"I am feeling a great deal better now," he soon announced. "I think I was rather fagged out. We came back so early because I found I was no longer needed. I am ever so much obliged to you. I'm afraid I am not very good company to-night and I will be back early in the morning. That plaster cast is getting a little loose. We will split it down to-morrow and have a good look at things."
Mrs. Barnett had risen also and was looking at him. In her eyes I detected something that was a very sweet, motherly sympathy. Her quick intuition had shown her that something had gone entirely wrong. Her smile was so kind and friendly that it seemed to dissolve away something hard that had come over the surface of the man.
"Isn't there anything that we can do for you?" she asked.
"Nothing!" he exclaimed. "What can any one expect to do? What is the use of keeping on trying when one has to be forever bucking against ignorance and stupidity? There is nothing the matter with me. Just a dead woman and baby, that is all. Just a poor, hard-working creature that has scarcely known a moment of real happiness in this world. She had five little ones already, clinging to her skirts, and a lot of stupid neighbors. I know the kind of advice she got from those silly old women. 'No use callin' in th' doctor. Them things comes on all right if yer has patience. They doctors does dreadful things. I's had seven an' here I be, an' no doctor ever nigh me.' Oh! I can hear the poor fools speaking, and naturally she took their advice. Then, of course, when she was gasping for breath and beginning to grow cold they sent for me, thirty miles away, and when I landed they told me it was all over, and I found them moaning, with a wild-eyed man huddled up in a corner hardly able to understand, and a lot of little ones crying for food."
He stopped and wiped his brow with his handkerchief, and looked around him, without appearing to see any of us. It was like a pent-up stream that had burst from its dam, and the flood was not yet exhausted.
"I felt like cursing the lot of them," he continued, "and giving them the tongue-lashing of their lives. But much good it would have done, and I managed to hold myself back! I couldn't help telling them that they should have sent for me three days ago, when things began to go wrong. They know well enough how to weep over their misery, but no one can make them use their silly heads. They keep on coming with infected gurry sores as if arms could be saved after they've nearly rotted away, and send for me to see the dying, as if I could raise them from their beds."
He had stopped suddenly, and looked embarrassed.
"I beg your pardon," he said. "I should not have spoken of these things. They are all a part of the game. I daresay I ought to have gone up on the hill, back of the cliffs, and had a good bout of bad language all to myself, where none could hear me."
Neither the parson nor his wife appeared to be the least bit shocked at this. They knew from long experience the things that try men's souls.
"I'm glad you've spoken," I told him. "It has relieved you, I'm sure, and we all sympathize with you."