HIS FIRST PATIENT
Oh, the dainty, dainty maid to the borders of the brook
Lingered down as lightly as the breeze;
And the shy water-spiders quit their scurrying to look;
And the happy water whispered to the trees.
--C. G. D. ROBERTS.
Dr. Gilbert Allen, gold-medalist of the Toronto School of Medicine, and
just home from a post-graduate course in London and Edinburgh, had his
coat off, his sleeves rolled up, and was busy arranging bottles on the
shelf of his tiny dispensary. He was whistling cheerily. It was young
Dr. Allen's nature to be cheerful even under adverse circumstances, and
this morning all his prospects were bright. For after years of
spending money--and largely another man's money, too--he was at last on
his feet. His college life had been a very happy one, it is true; so,
also, had been the years since his graduation, the first two spent as
house surgeon in a Toronto hospital, the last, and best of all, in the
Old Land. They had given him breadth and experience; but though
Gilbert was willing to concede that experience teaches, he was equally
assured that she does not pay bills. Now he was a free man, and master
of his profession. He used the last phrase modestly; he was ready and
anxious to make the mastery more complete, and at the same time to win
a name for himself and a home and a fortune for Rosalie.
As he stacked the bottles noisily in their places he glanced around the
little room, and wished he might turn a handspring, just to let off
steam and be able to write to Harwood and the other fellows to say his
office was big enough to admit of the feat. He wisely crushed the
desire, for he recognized the fact that he was under surveillance.
Just outside the windows stretched a little lawn, with a star-shaped
flower-bed in the middle. Up and down this green space, following a
leisurely and devious course, journeyed a lawnmower, propelled by a
long-limbed youth. His straw hat hung limply from his head, his coat
flapped limply from his shoulders, and his trousers bulged limply from
his big top-boots. Nevertheless, he had a certain lumbering airiness
of movement, and such a mien of lofty indifference to his surroundings
that the beholder was impressed with the idea that he was a very
sprightly gentleman indeed, and need never work unless he was so
minded. Just why he should spend a whole morning cutting a few square
yards of short May grass was a problem the doctor had not yet solved.
But even in his brief acquaintance, Gilbert had learned that the
actions of this young man, who had entered into an important relation
to himself as groom and general factotum, were not to be measured by
any rational standard.
The slow clatter of the lawnmower grew louder, and finally ceased
beneath the window. The doctor turned, a bottle in each hand. The
open sash was filled by a straw hat which formed the frame for a broad,
smiling countenance.
"Want any help?" the visitor inquired, genially.
"No, thank you," answered the doctor, adding, pointedly: "You have
other work to do, you know."
"Oh, I ain't worryin' about that," responded his man-servant,
reassuringly. "Old Doc. Williams uster say he'd make kindlin' wood o'
me, when I didn't hustle round, but it never fizzed on me." He hung
himself over the window-sill with a sigh of satisfaction, and gazed
admiringly at his employer.
A wire door, leading from the veranda to the main portion of the house,
swung slowly open, and a woman, wearing a big, blue-checked apron, and
carrying a long pewter spoon, looked out anxiously. "Davy!" she called
in a loud whisper, "why don't you get on with your work?"
"I'm helpin' the doctor with his mixtures," he answered, in a tone of
remonstrance.
The woman's tight mouth closed emphatically. "Well, hish!" she said,
raising her spoon warningly. "Susan Winters is sittin' on her porch,
an' she'll hear if you don't look out. It's no use talkin' about
things, anyhow."
The wire door creaked again, Mrs. Munn sailed away, and her son hung
himself farther over the window-sill. Evidently he had inherited none
of his mother's reticence.
"Say," he ventured, confidentially, "Elsie Cameron's home; came
yesterday, the very day you came. Ain't that funny?"
The young doctor did not seem to see anything humorous in the
coincidence. He glanced meaningly toward the lawnmower.
"I bet she thinks it's a kind of a come-down to come back an' work on
the farm after doin' nothin' but sing for so long. She's a bully
singer, I tell you, only she's got red hair."
