Rupert Hughes

“ Merrill turned back, aflame with resolution. Even as his hand hesitated over the latch of the Crawford gate the door opened and Findley came down the steps totteringly. He fell against the doctor's shoulder and wept like a child.
"He's dead, Vet! Fanny's boy is dead! The last thing she valued on earth is taken from her. I don't know how she can live through it. Her heart is crushed."
As the two men stood in helpless pity Doctor Lucas left the home where he had been so busy and so mortally futile. ”

“ She loves the blackguard still. It is part of God's mysterious wisdom that no villain should fall so low that some good woman's love shall not reach down and fasten on him. And now God has called her child to Him, and she is pining to follow him to Heaven."
Merrill's outcast love made him savage. He snarled: "You know more about Heaven than I do, Neverend, but I know more about earth than you do, and I tell you people don't die of grief. ”

“ Findley had told Merrill, rather patronizingly, that he himself had once planned to become a physician, but had thought better of it. A passing revivalist had taught him how much nobler a task than the saving of bodies is the saving of souls. ”

“ It looked like a stiletto, and Fanny thrust it aside with feeble haste and with a little wail that brought her mother to her side with the plea:
"Don't hurt the poor child."
Merrill pushed her aside. "She is too ill to feel it much." And he said to Fanny, "I won't give you any more pain than I can help."
She yielded, rather from inability to resist than from conviction. There was something ghastly in the figure of the man asking to be permitted to drive a pointed needle straight toward her heart. She would have been more frightened still had she known how frightened Merrill was. ”

“ The first Sunday the preacher murmured in the back of his mind, "A professional call, no doubt," realizing that a doctor has no Sabbath.
The next Sunday, another absence. "He is growing busier," thought the preacher. The fourth Sunday followed the third into the calendar, and yet no young Doctor Merrill. Young Mr. Findley gave him up for lost. He forgot to hope that some other church had gathered him in.
On the following Monday he met Doctor Merrill at the post-office, where almost all Carthage assembled twice a day.
"Why don't you come to church any more?" said the preacher. ”

“ Merrill tried to describe to Findley what he meant.
"The heart, you understand, hangs in a kind of sack called the pericardium. It has a little fluid to lubricate it, but the pericardium of that girl is not well. It is filled with thick liquid like this in the tube. And her heart must beat through it like a man wading in heavy snow. It grows wearier and weaker; it cannot beat much longer."
The brows of Findley were beautiful with pity, and the old mother became a child with fear and grief. ”

“ He placed the point of the hollow needle against the white skin at the fifth intercostal space; set his thumb along the needle as a check and pressed it backward, inward and downward with the uttermost nicety, avoiding bone and artery and cartilage and throbbing heart.
The girl quivered with a twinge of pain, and Findley, quivering with her throe, turned his eyes to Merrill, saw his intense frown dissolve in an arch of exultance—the exultance that surgeons feel on tracking a hidden trouble home. When he lifted away the needle the cylinder was filled with an evil fluid. ”

“ In Carthage the same man is both physician and surgeon, and Merrill had had none too much experience since he left his hospital practice. He had often regretted the sparsity of his opportunity to wield his knives, and Findley had abhorred his gruesome ambition. But now the reason of it was manifest.
He must pierce the very envelope of a beating heart and yet not touch the heart's self. And hearts are not always in the right place. ”

“ One cannot always be sure of a diagnosis, but here I am sure. I know; I can see. This fluid is the proof. If the pericardium is not opened and drained at once she will die, and die soon. If I am given freedom to act I can save her—I think. I am almost sure."
Findley translated the message of hope with a lilt of enthusiasm that raised the mother from the cold ashes of despair. She wanted to know more, but Merrill decided that it would only terrify and mystify her. He demanded immediate and full liberty to proceed. There was no hospital within reach, no better surgeon than Merrill within call. ”

“ Then Merrill took Findley downstairs into the parlor and begged him to steel himself to the great necessity, to realize why doctors and nurses must abjure ordinary human tendernesses and delicacies, mercies and decencies and sympathies.
"If you behave like a man and a doctor, Neverend, I'll make you a present of this girl's life. You see her heart isn't broken, it's suffering from a material infection—an aftermath of a rheumatic cold. ”

“ She'll be rather sick for a good while, but she'll be prettier than ever when you bring her back to town. You stay right here. People don't die of broken hearts, as you see, but they get well quicker if they're happy. I'll run up from Carthage as often as I can."
"God bless you, Vet! You're the best man in the world."
Merrill leered at him blearily. "I'm not a good man, Neverend, but I'm a damfine doctor, and it was a beautiful operation." ”

“ Young Doctor Merrill, who had commenced his career as a physician in a later and a saner day, looked with horror and contempt on this theory. His plan of campaign was to sneak the child to maturity by avoiding the gauntlet or covering his little patient with protection as football players surround and conceal a runner with interference. ”

“ The doctor begrudged the parson one unfair advantage. Mr. and Mrs. Crawford, the parents of Mrs. Fanny Protheroe, were members of the United Presbyterian Church, and when she came back from New York she followed them to their pew. She became addicted to Findley, and Doctor Merrill felt that the preacher, with his lofty consolations and his habit of calling defeats triumphs and renunciations victories, must have a peculiar value to the young woman whose urn of hopes was but a scatter of broken shards at her feet. ”

“ Though most of the bachelors in Carthage thought how interesting a wife so experienced a woman would make in that dull town, all of them were just a little afraid of her except two—the young doctor and the young preacher. ”

“ Weeks passed and the reports from the mountains brought no comfort to the pastor, who received them from his Aunt Hannah or from Fanny's mother. They brought no comfort to Doctor Merrill, who received them at second hand. Her state grew so bad that Doctor Lucas was sent for. He came back from the mountains ignorant, and admitting it. He blamed her bodily ills to her mental condition. When Findley told Merrill, Merrill growled: "Doesn't the old idiot know that it's bound to be the other way round?" ”

“ Because, to repeat it, they fought over essentials.
And then Fanny Protheroe came back to town to stay.
II THE very next Sunday the Reverend Wilfred Findley noted that Dr. Frank Merrill's head was once more visible in the cabbage rows of his garden. He wondered why. Not for an instant did he flatter himself, or his creed, or Merrill's interest in them as the cause.
It was in the late days of spring and the preacher was young, and he found his eyes recurring to the great attentive eyes of Fanny Protheroe. He caught himself thinking: "What a wonderwork of God is the human eye!" ”

“ He seized the walls a little lower down in the other forceps and, holding it with his left hand, reached for the scissors and made a slight incision, which he lengthened a trifle with a probe-pointed knife. ”