Jack Ainslie looked hastily after the idolized little figure, and noted that the ringmaster was right. She was a thought lame.
Hastily excusing himself, he ran after the child. “Have you hurt your foot, darling?” he asked anxiously. “You’re limping a little. Did you twist your ankle?”
“Oh, no, Daddy dear, I’m not hurt. I’m going to tea.” Gabrielle put up her face for the ever-expected kiss and ran after her nurse. Jack Ainslie dismissed the subject from his mind and showed the ringmaster the rest of the horses.
From that day, however, things changed for Gabrielle. Other people noticed the little limp, and her parents, terrified and distressed, sent for the family doctor. He discovered that in some way, probably at birth, her hip had been dislocated, and had formed a new socket for itself, and that henceforth she would limp—unless—and here all the mischief began—something could be done. Her father was frantic. Of course something must be done. That his Gabrielle, his dainty little lady with her pretty face, her quick intelligence, and her gracious ways, should be lame—oh, it was intolerable! He was broken-hearted and rebellious, and even his wife’s steadfast patience and unchanging tenderness could not make him resigned. Then began for Gabrielle a series of visits to London. She was taken from one great doctor to another till she grew quite used to marching about on thick piled carpets, clad in nothing but her sunny hair, while they discussed her interesting “case.”
“Doctors are chilly men,” said Gabrielle; “their hands are always cold to my body.”
An operation was arranged, but at the last moment Jack Ainslie drew back, for the surgeons would not guarantee success, and the family doctor said grave things about Gabrielle’s constitutional delicacy. So it was decided that more gradual means must be tried to bring about the desired result. The “gradual means” assumed the shape of an instrument, hideous to behold and painful to wear. It broke Jack Ainslie’s heart to see his little lady cabined and confined in such a cruel cage, and for the little lady herself it blotted out the sunshine and made life very grey and terrible. One thing was quite plain to Gabrielle, and that was that evidently Nature was very much to blame in having provided a new “socket” for the poor little dislocated bone. This impertinence must be interfered with at all costs—the doctors seemed to agree upon that. And Gabrielle wondered why it was so wrong to have no pain, to be perfectly unconscious of her “affliction,” as her nurse called it, and so interesting (to the doctors) and right, to be uncomfortable and to wear a hideous high-soled boot and an iron cage, with crutches under the arms that pushed her shoulders up to her ears.
As for the instrument, it was designed and ordered by three famous surgeons, and it cost the price of many ponies. Gabrielle tried to be brave. She was curiously conscious that the pain her parents suffered was far greater than her own. The instrument was adjusted in London, and on the way home in the train her mother asked her many times, “Does it hurt you, my darling?” And Gabrielle always answered bravely, “I can bear it, mother dear; I can bear it!”
When she got home that night, the poor little leg was black from the cruel pressure, and Mary Ainslie broke down and cried till she could cry no longer. Gabrielle tried to walk bravely in her cramping irons, and to smile at her parents when she met their troubled eyes. At first she broke the thing continually, for she was an active child, much given to jumping off chairs and playing at circus on the big old sofa. But by and by all desire to jump and run left her. She grew high-shouldered, and would sit very still for hours, while her daddy told her stories or drove her behind Roland in a little basket-carriage he had bought for her. Truly the iron entered into her soul, the cruel iron that cramped the child’s soft body; and Gabrielle’s eyes grew larger and larger, and her chin more pointed, while the once plump little hands were white as the petals of the pear-blossom outside the nursery window.
“I wish people wouldn’t ask me about it; they are kind, but I wish they wouldn’t,” Gabrielle would say. “I’m tired of telling them about the socket, and I’m not ‘a poor little soul’—I’m daddy’s little lady!”
There came to Jack Ainslie a very old college friend, a doctor, Gabrielle’s godfather, and devoted to her, and he was supremely dissatisfied with her treatment and implored them to take her to see a young surgeon, a friend of his own, who was making a great name, and doing wonders for everyone who came under his care. Jack Ainslie and his wife needed but small persuasion, and it was decided that Gabrielle should go to London as soon as possible.