He waited for some comment, but as there was none forthcoming, except a
louder clatter of bottles, he continued: "Everybody thinks she's so
awful good-lookin', but I don't think she's half as pretty as
Jean--that's her sister. Say"--his voice sank to a whisper--"did
anybody tell you about her sister yet?"
There was a note of strained anxiety, almost amounting to terror, in
the boy's tone, that commanded Gilbert's attention. He looked around.
Perhaps it was some serious illness, and the new doctor was badly in
need of a patient.
"No. What's the matter with her?" he asked, interestedly.
Davy glanced about him fearfully, as though he were about to disclose
the young woman as the author of a deadly crime. He leaned still
farther into the room. "She's--_she's my girl_!" he exploded, in a
loud whisper.
The new doctor turned his back suddenly. There was a long pause. "I
must congratulate you," he said at last, in a smothered voice.
Davy gazed at his broad back uncertainly. He had heard that formula
before, but it had always been delivered to the newly wed. He was
afraid the doctor was under a pleasant misapprehension.
"We're jist kind o' keepin' company--yet," he explained carefully.
"An' Jean, she's an awful girl to laugh. An' then there's old lady
Cameron--that's her mother. She's a blasted bother. There's never a
fella' goes to see them girls but she has to sit 'round an' do all the
talkin'. It ain't fair." His tone was deeply aggrieved. "You won't
like it any better'n' me if you keep company with Elsie," he added,
after a pause.
The doctor turned, and his expression was so alarming that the youth
slipped back several feet into the garden. "That's what everybody's
been sayin'," he stammered, in self-defense. "All the folks was sayin'
you'd be sure to keep company with Elsie when she came home. I thought
it would be kind o' handy 'count o' me goin' to see Jean. We'd be
company home, nights."
The indignation that had been rising in the young doctor's gray eyes
vanished. He turned quickly to his bottles and indulged in a spasm of
silent laughter. But his face was very grave when he looked around
again. "Look here, David," he said firmly, "I'd advise you not to
discuss my affairs. Neither you nor the rest of the village had better
even speculate upon them. You're almost dead sure to be wrong. Now go
on with your work."
The boy slowly and reluctantly detached himself from the window-sill,
and set the lawnmower on another zigzag journey. His hat, his coat,
and his trousers hung limper than ever. He moved wearily, and at the
end of the garden he sat down under a cherry-tree to muse on the
strange, sad fact that his new employer promised to be not one whit
more companionable than old Doc. Williams.
The young doctor finished his work, and went up the stairs three steps
at a time, making a commotion that brought Mrs. Munn from her
pie-baking in hurried alarm. He washed his hands, resumed his coat,
and, leaning out of the window, wished with all his might that he had
something to do. He was seized with an honest, pagan desire that some
one would get sick, or that there might be an accident in the
mill---just a mild accident, of course; or, better still, that that
queer specimen of humanity sitting under his cherry-tree, down there,
should be smitten with paralysis. He confessed that this last seemed
the most hopeful outlook, then laughed at himself for his monstrous
wishes. He seized his hat and ran downstairs. He would go out and
explore the village. He must do something, he warned himself, or he
would be in danger of rushing into the street and lacerating the first
man he met, just for the sake of sewing him up again.
He passed out to the gate. The long, shady village street, bordered by
tall, swaying elms, stretched away on either hand, peaceful and
deserted. To the new doctor the place looked half asleep, and
uncompromisingly healthful. The clear May morning air was filled with
a chorus of robins and orioles. A bluebird in the orchard bordering
his lawn was singing ecstatically. Far up the street the musical
cling-clang of the blacksmith's anvil, and from the depths of the
ravine, in the opposite direction, the hum of the sawmill, served only
like a lullaby to make the silence more dreamy.
He stepped out upon the boardwalk that ran along the street. Overhead
the maples and elms met, making a cool tunnel. In this green canopy
nest-building was being carried on, on a great scale and with
tremendous commotion. The doctor picked his way carefully along the
undulating surface of the sidewalk, for the boards were damp and
rotten, and liable to fly up at one end and break a limb; and though he
was anxious for a patient, he did not fancy serving in that capacity
himself.
