from each other.”
“Well, I suppose he must represent the reeds. You know the story of King Midas’s barber, who found out that his royal master had the ears of an ass beneath his hyacinthine curls. So the barber, in default of a Mr. Wynne, went to the reeds that grew on the shores of a neighbouring lake, and whispered to them, ‘King Midas has the ears of an ass.’ But he repeated it so often that the reeds learnt the words, and kept on saying them all day long, till at last the secret was no secret at all. If you keep on telling your tale to Mr. Wynne, are you sure he won’t repeat it in his turn?”
“If I pledge my word as a gentleman, sir, I pledge it for Mr. Wynne as well.”
“I suppose I must run the risk. But remember how soon a young girl’s name may be breathed upon, and sullied. Molly has no mother, and for that very reason she ought to move among you all, as unharmed as Una herself.”
“Mr. Gibson, if you wish it, I’ll swear it on the Bible,” cried the excitable young man.
“Nonsense. As if your word, if it’s worth anything, wasn’t enough! We’ll shake hands upon it, if you like.”
Mr. Coxe came forward eagerly, and almost squeezed Mr. Gibson’s ring into his finger.
As he was leaving the room, he said, a little uneasily, ‘May I give Bethia a crown-piece?”
“No, indeed! Leave Bethia to me. I hope you won’t say another word to her, while she’s here. I shall see that she gets a respectable place, when she goes away.”
Then Mr. Gibson rang for his horse, and went out on the last visits of the day. He used to reckon that he rode the world around in the course of the year. There were not many surgeons in the county who had so wide a range of practice as he; he went to lonely cottages on the borders of great commons; to farmhouses at the end of narrow country lanes that led to nowhere else, and were overshadowed by the elms and beeches overhead. He attended all the gentry within a circle of fifteen miles round Hollingford, and was the appointed doctor to the still greater families who went up to London every February—as the fashion then was— and returned to their acres in the early weeks of July. He was, of necessity, a great deal from home, and on this soft and pleasant summer evening he felt the absence as a great