Rab and His Friends | Page 6

nature that it is so.

The operating theatre is crowded; much talk and fun, and all the
cordiality and stir of youth. The surgeon with his staff of assistants is
there. In comes Ailie: one look at her quiets and abates the eager
students. That beautiful old woman is too much for them; they sit down,
and are dumb, and gaze at her. These rough boys feel the power of her
presence. She walks in quickly, but without haste; dressed in her mutch,
her neckerchief, her white dimity short-gown, her black bombazine
petticoat, showing her white worsted stockings and her carpet shoes.
Behind her was James with Rab. James sat down in the distance, and
took that huge and noble head between his knees. Rab looked
perplexed and dangerous; forever cocking his ear and dropping it as
fast.
Ailie stepped up on a seat, and laid herself on the table, as her friend
the surgeon told her; arranged herself, gave a rapid look at James, shut
her eyes, rested herself on me, and took my hand. The operation was at
once begun; it was necessarily slow; and chloroform--one of God's best
gifts to his suffering children--was then unknown. The surgeon did his
work. The pale face showed its pain, but was still and silent. Rab's soul
was working within him; he saw that something strange was going
on,--blood flowing from his mistress, and she suffering; his ragged ear
was up, and importunate; he growled and gave now and then a sharp
impatient yelp; he would have liked to have done something to that
man. But James had him firm, and gave him a GLOWER from time to
time, and an intimation of a possible kick;--all the better for James, it
kept his eye and his mind off Ailie.
It is over: she is dressed, steps gently and decently down from the table,
looks for James; then, turning to the surgeon and the students, she
courtesies, and in a low, clear voice begs their pardon if she has
behaved ill. The students--all of us--wept like children; the surgeon
happed her up carefully, and, resting on James and me, Ailie went to
her room, Rab following. We put her to bed. James took off his heavy
shoes, crammed with tackets, heel-capt and toe-capt, and put them
carefully under the table, saying, "Maister John, I'm for nane o' yer
strynge nurse bodies for Ailie. I'll be her nurse, and I'll gang aboot on
my stockin' soles as canny as pussy." And so he did; and handy and
clever and swift and tender as any woman was that horny-handed, snell,
peremptory little man. Everything she got he gave her: he seldom slept;

and often I saw his small shrewd eyes out of the darkness, fixed on her.
As before, they spoke little.
Rab behaved well, never moving, showing us how meek and gentle he
could be, and occasionally, in his sleep, letting us know that he was
demolishing some adversary. He took a walk with me every day,
generally to the Candlemaker Row; but he was sombre and mild,
declined doing battle, though some fit cases offered, and indeed
submitted to sundry indignities, and was always very ready to turn, and
came faster back, and trotted up the stair with much lightness, and went
straight to that door.
Jess, the mare, had been sent, with her weather-worn cart, to Howgate,
and had doubtless her own dim and placid meditations and confusions
on the absence of her master and Rab and her unnatural freedom from
the road and her cart.
For some days Ailie did well. The wound healed "by the first
intention;" for, as James said, "Oor Ailie's skin's ower clean to beil."
The students came in quiet and anxious, and surrounded her bed. She
said she liked to see their young, honest faces. The surgeon dressed her,
and spoke to her in his own short kind way, pitying her through his
eyes, Rab and James outside the circle,--Rab being now reconciled, and
even cordial, and having made up his mind that as yet nobody required
worrying, but, as you may suppose, semper paratus.
So far well; but four days after the operation my patient had a sudden
and long shivering, a "groosin'," as she called it. I saw her soon after;
her eyes were too bright, her cheek colored; she was restless, and
ashamed of being so; the balance was lost; mischief had begun. On
looking at the wound, a blush of red told the secret: her pulse was rapid,
her breathing anxious and quick; she wasn't herself, as she said, and
was vexed at her restlessness. We tried what we could. James did
everything, was everywhere; never in the way, never out of it; Rab
subsided under the table into a dark place, and