The quiet houses, surrounded by their demure gardens, gave no
indication that he was being watched from behind many a window-blind.
Neither was there any stir to give hint that from the upstairs window
of the village shop at the end of the street a telescope was pointing
at him, while Granny Long informed the breathless circle about her bed
that his necktie was of blue-gray satin, and that his hair was thick
and wavy.
Quite unconscious of the sensation he was creating, the new doctor
walked on. He passed a tiny white house set in a square garden bright
with early blossoms. A little woman, in a faded lilac gown, sat sewing
on the porch, and a green parrot, in a cage at her side, stalked to and
fro on his perch, muttering sullenly. At sight of the stranger the
bird gave an indignant stare, then swung, head downward, from his perch
and shouted, "Oh, Lordy, ain't we havin' a slow time!"
The remark so exactly coincided with the new doctor's sentiments that
he looked over the cedar hedge at the speaker with a feeling of
friendly regard. But the little lilac lady seemed quite of another
mind. She sprang up in dismayed haste, scattering thimble and scissors
out on the pathway, and, seizing the cage, fled with it indoors.
Gilbert passed on, feeling that there was one creature, at least, in
this new place who was in sympathy with him. His eye traveled with
satisfaction along the double row of trim houses and neat gardens; they
spoke of thrift and prosperity. There was only one exception, the
place next to the home of the ennuied parrot. Hens scratched merrily
in the midst of desert flower-beds, or nested under the lilac bushes, a
handsome goose and gander passed in stately promenade up and down the
front veranda, and the whole place had a happy, go-as-you-please air.
The last in the line was the schoolhouse, a big, square building,
scarred and worn, standing in the middle of a yard trampled bare of
grass, and surrounded by the forlorn skeleton of a fence. From the
battered pump in one corner, to the dilapidated woodshed in the other,
the whole premises had the appearance of having just weathered a long
and terrible siege. The commanding voice of the Duke of Wellington
coming through the open windows added to its military suggestiveness.
When he had passed the school the stranger found himself at the end of
the village. The row of houses stopped at a rustic bridge spanning a
ravine. Away up this valley he could see the tall smokestack of the
sawmill, with its waving plume of smoke coming up out of a fairy mass
of delicate May foliage. The mill-pond gleamed, green and golden
brown, between the willow clumps along its margin. From the dam a
stream issued in a little, noisy, silver waterfall. It babbled across
the road, under the old bridge, among bracken and mint, and wound this
way and that through the deep valley until it lost itself in a swamp
far to the south. A hard, beaten path led from the street down into
the gold and green depths. It was an alluring path, and Gilbert
stepped into it. He slid and stumbled down the steep bank, catching at
blossoming dogwood bushes and fragrant cedar boughs. A boyish light
came into his eyes as they caught the flash of the tiny river; here
green under an overhanging willow, there snow white under a rain of
cherry blossoms, now silver as it ran around a shallow curve, and again
gold in the sunlight filtered through a tangle of elm boughs and
bitter-sweet.
The little valley was as level as a floor at the bottom, carpeted with
vivid green grass spangled with dandelions, and intoxicating with the
perfume of the wild-cherry blossoms. A cow stood knee deep in the
stream, and another was feeding off the underbrush half way up the
bank. At a sudden curve in the brook a great elm stretched up from a
bank of blue violets. On its topmost limb, swinging gaily, an oriole
was blowing gloriously on his little golden trumpet.
Gilbert flung himself down on the violet bank. He had been born and
bred a country boy, and now, after years of city life, the old charm of
the free open spaces of earth and sky came over him stronger than ever.
