“Dear, dear,” said the old woman who had taken the most care of Ben, “what are we all doing here but to wait?” and then finding there was really nothing more to be heard, she and Sue bustled off to see about supper, and then to carry their tired bones to rest, and to dream over all the events of the wonderful day.
CHAPTER IV.
Such a battery of eyes as was on the watch for the doctor’s visit the next morning! Not one of the paupers could be persuaded to any work that would take his individual pair out of range of the street; each one had an excellent reason for choosing a station where he could shoot a glance out of the window, or down the yard, and no very long interval was allowed between the shots either. Mrs. Ganderby herself found it highly important to keep in the front part of the house and just make sure that Enoch was going on well with a bit of repair he had set himself about on the doorstep. Creepy sat under the butternut-tree, and the yellow leaves had fluttered down till they lay in a golden circle around his queer little chair; the doorstep was mended, Mrs. Ganderby could not find another spot out of order within reach of the front windows; one after another the old clock in the hall had ticked away the hours of the glistening October morning, and still no black horse came dashing up before the door. “If I hadn’t seen the doctor with my own eyes yesterday,” said Mrs. Ganderby, “I should say it was all a light-headed notion of the poor crooked thing that he was here at all, which he certainly was here, however; but what he had to say about coming again is another question that will take care of itself before the day is gone.”
Greater and greater grew the wonder and suspense. Was the doctor coming at all, and what was he going to do if he came? That was so far beyond what they knew, that they set themselves to imagining, until if they had seen him alight, one hand holding a terrible knife, with which to remove the lame child’s poor twisted spine, and the other a big anvil on which to hammer it straight again, they would not have been very much more astonished. Could they believe their eyes and ears, when at last, as the sun was getting round by the west, the ring of the horse’s hoofs was heard, and almost before he was fairly reined up, the doctor sprung out empty-handed, and was on the doorstep chatting with Mrs. Ganderby as gayly as if nothing of any solemnity had ever happened in the world, or was expected to happen while it should stand?
Sue crept round to the shadow of the jut where the old clock stood, just to get an idea of what he was saying. Praising the matron’s bed of nasturtiums which she had saved from the frost, and asking her what receipt she used for pickling them! Dear, dear, but this was a strange world! What had doctors to do with pickles? and how were they to notice the taste of one thing from another, coming in to dinner as they did with pockets full of poisons, and the cries of the sick and dying in their ears? But hark! They had stopped talking about the nasturtiums.
“By the way, Mrs. Ganderby,” said the doctor, “that little fellow that I was talking with yesterday, the lame child; it seems to me something might be done for him, and I propose that we should try. It’s rather dull music for a boy of his age; ten or twelve is he, Mrs. Ganderby?”