“Just so! just so!” said Dr Brash. “Goodness and—and, h’m—mercy sometimes take the form of a warning that it’s time we kept to bed for a week, and that’s what I recommend you.”
“Mercy on me! Am I so far through as that?” she said, alarmed. “It’s something serious,—I know by the cheerful face that you put on you. Little did I think that I would drop off so soon. And just at the very time when there’s so much to do!”
“Pooh!” said Dr Brash. “When you drop off, Miss Dyce, there’ll be an awful dunt, I’m telling you! God bless my soul, what do you think a doctor’s for but putting folk on their pins again! A week in bed—and—h’m!—a bottle. Everything’s in the bottle, mind you!”
“And there’s the hands of the Almighty too,” said Bell, who constantly deplored the doctor was so poor a Kirk attender, and not a bit in that respect like the noble doctors in her sister’s latest Scottish novels.
Dr Brash went out of the room, to find the rest of the household sorely put about in the parlour, Lennox an object of woe, and praying hard to herself with as much as she could remember of her Uncle Dan’s successful supplication for herself when she had the pneumonia. To see the cheerfulness of his countenance when he came in was like the sun-burst on a leaden sea. “Miss Bell’s as sound as her namesake,” he assured them. “There’s been something on her mind”—with a flash of the eye, at once arrested, towards Lennox,—“and she has worked herself into a state of nervous collapse. I’ve given her the best of tonics for her kind,—the dread of a week in bed,—and I’ll wager she’ll be up by Saturday. The main thing is to keep her cheerful, and I don’t think that should be very difficult.”
Bud there and then made up her mind that her own true love was Dr Brash, in spite of his nervous sisters and his funny waistcoats. Ailie said if cheerfulness would do the thing she was ready for laughing-gas, and the lawyer vowed he would rake the town for the very latest chronicles of its never-ending fun.
But Bud was long before him on her mission of cheerfulness to the bedroom of Auntie Bell. Did you ever see a douce Scotch lass who never in her life had harboured the idea that her native hamlet was other than the finest dwelling-place in all the world, and would be happy never to put a foot outside it?—that was to be the rôle to-day. A sober little lass, sitting in a wicker-chair whose faintest creak appeared to put her in an agony—sitting incredibly long and still, and speaking Scotch when spoken to, in the most careful undertone, with a particular kind of smile that was her idea of judicious cheerfulness for a sick-room.
“Bairn!” cried her aunt at last, “if you sit much longer like that you’ll drive me crazy. What in the world’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing, dear Auntie Bell,” said Bud, astonished.
“You needn’t tell me! What was the Doctor saying?”