He wondered if Rosalie would not be happy, too, if she were to come
down into this green-and-gold Paradise with him, and listen to the
brook babbling along over the pebbles. And yet, how could he ask her
to leave the wealth and ease of her city home and come to this dull
village? He reflected, with a deep sigh, upon the humiliating fact
that Rosalie would not consider the proposition for an instant, even if
he had the courage to make it. Well, he would work hard, and by and by
he would go back to the city, and then she would listen--she must
listen. He leaned back against the elm and dreamed of that day. He
could see the light in Rosalie's eyes as he had seen it that last day
in Toronto. He would have been happier to-day if they had not been so
bright and merry on the occasion of his departure. But what beautiful
eyes they were! Blue--so blue; as blue as--he was gazing at something
the exact color--a spot of vivid azure that had appeared from among the
trees at the top of the opposite bank. It moved, and Gilbert saw that
it was the figure of a girl in a violet gown. She made a pretty rural
picture as she stood for a moment poised upon the fence-top, a white
sunbonnet on her head and a basket on her arm. She descended sedately,
holding her basket with great care, and tripped down the zigzag path to
the edge of the stream. Here some big, white stones, peeping from the
golden pools, made a passage to the other side, and the trim lassie
began to pick her way daintily across. Gilbert watched her with amused
pleasure. He seemed to have stepped into some old rustic ballad. What
was that song the boys used to sing at college? Something about the
pretty, dainty maiden, going a-haying, or a-Maying, or a-something, all
of a bright May morning, tra la la! This one was just like her, only
she should be in her bare feet, and carry a pail and a stool, and be
coming down to milk that cow standing so placidly in the stream. He
felt an almost irresistible desire to sing out, "Where are you going,
my pretty maid?" If he were only a gallant youth, in a velvet cloak
and silken hose, he reflected, instead of a commonplace
nineteenth-century young man in gray tweed, he would go down the bank
and assist her over. The situation absolutely demanded it.
Suddenly he arose, with a smothered laugh. He would have to take a
part in the pretty comedy, after all, for the dainty damsel was in
distress. She stood poised on a stone in midstream, like a bird
desiring, yet not daring, to fly. A long leap was needed to land her
on the next stone, and she paused, perplexed, evidently mindful of her
eggs. Gilbert came quickly down the bank, his eyes twinkling.
"May I help you across?" he asked, coming toward her, hat in hand. He
felt that the words fell into a sort of jaunty rhythm of their own
accord.
The girl looked up quickly, startled at his sudden appearance. The
movement caused her sunbonnet to slip back, revealing her face, and
Gilbert felt suddenly and unaccountably abashed, for the girl looked
straight into his amused face with a glance of grave and unapproachable
dignity. He did not even notice, at first, how pretty she was. He saw
only those serious eyes. They were wonderful eyes, too; deep, and of a
strange, elusive amber, like the water at her feet. They held the
mystery of its deep brown pools, and the light of the golden flecks
upon its surface. There were the same brown shadows and golden lights
repeated in the masses of bronze hair piled like a crown on the top of
her shapely head.
From some impulse he did not understand, Gilbert felt a vague desire to
apologize for his very existence. It seemed as though that searching
glance had read the frivolous thoughts in which he had been indulging.
He wondered, in deep mortification, if she had noticed any faint tinge
of familiarity in his manner.
"I--I beg your pardon. I hope I did not startle you," he said, half
stammering. "I hope you will let me help you across."
"Thank you, you are very kind." Her voice was low, and very musical,
her manner was dignity itself. "I did not know the spaces were so
wide." She spoke with a frank simplicity, looking at him very honestly
and very gravely, and Gilbert felt tacitly rebuked. He was struck by
the fact that this country girl, in the coarse dress and sunbonnet,
whom he had whimsically likened to a rustic lass, to be helped across a
brook for a kiss, had instantly, by a mere glance, clothed the
situation in an impregnable mantle of conventionality. He took her
basket and held out his hand, feeling as though he were about to assist
a princess from her carriage. With a touch she sprang past him and
stepped quietly up the bank. "Thank you," she said, sedately, as she
took the basket from him. "I think it is Dr. Allen to whom I am
indebted, is it not?"
Gilbert clutched his hat again. "Yes, I am very fortunate to have had
the privilege," he said, feeling with relief that he was beginning to
recover.
