Читать книгу Magic for Marigold - L. M. Montgomery - Страница 8

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A terrible day came when Dr. Moorhouse told Lorraine gently that he could do nothing more. After he had gone Young Grandmother looked at Old Grandmother.

“I suppose,” she said in a low voice, “we had better take the cradle into the spare room.”

Lorraine gave a bitter cry. This was equivalent to a death sentence. At Cloud of Spruce, just as with the Murrays down at Blair Water, it was a tradition that dying people must be taken into the spare room.

“You’ll do one thing before you take her into the spare room,” said Old Grandmother fiercely. “Moorhouse and Stackley have given up the case. They’ve only half a brain between them anyhow. Send for that woman-doctor.”

Young Grandmother looked thunderstruck. She turned to Uncle Klon, who was sitting by the baby’s cradle, his haggard face buried in his hands.

“Do you suppose—I’ve heard she was very clever—they say she was offered a splendid post in a children’s hospital in Montreal but preferred general practice—”

“Oh, get her, get her,” said Klondike—savage from the bitter business of hoping against hope. “Any port in a storm. She can’t do any harm now.”

“Will you go for her, Horace,” said Young Grandmother quite humbly.

Klondike Lesley uncoiled himself and went. He had never seen Dr. Richards before—save at a distance, or spinning past him in her smart little runabout. She was in her office and came forward to meet him gravely sweet.

She had a little, square, wide-lipped, straight-browed face like a boy’s. Not pretty but haunting. Wavy brown hair with one teasing, unruly little curl that would fall down on her forehead, giving her a youthful look in spite of her thirty-five years. What a dear face! So wide at the cheek-bones—so deep grey-eyed. With such a lovely, smiling, generous mouth. Some old text of Sunday-school days suddenly flitted through Klondike Lesley’s dazed brain:

“She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.”

For just a second their eyes met and locked. Only a second. But it did the work of years. The irresistible woman had met the immovable man and the inevitable had happened. She might have had thick ankles—only she hadn’t; her mother might have meowed all over the church. Nothing would have mattered to Klondike Lesley. She made him think of all sorts of lovely things, such as sympathy, kindness, generosity, and women who were not afraid to grow old. He had the most extraordinary feeling that he would like to lay his head on her breast and cry, like a little boy who had got hurt, and have her stroke his head and say,

“Never mind—be brave—you’ll soon feel better, dear.”

“Will you come to see my little niece?” he heard himself pleading. “Dr. Moorhouse has given her up. We are all very fond of her. Her mother will die if she cannot be saved. Won’t you come?”

“Of course I will,” said Dr. Richards.

She came. She said little, but she did some drastic things about diet and sleeping. Old and Young Grandmothers gasped when she ordered the child’s cradle moved out on the veranda. Every day for two weeks her light, steady footsteps came and went about Cloud of Spruce. Lorraine and Salome and Young Grandmother hung breathlessly on her briefest word.

Old Grandmother saw her once. She had told Salome to bring “the woman-doctor in,” and they had looked at each other for a few minutes in silence. The steady, sweet, grey eyes had gazed unquailingly into the piercing black ones.

“If a son of mine had met you I would have ordered him to marry you,” Old Grandmother said at last with a chuckle.

The little humorous quirk in Dr. Richards’ mouth widened to a smile. She looked around her at all the laughing brides of long ago in their billows of tulle.

“But I would not have married him unless I wanted to,” she said.

Old Grandmother chuckled again.

“Trust you for that.” But she never called her “the woman-doctor” again. She spoke with her own dignity of “Dr. Richards”—for a short time.

Klondike brought Dr. Richards to Cloud of Spruce and took her away. Her own car was laid up for repairs. But nobody was paying much attention to Klondike just then.

At the end of the two weeks it seemed to Lorraine that the shadow had ceased to deepen on the little wasted face.

A few more days—was it not lightening—lifting? At the end of three more weeks Dr. Richards told them that the baby was out of danger. Lorraine fainted and Young Grandmother shook and Klondike broke down and cried unashamedly like a schoolboy.