Roy ran to the house as fast as he could to find help, and very soon old Pedder, the gardener, and Jim were carrying Christina between them, with mother, who had just come back, and nurse, walking by her side. Christina was put to bed and her foot wrapped in bandages, but she cried almost incessantly, no matter how often she was assured that she was forgiven. “Her sobs,” the cook said, coming downstairs after her twentieth visit to the nursery—“her sobs are that heartrending I couldn’t stand it; and all the while she asks for that blessed doll, which its eyes is rattling in its head like marbles, through falling on the ground, and Master Roy and Jim’s trying to catch them with a skewer.”
Cook was quite right. Roy and Jim, with Diana between them, were seated in the harness-room, probing tenderly the depths of that poor Parisienne’s skull. A housemaid was looking on without enthusiasm. “You won’t do it,” she said every now and then; “you can’t catch dolls’ eyes with skewers. No one can. It’s impossible. The King himself couldn’t. The Primest Minister couldn’t. No,” she went on, “no one could do it. No one but the Miss Bannisters’ Brother near where I live at Dormstaple. He could. You ought to take it to him. He’d mend it in a jiffy—there’s nothing he can’t do in that way.”
Roy said nothing, but went on prodding and probing. At last he gave up in despair. “All right, I’ll take it to the Miss Bannisters’ Brother,” he said. “Dormstaple’s only six miles.” But a sudden swoop from a figure in the doorway interrupted his bold plan.
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” cried nurse, seizing the doll, “with that angel upstairs crying for it every minute, and the doctor saying she’s in a high fever with lying on the wet grass”; and with a swirl of white skirts and apron, nurse and Diana were gone.
Roy put his hands in his pockets and wandered moodily into the garden. The world seemed to have no sun in it any more.
III
The next day Christina was really ill. It was not only the ankle, but she had caught a chill, the doctor said, and they must be very careful with her. Roy went about with a sad and sadder face, for Christina was his only playmate, and he loved her more than anything else; besides, there was now no one to bowl to him, and also it seemed so silly not to be able to mend a doll’s eyes. He moped in the house all the morning, and was continually being sent away from Christina’s door, because she was too ill to bear anyone in the room except nurse. She was wandering in her mind, nurse said, and kept on saying that she had blinded her doll, and crying to have its eyes made right again; but she would not let a hand be laid upon her, so that to have Diana mended seemed impossible. Nurse cried too, as she said it, and Roy joined with her. He could not remember ever having been so miserable.
The doctor looked very grave when he was going away. “That doll ought to be put right,” he said to Mrs. Tiverton. “She’s a sensitive little thing, evidently, and this feeling of disobeying you and treating her father’s present lightly is doing her a lot of harm, apart altogether from the chill and the sprain. If we could get those eyes in again she’d be better in no time, I believe.”
Roy and his mother heard this with a sinking heart, for they knew that Christina’s arms locked Diana to her side almost as if they were bars of iron.
“Anyway,” the doctor said, “I’ve left some medicine that ought to give her some sleep, and I shall come again this afternoon.” So saying, he touched up his horse, and Mrs. Tiverton walked into the house again.