Mrs. Harrowby and her daughters went off to Cheltenham two days after Alick was announced as “down,” to find there the security of living which had failed them here.  They were people of the highest respectability—­people who are the very pith and marrow of English social virtue; but they had not been touched with the divine fire of self-sacrifice for humanity, and they had no desire to hush the groans of the afflicted if they thereby ran the risk of having to gnash their own teeth.  They could do no good at home.  As Mrs. Harrowby said, as one propounding a self-evident paradox, how could they go and see the sick or help to nurse ploughmen and their children?  They would only catch the fever themselves, and so spread it still farther.  And every one knows what a wicked thing that is to do.  Cook had orders to supply a certain amount of soup and wine when asked for, which was more to the purpose than any mere sentimental kindness, of no use to the one and highly dangerous to the other; and as Edgar had a great deal to do in the house and stables, it was as well, she said with the air of one undergoing something disagreeable for high principles, to get out of his way and leave him to his bricks and mortar undisturbed.  Gentlemen, she said, as the clamp holding all together, do not like to be interfered with in their own domain.  That fever in the bottom was such an admirable lever of womanly good sense!  So they went and enjoyed themselves at Cheltenham as much as it was in the Harrowby nature to do, and even Josephine’s kind heart consoled itself in the Pump-room while their miserable tenants at home sickened and died as comfortably as circumstances would allow.

The Fairbairns, too, found themselves obliged to pay a long-promised visit to London now on the instant, and swept out of the place with even more than their characteristic promptitude; and the rector would have given up his charge to a substitute if he could.  But floating clerical labor was just then scarce, and he could not find any one to take his place in the Valley of the Shadow, though he offered the liberal terms which are dictated by fear.  He sent away his wife and daughter, but he himself was bound to his post, and had to make the best of the bad bit of cord that held him.  He used to say with his grand manner of martyrdom that, whatever he suffered, he must pull the laboring-oar to the end, and attend to the sheep committed to his charge.  And he said it so often that he got at last to believe in his own devotion.  All the same, that laboring-oar of his pulled nothing heavier than a cock-boat, and in waters no stormier than a duck-pond; and when his sheep had the rot he was too delicate about the hands to meddle with them.  He preached to the living and he buried the dead surrounded by all the protective appliances that science has devised or money can supply.  When the epidemic was over he too talked of Providence and his trust therein, and how he had been mercifully spared as his reward.