This something he put down on the broad, low couch against the wall, and throwing back the robe, disclosed to view a much battered and bleeding Zeb. The child’s dress was nearly torn from her body. Her black hair, discolored and partly drawn over her face, was matted with blood that had run down from cuts in her head.
“Take scissors and cut it away,” said Dr. Camperdown shortly. “I’ll be back,” and he hurried from the room. In a very short time he was with her again, having with quick, impatient fingers, thrown out Polypharmacy’s weight on the snow, obtained his surgeon’s bag from the sleigh, and seized the whip from its socket. This latter he smiled grimly at, as he brought it in and set it in a corner of the room. All the upper part of it was gone, broken off short, and the heavy handle was stained with blood.
“Doctor, doctor,” moaned the child, who, when Stargarde touched her, recovered from her state of insensibility. And “Doctor, doctor,” she continued to moan all the time they were washing and dressing her wounds and fitting in place the strips of court-plaster. The cuts and bruises were all about her head. The little, thin body, a mere skeleton of a thing, was unhurt, and at last Camperdown ejaculated, “Let her alone now; she’ll drop off again.”
Stargarde, while there was necessity for action, forbore to ask questions, and when her attendance of the child was over, still forbore, for she saw that Camperdown was in a state of furious, repressed temper.
“May I go to the kitchen?” he asked abruptly; and at her murmured, “Certainly,” he withdrew, taking his whip with him, and making a great noise and splashing while cleaning it. When he came back into the little parlor, she was glad to see that his features were less convulsed. She poured him out a cup of tea, which he drank absently and in silence, and then sat with knit brows looking at the unconscious child on the sofa.
“How long since you’ve seen her?” he said at last.
“Two days,” replied Stargarde. “She has been avoiding me. Poor child, she has not been in a good temper. The truant officer found her out, and being under fourteen, she was obliged to go to school. Some of the girls told me that she was very angry about it on account of her shabby clothes. They also said that they feared she wasn’t getting enough to eat. Think of that, Brian, in this good Christian city of Halifax, where thousands of citizens sit down daily to comfortable breakfast tables.”
He made some sort of an inarticulate reply, and she continued: “I went by there the other morning and the little things were singing their opening song, ‘For daily bread and wholesome food, we thank thee, Lord.’ Think of the mockery of it! The city refuses bread to their children and puts a song into their mouths.”
“Have you been making up your books?” asked Camperdown, with an abrupt change of subject, and a glance at the papers on the table.
“Yes; I have just finished collecting this quarter’s rents, and I wanted to get things in order before Christmas. I wish we had a dozen of these model tenement houses, Brian. Do you know I am besieged with applications to enter? And yet some people say that if you build houses for the poor they won’t go into them.”