Seth Prescott was the only practising physician for some half-dozen
villages. His mud-bespattered sulky and his smart mare, advancing
always with desperate flings of forward hoofs--which caused the
children to scatter--were familiar objects, not only in the cluster
of Uphams, but also in Dale and Granby, and the little outlying
hamlet of Ford's Hill, which was nothing but a scattering group of
farm-houses, with a spire in their midst, and which came under the
jurisdiction of Upham. In all these villages people were wont to run
from the windows to the doors when they saw the doctor's sulky whirl
past, peer after it, up or down the road, to see where it might stop,
and speculate if this old soul were about to leave the world, or that
new soul to come into it.
One afternoon, not long before he was twenty-one, Jerome Edwards
walked some three miles and a half to Ford's Hill to carry some shoes
to a woman binder who was too lame to come for them herself. Jerome
walked altogether of late years, for the white horse was dead of old
age: but it was well for him, since he was saved thereby from the
permanent crouch of the shoe-bench.
When, having left his shoes, he was returning down the steep street
of the little settlement, he saw Doctor Prescott's sulky ahead of
him. Then, just before it reached a small weather-beaten house on the
right, he saw a woman rush out as if to stop it, and a man follow
after her and pull her back through the door.
The sulky was driven past at a rapid pace; for the weather was sharp,
and the doctor's mare stepped out well after standing. When Jerome
reached the house the doctor was scarcely within hailing distance;
but the woman was out again, calling after him frantically: "Doctor!
Doctor! Doctor Prescott! Stop! Stop here! Doctor!"
Jerome sprang forward to offer his assistance in summoning him, but
at that instant the man reappeared again and clutched the woman by
the arm. "Come back, come back in the house, Laura," he gasped,
faintly, and yet with wild energy.
Jerome saw then that the man was ghastly, staggering, and
yellow-white, except for blazing red spots on the cheeks, and that
his great eyes were bright with fever. Jerome knew him; he was a
young farmer, Henry Leeds by name, and not long married. Jerome had
gone to school with the wife, and called her familiarly by name.
"What's the matter, Laura?" he asked.
"Oh, J'rome," she half sobbed, "do help me--do call the doctor.
Henry's awful sick; I know he is. He'd ought to have the doctor, but
he won't because it costs so much. Do call him; I can't make him
hear."
Jerome opened his mouth to shout, but the sick man flew at him with
an awful, piteous cry. "Don't ye, don't ye," he wailed out; "I tell
ye not to, J'rome Edwards. I 'ain't got any money to pay him with."
"But you're sick, Henry," said Jerome, putting his hand on the man's
shaking shoulder to steady him. "You'd better let me run after him--I
can make him hear now. It won't cost much."
"Don't ye do it," almost sobbed the young farmer. "It costs us a
dollar every time he comes so far, an' he'll say right off, the way
he did about mother that last time she was sick--when she broke her
hip--that he'd take up a little piece of land beforehand; it would
jest pay his bill. He'll do that, an' I tell ye I 'ain't got 'nough
land now to support me. I 'ain't got 'nough land now, J'rome."
The poor young wife was weeping almost like a child. "Do let him call
the doctor, do let him, Henry," she pleaded.
"There's another thing, J'rome," half whispered the young man,
turning his back on his wife and fastening mysterious bright eyes on
Jerome's--"there's another thing. Laura, she'll have to have the
doctor before long, you can see that, an'--there'll be another mouth
to fill, an' I've been savin' up a little, an' it ain't goin' for
_me_--I tell ye it ain't goin' for _me_, J'rome."
All the while poor Henry Leeds, in spite of hot red spots on his
cheeks, was shivering violently, but stiffly, like a tree in a
freezing wind. The doctor had whirled quite out of sight over the
hill. "He's gone," wailed the wife--"he's gone, and Henry 'll
die--oh, I know he'll die!"
Then Jerome, who had been standing bewildered, not knowing whether he
should or should not run and call after the doctor, and listening
first to one, then to the other, collected himself. "No, he isn't
going to die, either," he said to the poor girl, who was very young;
and he said it quite sharply, because he so pitied her in her
innocent helplessness, and would give her courage even in a bitter
dose. He asked her, furthermore, as brusquely as Doctor Prescott
himself could have done, what medicine she had in the house. Then he
bade her hasten, if she wished to help and not hurt her husband, to
the nearest neighbor and beg some sweat-producing herbs--thoroughwort
or sage or catnip--all of which he had heard were good for fever.
