Читать книгу Seibert of the Island - Gordon Young - Страница 21

The next morning Dr. Lemaitre came bouncing out from town, with saddle-bags a-flop, and nearly fell off his fat pony to see old Combe, who had sent word that he had eaten crab meat again and was dying, shuffling back and forth at the gate.

"Well, well, well, well!" cried Dr. Lemaitre, getting off his pony. "You are so near death you come out to get your powders the quicker. I wish so much sense was in everybody!"

"My daughter has come home. Did that fool boy go an' tell you I was sick?"

"Your daughter! She has made the escape from Herr Seibert!" Dr. Lemaitre nodded rapidly, as one who has known all along that the thing must happen. "Let us hasten. The poor child!"

At the mention of Seibert Combe began to pour out his woe. Dr. Lemaitre patted him gently, as one pats an aged dog. His poor friend was a little cracked.

"No, Dr. Lemater. Or'na ain't my daughter. Nada, she has come home."

"Oh, oh, oh! Nada! Yes, little Nada. I had not heard. Those rascals that get sick so far from the town—I must let them die without my help. I am away so much that I do not hear half the news. Not half! Little Nada is sick. Tuh-tuh-tuh!" Addressing his pony, "Hear that? Little Nada is sick! You shall gallop all the way back to make up for your pokiness. A physician should have a thin horse, then people will think he comes quickly."

Combe explained that she wasn't sick, either. A trader who had not had the time to come down the other side of the coast had landed her on the beach, and landed one of his seamen. It was the seaman who was sick. Combe was secretive, though ever since Waller's accident Dr. Lemaitre had been his close friend.

Dr. Lemaitre was the only physician on the island excepting a young, blear-eyed veterinary that Seibert kept to look after his stock—and blacks. The little doctor was round, and had the look of cherubic gentleness, though he was a terrible atheist, with his untidy house full of wicked books.

Now he bustled along rapidly, the worn black bag so full of powerful mystery to the natives in one hand, and the panama in the other and flopping at his warm, red face. The doctor was growing bald and grey together, as a hilltop is harvested as the grain ripens.

McGuire kept out of sight, but Nada, who knew him almost as well as she knew her father, rushed into his short arms, kissing his red face and bald head until he was puffing happily, though a little flustered.

He made her stand off and turn round, exclaiming in amazement that she was a woman! Tuh-tuh-tuh! Who could believe it? Little Nada was just so high only yesterday!

Indeed, it seemed such a few years before, such a very few, when the gaunt Waller himself had come riding through the rainy night, leading a horse on which Dr. Lemaitre was to go back with him. What a ride! He had held on for dear life with eyes shut—it was too dark to see in any case—galloping through the rain over a slippery road. His legs had not been long enough for the stirrups. They beat and flopped, those stirrups, as if the devil with a club ran behind and urged the horse on. Dr. Lemaitre clung to the saddle, eyes shut, teeth clenched, hands desperately tight. What a ride! For months, especially after an evening of a little too much Monsieur Voltaire, roasted fowl, and Burgundy, Dr. Lemaitre would think of it in his sleep and struggle half the night to keep on the bounding saddle.

At the end of the ride, while Combe, old even then, shuffled about outside the room, muttering prayers that had the sound of curses, Dr. Lemaitre had helped Nada to crawl into this ragged, topsy-turvy world.

In the way that doctors do feel toward those they have helped to grow tall in life, she seemed partly to belong to him; but he did not have a feeling of quite the same kind toward her sister.

Dr. Lemaitre, with Nada on his arm, went to Paullen's bed.

He yanked up the mosquito netting, which kept flies off in the day, and, bending over with a pleasant smile and cheerful greeting, searchingly scanned the boy's face. Right off this little doctor seemed to understand something, and he removed his iron-rimmed spectacles, wiping them briskly and peering down at Nada, who busily adjusted the coverlet.

He then examined Paullen's ribs, where only a little tenderness remained, then his tongue, pulse, took his temperature, and said: "Orange juice, all that he can drink"; after which he doled out some white powders, a half-dozen pills of a deadly green, and used a few pharmaceutical words by way of assisting the handsome boy to believe in him.

"Yes, yes, yes. He is all right," Dr. Lemaitre told Nada when she went with him to his pony. "Such a nurse. He has pleasure in being sick. That is what is the matter!"

Laughingly she blushed.