Sowing Seeds in Danny | Page 8

a queer little wavering cry and a sudden rush of tears. But she put up a good fight nevertheless. She wanted to live so much, for the sake of Mary, her beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter.
Mrs. Barner did not live to see the whole work of degeneration, for the end came in the early spring, swift and sudden and kind.
The doctor's grief for his wife was sincere. He always referred to her as "my poor Mildred," and never spoke of her except when comparatively sober.
Mary Barner took up the burden of caring for her father without question, for she loved him with a great and pitying love, to which he responded in his best moments. In the winter she went with him on his drives night and day, for the fear of what might happen was always in her heart. She was his housekeeper, his office-girl, his bookkeeper; she endured all things, loneliness, poverty, disgrace, without complaining or bitterness.
One day shortly after Mrs. Barner's death big John Robertson from "the hills" drove furiously down the street to the doctor's house, and rushed into the office without ringing the bell. His little boy had been cut with the mower-knives, and he implored the doctor to come at once.
The doctor sat at his desk, just drunk enough to be ugly-tempered, and curtly told Mr. Robertson to go straight to perdition, and as the poor man, wild with excitement, begged him to come and offered him money, he yawned nonchalantly, and with some slight variations repeated the injunction.
Mary hearing the conversation came in hurriedly.
"Mary, my dear," the doctor said, "please leave us. This gentleman is quite forgetting himself and his language is shocking." Mary did not even look at her father. She was packing his little satchel with all that would be needed.
"Now pick him up and take him," she said firmly to big John. "He'll be all right when he sees your little boy, never mind what he says now."
Big John seized the doctor and bore him struggling and protesting to the wagon.
The doctor made an effort to get out.
"Put him down in the bottom with this under his head"--handing Big John a cushion--"and put your feet on him," Mary commanded.
Big John did as she bid him, none too gently, for he could still hear his little boy's cries and see that cruel jagged wound.
"Oh, don't hurt him," she cried piteously, and ran sobbing into the house. Upstairs, in what had been her mother's room, she pressed her face against her mother's kimono that still hung behind the door. "I am not crying for you to come back, mother," she sobbed bitterly, "I am just crying for your little girl."
The doctor was asleep when John reached his little shanty in the hills. The child still lived, his Highland mother having stopped the blood with rude bandaging and ashes, a remedy learned in her far-off island home.
John shook the doctor roughly and cursed him soundly in both English and Gaelic, without avail, but the child's cry so full of pain and weakness roused him with a start. In a minute Dr. Frederick Barner was himself. He took the child gently from his mother and laid him on the bed.
For two days the doctor stayed in John's dirty little shanty, caring for little Murdock as tenderly as a mother. He cooked for the child, he sang to him, he carried him in his arms for hours, and soothed him with a hundred quaint fancies. He superintended the cleaning of the house and scolded John's wife soundly on her shiftless ways; he showed her how to bake bread and cook little dishes to tempt the child's appetite, winning thereby her undying gratitude. She understood but little of the scolding, but she saw his kindness to her little boy, for kindness is the same in all languages.
On the third day, the little fellow's fever went down and, peeping over the doctor's shoulder, he smiled and chattered and asked for his "daddy" and his "mathar."
Then Big John broke down utterly and tried to speak his gratitude, but the doctor abruptly told him to quit his blubbering and hitch up, for little Murdock would be chasing the hens again in a week or two.
The doctor went faithfully every day and dressed little Murdock's wound until it no longer needed his care, remaining perfectly sober meanwhile. Hope sprang up in Mary's heart--for love believeth all things.
At night when he went to bed and she carefully locked the doors and took the keys to her room, she breathed a sigh of relief. One more day won!
But alas for Mary's hopes! They were built upon the slipping, sliding sands of human desire. One night she found him in the office of the hotel; a red-faced, senseless, gibbering old man, arguing theology with a