"I am Miss Cameron," she said, with a stateliness that seemed to
convert the sunbonnet into a crown, and the basket of eggs into a
scepter.
Gilbert's mind dived back into the remembrance of his stableboy's
remarks of a few minutes earlier. What had he said? He could not
remember, except that the village had designated some one of that name
as the object of his future attentions, and there was something, too,
about red hair. He thought her hair beautiful--quite wonderful,
indeed, in its bronze splendor.
He murmured some polite remark, and was wondering if he might ask to be
allowed to carry the basket of eggs up the hill, or if he would be
committing an outrage by so doing, when he was saved from making a
second mistake by a shout from the opposite bank:
"Elsie! Elsie, lassie! Would yon be the new doctor body ye've got
there?"
The voice came from a little old man, hobbling, with the aid of a
stick, along the water's edge. His small body was almost bent double,
and his whole person seemed engulfed in a huge straw hat, from under
which appeared his only prominent feature--a long, wispy, red beard.
The girl gave a little inarticulate sound, and Gilbert glanced at her.
Her stately gravity had vanished, her face was lit with a radiant
smile. She ran down to the brink of the stream.
"Yes, Uncle Hughie," she called, in a clear, silvery tone, with a new
caressing quality in it, "it's Dr. Allen. Do you want to speak to him?"
"Yes, yes. Oh, yes, indeed. Come away across, man! Come away!
There's a poor, sick body lying down the glen a wee bit. Come away,
man, and try your hand on him whatefer."
Gilbert glanced at the girl again, half doubtfully. This was so unlike
the first call to a patient which he had so often pictured that he was
taken unawares. She seemed to divine his thoughts.
"Will you go?" she said gently. "It is my uncle. He is always helping
some one in trouble. Perhaps there has been an accident in the mill."
"Of course, of course, I shall be glad," he cried, filled with
compunction; and with a word of farewell he sprang nimbly across the
stepping-stones.
"Do you need my help, Uncle Hughie?" called the silvery voice behind
him.
"Och, it's the good lassie you will be!" came from under the straw hat.
"No, no. It is jist a poor tramp body, and the doctor will be curing
him."
Gilbert reached the other side, and the queer little figure hobbled
toward him with outstretched hand. He took off his hat and made a
stately bow, and the young man looked at him with pleasure and
surprise. The little old man's face was wrinkled and brown, and bore
the marks of pain, but his eyes shone out with a warm, kind brilliancy
that went straight to the stranger's heart. They were the girl's eyes,
exactly, but with none of her lofty reserve.
"Ech! hech!" he cried, disappearing once more within the hat. "Indeed
and indeed, and it's the new doctor! Hoch, yes, yes, it is welcome you
will be to Elmbrook. Eh, and we would not be expecting such a
fine-looking one. Indeed, no! And it would be a fine Scottish name,
too, oh, a fine name indeed, Allen. And--you would not be hafing the
Gaelic, I suppose?" His eyes gleamed wistfully from between the hat
and the whiskers.
"No," said Gilbert, smiling. "My mother spoke it, but she did not
teach us children."
"Och, och, well, well," he said, reassuringly. "It will not be the way
of the young Canadians, and perhaps it is better. Come away, now, come
away! I would be finding a poor tramp body down the glen here, ech,
ech, the peety of it! The peety of it!"
He hobbled away ahead, talking volubly. Gilbert glanced back as he
followed, but the princess in the violet gown had disappeared.
"Eh, now, it would jist be the good Lord that would be sending him to
me, indeed. Eh, the Almighty would be giving me everything in the
world that I could be wanting. But I will jist be an awful complainin'
body, and sometimes I would be saying, if I would only have the chance
to help some one. That's it!" he cried, turning a flashing eye upon
Gilbert. "That will be the only thing worth while in this world. Eh,
it is you that will be finding that out, Dr. Allen, and a happy man you
will be, oh, yes, indeed. It is the doctor bodies that has the
chance." He stopped and turned again. "Eh, did ye ever think He would
be a doctor Himself?" he added, in an awed whisper. "Yes, yes, most
folks now would be thinkin' He would jist be a preacher. But I would
be rastlin' things out sometimes at night, when the rheumatics would be
keeping me awake. The rheumatics would be a fine thing to make a body
think, doctor, oh, yes, a fine thing, and I would be wishing one night
that old Dr. Williams would be curing me, and then I would be rastlin'
it out that He would jist be a doctor Himself. Oh, hoch, yes, yes,
indeed it would be wonderful; yes, yes, wonderful!"
