In faith! a senseless bell, a merciless bell, waking folk to toil and grief. Dr Brash and Ailie heavy-eyed, beside the bed in the attic bower, shivered at the sound of it, and looked with fear and yearning at the sleeping child.
Bud moved her head from side to side a little on the pillow, with a murmur from her parched lips, and there was a flicker of the eyelids—that was all. Between her and the everlasting swound, where giddily swings the world and all its living things, there seemed no more than a sheet of tissue-paper: it was as if a breath of the tender morning air would quench the wavering flame that once was joy and Lennox Dyce. The heart of Auntie Ailie rose clamouring in her bosom; her eyes stung with the brine of tears restrained, but she clenched her teeth that she might still be worthy of the doctor’s confidence.
He saw it, and put out his hand and pressed her shoulder, a fat old-fashioned man, well up in years, with whiskers under his chin like a cravat, yet beautiful as a prince to Ailie, for on him all her hopes were cast. “They call me agnostic—atheist even, whiles, I hear,” he had said in the midst of their vigil; “and, indeed, I’m sometimes beat to get my mind beyond the mechanism, but—h’m!—a fine child, a noble child; she was made for something—h’m! That mind and talent—h’m!—that spirit—h’m!—the base of it was surely never yon grey stuff in the convolutions.” And another time the minister had come in (the folk in the street were furious to see him do it!), and timidly suggested prayer. “Prayer!” said Dr Brash, “before this child, and her quite conscious! Man, what in God’s own name are we doing here, this—h’m!—dear good lady and I, but fever ourselves with sleepless, silent prayer? Do you think a proper prayer must be official? There’s not a drop of stuff in a druggist’s bottle but what’s a solution of hope and faith and—h’m!—prayer. Con-found it, sir!”
He put out his hand and pressed her on the shoulder, and never said a word. Oh, the doctors! the doctors! Hale men and hearty, we can see their shortcomings and can smile at them, but when the night-light burns among the phials!
It was the eighth day after Kate, with a face of clay, and her sleeves rolled up, and the dough still on her elbows as she had come from the baking-board, burst upon the doctor in his surgery with the cry, “Dr Brash, Dr Brash! ye’re to haste ye and come at once to the wee one!” He had gone as nearly on the wings of the wind as a fat man may in carpet-slippers, and found a distracted family round the fevered child.
“Tut, tut, lassie,” said he, chucking her lightly under the chin. “What new prank is this, to be pretending illness? Or if it’s not a let-on, I’ll be bound it’s MacGlashan’s almond tablet.”
“It’s these cursèd crab-apples in the garden; I’m sure it’s the crab-apples, doctor,” said Miss Bell, looking ten years older than her usual.
“H’m! I think not,” said Dr Brash more gravely, with his finger on the pulse.
“It’s bound to be,” said Bell, piteous at having to give up her only hope. “Didn’t you eat some yesterday, pet, after I told you that you were not for your life to touch them?”
“No,” said Bud, with hot and heavy breathing.