"And why on earth didn't you?"
"The domned thing went clane out o' my head."
He turned to the window ledge by the stable door where, among a
confusion of cobwebs and dusty bottles and tin cans, the drench of
turpentine and linseed oil, the little phial of chlorodyne, and the
clean tin pannikin with its wide protruding mouth, stood ready, all
gleaming in the lantern light, forgotten since the day before.
"Thot's the stoof. Will yo halp me give it 'er, doctor?"
"All right. Can you hold her?"
"That I can. Coom oop, Daasy. Coom oop. There, my beauty. Gently,
gently, owd laass."
Rowcliffe took off his coat and shook up the drench and poured it into
the pannikin, while Greatorex got the struggling mare on to her feet.
Together, with gentleness and dexterity they cajoled her. Then Jim
laid his hands upon her mouth and opened it, drawing up her head
against his breast. Willie, suddenly competent, held the lantern while
Rowcliffe poured the drench down her throat.
Daisy, coughing and dribbling, stood and gazed at them with sad and
terrified eyes. And while the undertaker's men screwed down the lid
upon John Greatorex in his coffin, Jim Greatorex, his son, watched
with Daisy in her stall.
And Steven Rowcliffe watched with him, nursing the sick mare, making
up a fresh, clean bed for her, rubbing and fomenting her swollen and
tortured belly. When Daisy rolled in another agony, Rowcliffe gave her
chlorodyne and waited till suddenly she lay still.
In Jim's face, as he looked down at her, there was an infinite
tenderness and pity and compunction.
Rowcliffe, wriggling into his coat, regarded him with curiosity and
wonder, till Jim drew himself up and fixed him with his queer, unhappy
eyes.
"Shall I save her, doctor?"
"I can't tell you yet. I'd better send the vet up tomorrow hadn't I?"
"Ay----" Jim's voice was strangled in the spasm of his throat. But he
took Rowcliffe's hand and wrung it, discharging many emotions in that
one excruciating grip.
Rowcliffe pointed to the little phial of chlorodyne lying in the
straw. "If I were you," he said, "I shouldn't leave that lying about."
Through his long last night in the gray house haunted by the moon,
John Greatorex lay alone, screwed down under a coffin lid, and his
son, Jim, wrapped in a horse-blanket and with his head on a hay sack,
lay in the straw of the stable, beside Daisy his mare. From time to
time, as his mood took him, he turned and laid his hand on her in a
poignant caress. As if she had been his first-born, or his bride, he
spoke to her in the thick, soft voice of passion, with pitiful, broken
words and mutterings.
"What is it, Daasy----what is it? There, did they, then, did they? My
beauty--my lil laass. I--I wuss a domned brute to forget tha, a domned
brute."
All that night and the next night he lay beside her. The funeral
passed like a fantastic interlude between the long acts of his
passion. His great sorrow made him humble to Mrs. Gale so that he
allowed her to sustain him with food and drink. And on the third day
it was known throughout Garthdale that young Greatorex, who had lost
his father, had saved his mare.
Only Steven Rowcliffe knew that the mare had saved young Greatorex.
* * * * *
And the little phial of chlorodyne was put back among the cobwebs and
forgotten.