Complete Works of R S Surtees

by R S Surtees

  Being a shrewd sort of fellow, he knew there was nothing like striking out a new light for attracting notice, and the more that light was in accordance with the wishes of the world, the more likely was it to turn to his own advantage. Half the complaints of the upper classes he knew arose from over-eating and indolence, so he thought if he could originate a doctrine that with the use of Handley Cross waters people might eat and drink what they pleased, his fortune would be as good as made. To this end, therefore, he set himself manfully to work. Aided by the local press, he succeeded in drawing a certain attention to the water, the benefit of which soon began to be felt by the villagers of the place; and the landlord of the Fox and Grapes had his stable constantly filled with gigs and horses of the visitors. Presently lodgings were sought after, and carpeting began to cover the before sanded staircases of the cottages. These were soon found insufficient; and an enterprising bricklayer got up a building society for the erection of a row of four-roomed cottages, called the Grand Esplanade. Others quickly followed, the last undertaking always eclipsing its predecessor, until that, which at first was regarded with astonishment, was sunk into insignificance by its more pretending brethren.

  The Doctor’s practice “grew with the growth” of Handley Cross.

  His rosy face glowed with health and good living, and his little black eyes twinkled with delight as he prescribed for each patient, sending them away as happy as princes.

  “Ah, I see how it is,” he would say, as a gouty alderman slowly disclosed the symptoms of his case. “Shut up your potato trap! I see how it is. Soon set you on your legs again. Was far worse myself. All stomach, sir — all stomach, sir — all stomach — three-fourths of our complaints arise from stomach;” stroking his corpulent protuberancy with one hand, and twisting his patient’s button with the other. “Clean you well out and then strengthen the system. Dine with me at five and we will talk it all over.”

  With languid hypochondriacs he was subtle, firm, and eminently successful. A lady who took it into her head that she couldn’t walk, Roger had carefully carried out of her carriage into a room at the top of his house, when raising a cry of “Fire!” she came spinning down stairs in a way that astonished herself. He took another a mile or two out of town in a fly, when, suddenly pulling up, he told her to get out and walk home, which she at length did, to the great joy of her husband and friends. With the great and dignified, and those who were really ill, he was more ceremonious. “You see, Sir Harry,” he would say, “it’s all done by eating! More people dig their graves with their teeth than we imagine. Not that I would deny you the good things of this world, but I would recommend a few at a time, and no mixing. No side dishes. No liqueurs — only two or three wines. Whatever your stomach fancies give it! Begin now, to-morrow, with the waters. A pint before breakfast — half an hour after, tea, fried ham and eggs, brown bread, and a walk, Luncheon — another pint — a roast pigeon and fried potatoes, then a ride. Dinner at six, not later mind; gravy soup, glass of sherry, nice fresh turbot and lobster sauce — wouldn’t recommend salmon — another glass of sherry — then a good cut out of the middle of a well-browned saddle of mutton, wash it over with a few glasses of iced champagne; and if you like a little light pastry to wind up with, well and good. — A pint of old port and a devilled biscuit can hurt no man. Mind, no salads, or cucumbers, or celery, at dinner, or fruit after. Turtle soup is very wholesome, so is venison. Don’t let the punch be too acid though. Drink the waters, live on a regimen, and you’ll be well in no time.”

