Barchester Towers Anthony Trollope (iphone ebook reader .TXT) 📖

that he could put forward no claim to such conduct on their part unless he taught them the great Christian doctrine of works and faith combined. On this he enlarged, but not very amply, and after twenty minutes succeeded in sending his new friends home to their baked mutton and pudding well pleased with their new minister.

Then came the lunch at Ullathorne. As soon as they were in the hall Miss Thorne took Mr. Arabin’s hand and assured him that she received him into her house, into the temple, she said, in which she worshipped, and bade him Godspeed with all her heart. Mr. Arabin was touched and squeezed the spinster’s hand without uttering a word in reply. Then Mr. Thorne expressed a hope that Mr. Arabin found the church well adapted for articulation, and Mr. Arabin having replied that he had no doubt he should as soon as he had learnt to pitch his voice to the building, they all sat down to the good things before them.

Miss Thorne took special care of Mrs. Bold. Eleanor still wore her widow’s weeds, and therefore had about her that air of grave and sad maternity which is the lot of recent widows. This opened the soft heart of Miss Thorne, and made her look on her young guest as though too much could not be done for her. She heaped chicken and ham upon her plate and poured out for her a full bumper of port wine. When Eleanor, who was not sorry to get it, had drunk a little of it, Miss Thorne at once essayed to fill it again. To this Eleanor objected, but in vain. Miss Thorne winked and nodded and whispered, saying that it was the proper thing and must be done, and that she knew all about it; and so she desired Mrs. Bold to drink it up and not mind anybody.

“It is your duty, you know, to support yourself,” she said into the ear of the young mother; “there’s more than yourself depending on it;” and thus she coshered up Eleanor with cold fowl and port wine. How it is that poor men’s wives, who have no cold fowl and port wine on which to be coshered up, nurse their children without difficulty, whereas the wives of rich men, who eat and drink everything that is good, cannot do so, we will for the present leave to the doctors and the mothers to settle between them.

And then Miss Thorne was great about teeth. Little Johnny Bold had been troubled for the last few days with his first incipient masticator, and with that freemasonry which exists among ladies, Miss Thorne became aware of the fact before Eleanor had half-finished her wing. The old lady prescribed at once a receipt which had been much in vogue in the young days of her grandmother, and warned Eleanor with solemn voice against the fallacies of modern medicine.

“Take his coral, my dear,” said she, “and rub it well with carrot-juice; rub it till the juice dries on it, and then give it him to play with⁠—”

“But he hasn’t got a coral,” said Eleanor.

“Not got a coral!” said Miss Thorne with almost angry vehemence. “Not got a coral⁠—how can you expect that he should cut his teeth? Have you got Daffy’s Elixir?”

Eleanor explained that she had not. It had not been ordered by Mr. Rerechild, the Barchester doctor whom she employed; and then the young mother mentioned some shockingly modern succedaneum which Mr. Rerechild’s new lights had taught him to recommend.

Miss Thorne looked awfully severe. “Take care, my dear,” said she, “that the man knows what he’s about; take care he doesn’t destroy your little boy. But”⁠—and she softened into sorrow, as she said it, and spoke more in pity than in anger⁠—“but I don’t know who there is in Barchester now that you can trust. Poor dear old Doctor Bumpwell, indeed⁠—”

“Why, Miss Thorne, he died when I was a little girl.”

“Yes, my dear, he did, and an unfortunate day it was for Barchester. As to those young men that have come up since”⁠—Mr. Rerechild, by the by, was quite as old as Miss Thorne herself⁠—“one doesn’t know where they came from or who they are, or whether they know anything about their business or not.”

“I think there are very clever men in Barchester,” said Eleanor.

“Perhaps there may be; only I don’t know them: and it’s admitted on all sides that medical men aren’t now what they used to be. They used to be talented, observing, educated men. But now any whippersnapper out of an apothecary’s shop can call himself a doctor. I believe no kind of education is now thought necessary.”

Eleanor was herself the widow of a medical man and felt a little inclined to resent all these hard sayings. But Miss Thorne was so essentially good-natured that it was impossible to resent anything she said. She therefore sipped her wine and finished her chicken.

“At any rate, my dear, don’t forget the carrot-juice, and by all means get him a coral at once. My grandmother Thorne had the best teeth in the county and carried them to the grave with her at eighty. I have heard her say it was all the carrot-juice. She couldn’t bear the Barchester doctors. Even poor old Dr. Bumpwell didn’t please her.” It clearly never occurred to Miss Thorne that some fifty years ago Dr. Bumpwell was only a rising man and therefore as much in need of character in the eyes of the then ladies of Ullathorne as the present doctors were in her own.

The archdeacon made a very good lunch, and talked to his host about turnip-drillers and new machines for reaping, while the host, thinking it only polite to attend to a stranger, and fearing that perhaps he might not care about turnip crops on a Sunday, mooted all manner of ecclesiastical subjects.

“I never saw a heavier lot of wheat, Thorne, than you’ve got there in that field beyond the copse. I suppose that’s guano,” said the archdeacon.

“Yes, guano. I get it from Bristol