And, after a time, Maddy did awaken, but in the eyes fixed, for a moment, so intently on him, there was no look of recognition, and the doctor was half glad that it was so. He did not wish her to associate him with her late disastrous failure; he would rather she should think of him as some one come to cure her, for cure her he would, he said to himself, as he gazed into her childish face and thought how sad it was for such as she to die. When he first entered the cottage he had been struck with the extreme plainness of the furniture, betokening the poverty of its inmates; but now he forgot everything except the sick girl, who grew more and more restless, and kept talking of him and the Latin verb which meant to love, and which was not in the grammar.
“Guy was a fool and I was a brute,” the doctor mattered, as he folded up the bits of paper whose contents he hoped might do much toward saving Maddy’s life.
Then, promising to come again, he rode rapidly away, to visit other patients, who that afternoon were in danger of being sadly neglected, so constantly was their physician’s mind dwelling upon the little, low chamber where Maddy Clyde was lying. As night closed in she awoke to partial consciousness, and heard that Dr. Holbrook had been there prescribing for her. Turning her face to the wall, she seemed to be thinking; then calling her grandmother to her she asked “Did he smooth my hair and say, ‘poor child?’”
Her grandmother hardly thought he did, though she was not in the room all the time. “He had staid a long while and was greatly interested,” she said.
Maddy had a vague remembrance of such an incident, and in her heart forgave the doctor for his rejection, and thought only how handsome he had looked, even while tormenting her with such unheard-of questions, and how kind he was to her now. The sight of her grandfather, who came in to see her, awoke a new train of ideas, and bidding him to sit beside her, she asked if their home must be sold. Maddy was not to be put off with an evasion, and so grandpa told her honestly at last that Slocum would probably foreclose and the place be sold.
“But never you mind, Maddy,” he said, cheerily, when he saw how excited she seemed; “we shall manage somehow. I can rent two or three rooms cheap of Mr. Green—he told me so—and with old Sorrel I can work on the road, and fetch things from the depot, and in the winter I can shovel snow, and clean roofs. We shall not starve—not a bit of it—so don’t you worry, it will make you wus, and I’d rather lose the old homestead a thousand times over than lose you.”
Maddy did not reply, but the great tears poured down her flushed cheeks, as she thought of her feeble old grandfather working on the road and shoveling snow to earn his bread; and the fever, which had seemed to be abating, returned with double force, and when next morning the doctor came, there was a look of deep anxiety upon his face as he watched the alarming symptoms of his delirious patient, who talked incessantly, not of the examination now, but of the mortgage and the foreclosure, begging him to see that the house was not sold; to tell them she was earning thirty-six dollars by teaching school; that Beauty should be sold to save their dear old home. All this was strange at first to the doctor, but the rather voluble Mrs. Green, who had come to Grandma Markham’s relief, enlightened him, dwelling with a kind of malicious pleasure upon the fact that Maddy’s earnings, had she been permitted to get a “stifficut,” were to be appropriated toward paying the debt.
If the doctor had hated himself the previous day when he rode from the red cottage gate, he hated himself doubly now as he went dashing down the road, determined to resign his office of school inspector that very day. And he did.
Summoning around him those who had been most active in electing him, he refused to officiate again, assuring them that if any more candidates came he should either turn them from his door or give them a certificate without asking a question.
“Put anybody you like in my place,” he said; “anybody but Guy Remington. Don’t, for thunder’s sake, take him.”