“What’s the damage?” he asked, as we were driving home; and when I named the charge for the visit, he sighed as, slowly drawing out his wallet, he said regretfully: “That’s just what I got for the last calf I sold.”
I don’t recall much about him after that, except that he dropped into the office a few times for prescriptions for himself, and once brought me some fruit and some Christmas greens; but if he pushed his hints further, I have forgotten about it.
It was during my years in U—— that Sister’s marriage took place; that Grandma died; and that Kate’s first baby was born—events of great moment to me. I recall the feeling of sadness and irrevocability that night as the train bore Sister away on her honeymoon. It was harder, though, to see her leave, a year later, after a summer spent at home, for she was then about to become a mother, and was going so far away; but, well and happy, she was full of plans for getting settled in her new home, and her chief regret was Grandma’s approaching death with the certainty that she could never see her baby.
When Grandma died we were all anxious to know just the nature of the heart trouble from which she had suffered so long. Our family physician had refused to do the autopsy; and, incredible as it seems to me now (so important did it seem then), I said, “I will do it since Dr. Hall will not.” I asked Dr. Campbell to be present; his right hand was disabled, or he would have spared me the ordeal. There, in that little bedroom, the Doctor and my father looking on, on my twenty-third birthday, I made the examination which revealed to us the cause of those agonizing attacks from which Grandma so long had suffered; but it was little more than a careful study of the case ought to have shown during life. In these later years I have thought with horror of the girl that stood there that afternoon and cut through the breast that had nourished her mother; through the dear breast that had pillowed so often her own childish head; down, down, into the poor, out-worn heart. It was a horrible thing to do. Now, try as I will, I can hardly see how the thing could have presented itself to me so as to make it seem imperative to take that unnatural step. Father, who was as tenderly attached to Grandma as an own son could be, had to leave the room before the work was done. A merciful something kept me from feeling about it then as I do now. Yet I knew then, and know now, that, hard as it was, it was easier to do the work myself—for it was done reverently, and from a rigid sense of duty—than it would have been to stand by and see even the most considerate of physicians lay the investigating hands of science upon the body of my grandmother.
As Sister’s husband was just starting in the practice of medicine in a little New England village, and as he had had no experience with such cases outside of his college work, both he and Sister wished me to be with them at the time of her confinement. I also wished to be there, and was planning my work accordingly when, to my consternation, I received a telegram saying: “Read Isaiah IX 6, and come immediately. Both doing well.” Rushing across the hall into the rooms of my neighbours, the Randolphs, I cried, “Give me a Bible, quick! I’m afraid my sister’s got her baby!” And so it was: “Unto us a Child is born; unto us a Son is given.”
What disappointment and anxiety I felt as I journeyed there! It seemed unbelievable that she could go through all that, and I not with her. I felt resentment toward the little being that had come so inopportunely—there she was in her new home, not yet settled, among strangers, all unprepared for what had been happening in the last twenty-four hours!
When I saw her, pale and weak, but smiling through her tears as she guarded the little bundle by her side, I felt an added resentment toward that bundle. I did not even feel drawn to it when I saw the tiny red face; but when he lifted up his voice and wept, the cry, so weak and helpless, went to my heart; from that instant I loved him.
During labour, when they had told my sister that the child would be there before morning, she had exclaimed, “It isn’t so—it can’t be so—Genie can’t get here—I won’t have my baby till Genie gets here!” They laughed at us both for our disappointment over the precipitate outcome.
I stayed with them two weeks—a strenuous, anxious time—and, the very day I left, was taken with what later proved to be gastric fever. Stopping over in Concord a day and a night to see Laidlaw, and have dinner with him and two other class-mates living near, I was so ill that evening that I had to leave the dining room, and that night Laidlaw and his landlady were up with me most of the night. Journeying next day as far as Worcester, I was detained there for two weeks at Dr. Carson’s, where she and Fenton (of the hospital days) took excellent care of me. It was the first time since childhood that I had been “down sick,” but, soon recuperating, I went back to my work in U——.
From that time onward my interests widened—two centres now—Home, and Sister’s home; everything that happened in that New England home was of great moment to me. The baby’s growth and development were topics of never-failing interest. When they came home the next year, how infinitely richer life was with that baby in our midst! How much more wonderful than ordinary babies—his winsome smile, his soft pansy eyes, and that first tooth! I suspect that for the next three years, at least, I taxed to the limit the tolerance of my friends with numerous little stories about my sister’s phenomenal child.