Polpeor, you must know, is a fishing-haven on the south coast of Cornwall, famous during the Napoleonic Wars for its privateering, and for its smuggling scarcely less notorious down to the middle of the last century. The doctor"s parents, though of small estate, had earned by these and more legitimate arts enough money to set them dreaming of eminence for their only child, and sent him up to London to Guy"s Hospital, where he studied surgery under the renowned Mr Astley Cooper. Having qualified himself in this and in medicine, he returned to his native home, which he never again left--save now and then for a holiday--until the day of his death.
a.s.siduous in visiting the sick, he found the real happiness of his life (one might almost say its real business) in his scientific and literary recreations. The range and diversity of these may be gathered from a list of his published writings: "The Efficacy of Digitalis Applied to Scrofula," "On the Carpenter Bee (Apis Centuncularis)," "Domestic Usage and Economy in the Reign of Elizabeth," "A Reply to a Query on Singular Fishes," "The Fabulous Foundation of the Popedom" (abridged from Bernard), "Migratory Birds of the West of England," "G.o.d"s Arrow against Atheism and Irreligion," "A Dissertation on the Mermaid," "Observations on the Natural History of the Chameleon," "Ditto on the Jewish and Christian Sabbath Days," "Ditto on Cider-making and the Cultivation of Apple Trees," "Contributions to a Cla.s.sification of British Crustacea,"
"On Man as the Image of the Deity," "_Daulias Advena_; or, the Migrations of the Swallow Tribe." We select these from the output of one decade only. A little later the activity grows less miscellaneous, and he is drifting upon his _magnum opus_, as the t.i.tles indicate, "Some Particulars of Rare Fishes found in Cornwall,"
"An Account of a Fish nearly allied to Hemiranphus," "On the Occurrence of the Crustacean Scyllurus Arctus."
He would announce these strange visitors--_sepia biserialis_, for an instance--with no less eagerness than a journalist hails the advent of a foreign potentate. He had invented, as we have said, an apparatus on which he mounted them, with a jet of salt water that played over their scales and kept fresh, as he maintained, the delicate hues he copied from his water-colour box; with what success let anybody judge who has studied the four great volumes wherein these drawings survive, reproduced by lithography, and published by subscription.
Immersed in these studies, Doctor Unonius found no leisure to think of matrimony; and his friends and neighbours often took occasion to deplore it, for he was an extremely personable man, fresh-coloured and hale, of clean and regular habits, and, moreover, kind-hearted to a fault. All Polpeor agreed that he needed a wife to look after him, to protect him from being robbed; and Polpeor (to do it justice) did not say this without knowledge. The good man could never be persuaded that Polpeor folk--_his_ folk--were capable of doing him a wrong; but certain it is that learnedly as he wrote "On the Cultivation of Apple Trees," the fruit of his carefully tended standards and espaliers seldom arrived at his own table.
They burgeoned, they bloomed; the blossom "pitched," as we say in the West; the fruit swelled, ripened, and then--
Garden shows were rarities in those days: but Tregarrick (Polpeor"s nearest market town) boasted a Horticultural Society and an annual Exhibition. Whether from indolence or modesty Doctor Unonius never competed, but he seldom missed to visit the show and to con the exhibits. The date was then, and is to this day, the Feast of St Matthew, which falls on the twenty-first of September: and one year, on the morrow of St Matthew"s Feast, the doctor, gazing pensively over his orchard gate at a n.o.ble tree of fruit, remarked to his friend and next-door neighbour, Captain Minards, late of the merchant service--
"Do you know, Minards, I was at Tregarrick yesterday; and I think-- yes, without vaunting, I really think that the best of my pearmains yonder would have stood a fair chance of the prize for Table Varieties."
"The prize?" grunted Captain Minards. "Don"t you fret about that: you won it all right."
"Eh?" queried Doctor Unonius, wiping his spectacles.
"Ay," said Captain Minards, filling a pipe; "you won it, right enough."
"But--"
"There"s no "but" about it. And what vexes me," pursued Captain Minards, "is that the rascals don"t even trouble to rob you neatly.
See that branch broken, yonder."
"That"s with the weight of the crop."
"Weight o" my fiddlestick! And the ground all strewed with short twigs!"
"The wind"s doing."
"When you know the weather has been flat calm for a week past!"
"There"s an extraordinary eddy just here, at the turn of the valley; I have often observed a puff of wind--you might almost call it a gust--spring up with no apparent reason."
"Well, you"re a man of science," Captain Minards replied doggedly, "and if you tell me this puff o" wind carried your pearmains all the way to Tregarrick and entered "em at the show under some other body"s name, I"m bound to believe you. But I wonder you don"t put it into a book. It"s interestin" enough."
With this Parthian shot he departed. But two nights later he was awakened in his bedroom, which overlooked the doctor"s orchard, by a strange rustling among the apple trees. _Thud--thud!_--there as he lay he listened for half a minute to the sounds of the dropping fruit.
The night was calm. . . . On the wall facing the bed"s foot there hung an old gun. Captain Minards arose, reached it down, loaded it with a charge of powder, and, stepping to the window, let bang at the trees. . . . After listening awhile he replaced the gun and retired to rest.
