Mavis of Green Hill Part 14

I was too angry to speak.

"Look here, Miss Carroll," he said quietly, "let's get down to bra.s.s tacks. For eleven years you have lain on your back, allowing yourself to be waited on, coddled, wrapped in cotton wool. You have had the companionship of your father, who is the finest man in the world, but whose whole life is wrapped up in you, and who has sacrificed that life to your whims and your desires. Your father was never meant to be buried down here; not with that personality and fine brain. Think of the doors which should be open to him and which your illness has closed,--travel, society, the exploration of places and people, instead of a rather pretty, very narrow, Connecticut _rut_! You have had Sarah--sentimental to a degree under a rocky exterior, ready and anxious to work her fingers to the bone to please you. You have had an entire village at your beck and call; have dispensed justice and advice from your bed like Royalty; and you have thrived on it, my dear lady, thrived on the adoration and the sacrifice, and on your own martyrdom. Now, I am here solely to give you a chance to repay your father and all the others for their love and care and coddling. Do you realize that your father is a comparatively young man? That, by tying him to your bedside you have narrowed his life down until it consists of this room, this house, this tiny village? It's up to you to give something to your father. It may cost you pain. But I wonder if you have any idea of what you have cost him in heartache? Are you willing to make the effort, if only for his sake?"

No one in all my life had ever spoken to me like that! I was so hurt, so outraged, so bewildered, it seemed as if I just couldn't live a minute longer, with that cool, cutting voice in my ears.

"You--you--brute!" I said, choking, "It's not fair! Do you mean to tell me that I am selfish and unkind? That I don't love my father?

That I am a useless, worthless hypochondriac?"

He smiled.

"Perhaps I wouldn't put it quite so strongly," he suggested courteously.

I shut my hands hard under the bedclothes and held my head very high.

"Very well," I told him, rather viciously, "I will do all you say, if Father and Doctor MacAllister are agreed."

I could feel the red spots burning on my cheeks. And in my mind I was saying, over and over, like a child, "I'll show you! _I'll show you!_"

I think I almost hoped I should die--just to make him sorry. And it was so hard to keep the tears back. I wouldn't cry. I _wouldn't_.

I cried.

Suddenly, his arm was around me, and his voice, so changed, so immeasurably gentle, was saying, very close,

"You poor little kid!"

"I hate you!" I said, at that.

The arm tightened; then dropped. Dr. Denton rose.

"Good!" he said, heartily, towering above me. "That's something to work on! Well, I have your promise, and for love of your father and hate of me you'll walk yet, before the winter. And now, I will send Sarah to you with something to quiet those--outraged feelings.

Tomorrow we'll begin the treatment."

Then he left the room.

And that's all Diary. I had a talk with Father. I can't set it down here. It was too beautiful and too intimate. But now that I realize all that it has meant, this long illness of mine, and all that my recovery might mean to him, I am willing to undergo any torture, any agony; willing even to endure the Cruel Magician and his Black Magic.

How I hate him, Diary! It makes me feel quite strong to hate anyone so,--I, who have always cared for people, and lived on their love.

What have I just written ... "lived on their love"...? I wonder if he is right, if I have taken everything, and given nothing in return?

Tonight, with my mind and soul in chaos, I wish more than ever that my Mother had lived.

Dear Diary, silent and loyal confidant, wish me well for tomorrow!

GREEN HILL September 22

Yesterday, Diary, was the most exhausting day I have ever survived! An alternate succession of ma.s.sage and naps, and naps and ma.s.sage! And two efforts to sit up! The first was quite unsuccessful. I was trembling all over with excitement, and perhaps fear. And at the very first attempt, fear of pain and the immediate succeeding pain itself, absolutely unnerved me. Dr. Mac, standing close beside the bed, looked across at his colleague. He didn't shake his head, but the expression in his keen old eyes was equivalent. Dr. Denton frowned.

"Will you try again, in a few minutes, Miss Carroll?" he asked, ignoring Dr. Mac, and the little hurt, despairing sound which I couldn't help making.

"I can't!" I said flatly.

He spread out his hands in an entirely foreign gesture of defeat.

"Of course, if you prefer not...." he suggested sketchily.

There was something so positively scornful in the look he bent on me that I writhed. I made my two eyes as much like swords as possible--I hope, Diary, that they were not crossed!--and snapped, "Do you mean to imply...?"

Suddenly I stopped. I was looking straight into the steel-blue eyes, and it was not until I saw their frosty expression change to something distinctly like triumph that I discovered that--_I was sitting up!_

Actually! But only for the fraction of a minute. It was the discovery itself, I think, that laid me flat again, with Dr. Mac's arm around me, and his disengaged hand stretched across the bed, frantically shaking Dr. Denton's.

"Laddie, 'tis mar-r-vellous!" he was saying, with a remarkable rolling of his r's.

But Dr. Denton was looking at me.

"You see," he said quietly, "that after all you _can_ do it. It is only a matter of patience, and the will to conquer. And perhaps a certain amount of--impetus."

He was smiling, quite flushed, his eyes more brilliant than I had ever seen them.

"And now," he said, "suppose I go down and tell your father. He has been walking the floor ever since we came up, I know. We won't bother you again today, Miss Carroll. But tomorrow you're going to be perfectly amazed to see how easy it will be to repeat the performance."

After he had gone, Dr. Mac walked around my little room, loquacious for once in his life.

"Isn't he a wonder?" he kept asking me. "La.s.sie, it's worth living for just to meet a man like that. The born healer," he kept saying over and over, "the born healer!"

"I've no doubt," I said politely, "that Dr. Denton is a very able physician."

Dr. Mac stopped in his tracks, so suddenly that he nearly fell over.

"What's this? What's this?" he said, his bushy eyebrows drawn down over his eyes, so closely that I could not see their expression.

I repeated my remark.

One piercing glance, the suspicion of a twinkle, a deep, disconcerting chuckle. And then my old friend said cryptically,

"So that's the way the land lies, little Mavis!"

"What do you mean?" I began, irritably. I seem to be in a continual state of annoyance these days, Diary.

But he had gone, and all the way downstairs I could hear him chuckling.

Even my succeeding little thanksgiving talk with Father failed to put me in a good humor again.

I think Doctor Mac is horrid!

But if I am cured, Diary, won't I make them _all_ "sit up!"