  With these and such like comfortable assurances, he pocketed his guineas, and bowed his patients out by the dozen. The theory was pleasant both to doctor and patient, and peculiarly suited the jolly air of the giver. We beg pardon for not having drawn a more elaborate sketch of Mr. Swizzle before. In height he was exactly five feet eight, and forty years of age. He had a long fat red face, with little twinkling black eyes, set high in his forehead, surmounted by fullish eyebrows and short bristly iron-grey hair, brushed up like a hedgehog’s back. His nose was snub, and he rejoiced in an ample double chin, rendered more conspicuous by the tightness of an ill-tied white neckcloth, and the absence of all whisker or hair from his face. A country-made snuff-coloured coat, black waistcoat, and short greenish drab trousers, with high-lows, were the adjuncts of his short ungainly figure. A peculiarly good-natured smile hovered round the dimples of his fat cheeks, which set a patient at ease on the instant. This, with his unaffected, cheery, free and easy manner and the comfortable nature of his prescriptions, gained him innumerable patients. That to some he did good, there is no doubt. The mere early rising and exercise he insisted upon, would renovate a constitution impaired by too close application to business and bad air; while the gourmand, among whom his principal practice lay, would be benefited by abstinence and regular hours. The water no doubt had its merits, but, as usual, was greatly aided by early rising, pure air, the absence of cares, regular habits, and the other advantages, which mineral waters invariably claim as their own. One thing the Doctor never wanted — a reason why he did not cure. If a patient went back on his hands, he soon hit off an excuse— “You surely didn’t dine off goose, on Michaelmas-day?” or “Hadn’t you some filberts for dessert?” &c., all of which information he got from the servants or shopkeepers of the place. When a patient died on his hands, he used to say, “He was as good as dead when he came.”

  The Handley Cross mania spread throughout the land! Invalids in every stage of disease and suffering were attracted by Roger’s name and fame. The village assumed the appearance of a town. A handsome Crescent reared its porticoed front at the north end of the green, to the centre house of which the Doctor removed from his humble whitewashed cottage, which was immediately rased, to make way for a square of forty important houses. Buildings shot up in all directions. Streets branched out, and markets, and lawns, and terraces, stretched to the right and the left, the north, the south, the east, and the west. The suburbs built their Prospect Houses, Rose Hill Villas, Hope Cottages, Grove Places, Gilead Terraces, and Tower View Halls. A fortune was expended on a pump room, opening into spacious promenade and ball rooms, but the speculators never flagged, and new works were planned before those in hand were completed.

  A thriving trade soon brings competition — another patientless doctor determined to try his luck in opposition to Roger Swizzle. Observing the fitness of that worthy’s figure for the line he had taken, Dr. Sebastian Mello considered that his pale and sentimental countenance better became a grave and thoughtful character so determined to devote himself to the serious portion of the population. He too was about forty, but a fair complexion, flowing sandy locks, and a slight figure, would let him pass for ten years younger. He had somewhat of a Grecian face, with blue eyes, and regular teeth, vieing the whiteness of his linen.

  Determined to be Swizzle’s opposite in every particular, he was studiously attentive to his dress. Not that he indulged in gay colours, but his black suit fitted without a wrinkle, and his thin dress boots shone with patent polish; turned-back cambric wristbands displayed the snowy whiteness of his hand, and set off a massive antique ring or two. He had four small frills to his shirt, and an auburn hair chain crossed his broad roll-collared waistcoat, and passed a most diminutive Geneva watch into its pocket. He was a widower with two children, a boy and a girl, one five and the other four. Mystery being his object, he avoided the public gaze. Unlike Roger Swizzle, who either trudged from patient to patient, or whisked about in a gig, Dr. Sebastian Mello drove to and fro in a claret-coloured fly, drawn by dun ponies. Through the plate glass windows a glimpse of his reclining figure might be caught, lolling luxuriously in the depths of its swelling cushions, or musing complacently with his chin on a massive gold-headed cane. With the men he was shy and mysterious; but he could talk and flatter the women into a belief that they were almost as clever as himself.

  As most of his fair patients were of the serious, or blue-stocking school, he quickly discovered the bent of each min
d, and by studying the subject, astonished them by his genius and versatility. In practice he was also mysterious. Disdaining Roger Swizzle’s one mode of treatment, he professed to take each case upon its merits, and kept a large quarto volume, into which he entered each case, and its daily symptoms. Thus, while Roger Swizzle was inviting an invalid to exhibit his tongue at the corner of a street — lecturing him, perhaps, with a friendly poke in the ribs, for over-night indulgence, Dr. Mello would be poring over his large volume, or writing Latin prescriptions for the chemists. Roger laughed at Sebastian, and Sebastian professed to treat Roger with contempt — still competition was good for both, and a watering-place public, ever ready for excitement, soon divided the place into Swizzleites and Melloites.

