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."