Doctor Luke of the Labrador by Norman Duncan (color ebook reader .txt) 📖

space the inevitable came upon us: punts put in for the doctor at unseasonable hours, desperately reckless of weather; schooners beat up with men lying ill or injured in the forecastles; the folk of the neighbouring ports brought their afflicted to be miraculously restored, and ingenuously quartered their dying upon us. A wretched multitude emerged from the hovels--crying, "Heal us!" And to every varied demand the doctor freely responded, smiling heartily, God bless him! spite of wind and weather: ready, active, merry, untiring--sad but when the only gift he bore was that of tender consolation.

* * * * *


One night there came a maid from Punch Bowl Harbour. My sister sent her to the shop, where the doctor was occupied with the accounts of our business, myself to keep him company. 'Twas a raw, black night; and she entered with a gust of wind, which fluttered the doctor's papers, set the lamp flaring, and, at last, escaped by way of the stove to the gale from which it had strayed.

"Is you the doctor?" she gasped.

She stood with her back against the door, one hand still on the knob and the other shading her eyes--a slender slip of a girl, her head covered with a shawl, now dripping. Whisps of wet black hair clung to her forehead, and rain-drops lay in the flushed hollows of her cheeks.

"I am," the doctor answered, cheerily, rising from his work.

"Well, zur," said she, "I'm Tim Hodd's maid, zur, an' I'm just come from the Punch Bowl in the bait-skiff, zur--for healin'."

"And what, my child," asked the doctor, sympathetically, "may be the matter with you?"

Looking back--with the added knowledge that I have--it seems to me that he had no need to ask the question. The flush and gasp told the story well enough, quite well enough: the maid was dying of consumption.

"Me lights is floatin', zur," she answered.

"Your lights?"

"Ay, zur," laying a hand on her chest. "They're floatin' wonderful high. I been tryin' t' kape un down; but, zur, 'tis no use, at all."

With raised eyebrows the doctor turned to me. "What does she mean, Davy," he inquired, "by her 'lights'?"

"I'm not well knowin'," said I; "but if 'tis what _we_ calls 'lights,' 'tis what _you_ calls 'lungs.'"

The doctor turned sadly to the maid.

"I been takin' shot, zur, t' weight un down," she went on; "but, zur, 'tis no use, at all. An' Jim Butt's my man," she added, hurriedly, in a low voice. "I'm t' be married to un when he comes up from the Narth. Does you think----"

She paused--in embarrassment, perhaps: for it may be that it was the great hope of this maid, as it is of all true women of our coast, to live to be the mother of sons.

"Go on," the doctor quietly said.

"Oh, does you think, zur," she said, clasping her hands, a sob in her voice, "that you can cure me--afore the fleet--gets home?"

"Davy," said the doctor, hoarsely, "go to your sister. I must have a word with this maid--alone." I went away.

* * * * *


We caught sight of the _Word of the Lord_ beating down from the south in light winds--and guessed her errand--long before that trim little schooner dropped anchor in the basin. The skipper came ashore for healing of an angry abscess in the palm of his hand. Could the doctor cure it? To be sure--the doctor could do _that_! The man had suffered sleepless agony for five days; he was glad that the doctor could ease his pain--glad that he was soon again to be at the fishing. Thank God, he was to be cured!

"I have only to lance and dress it," said the doctor. "You will have relief at once."

"Not the knife," the skipper groaned. "Praise God, I'll not have the knife!"

It was the doctor's first conflict with the strange doctrines of our coast. I still behold--as I lift my eyes from the page--his astonishment when he was sternly informed that the way of the Lord was not the way of a surgeon with a knife. Nor was the austere old fellow to be moved. The lance, said he, was an invention of the devil himself--its use plainly a defiance of the purposes of the Creator. Thank God! he had been reared by a Christian father of the old school.

"No, no, doctor!" he declared, his face contorted by pain. "I'm thankin' you kindly; but I'm not carin' t' interfere with the decrees o' Providence."

"But, man," cried the doctor, "I _must_----"

"No!" doggedly. "I'll not stand in the Lard's way. If 'tis His will for me t' get better, I'll get better, I s'pose. If 'tis His blessed will for me t' die," he added, reverently, "I'll have t' die."

"I give you my word," said the doctor, impatiently, "that if that hand is not lanced you'll be dead in three days."

The man looked off to his schooner.

"Three days," the doctor repeated.

"I'm wonderful sorry," sighed the skipper, "but I got t' stand by the Lard."

And he _was_ dead--within three days, as we afterwards learned: even as the doctor had said.

* * * * *


Once, when the doctor was off in haste to Cuddy Cove to save the life of a mother of seven--the Cuddy Cove men had without a moment's respite pulled twelve miles against a switch of wind from the north and were streaming sweat when they landed--once, when the doctor was thus about his beneficent business, a woman from Bowsprit Head brought her child to be cured, incredulous of the physician's power, but yet desperately seeking, as mothers will. She came timidly--her ailing child on her bosom, where, as it seemed to me, it had lain complaining since she gave it birth.