  Portraits appeared at the windows, bespeaking the character of each — Swizzle sat with a patient at a round table, indulging in a bee’s-winged bottle of port, while Mello reclined in a curiously carved chair, one beringed hand supporting his flowing-locked head, and the other holding a book. Swizzle’s was painted by the artist who did the attractive window-blind at the late cigar shop in the Piccadilly Circus, while Sebastian was indebted to Mr. Grant for the gentlemanly ease that able artist invariably infuses into his admirable portraits.

  Just as the rival doctors were starting into play, a third character slipped into Handley Cross, without which, a watering-place is incomplete. A tall, thin, melancholy-looking man made his appearance at the Spa, and morning after morning, partook of its beverage, without eliciting from widow, wife, or maid, an inquiry as to who he was. He might be a methodist preacher, or a music-master, or a fiddler, or a fencer, or a lawyer, or almost anything that one chose to fancy — he might also be any age, from five-and-thirty to fifty, or even more, for strongly indented lines furrowed the features of a square and cadaverous countenance, while intrusive grey hairs appeared among his thin black hair, plastered to advantage over a flat low forehead — straggling whiskers fringed his hollow cheeks, growing into a somewhat stronger crop below the chin.

  His costume consisted of an old well-brushed hat, lined throughout with black, a mohair stock, with a round embroidered shirt-collar, an old white-elbowed, white-seamed black dress coat, while a scrimpy, ill-washed buff waistcoat exposed the upper buttons of a pair of much puckered Oxford-grey trowers, and met, in their turn, a pair of square-cut black gaiters and shoes.

  The place being yet in its infancy, and many of the company mere birds of passage, the “unnoticed” held on the even tenor of his way, until he eat himself into the President’s chair of the Dragon Hotel. He then became a man of importance. The after comers, having never known him in any other situation, paid him the deference due to a man who daily knocked the table with a hammer, and proposed the health of “Her Majesty the Queen,” while mutual convenience connived at the absurdity of being introduced by a man who knew nothing of either party. Being of a ferreting disposition, he soon got acquainted with people’s histories, and no impediment appearing in the way, he at length dubbed himself Master of the Ceremonies, and issued his cards,

  “Captain Doleful, M.C.”

  Who, or what he was, where he came from, or anything about him, no one ever cared to inquire. He was now “Master of the Ceremonies,” and Masters of Ceremonies are not people to trifle with. The visitors who witnessed his self-installation having gone, and feeling his throne pretty firm under him, he abdicated the chair at the Dragon, and retiring to lodgings at Miss Jelly’s, a pastry-cook and confectioner, at the corner of two streets, opened books at the libraries for the reception and record of those complimentary fees that prudent mammas understand the use of too well for us to shock the delicacy of either party by relating.

  This much, however, we should mention of Captain Doleful’s history, for the due appreciation of his amiable character. He was pretty well off, that is to say, he had more than he spent; but money being the darling object of his heart, he perhaps saved more than others would have done out of the same income. He had been in the militia — the corps we forget — but he had afterwards turned coal-merchant (at Stroud, we believe), an unprosperous speculation, so he sold the good-will of a bad business to a young gentleman anxious for a settlement, and sunk his money in an annuity. There are dozens of such men at every large watering-place. In this case, a master of the ceremonies was as much wanted as anything else, for the Pump and Promenade Rooms were on the eve of completion, and there would be no one to regulate the music in the morning, the dances in the evening, or the anticipated concerts of the season. It was out of Roger Swizzle’s line, and, of course, Sebastian Mello disapproved of such frivolities.

