Part 31 (2/2)

Haven't you a wife, too, doctor? Then show a bit o' mercy to mine!”

”Tut, tut, man, none of that!” said Mahony curtly. ”You should have bespoken me at the proper time to attend your wife.--Besides, there'll be no getting along the road to-night.”

The other caught the note of yielding. ”Sure an' you'd go out, doctor dear, without thinkin', to save your dog if he was drownin'. I've got me buggy down there; I'll take you safe. And you shan't regret it; I'll make it worth your while, by the Lord Harry I will!”

”Pshaw!”--Mahony opened the door of the surgery and struck a match. It was a rough grizzled fellow--a ”c.o.c.ky,” on his own showing--who presented himself in the lamplight. His wife had fallen ill that afternoon. At first everything seemed to be going well; then she was seized with fits, had one fit after another, and all but bit her tongue in two. There was n.o.body with her but a young girl he had fetched from a mile away. He had meant, when her time came, to bring her to the District Hospital. But they had been taken unawares. While he waited he sat with his elbows on his knees, his face between his clenched fists.

In dressing, Mahony rea.s.sured Polly, and instructed her what to say to people who came inquiring after him; it was unlikely he would be back before afternoon. Most of the patients could wait till then. The one exception, a case of typhoid in its second week, a young Scotch surgeon, Brace, whom he had obliged in a similar emergency, would no doubt see for him--she should send Ellen down with a note. And having poured Doyle out a n.o.bbler and put a flask in his own pocket, Mahony reopened the front door to the howl of the wind.

The lantern his guide carried shed only a tiny circlet of light on the blackness; and the two men picked their steps gingerly along the flooded road. The rain ran in jets off the brim of Mahony's hat, and down the back of his neck.

Having climbed into the buggy they advanced at a funeral pace, leaving it to the sagacity of the horse to keep the track. At the creek, sure enough, the water was out, the bridge gone. To reach the next bridge, five miles off, a crazy cross-country drive would have been necessary; and Mahony was for giving up the job. But Doyle would not acknowledge defeat. He unharnessed the horse, set Mahony on its back, and himself holding to its tail, forced the beast, by dint of kicking and las.h.i.+ng, into the water; and not only got them safely across, but up the steep sticky clay of the opposite bank. It was six o'clock and a cloudless morning when, numb with cold, his clothing clinging to him like wet seaweed, Mahony entered the wooden hut where the real work he had come out to do began.

Later in the day, clad in an odd collection of baggy garments, he sat and warmed himself in the sun, which was fast drawing up in the form of a blankety mist the moisture from the ground. He had successfully performed, under the worst possible conditions, a ticklish operation; and was now so tired that, with his chin on his chest, he fell fast asleep.

Doyle wakened him by announcing the arrival of the buggy. The good man, who had more than one n.o.bbler during the morning could not hold his tongue, but made still another wordy attempt to express his grat.i.tude.

”Whither me girl lives or dies, it'll not be Mat Doyle who forgits what you did for him this night, doctor! An' if iver you want a bit o' work done, or some one to do your lyin' awake at night for you, just you gimme the tip. I don't mind tellin' you now, I'd me shootin'-iron here”--he touched his right hip--”an' if you'd refused--you was the third, mind you,--I'd have drilled you where you stood, G.o.d d.a.m.n me if I wouldn't!”

Mahony eyed the speaker with derision. ”Much good that would have done your wife, you fathead! Well, well, we'll say nothing to MINE, if you please, about anything of that sort.”

”No, may all the saints bless 'er and give 'er health! An' as I say, doctor....” In speaking he had drawn a roll of bank-notes from his pocket, and now he tried to stuff them between Mahony's fingers.

”What's this? My good man, keep your money till it's asked for!” and Mahony unclasped his hands, so that the notes fluttered to the ground.

”Then there let 'em lay!”

But when, in clothes dried stiff as cardboard, Mahony was rolling townwards--his coachman, a lad of some ten or twelve who handled the reins to the manner born--as they went he chanced to feel in his coat pocket, and there found five ten-pound notes rolled up in a neat bundle.