"I'm thinkin' he'll die," she told my sister.

My sister cried out against this hopelessness. 'Twas not kind to the dear Lord, said she, thus to despair.

"They says t' Bowsprit Head," the woman persisted, "that he'll die in a fit. I'm--I'm--not wantin' him," she faltered, "t' die--like that."

"No, no! He'll not!"

She hushed the child in a mechanical way--being none the less tender and patient the while--as though her arms were long accustomed to the burden, her heart used to the pain.

"There haven't ever been no child," said she, looking up, after a moment, "like this--afore--t' Bowsprit Head."

My sister was silent.

"No," the woman sighed; "not like this one."

"Come, come, ma'm!" I put in, confidently. "Do you leave un t' the doctor. _He'll_ cure un."

She looked at me quickly. "What say?" she said, as though she had not understood.

"I says," I repeated, "that the doctor will cure that one."

"Cure un?" she asked, blankly.

"That he will!"

She smiled--and looked up to the sky, smiling still, while she pressed the infant to her breast. "They isn't nobody," she whispered, "not nobody, ever said that--afore--about my baby!"

Next morning we sat her on the platform to wait for the doctor, who had now been gone three days. "He does better in the air," said she. "He--he-_needs_ air!" It was melancholy weather--thick fog, with a drizzle of rain: the wind in the east, fretful and cold. All morning long she rocked the child in her arms: now softly singing to him--now vainly seeking to win a smile--now staring vacantly into the mist, dreaming dull dreams, while he lay in her lap.

"He isn't come through the tickle, have he?" she asked, when I came up from the shop at noon.

"He've not been sighted yet."

"I'm thinkin' he'll be comin' soon."

"Ay; you'll not have t' wait much longer."

"I'm not mindin' _that_," said she, "for I'm used t' waitin'."

The doctor came in from the sea at evening--when the wind had freshened to a gale, blowing bitter cold. He had been for three days and nights fighting without sleep for the life of that mother of seven--and had won! Ay, she had pulled through; she was now resting in the practiced care of the Cuddy Cove women, whose knowledge of such things had been generously increased. The ragged, sturdy seven still had a mother to love and counsel them. The Cuddy Cove men spoke reverently of the deed and the man who had done it. Tired? The doctor laughed. Not he! Why, he had been asleep under a tarpaulin all the way from Cuddy Cove! And Skipper Elisha Timbertight had handled the skiff in the high seas so cleverly, so tenderly, so watchfully--what a marvellous hand it was!--that the man under the tarpaulin had not been awakened until the nose of the boat touched the wharf piles. But the doctor was hollow-eyed and hoarse, staggering of weariness, but cheerfully smiling, as he went up the path to talk with the woman from Bowsprit Head.

"You are waiting for me?" he asked.

She was frightened--by his accent, his soft voice, his gentle manner, to which the women of our coast are not used. But she managed to stammer that her baby was sick.

"'Tis his throat," she added.

The child was noisily fighting for breath. He gasped, writhed in her lap, struggled desperately for air, and, at last, lay panting. She exposed him to the doctor's gaze--a dull-eyed, scrawny, ugly babe: such as mothers wish to hide from sight.

"He've always been like that," she said. "He's wonderful sick. I've fetched un here t' be cured."

"A pretty child," said the doctor.

'Twas a wondrous kind lie--told with such perfect dissimulation that it carried the conviction of truth.

"What say?" she asked, leaning forward.

"A pretty child," the doctor repeated, very distinctly.

"They don't say that t' Bowsprit Head, zur."

"Well--_I_ say it!"

"I'll tell un so!" she exclaimed, joyfully. "I'll tell un you said so, zur, when I gets back t' Bowsprit Head. For nobody--nobody, zur--ever said that afore--about my baby!"

The child stirred and complained. She lifted him from her lap--rocked him--hushed him--drew him close, rocking him all the time.

"Have you another?"

"No, zur; 'tis me first."

"And does he talk?" the doctor asked.

She looked up--in a glow of pride. And she flushed gloriously while she turned her eyes once more upon the gasping, ill-featured babe upon her breast.

"He said 'mama'--once!" she answered.

In the fog--far, far away, in the distances beyond Skull Island, which were hidden--the doctor found at that moment some strange interest.

"Once?" he asked, his face still turned away.

"Ay, zur," she solemnly declared. "I calls my God t' witness! I'm not makin' believe, zur," she went on, with rising excitement. "They says t' Bowsprit Head that I dreamed it, zur, but I knows I didn't. 'Twas at the dawn. He lay here, zur--here, zur--on me breast. I was wide awake, zur--waitin' for the day. Oh, he said it, zur," she cried,