She had scarcely turned the bend in the path, and was barely out of
Ann's view, when she had to lower her bundle and rest. Seated on a
moss-grown stone near the dry bed of the stream which had fed Ann's pool
before the drought, she found herself taking the most morbid view of her
condition. The delicate roots of the livid growth on her breast seemed
to be insidiously burrowing more deeply towards her heart than ever
before. Ah, what a fool she had been at such a crisis to listen to an
idle tramp, who had not only given her a stone when she had paid for
bread, but had revealed her secret to the one person she had wished to
keep it from! But she essayed to convince herself that all hope was not
gone, and the very warning Ann had angrily uttered might be turned to
advantage. She would now be open about her trouble, since Ann knew it,
anyway, and perhaps medical skill might help her, even yet, to triumph.
Under that faint inspiration she shouldered her burden and crept slowly
homeward.
Reaching her cottage, she dropped the ball of clothes at the door and
went into the sitting-room, where Virginia sat complacently sewing at a
window on the shaded side of the house. The girl had only a few moments
before washed her long, luxuriant hair, and it hung loose and beautiful
in the warm air. She was merrily singing a song, and hardly looked at
her mother as she paused near her.
"Hush, for God's sake, hush!" Jane groaned. "Don't you see I'm unable to
stand?"
In sheer astonishment Virginia turned her head and noticed her mother's
pale, long-drawn face. "What is it, mother, are you sick?"
By way of reply the old woman sank into one of the hide-bottomed chairs
near the open doorway and groaned again. Quickly rising, and full of
grave concern, the girl advanced to her. Standing over the bowed form,
she looked out through the doorway and saw the bundle of clothes.
"You don't mean to tell me, mother, that you have carried that load all
about looking for water to wash in!" she exclaimed, aghast.
"Yes, I took them to the rock-pool and back; but that ain't it," came
from between Jane's scrawny hands, which were now spread over her face.
"I am strong enough bodily, still, but I met Ann Boyd down there. She
had all the place there was, and had muddied up the water. Virginia, she
knows about that spot on my breast that the medicine peddler said was a
cancer. She wormed it out of him. He told her more than he did me. He
told her it would soon drag me to the grave. It's a great deal worse
than it was before I began to rub his stuff on it. He's a quack. I was a
fool not to go to a regular doctor right at the start."
"You think, then, that it really _is_ a cancer?" gasped the girl, and
she turned pale.
"Yes, I have no doubt of it now, from the way it looks and from the way
that woman gloated over me. She declared she knew all about it, and that
nothing on earth had made her so glad. I want to see Dr. Evans. I wish
you'd run over to his house and have him come."
"But he's not a regular doctor," protested the girl, mildly. "They say
he is not allowed to practise, and that he only uses remedies of his own
making. The physicians at Darley were talking of having him arrested not
long ago."
"Oh, I know all that," Jane said, petulantly, "but that's because he
cured one or two after they had been given up by licensed doctors. He
knows a lots, and he will tell me, anyway, whether I've got a cancer or
not. He knows what they are. He told Mrs. Hiram Snodgrass what her tumor
was, and under his advice she went to Atlanta and had it cut out, and
saved her life when two doctors was telling her it was nothing but a
blood eruption that would pass off. You know he is good-hearted."
With a troubled nod, Virginia admitted that this was true. Her sweet
mouth was drawn down in pained concern, a stare of horror lay in her
big, gentle eyes. "I'll go bring him," she promised. "I saw him pass
with a bag of meal from the mill just now."
"Well, tell him not to say anything about it," Jane cautioned her.
"Evidently Ann Boyd has not talked about it much, and I don't want it to
be all over the neighborhood. I despise pity. I'm not used to it. If it
gets out, the tongues of these busy-bodies would run me stark crazy.
They would roost here like a swarm of buzzards over a dying horse."
Virginia returned in about half an hour, accompanied by a gray-headed
and full-whiskered man of about seventy years of age, who had any other
than the look of even a country doctor. He wore no coat, and his rough
shirt was without button from his hairy neck to the waistband of his
patched and baggy trousers. His fat hands were too much calloused by
labor in the field and forest, and by digging for roots and herbs, to
have felt the pulse of anything more delicate than an ox, and under less
grave circumstances his assumed air of the regular visiting physician
would have had its comic side.
"Virginia tells me you are a little upset to-day," he said, easily,
after he had gone to the water-bucket and taken a long, slow drink from
the gourd. He sat down in a chair near the widow, and laid his straw hat
upon the floor, from which it was promptly removed by Virginia to one of
the beds. "Let me take a look at your tongue."
"I'll do no such of a thing," retorted Jane, most flatly. "There is
nothing wrong with my stomach. I am afraid I've got a cancer on my
breast, and I want to make sure."