She went away, wrapped in the thick shawl which Jerome had found in a
closet, and himself pinned over the wild fair head, under the
quivering chin, while he quieted her with grave admonitions, as if he
were her father. Then he led poor Henry Leeds--still crying out that
he would not have the doctor--into his house and his bedroom, and got
him to bed, though it was a hard task.
"I tell you, Henry," pleaded Jerome, struggling with him to loosen
his neck-band, "you shall not have the doctor; I'll doctor you
myself."
"You don't know how--you don't know how, J'rome! She'll say you don't
know how; she'll send for him, an' then, when he's got all my land,
how am I goin' to get them a livin'?"
"I tell you, Doctor Prescott sha'n't darken your doors, Henry Leeds,
if you'll behave yourself," said Jerome, stoutly; "and I can break up
a fever as well as he can, if you'll only let me. Mother broke up one
for me, and I never forgot it. You let me get your clothes off and
get you into bed, Henry."
Jerome had had some little experience through nursing his mother,
but, more than that, had the natural instinct of helpfulness,
balanced with good sense and judgment, which makes a physician.
Moreover, he worked with as fiery zeal as if he were a surgeon in a
battle-field. Soon he had Henry Leeds in his feather bed, with all
the wedding quilts and blankets of poor young Laura piled over him.
The fire was almost out, for the girl was a poor house-keeper, and
not shod by nature for any of the rough emergencies of life. Jerome
had the fire blazing in short space, and some hot water and hot
bricks in readiness.
Poor young Laura Leeds had to go almost half a mile for her healing
herbs, as the first neighbor was away from home and no one came in
answer to her knocks. By the time she returned, with a stout
neighboring mother at her side--both of them laden with dried
aromatic bouquets, and the visitor, moreover, clasping a bottle or
two of household panaceas, such as camphor and castor-oil--Jerome had
the sick man steaming in a circle of hot bricks, and was rubbing him
under the clothes with saleratus and water.
Jerome's proceedings might not have commended themselves to a school
of physicians; but he reasoned from the principle that if remedies
were individually valuable, a combination of them would increase in
value in the proportion of the several to one. Sage and thoroughwort,
sarsaparilla, pennyroyal, and burdock--nearly every herb, in fact, in
the neighbor's collection--were infused into one black and eminently
flavored tea, into which he dropped a little camphor, and even a
modicum of castor-oil. Jerome afterwards wondered at his own daring;
but then, with a certainty as absolute as the rush of a stung animal
to a mud bath--as if by some instinct of healing born with him--he
concocted that dark and bitter beverage, and fed it in generous doses
to the sick man. Nobody interfered with him. The neighbor, though
older than Laura and the mother of several children, had never known
enough to bring out their measles and loosen their colds. The herbs
had been gathered and stored by her husband's mother, and for many a
year hung all unvalued in her garret. Luckily Jerome, through his old
gathering for the apothecary, knew them all.
Jerome set one of the neighbor's boys to Upham Corners to tell his
mother of his whereabouts; then he remained all night with young
Henry Leeds, and by dint of his medley of herbs, or his tireless
bathing and nursing, or because the patient had great elasticity of
habit, or because the fever was not, after all, of a dangerous
nature, his treatment was quite successful.
Jerome went home the next morning, and returned late in the
afternoon, to stay overnight again. The day after, the fever did not
appear, and Henry Leeds was on the fair way to recovery. A few weeks
later came the affair of the contract in Robinson's store, and Jerome
grasped a new purpose from the two.
The next day, when he carried some finished shoes to Dale, he bought
a few old medical books, the remnant of a departed doctor's library,
which had been stowed away for years in a dusty corner of the great
country store. This same store included in its stock such
heterogeneous objects, so utterly irrelevant to one another and at
such tangents of connection, that it seemed sometimes like a very
mad-house of trade.