The young man regarded him curiously. Some strange emotion stirred in
his heart: a memory of those days when his mother made the Great
Physician a very real person to him. It seemed so long ago that he had
almost forgotten, and yet he experienced a feeling as though he had
suddenly come face to face with a long-lost friend.
"I am afraid such rheumatism as you must endure would keep me from
thinking of anything but myself," he said, his professional eye taking
in the signs of the painful disease in the old man's crippled frame.
His companion gave a joyous laugh. "Hoots! It will jist be a wee
tickle sometimes. But I will be an awful complainin' body, doctor.
Old Dr. Williams could be telling you I would be a terrible burden to
him, indeed; and you will be finding me a bother. Yes, oh, yes. That
is why I would be so pleased that the Almighty would be sending me a
chance to help. For I would jist be grumblin' and a burden all the
days--eh, yes, yes, och, hoch!" His voice suddenly dropped to a
pitying, caressing tone, such as one might use to a hurt child. "Here
he is," he whispered. "Eh, the peety of it!"
A man was half sitting, half lying, on the grassy bank of the stream,
supported by a pile of balsam boughs. His long body, in its worn,
patched clothing, was pitifully emaciated. His face was ghastly, and
deeply marked with the sad lines that grief alone can trace. His hair
was white, and yet, somehow, he did not seem aged, except by suffering.
He opened his eyes as the young doctor bent over him. There was the
pathetic look in them of an animal that had received its death-wound.
But as the light of consciousness returned there was resentment in his
glance as well as pain. He looked like a man who had been pushed to
the edge of despair, but who could still fight, not in hope, but in
fierce anger against his lot.
"He must be moved to some house at once," the doctor announced after a
brief examination. "He seems to be suffering from exhaustion and
hunger."
Old Hughie Cameron was fussing about him, making inarticulate, pitying
remarks. "Oh, yes, yes, he will jist be coming with me, then," he
cried eagerly. "The Cameron door will always be on the latch indeed!
Oh, yes, the folks will be real pleased, whatefer."
The sick man looked up suddenly and spoke with unlooked-for strength.
"I will accept charity from no living man," he said curtly.
"Hoots, toots!" cried Uncle Hughie, in gentle remonstrance. "Charity!
It would jist be a bit of a neighborly act, man! Come away, now,
come." His voice was coaxing. "Here is the doctor, now, waiting to
help you. Yes, yes, a fine new doctor, indeed," he added enticingly.
"Come," said Gilbert authoritatively. "You must have food and shelter
at once. You can't stay here."
The man opened his eyes again. "I haven't a cent of money," he said
weakly, but defiantly. "But if you will take me to some place I can
rent, I will earn money and pay for it after. But I will enter no
man's house. I will stay here and die--it would be best, anyway." He
closed his eyes indifferently.
Old Hughie suddenly plucked the puzzled young doctor's sleeve. "There
will be an old shanty down the glen here, a wee step," he whispered,
"jist by the Drowned Lands. It belongs to Sandy McQuarry, but he would
be giv----" He paused, for the fierce eyes opened upon him--"renting
it," he substituted hastily.
"I will go there," whispered the sick man, and Gilbert stooped and
raised him gently.
"And what will your name be?" asked Uncle Hughie, striving in his pity
to say something friendly which this strange man would not resent.
"My name," said the man slowly, "my name"--he stood and looked about
him in a dazed way--"yes, yes, it's McIntyre--John McIntyre." He
wavered a moment, then fell, fainting, in the young doctor's arms.