The main part of the road was dry and hard again; but all dips and holes were wells of liquid mud, which bespattered the two of them from top to toe as the buggy b.u.mped carelessly in and out. Mahony diverted himself by thinking of what he could give Polly with this sum. It would serve to buy that pair of gilt cornices or the heavy gilt-framed piergla.s.s on which she had set her heart. He could see her, pink with pleasure, expostulating: ”Richard! What WICKED extravagance!” and hear himself reply: ”And pray may my wife not have as pretty a parlour as her neighbours?” He even cast a thought, in pa.s.sing, on the pianoforte with which Polly longed to crown the furnis.h.i.+ngs of her room--though, of course, at least treble this amount would be needed to cover its cost.-- But a fig for such nonsense! He knew but one legitimate use to make of the unexpected little windfall, and that was, to put it by for a rainy day. ”At my age, in my position, I OUGHT to have fifty pounds in the bank!”--times without number he had said this to himself, with a growing impatience. But he had not yet managed to save a halfpenny.

Thrive as the practice might, the expenses of living held even pace with it. And now, having got its cue, his brain started off again on the old treadmill, reckoning, totting up, finding totals, or more often failing to find them, till his head was as hot as his feet were cold.

To-day he could not think clearly at all.

Nor the next day either. By the time he reached home he was conscious of feeling very ill: he had lancinating pains in his limbs, a chill down his spine, an outrageous temperature. To set out again on a round of visits was impossible. He had just to tumble into bed.

He got between the sheets with that sense of utter well-being, of almost sensual satisfaction, which only one who is s.h.i.+vering with fever knows. And at first very small things were enough to fill him with content: the smoothness of the pillow's sleek linen; the shadowy light of the room after long days spent in the dusty glare outside; the possibility of resting, the knowledge that it was his duty to rest; Polly's soft, firm hands, which were always of the right temperature--warm in the cold stage, cool when the fever scorched him, and neither hot nor cold when the dripping sweats came on. But as the fever declined, these slight pleasures lost their hold. Then he was ridden to death by black thoughts. Not only was day being added to day, he meanwhile not turning over a penny; but ideas which he knew to be preposterous insinuated themselves in his brain. Thus, for hours on end he writhed under the belief that his present illness was due solely to the proximity of the Great Swamp, and lay and cursed his folly in having chosen just this neighbourhood to build in. Again, there was the case of typhoid he had been anxious about, prior to his own breakdown: under his LOc.u.m, peritonitis had set in and carried off the patient. At the time he had accepted the news from Polly's lips with indifference--too ill to care. But a little later the knowledge of what it meant broke over him, and he suffered the tortures of the d.a.m.ned.

Not Brace; he alone would be held responsible for the death; and perhaps not altogether unjustly. Lying there, a prey to morbid apprehensions, he rebuilt the case in memory, struggling to recall each slight variation in temperature, each swift change for better or worse; but as fast as he captured one such detail, his drowsy brain let the last but one go, and he had to beat it up anew. During the night he grew confident that the relatives of the dead woman intended to take action against him, for negligence or improper attendance.

An attempt to speak of these devilish imaginings to wife and friend was a failure. He undertook it in a fit of desperation, when it seemed as if only a strong and well grounded opposition would save his reason.

But this was just what he could not get. Purdy, whom he tried first, held the crude notion that a sick person should never be gainsaid; and soothingly sympathised and agreed, till Mahony could have cried aloud at such blundering stupidity. Polly did better; she contradicted him.

But not in the right way. She certainly pooh-poohed his idea of the nearness of Yuille's Swamp making the house unhealthy; but she did not argue the matter, step by step, and CONVINCE him that he was wrong. She just laughed at him as at a foolish child, and kissed him, and tucked him in anew. And when it came to the typhoid's fatal issue, she had not the knowledge needed to combat him with any chance of success. She heard him anxiously out, and allowed herself to be made quite nervous over a possible fault on his part, so jealous was she for his growing reputation.

So that in the end it was he who had to comfort her.

”Don't take any notice of what I say to-day, wife. It's this blessed fever.... I'm light-headed, I think.”

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