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 how 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."