“Oh, they’ve had a great deal of trouble,” Miss Frothingham added with a grave expression, as the older woman turned inquiring eyes upon her. “Mr. Rutledge has been ill for weeks, and the baby is quite small—six or seven months old, I suppose.”
“Why, he’s a successful man!” his sister said impatiently as the other paused.
“Oh, yes, they have a good Swedish girl, I know, and a little car, and all that! But I imagine this has been a terribly hard winter for them. They’re lovely people, Doctor Madison,” added little Miss Frothingham bravely and earnestly. “So wonderful with their children, and they have a little vegetable garden, and fruit trees, and all that! But all the children in that neighborhood had whooping cough last fall, and I know Mrs. Rutledge was pretty tired, and then he got double pneumonia before Thanksgiving, and he hasn’t been out of the house since.”
“He’s a wonderful boy!” Doctor Madison said in a silence. “We were orphans, and he was a wonderful little brother to me. My grandparents were the stern, old-fashioned sort, but Timmy could put fun and life into punishment, even. Many an hour I’ve spent up here in this very attic with him—in disgrace.”
She got up, walked a few paces across the bare floor, picked an old fur buggy-robe from a chair, looked at it absently, and put it down again.
“What insanity brought me up to this attic on a snowy Christmas Eve!” she demanded abruptly, laughing, but with the tears Miss Frothingham had never seen there before in her eyes. “It all comes over me so—what life was when Timmy and George—Merle’s father—were in it! Poor little girl,” she added, sitting down on a trunk and drawing Merle toward her; “you were to have seven brothers and sisters, and a big Daddy to adore you and spoil you! And he had been two months in his grave when she was born,” she added to the other woman.
“But then couldn’t you afford to have all my brothers and sisters?” Merle demanded anxiously.
“It couldn’t be managed, dear. Life gets unmanageable, sometimes,” her mother answered, smiling a little sadly. “But a brother is a wonderful thing for a small girl to have. Everything has robbed this child,” she added, “the silence between her uncle and me—her father’s death—my profession. If I had been merely a general practitioner, as I was for three years,” she went on, “there would have been a score of what we call ‘G. P.’s’ to fill her poor little stocking! But half my grateful patients hardly know me by sight, much less that I have a greedy little girl who has a stocking to be filled!”
“Mother, I love you,” Merle said, for the first time in her life stirred by the unusual hour and mood, and by the tender, half-sorrowful, and all-loving voice she had never heard before.
“And I love you, little girl, even if I am too busy to show it!” her mother answered seriously. “But here! Do let’s get done with this before we break our hearts!” she added briskly, in a sudden change of mood. And she sank upon her knees before a trunk and began vigorously to deal with its contents. “And I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Merle,” her mother went on, briskly lifting out and inspecting garments of all sorts. “I’ll go to see Mr. Waldteufel on Wednesday——”