The Woodlanders - Page 39/314

Mrs. Oliver looked across. "Oh, that," she said, "is from the

doctor's. He's often doing things of that sort. Perhaps you don't

know that we've a doctor living here now--Mr. Fitzpiers by name?"

Grace admitted that she had not heard of him.

"Well, then, miss, he's come here to get up a practice. I know him

very well, through going there to help 'em scrub sometimes, which your

father said I might do, if I wanted to, in my spare time. Being a

bachelor-man, he've only a lad in the house. Oh yes, I know him very

well. Sometimes he'll talk to me as if I were his own mother."

"Indeed."

"Yes. 'Grammer,' he said one day, when I asked him why he came here

where there's hardly anybody living, 'I'll tell you why I came here. I

took a map, and I marked on it where Dr. Jones's practice ends to the

north of this district, and where Mr. Taylor's ends on the south, and

little Jimmy Green's on the east, and somebody else's to the west.

Then I took a pair of compasses, and found the exact middle of the

country that was left between these bounds, and that middle was Little

Hintock; so here I am....' But, Lord, there: poor young man!"

"Why?"

"He said, 'Grammer Oliver, I've been here three months, and although

there are a good many people in the Hintocks and the villages round,

and a scattered practice is often a very good one, I don't seem to get

many patients. And there's no society at all; and I'm pretty near

melancholy mad,' he said, with a great yawn. 'I should be quite if it

were not for my books, and my lab--laboratory, and what not. Grammer,

I was made for higher things.' And then he'd yawn and yawn again."

"Was he really made for higher things, do you think? I mean, is he

clever?"

"Well, no. How can he be clever? He may be able to jine up a broken

man or woman after a fashion, and put his finger upon an ache if you

tell him nearly where 'tis; but these young men--they should live to my

time of life, and then they'd see how clever they were at

five-and-twenty! And yet he's a projick, a real projick, and says the

oddest of rozums. 'Ah, Grammer,' he said, at another time, 'let me

tell you that Everything is Nothing. There's only Me and not Me in the

whole world.' And he told me that no man's hands could help what they

did, any more than the hands of a clock....Yes, he's a man of strange

meditations, and his eyes seem to see as far as the north star."