A Strange Story | Page 5

and called the
Abbey Hill. These superb Areopagites exercised over the wives and
daughters of the inferior citizens to whom all of L----, except the Abbey
Hill, owed its prosperity, the same kind of mysterious influence which
the fine ladies of May Fair and Belgravia are reported to hold over the
female denizens of Bloomsbury and Marylebone.
Abbey Hill was not opulent; but it was powerful by a concentration of
its resources in all matters of patronage. Abbey Hill had its own
milliner and its own draper, its own confectioner, butcher, baker, and
tea-dealer; and the patronage of Abbey Hill was like the patronage of
royalty,--less lucrative in itself than as a solemn certificate of general
merit. The shops on which Abbey Hill conferred its custom were
certainly not the cheapest, possibly not the best; but they were
undeniably the most imposing. The proprietors were decorously
pompous, the shopmen superciliously polite. They could not be more
so if they had belonged to the State, and been paid by a public which
they benefited and despised. The ladies of Low Town (as the city
subjacent to the Hill had been styled from a date remote in the feudal
ages) entered those shops with a certain awe, and left them with a
certain pride. There they had learned what the Hill approved; there they
had bought what the Hill had purchased. It is much in this life to be
quite sure that we are in the right, whatever that conviction may cost us.
Abbey Hill had been in the habit of appointing, amongst other objects

of patronage, its own physician. But that habit had fallen into disuse
during the latter years of my predecessor's practice. His superiority
over all other medical men in the town had become so incontestable,
that, though he was emphatically the doctor of Low Town, the head of
its hospitals and infirmaries, and by birth related to its principal traders,
still as Abbey Hill was occasionally subject to the physical infirmities
of meaner mortals, so on those occasions it deemed it best not to push
the point of honour to the wanton sacrifice of life. Since Low Town
possessed one of the most famous physicians in England, Abbey Hill
magnanimously resolved not to crush him by a rival. Abbey Hill let
him feel its pulse.
When my predecessor retired, I had presumptuously expected that the
Hill would have continued to suspend its normal right to a special
physician, and shown to me the same generous favour it had shown to
him, who had declared me worthy to succeed to his honours. I had the
more excuse for this presumption because the Hill had already allowed
me to visit a fair proportion of its invalids, had said some very gracious
things to me about the great respectability of the Fenwick family, and
sent me some invitations to dinner, and a great many invitations to tea.
But my self-conceit received a notable check. Abbey Hill declared that
the time had come to reassert its dormant privilege; it must have a
doctor of its own choosing,--a doctor who might, indeed, be permitted
to visit Low Town from motives of humanity or gain, but who must
emphatically assert his special allegiance to Abbey Hill by fixing his
home on that venerable promontory. Miss Brabazon, a spinster of
uncertain age but undoubted pedigree, with small fortune but high nose,
which she would pleasantly observe was a proof of her descent from
Humphrey Duke of Gloucester (with whom, indeed, I have no doubt, in
spite of chronology, that she very often dined), was commissioned to
inquire of me diplomatically, and without committing Abbey Hill too
much by the overture, whether I would take a large and antiquated
mansion, in which abbots were said to have lived many centuries ago,
and which was still popularly styled Abbots' House, situated on the
verge of the Hill, as in that case the "Hill" would think of me.

"It is a large house for a single man, I allow," said Miss Brabazon,
candidly; and then added, with a sidelong glance of alarming sweetness,
"but when Dr. Fenwick has taken his true position (so old a family!)
amongst us, he need not long remain single, unless he prefer it."
I replied, with more asperity than the occasion called for, that I had no
thought of changing my residence at present, and if the Hill wanted me,
the Hill must send for me.
Two days afterwards Dr. Lloyd took Abbots' House, and in less than a
week was proclaimed medical adviser to the Hill. The election had
been decided by the fiat of a great lady, who reigned supreme on the
sacred eminence, under the name and title of Mrs. Colonel Poyntz.
"Dr. Fenwick," said this lady, "is a clever young man