  Handley Cross had now assumed quite a different character. Instead of a quiet, secluded village, rarely visited by a stranger, and never by any vehicle of greater pretensions than a gig, it had become a town of some pretension, with streets full of shops, large hotels, public buildings, public houses, and promenades. The little boys and girls left their labour in the fields, to become attendants on leg-weary donkeys, or curtseying-offerers of wild flowers to the strangers. A lovers’ walk, a labyrinth, a waterfall, grottoes, and a robber’s cave, were all established; and as the controversy between the doctors waxed warmer, Sebastian Mello interdicted his patients from the use of Swizzle’s Spa, and diluting a spring with Epsom salts and other ingredients, proclaimed his to be the genuine one, and all others spurious. He then, under the signature of “Galen,” entered into a learned and rather acrimonious argument with himself, in the great London Medical Mediator, as to the wonderful virtues of the Handley Cross New Spa.

  Galen, who led the charge, while admitting Dr. Mello’s great talents, had described the waters as only so so; while Dr. Sebastian Mello, disdaining the paltry subterfuge of an anonymous signature, boldly came forward and stated facts to prove the contrary.

  Galen, nothing daunted, quoted other places as superior; but his vehemence diminishing in the ratio of the doctor’s eloquent confidence, he gradually died out, leaving the doctor the undisputed champion of a water capable of curing every disease under the sun. Parliament being up, and news scarce, the doctor contrived, through the medium of a brother, a selector of shocking accidents, to get sundry extracts inserted in a morning paper, from whence the evening ones gladly transplanting them, and the country ones rehashing them for their Saturday customers, the name of the waters, and the fame of the doctor, spread throughout the land, and caused a wonderful sensation in his favour.

  The effects were soon felt, for lodgings and houses were written for from all parts, and a crowning piece of luck a railway was just then opened out to Silverley, some twenty miles beyond, for the purpose of supplying London with lily-white sand, which was soon converted into a passenger line, with a station for our rising Spa.

  CHAPTER III. THE RIVAL ORATORS.

  THUS, THEN, MATTERS stood at Michael Hardey’s death. A great town had risen in the centre of his country, the resort of the rich, the healthy, the sick, and the idle of the land. Rival doctors divided the medical throne, and Captain Doleful was the self-appointed arbiter elegantiarum. The hounds, though originally hardly a feature, had lately been appended to the list of attractions both in the way of newspaper encomiums, and in the more open notice of “Houses to Let.” Indeed, such was the fame of Michael and his pack, that several corpulent cob-riding bachelors had taken up their quarters at Handley Cross, for the purpose of combining morning exercise and evening amusements, and several young gentlemen had shown such an anxiety to get the horses out of the flys, that Duncan Nevin, the livery-stable-keeper, had begun to think seriously of keeping a hack hunter or two.

  This worthy — a big, consequential, dark-haired, dark-eyed, butler-marrying-housekeeper, having run the gauntlet of inn, public-house, and waiter, since he left service, had set up in Handley Cross, as spring-van luggage remover, waiter at short notice, and owner of a couple of flys and three horses, an establishment that seemed more likely to do good than any of his previous speculations. Not that he knew any thing about hor
ses, but having resolved that ten pounds was an outside price, he could not easily lose much. As a seller he was less contracted in his estimates.

  He it was who first heard of the death of Michael Hardey, and quickened by self-interest he was soon at Miss Jelly’s with Captain Doleful. Roger Swizzle being seen feeling a patient’s pulse in a donkey gig, was invited to the consultation, and though none of them saw how the thing was to be accomplished — they agreed that it would be a great feature to have the hounds at Handley Cross, and that a public meeting should be called to take the matter into consideration. Of course, like sensible people, the land-owners would take their tone from the town, it being an established rule at all watering-places, that the visitors are the lords paramount of the soil.

  The meeting, as all watering-place meetings are, was most numerously attended; fortunately some were there who could direct the line of proceeding. On the motion of Captain Doleful, Augustus Barnington, Esq., a rich, red-headed, Cheshire squire, took the chair, and not being a man of many words, contented himself by stammering something about honour, and happy to hear observations. We do not know that we need introduce Mr. Barnington further at present, save as the obedient husband of a very imperious lady, the self-appointed Queen of Handley Cross.