Sowing Seeds in Danny | Page 8

though trembling, hands. He might not be able to
walk across the room, but he could diagnose correctly and prescribe
successfully.
When he came to Millford years ago, his practice grew rapidly. People
wondered why he came to such a small place, for his skill, his wit, his
wonderful presence would have won distinction anywhere.
His wife, a frail though very beautiful woman, at first thought nothing
of his drinking habits--he was never anything but gentlemanly in her
presence. But the time came when she saw honour and manhood slowly
but surely dying in him, and on her heart there fell the terrible weight
of a powerless despair. Her health had never been robust and she

quickly sank into invalidism.
The specialist who came from Winnipeg diagnosed her case as chronic
anaemia and prescribed port wine, which she refused with 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