Next morning Doctor Unonius was called away from his breakfast to visit Sarah Puckey, an aged market woman or "regrater," whom he found in a state of prostration following (it was alleged) upon a severe nervous shock. He attended the old woman for the remainder of her days, which were few; and while they lasted she remained--in the language of Polpeor--a "bedrider." She never confided to him the nature of the shock which had laid her low; but at the last, satisfied of her own salvation, she worried herself sadly over the doctor and his defenceless life.
"I"m a saved woman," she declared, "and a dyin" old woman, and these things be clear to my eyes. A wife--that"s what you want. Your laudanums and your doldadums and your nummy-dummies[1] may be all very well--"
"What are they?" asked the doctor.
"Latin," she answered promptly. "I be a dyin" woman, I tell "ee, an"
got the gift o" tongues. . . . And your "natomies and fishes" innards may be all very well, but you want a wife to look after the money an"
tell the men to wipe their sea-boots "pon the front mat. When it comes to their unpickin" a trawl in your very drawin"-room, an" fish scales all over the best Brussels, as I"ve a-see"d "em before now--"
Mrs Puckey paused for breath.
"Have "ee ever had a mind to the widow Tresize?" she asked.
"Certainly not," the doctor answered.
"That"s a pity, too: for Landeweddy Farm"s her own freehold, an" I"ve heard her say more"n once how sorry she feels for you, livin" alone as you do. I don"t everyways like Missus Tresize, but she"s a bowerly woman an" nimble for her age--which can"t be forty, not by a year or two. Old Tresize married her for her looks. I mind goin" to the weddin", an" she brought en no more"n her clothes an" herself inside of "em: an" now she"ve a-buried th" old doter, an" sits up at Landeweddy in her own parlour a-playin" the pianner with both hands.
What d"ee reckon a woman does _that_ for?"
"Maybe because she is fond of music," said Doctor Unonius dryly.
The invalid chuckled, until her old head in its white mob-cap nodded against the white pillow propping it.
"I married three men mysel" in my time, as you d" know; an" if either wan had been rich enough to leave me a pianner, I"d ha" married three more. . . . What tickles me is you men with your talk o" spoort.
Catchin" fish for a business I can understand: you got to do that for money, which is the first thing in life; an" when you"re married, the woman sees that you don"t shirk it. But you make me laugh, puttin"
on airs an" pretendin" to do it for spoort--"Wimmen ha"n"t got no sense o" spoort," says you, all solemn as owls. Soon as a boy turns fourteen he takes up the trick. "Wimmen ha"n"t got no sense o"
spoort," says he, sticking his hands in his breeches pockets; an" off he goes to hook fish, an" comes swaggerin" back to be taken, catch an" all, by a young "ooman that has been sayin" naught but markin"
him down all the time. Spoort? This world, doctor, is made up of hooks an" eyes: an" you reckon--do "ee--the best spoort goes to the hooks? Ask the eyes and the maidens that make "em."
The doctor, who had risen and picked up his hat when Mrs Puckey linked his name with the widow Tresize"s, came back and re-seated himself by the bedside. The old woman enjoyed her chat--it did her more good than medicine, she said--and so long as she steered it clear of himself and his private affairs he was willing enough to indulge her. Nay, he too--being no prude--enjoyed her general disquisitions on matrimony and the s.e.xes. _h.o.m.o sum, etc_., . . . He was a great reader of Montaigne, and like Montaigne he loved listening to folks, however humble, who (as he put it) knew their subject. Mrs Puckey certainly knew her subject, and if in experience she fell a little short of Chaucer"s "Wife of Bath," she handled it with something of that lady"s freedom, and, in detail, with a plainness of speech worthy of Panurge.
She knew very well that by further reference to Mrs Tresize she risked cutting short the doctor"s visit. Yet, woman-like, she could not forbear from just one more word.
"She keeps it under the bed."
"Keeps what?" asked Doctor Unonius.
The old woman chuckled again. "Why, her money, to be sure--hundreds an" hundreds o" pounds--in a great iron chest. I wonder she can sleep o" nights with it, up in that g"e"rt lonely house, an" not a man within call--Aw, doctor, dear, don"t tell me you"re _goin"!_"
[1] _Quaere_. Was this some faint inherited memory of "the old profession"?--_In nomine domini, etc._
CHAPTER II.
A year pa.s.sed; a year and three months. Old Mrs Puckey was dead and laid in churchyard, and the doctor remained a bachelor. Christmas found him busy upon two papers written almost concurrently: the one "A Description of a Kind of Trigla vulgarly confounded with Trigla Blochii," intended for Loudon"s "Magazine of Natural History," the other, "On Savagery in Dogs and Methods of Meeting their Attacks,"
for the _Journal_ of the Royal Inst.i.tution of Cornwall.
On the morning of St Stephen"s (or Boxing) Day, his professional visits over, he devoted an hour to the second of these treatises.
He had reached this striking pa.s.sage,--
"Homer informs us that the fury of a dog in attacking an approaching stranger is appeased by the man"s sitting down:--
""Soon as Ulysses near th" enclosure drew, With open mouths the furious mastiffs flew: Down sat the sage and, cautious to withstand, Let fall th" offensive truncheon from his hand."
Pope.
"Even at the present day this is a well-understood mode of defence, as will be seen from the following:--