How he reckoned minutes and hours between times, so that the medicine should be administered to the moment—an observance which he held to be absolutely necessary to ensure efficacy; and more than once he was almost in agony for fear that Mrs Ruggles should have administered a couple of doses too closely together. Never did doctor have nurse so exact in carrying out his instructions, and, could attention have ensured it, little Pine would soon have grown strong.
But it was not to be; the little eyes grew brighter, and the fragile form more thin day by day; day by day a weary listlessness crept over the child, while, as if compassionating her sufferings, Nature was kind, and continued to soothe her often with a gentle loving sleep.
More oil, and more again, and then a flicker and a leap up of the flame that had for days been sinking slowly. But the flashes, though bright, were evanescent, and he who trimmed so diligently oft felt his heart to sink.
But Tim’s despondency never lasted long. “She’ll be better soon as the wind changes,” he would say; but the wind changed, and still Pine sank.
“Oil’s not so strong as the last,” then Tim would say; and the next time the stock grew low he would trot off to a fresh chemist’s, whose medicament would have no better effect than the last. So poor Tim would try, in his anxiety, another and another, until he had put every chemist within range under contribution, but with no more satisfactory result.
“I’m sure it ain’t so strong,” he would exclaim half-a-dozen times a day; and then he would bring out his own stock from under a little pile of cloth shreds, remove the cork, and apply the bottle-neck first to one and then to the other nostril, shaking his head afterwards in a most learned manner, and vowing that it was the most cruel thing he knew to adulterate a medicine.
Tim would even go so far as to feel the child’s pulse after the fashion of the dispensary doctor, when, having no watch, he would attentively gaze the while at the swinging pendulum of the old Dutch clock. And though it is extremely doubtful whether he could tell any difference in the regularity of the beats, yet he always seemed to derive a great deal of satisfaction from the proceeding.
But little Pine seldom complained, and then only softly to Tim, as she crept to him for comfort. She never hesitated to take from his hands her nauseous medicine, and day after day Tim carefully, anxiously trimmed the little lamp, which, in spite of all his care, burned lower and lower, flickering in the socket, until such time as a harsher blast than usual should beat it out.