Jim and His Dog—Part II
Jim, who was very much terrified at the sight of his father lying helpless, was glad to have anything to do, and he set off at full speed toward the Vicarage. He passed it to the right, and never stopped running till he came to the doctor’s garden-gate some way beyond it. Here he waited for a minute, breathless, and then he ran up the garden-path, and pulled the bell with such vehemence that the doctor himself came out to know what was the matter. He gave one look at Jim, and then asked him who had sent him. Jim’s only response was to begin to cry, with gasping sobs, from a mixture of grief, terror, and the voice of a kind friend on the top of it.
“Sit down here a minute,” said the doctor kindly, pointing to a bench under the verandah. “I’m going to give these letters to my old housekeeper to post, and when I come back you must try and speak up like a man, and tell me what’s the matter; and then, please God, I shall be there all the quicker to set things straight again.”
“Please, sir,” sobbed Jim, who was anxious to lose no time, “it’s my father; he’s broken his leg, and Betty Stantiman says,”—here the sobs came thicker—“she says she thinks the bone’ll sure to come right through the skin, like her master’s did ten year agone.”
“Oh! so that’s Betty Stantiman’s opinion, is it?” said the doctor; “don’t you listen to what all the silly old women say. And now look up at me if you can, and hear what I’ve got to say. It’s very often a much better job to break one’s leg than one’s head. Now run home and tell your mother so; and tell her I shall be down in less than ten minutes, and that she must get the sacking of the bed braced up tight, and not let anybody touch your father.”
Jim ran off without a word. He never could find anything to say when he was either very joyful or very sad. Just now he ought to have had something to say, for the doctor’s words had comforted him considerably. And as he sped away home, he repeated them over and over to himself.
It seemed so extraordinary; he had often had a broken head, but never a broken leg, which in Jim’s eyes was about the worst thing that could happen to anybody, short of being killed outright.
Yet what the doctor said must be true, and his words were the first Jim said to his mother when he got home. But she was not so much comforted by them as Jim had been.
Her husband was fast getting more and more faint from pain, and being carried slowly through the hot sun; and although they were bathing his face and hands with cold water, and making him smell an old neighbour’s salts, which she had had “a many years,” he did not seem to revive.
One look at his father’s face was quite enough for Jim, and he went and sat down on the bank outside to watch for the doctor; and then being too anxious to sit still, he walked up and down in front of the house, or up and down the garden-path, peeping in at the door every now and then to see if his father looked less white and deathlike. He was not kept long in suspense. The sound of a horse’s hoofs upon the road was heard, and then the doctor’s little carriage came in sight, with the doctor inside and his servant beside him driving. He came through the village in this way almost every morning, and almost always had the local paper spread out before him. That was when he was going with an easy mind to visit an old woman with the rheumatics, or some children getting well through the chicken-pox.
To-day being anxious, the paper was folded up and tucked into the seat behind him. If all went well, he might read it on his way home. Before the horse had fairly stopped, he had sprung out of the carriage; and motioning to Jim to follow him (he might want him to fetch something presently), went quickly up the path and into the house.
“Take that pillow away from under his head,” he said rather sharply. “Don’t you know you should always lay a person down flat when he’s faint?” Then he pulled out a little bottle and gave the patient something that revived him almost directly. “There, now, you’re ever so much better, my man,” he said cheerily, as Jim’s father opened his eyes and a little colour came back into his cheeks. “Now we’ll have a look at this leg of yours!” He bent down and cut off the heavy boot quickly and skilfully.
At another time, Mrs. Curtis would have been horrified to see fourteen shillings’ worth of good shoe leather damaged in this manner, but she was not thinking of shoes just then. The other women were, though, and their expressions showed it.
“Nothing the matter with the ankle,” said the doctor, “that’s a precious good job; nor with the knee, that’s another. The leg’s broken, but in about the best place it could possibly have been broken in.”
At this good news the women who had seemed incapable of doing anything suddenly revived, and ran hither and thither for splints, bandages, a little good elixir—everything the doctor wanted; opening the door leading to the stairs to let him see if it would be possible to carry the patient up them. “Impossible!” he determined. “Could a small bed be brought down?”
Mrs. Curtis was obliged to confess that she had no small bed, and that the children slept upon a mattress on the floor.
“I must have one, somehow,” said the doctor, “and a screen to keep off the draught from the door; and it will be better in every way,” he continued; “much warmer. Abominable the way these Devonshire cottages are built, without the possibility of a fire upstairs.”
One of the neighbours now volunteered to lend a small bed; and the doctor remembered he had a screen, which he would send down presently.
It was high time to set the leg; and when the patient had been carefully moved to the bed, it was skilfully and successfully accomplished.
“Now, if we can only keep children and the dog out of the way,” concluded the doctor, taking in Polly and Spot at a glance, “I mean,” he said, “if we can keep him tolerably quiet, and only have sensible people like you, Mrs. Curtis, about him, we shall have him out and about again in no time.” Then he went away, much relieved at such a successful termination to his morning’s work.
But in the afternoon, when her husband was sleeping quietly, only little Jim beside him, with one small hand in his father’s big one and the other passing quietly up and down Spot’s smooth back, Mrs. Curtis, as she sat beside the fire knitting her great blue stocking, was thinking about how she was going to manage without the weekly wages. The thankful thoughts she had been so full of were being fast mingled with anxious ones again, as she turned it over and over in her mind. It was now Monday, and so the wages were safe for that week; but after that!
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