Close beside Mrs. Francis's comfortable home stood another large house, weather-beaten and dreary looking, a house whose dilapidated verandas and broken fence clearly indicated that its good days had gone by. In the summer-time vines and flowers grew around it to hide its scars and relieve its grimness, pathetic as a brave smile on a sad face.
Dr. Barner, brilliant, witty and skilful, had for many years been a victim of intemperance, but being Scotch to the backbone, he never could see how good, pure "Kilmarnock," made in Glasgow, could hurt anyone. He knew that his hand shook, and his brain reeled, and his eyes were bleared; but he never blamed the whiskey. He knew that his patients sometimes died while he was enjoying a protracted drunk, but of course, accidents will happen, and a doctor's accidents are soon buried and forgotten. Even in his worst moments, if he could be induced to come to the sick bed, he would sober up wonderfully, and many a sufferer was relieved from pain and saved from death by his gentle and skilful, though trembling, hands. He might not be able to walk across the room, but he could diagnose correctly and prescribe successfully.
When he came to Millford years ago, his practice grew rapidly. People wondered why he came to such a small place, for his skill, his wit, his wonderful presence would have won distinction anywhere.
His wife, a frail though very beautiful woman, at first thought nothing of his drinking habits—he was never anything but gentlemanly in her presence. But the time came when she saw honour and manhood slowly but surely dying in him, and on her heart there fell the terrible weight of a powerless despair. Her health had never been robust and she quickly sank into invalidism.
The specialist who came from Winnipeg diagnosed her case as chronic anaemia and prescribed port wine, which she refused with a queer little wavering cry and a sudden rush of tears. But she put up a good fight nevertheless. She wanted to live so much, for the sake of Mary, her beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter.
Mrs. Barner did not live to see the whole work of degeneration, for the end came in the early spring, swift and sudden and kind.
The doctor's grief for his wife was sincere. He always referred to her as "my poor Mildred," and never spoke of her except when comparatively sober.
Mary Barner took up the burden of caring for her father without question, for she loved him with a great and pitying love, to which he responded in his best moments. In the winter she went with him on his drives night and day, for the fear of what might happen was always in her heart. She was his housekeeper, his office-girl, his bookkeeper; she endured all things, loneliness, poverty, disgrace, without complaining or bitterness.
One day shortly after Mrs. Barner's death big John Robertson from "the hills" drove furiously down the street to the doctor's house, and rushed into the office without ringing the bell. His little boy had been cut with the mower-knives, and he implored the doctor to come at once.
The doctor sat at his desk, just drunk enough to be ugly-tempered, and curtly told Mr. Robertson to go straight to perdition, and as the poor man, wild with excitement, begged him to come and offered him money, he yawned nonchalantly, and with some slight variations repeated the injunction.
Mary hearing the conversation came in hurriedly.
"Mary, my dear," the doctor said, "please leave us. This gentleman is quite forgetting himself and his language is shocking." Mary did not even look at her father. She was packing his little satchel with all that would be needed.
"Now pick him up and take him," she said firmly to big John. "He'll be all right when he sees your little boy, never mind what he says now."
Big John seized the doctor and bore him struggling and protesting to the wagon.
The doctor made an effort to get out.
"Put him down in the bottom with this under his head"—handing Big John a cushion—"and put your feet on him," Mary commanded.
Big John did as she bid him, none too gently, for he could still hear his little boy's cries and see that cruel jagged wound.
"Oh, don't hurt him," she cried piteously, and ran sobbing into the house. Upstairs, in what had been her mother's room, she pressed her face against her mother's kimono that still hung behind the door. "I am not crying for you to come back, mother," she sobbed bitterly, "I am just crying for your little girl."
The doctor was asleep when John reached his little shanty in the hills. The child still lived, his Highland mother having stopped the blood with rude bandaging and ashes, a remedy learned in her far-off island home.
John shook the doctor roughly and cursed him soundly in both English and Gaelic, without avail, but the child's cry so full of pain and weakness roused him with a start. In a minute Dr. Frederick Barner was himself. He took the child gently from his mother and laid him on the bed.
For two days the doctor stayed in John's dirty little shanty, caring for little Murdock as tenderly as a mother. He cooked for the child, he sang to him, he carried him in his arms for hours, and soothed him with a hundred quaint fancies. He superintended the cleaning of the house and scolded John's wife soundly on her shiftless ways; he showed her how to bake bread and cook little dishes to tempt the child's appetite, winning thereby her undying gratitude. She understood but little of the scolding, but she saw his kindness to her little boy, for kindness is the same in all languages.
On the third day, the little fellow's fever went down and, peeping over the doctor's shoulder, he smiled and chattered and asked for his "daddy" and his "mathar."
Then Big John broke down utterly and tried to speak his gratitude, but the doctor abruptly told him to quit his blubbering and hitch up, for little Murdock would be chasing the hens again in a week or two.
The doctor went faithfully every day and dressed little Murdock's wound until it no longer needed his care, remaining perfectly sober meanwhile. Hope sprang up in Mary's heart—for love believeth all things.
At night when he went to bed and she carefully locked the doors and took the keys to her room, she breathed a sigh of relief. One more day won!
But alas for Mary's hopes! They were built upon the slipping, sliding sands of human desire. One night she found him in the office of the hotel; a red-faced, senseless, gibbering old man, arguing theology with a brother Scotchman, who was in the same condition of mellow exhilaration.
Mary's white face as she guided her father through the door had an effect upon the men who sat around the office. Kind-hearted fellows they were, and they felt sorry for the poor little motherless girl, sorry for "old Doc" too. One after another they went home, feeling just a little ashamed.
The bartender, a new one from across the line, a dapper chap with diamonds, was indignant. "I'll give that old man a straight pointer," he said, "that his girl has to stay out of here. This is no place for women, anyway"—which is true, God knows.
Five years went by and Mary Barner lived on in the lonely house and did all that human power could do to stay her father's evil course. But the years told heavily upon him. He had made some fatal mistakes in his prescribing, and the people had been compelled to get in another doctor, though a great many of those who had known him in his best days still clung to the "old man" in spite of his drinking. They could not forget how he had fought with death for them and for their children.
Of all his former skill but little remained now except his wonderful presence in the sick-room.
He could still inspire the greatest confidence and hope. Still at his coming a sick man's fears fell away from him, and in their stead came hope and good cheer. This was the old man's good gift that even his years of sinning could not wholly destroy. God had marked him for a great physician.
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