It was of this store that the story was told for miles around how one
day Lawyer Means, having driven over with Colonel Lamson from Upham
Corners, made a bet with him that he could not ask for anything not
included in its stock of trade; and the Colonel had immediately gone
in and asked for a skeleton; for he thought that he was thereby sure
of winning his bet, and of putting to confusion his friend and the
storekeeper. The latter, however, who was not the Bill Dickey of this
time, but an unkempt and shrewd old man of an earlier date, had
conferred with his own recollection for a minute, and asked,
reflectively, of his clerk, "Lemme see, we've got a skeleton
somewheres about, 'ain't we, Eph?" And had finally unearthed--not
adjacent to the old doctor's medical books, for that would have been
to much method in madness, but in some far-removed nook--a ghastly
box, containing a reasonably complete little skeleton. Then was the
laugh all on Colonel Jack Lamson, who had his bet to pay, and was put
to hard shifts to avoid making his grewsome purchase, the article
being offered exceedingly cheap on account of its unsalable
properties.
"It's been here a matter of twenty-five year, ever sence the old
doctor died. Them books, an' that, was cleaned out of his office, an'
brought over here," the old storekeeper had said. "Let ye have it
cheap, Colonel; call it a shillin'."
"Guess I won't take it to-day."
"Call it a sixpence."
"What in thunder do you suppose I want a skeleton for?" asked the
Colonel, striding out, while the storekeeper called after him, with
such a relish of his own wit that it set all the loafers to laughing
and made them remember it:
"Guess ye'd find out if ye didn't have one, Colonel; an' I guess,
sence natur's gin ye all the one she's ever goin' to, ye'll never
have a chance to git another as cheap as this."
That same little skeleton was yet for sale when Jerome purchased his
medical books at the price of waste-paper, and might possibly have
been thrown into the bargain had he wished to study anatomy.
Jerome sought only to gain an extension of any old wife's knowledge
of healing roots and herbs and the treatment of simple and common
maladies. Surgery he did not meddle with, until one night, about a
year later, when Jake Noyes, Doctor Prescott's man, came over
secretly with a little whimpering dog in his arms.
"We run over this little fellar," he said to Jerome, when he had been
summoned to the door, "an' his leg's broke, an' the doctor told me
I'd better finish him up; guess he's astray; but"--Jake's voice
dropped to a whisper--"I've heard what you're up to, an' I've brought
a splint, an', if you say so, I'll show you how to set a bone."
So up in his little chamber, with his mother and Elmira listening
curiously below, and a little whining, trembling dog for a patient,
Jerome learned to set a bone. His first surgical case was nearly a
complete success, moreover, for the little dog abode with him for
many a year after that, and went nimbly and merrily on his four legs,
with scarcely a limp.
Later on, Jake Noyes, this time with Jerome himself as illustration,
gave him a lesson in bleeding and cupping, which was considered
indispensable in the ordinary practice of that day. "Dun'no' what the
doctor would say," Jake Noyes told Jerome, "an' I dun'no' as I much
care, but I'd jest as soon ye'd keep it dark. Rows ain't favorable to
the action of the heart, actin' has too powerful stimulants in most
cases, an' I had an uncle on my mother's side that dropped dead. But
I feel as if the doctor had ground the face of the poor about long
enough; it's about time somebody dulled his grindstone a little. He's
just foreclosed that last mortgage on John Upham's place, an' they've
got to move. Mind ye, J'rome, I ain't sayin' this to anybody but you,
an' I wouldn't say it to you if I didn't think mebbe you could do
something to right what he'd done wrong. If he won't do it himself,
somebody ought to for him. Tell ye what 'tis, J'rome, one way an'
another, I think considerable of the doctor. I've lived with him a
good many years now. I've got some books I'll let ye take any time. I
calculate you mean to do your doctorin' cheap."
"Cheap!" replied Jerome, scornfully. "Do you think I would take any
pay for anything I could do? Do you think _that's_ what I'm after?"
Jake Noyes nodded. "Didn't s'pose it was, J'rome. Well, there'll be
lots of things you can't meddle with; but there's no reason why you
can't doctor lots of little ails--if folks are willin'--an' save 'em
money. I'll learn ye all I know, on the doctor's account. I want it
to balance as even as he thinks it does."
The result of it all was that Jerome Edwards became a sort of free
medical adviser to many who were too poor to pay a doctor's fees, and
had enough confidence in him. Some held strenuously to the opinion
that "he knew as much as if he'd studied medicine." He was in
requisition many of the hours when he was free from his shoemaker's
bench; and never in the Uphams was there a sick man needing a watcher
who did not beg for Jerome Edwards.