The popularity of this world is as transient as its glory, as Mr Hall found out before the first year of his partnership was over.He had plenty of leisure left to him now to nurse his gout and cherish his eyesight.The younger doctor had carried the day; nearly every one sent for Mr Gibson now; even at the great houses - even at the Towers, that greatest of all, where Mr Hall had introduced his new partner with fear and trembling, with untold anxiety as to his behaviour, and the impression he might make on my lord the Earl, and MY lady the Countess.Mr Gibson was received at the end of a twelvemonth with as much welcome respect for his professional skill as Mr Hall himself had ever been.Nay - and this was a little too much for even the kind old doctor's good temper - Mr Gibson had even been invited once to dinner at the Towers, to dine with the great Sir Astley, the head of the profession! To be sure, Mr Hall had been asked as well;but he was laid up just then with his gout (since he had had a partner the rheumatism had been allowed to develop itself, and he had not been able to go.Poor Mr Hall never quite got over this mortification; after it he allowed himself to become dim of sight and hard of hearing, and kept pretty closely to the house during the two winters that remained of his life.He sent for an orphan grand-niece to keep him company in his old age; he, the woman-contemning old bachelor, became thankful for the cheerful presence of the pretty, bonny Mary Preston, who was good and sensible, and nothing more.She formed a close friendship with the daughters of the vicar, Mr Browning, and Mr Gibson found time to become very intimate with all three.Hollingford speculated much on which young lady would become Mrs Gibson, and was rather sorry when the talk about possibilities, and the gossip about probabilities with regard to the handsome young surgeon's marriage, ended in the most natural manner in the world, by his marrying his predecessor's niece.The two Miss Brownings showed no signs of going into a consumption on the occasion, although their looks and manners were carefully watched.On the contrary, they were rather boisterously merry at the wedding, and poor Mrs Gibson it was that died of consumption, four or five years after her marriage - three years after the death of her great-uncle, and when her only child, Molly, was just three years old.Mr Gibson did not speak much about the grief at the loss of his wife, which it is to be supposed that he felt.Indeed, he avoided all demonstration of sympathy, and got up hastily and left the room when Miss Phoebe Browning first saw him after his loss, and burst into an uncontrollable flood of tears, which threatened to end in hysterics.Miss Browning afterwards said she never could forgive him for his hard-heartedness on that occasion;but a fortnight afterwards she came to very high words with old Mrs Goodenough, for gasping out her doubts whether Mr Gibson was a man of deep feeling;judging by the narrowness of his crape hat-band, which ought to have covered his hat, whereas there was at least three inches of beaver to be seen.
And, in spite of it all, Miss Browning and Miss Phoebe considered themselves as Mr Gibson's most intimate friends, in right of their regard for his dead wife, and would fain have taken a quasi-motherly interest in his little girl, had she not been guarded by a watchful dragon in the shape of Betty, her nurse, who was jealous of any interference between her and her charge;and especially resentful and disagreeable towards all those ladies who, by suitable age, rank, or propinquity, she thought capable of 'casting sheep's eyes at master.' Several years before the opening of this story, Mr Gibson's position seemed settled for life, both socially and professionally.He was a widower, and likely to remain so; his domestic affections were centred on little Molly, but even to her, in their most private moments, he did not give way to much expression of his feelings; his most caressing appellation for her was 'Goosey,' and he took a pleasure in bewildering her infant mind with his badinage.He had rather a contempt for demonstrative people, arising from his medical insight into the consequences to health of uncontrolled feeling.He deceived himself into believing that still his reason was lord of all, because he had never fallen into the habit of expression on any other than purely intellectual subjects.Molly, however, had her own intuitions to guide her.Though her papa laughed at her, quizzed her, joked at her, in a way which the Miss Brownings called 'really cruel' to each other when they were quite alone, Molly took her little griefs and pleasures, and poured them into her papa's ears, sooner even than into Betty's, that kind-hearted termagant.The child grew to understand her father well, and the two had the most delightful intercourse together - half banter, half seriousness, but altogether confidential friendship.Mr Gibson kept three servants;Betty, a cook, and a girl who was supposed to be housemaid, but who was under both the elder two, and had a pretty life of it in consequence.Three servants would not have been required if it had not been Mr Gibson's habit, as it had been Mr Hall's before him, to take two 'pupils,' as they were called in the genteel language of Hollingford, (apprentices,' as they were in fact - being bound by indentures, and paying a handsome premium' to learn their business.They lived in the house, and occupied an uncomfortable, ambiguous, or, as Miss Browning called it with some truth, 'amphibious'