"You don't say!" Evans exclaimed. "Well, it wouldn't surprise me. I see
'em mighty often these days. Well, you'd better let me look at it. Stand
thar in the door so I can get a good light. I'm wearing my wife's
specks. I don't know whar I laid mine, but I hope I'll get 'em back. I
only paid twenty-five cents for 'em in Darley, and yet three of my
neighbors has taken such a liking to 'em that I've been offered as high
as three dollars for 'em, and they are only steel rims and are sorter
shackly at the hinges at that. Every time Gus Willard wants to write a
letter he sends over for my specks and lays his aside. I reckon he
thinks I'll get tired sendin' back for 'em and get me another pair. Now,
that's right"--Mrs. Hemingway had taken a stand in one of the rear doors
and unbuttoned her dress. Despite her stoicism, she found herself
holding her breath in fear and suspense as to what his opinion would be.
Virginia, pale and with a fainting sensation, sat on the edge of the
nearest bed, her shapely hands tightly clasped in her lap. She saw Dr.
Evans bend close to her mother's breast and touch and press the livid
spot.
"Do you feel that?" he asked.
"Yes, and it hurts some when you do that."
"How long have you had it thar?" he paused in his examination to ask,
peering over the rims of his spectacles.
"I noticed it first about a year ago, but thought nothing much about
it," she answered.
"And never showed it to nobody?" he said, reprovingly.
"I let a peddler, who had stuff to sell, see it awhile back." There was
a touch of shame in Jane's face. "He said his medicine would make it
slough off, but--"
"Slough nothing! That trifling skunk!" Evans cried. "Why, he's the
biggest fake unhung! He sold that same stuff over the mountain to
bald-headed men to make hair grow. Huh, I say! they talk about handling
_me_ by law, and kicking _me_ out of the country on account of my
knowledge and skill, and let chaps like him scour the country from end
to end for its last cent. What the devil gets into you women? Here
you've let this thing go on sinking its fangs deeper and deeper in your
breast, and only fertilizing it by the treatment he was giving you. Are
you hankering for a change of air? Thar was Mrs. Telworthy, that let her
liver run on till she was as yaller as a pumpkin with jaundice before
she'd come to me. I give 'er two bottles of my purifier, and she could
eat a barbecued ox in a month."
"What do you think I ought to do about this?" asked Jane; and Virginia,
with strange qualms at heart, thought that her mother had put it that
way to avoid asking if the worst was really to be faced.
Evans stroked his bushy beard wisely. "Do about it?" he repeated, as he
went back to his chair, leaving the patient to button her dress with
stiff, fumbling fingers. "I mought put you on a course of my blood
purifier and wait developments, and, Sister Hemingway, if I was like the
regular run of doctors, with their own discoveries on the market, I'd do
it in the interest of science, but I'm not going to take the resk on my
shoulders. A man who gives domestic remedies like mine is on safe ground
when he's treating ordinary diseases, but I reckon a medical board would
decide that this was a case for a good, steady knife. Now, I reckon
you'd better get on the train and take a run down to Atlanta and put
yourself under Dr. Putnam, who is noted far and wide as the best cancer
expert in the land."
"Then--then that's what it is?" faltered Mrs. Hemingway.
"Oh yes, that's what you've got, all right enough," said Evans, "and the
thing now is to uproot it."
"How--how much would it be likely to cost?" the widow asked, her
troubled glance on Virginia's horror-stricken face.
"That depends," mused Evans. "I've sent Putnam a number of cases, and he
would, I think, make you a special widow-rate, being as you and me live
so nigh each other. At a rough guess, I'd say that everything--board and
room and nurse, treatment, medicines, and attention--would set you back
a hundred dollars."
"But where am I to get that much money?" Jane said, despondently.
"Well, thar you have me," Evans laughed. "I reckon you know your
resources better than anybody else, but you'll have to rake it up some
way. You ain't ready to die yet. Callihan has a mortgage on your land,
hain't he?"
"Yes, and on my crop not yet gathered," Jane sighed; "he even included
every old hoe and axe and piece of harness, and the cow and calf, and
every chair and knife and fork and cracked plate in the house."
"Well," and Evans rose and reached for his hat, "as I say, you'll have
to get up the money; it will be the best investment you could make."
When he had left, Virginia, horror-stricken, sat staring at her mother,
a terrible fear in her face and eyes.
"Then it really _is_ a cancer?" she gasped.
"Yes, I was afraid it was all along," said Jane. "You see, the peddler
said so plainly, and he told Ann Boyd about it. Virginia, she didn't
know I knew how bad it was, for she hinted at some awful end that was to
overtake me, as if it would be news to me. Daughter, I'm going to try my
level best to throw this thing off. I always had a fear of death. My
mother had before me; she was a Christian woman, and was prepared, if
anybody was, and yet she died in agony. She laid in bed and begged for
help with her last breath. But my case is worse than hers, for my one
foe in this life is watching over me like a hawk. Oh, I can't stand it!
You must help me study up some way to raise that money. If it was in
sight, I'd feel better. Doctors can do wonders these days, and I'll go
to that big one if I possibly can."