Doctor's Daughter

by Jean S. MacLeod

  They reached the great pits hollowed out of the side of the hill at last, to see dust and smoke still rising from the ledge far up the old face where an avalanche of rock and stone had come hurtling down into the working space below. On the far side of the quarry, around the pay hut and the squat office building, a small group of silent men stood waiting.

  Christine ran toward them, but even as she hurried forward she was aware of resentment dominating all other emotion in their dust-begrimed faces.

  “Where’s the doctor?” old Abel Morrison demanded in a voice that was little more than a growl. “We sent for him.”

  “He’ll come,” Christine assured him while her eyes probed beyond the group. “Where ... are they? Can someone tell me what has happened?”

  No one spoke for a split second and then Abel said in a voice thick with resentment, “Something that happened here once before, but it was the new master of Glenavon that gave the order this time and the old one that has paid the price.”

  She searched their faces, knowing that they were accusing Huntley.

  “What right have you to say that?” she demanded weakly.

  “The old man’s dead,” somebody said from the back of the crowd, “and his nephew gave the order for that face to be blasted.”

  “No!” The single word was a cry, nothing more, and it held all the protest that her love and faith in Huntley was capable of mustering. “Take me in to them,” she commanded. “Bob says they were both hurt.”

  They made way for her, sullenly, still half resentfully, and she went in through the door of the office, the bright, searching light of the summer afternoon flooding in behind her. She saw the first-aid men busy on both sides of the room, but none of their faces were clear to her as she recognized the prone figure on the improvised bed beneath the window. He lay half turned on his stomach under a blanket and his bandaged head jerked upward at sight of her with all the old vigor in his voice.

  “Get them to stop fussing about me and see to my uncle. He’s taken the real rap over this.”

  She could not tell him that Ben Treverson was dead, and so she looked beyond him to the men who had been on the spot almost immediately after the accident had happened. Someone drew her aside as she rose to her feet and said in an undertone, “We thought the old man had gone, but he’s still breathing and his pulse is a bit steadier. He doesn’t seem to be able to move, though, and he can’t speak.”

  “I wish my father would get here!” Christine exclaimed, feeling suddenly weak and ineffective in her self-appointed role. “He would know what to do for them both.”

  She stood rigidly beside Ben Treverson’s improvised couch, looking down at the parchment-like face and the strangely twisted mouth which told so plainly of a seizure, wishing that he had been able to speak, yet realizing that what he might have to say could so easily shatter all her dreams and reduce her faith to ashes. Then she turned back to where his nephew lay on the far side of the hut and bent over Huntley’s restless form.

  “My father can’t be very many minutes now,” she assured him. “They’ve done what they can for your uncle, and we’ll soon get him away.”

  A look of relief spread over his face, to be obliterated immediately by a sudden quick spasm of pain as he moved, and she knelt down beside him, saying unsteadily, “You’ve been badly hurt. Don’t move.”

  “I’m all right,” he told her sharply. “A flesh wound or two, mostly on my back, I gather. Thank heaven, my head seems to have escaped injury!” He was frowning, his eyes dark and commanding on hers. “It’s a damnable position all around. I can’t even move without this confounded pain—”

  “Far better lie still until we find out just what the damage is,” she advised. “You won’t gain anything by causing yourself all this unnecessary pain. I’ve seen your uncle.” She lowered her voice. “He appears to be suffering from shock.”

  “There’s no injury to his head?”

  “None that I can see.”

  “Internal?”

  “We’ll have to wait to know about that until my father or Dr. Caitland arrives.”

  He moved again, dismissing the doctor’s young assistant with a gesture of indifference.

  “Your father was out on his round, I suppose?”

  “Yes, but he couldn’t have been any farther than Kilcraven. Rhona has gone to bring him.”

  “See that he ... looks after my uncle.” His breathing was growing difficult, his dark eyes becoming heavy and blurred. “He has tremendous faith in him...”

  “Huntley—!”

  She whispered his name below her breath, her heart thumping madly, and then she heard her father’s voice behind her and Gordon Caitland’s, as voices come in a dream, and her confidence was restored.

  “In here, father!” She crossed the floor and was standing at the door of the hut as her father approached it. She could see by the gravity of his expression that he had been told something of the happenings of the past hour even in the short distance that separated the offices from his parked car. “They’re both emergencies, I think, but Huntley has just lost consciousness.”

  Their eyes met and held for a split second in which she felt that he had seen straight into her torn heart, and then he strode across the hut to where old Ben lay under the far window. The old man’s eyes fastened on his face, their intensity demanding his release from the bonds which rendered him speechless, and John Helmsdale made his examination with a mounting sense of frustration. He turned abruptly away from those beseeching eyes at last to give his orders to the men.

  “He must remain here,” he said. “Send for a mattress of some sort and keep the place warm. I can’t take the risk of moving him yet.”

  Christine was standing beside Huntley when her father moved toward the other window.

  “They have a station wagon at Glenavon,” he said, after the briefest of examinations. “See if you can find it and bring it down here. You could also bring the mattress and explain things to Mrs. Campbell. Don’t let her panic, whatever you do. I have enough on my hands here.”

  “Will he ... be all right?” She could not keep herself from asking the question nor from wanting to linger by Huntley’s side while he still lay there unconscious. “His back has been badly hurt.”

  “He’s tough as they make ‘em,” her father assured her roughly but kindly, “but we can make him much more comfortable if you’ll bring down the car.”

  She knew she had received a command and made no further attempt to linger. It was no great distance to Glenavon and she ran most of the way, meeting Jessie Campbell as she turned the first bend in the long, unkempt driveway leading up to the house. The old housekeeper had thrown on a shawl and run through the trees, her anxious, white face expressing all her concern for the man she had served for so many years, and whom she knew and understood better than anyone in Kinaird.

  “I was down in the village,” she explained, “and I’m just now back. This is surely an awful thing to be happening and these two quarreling all the morning into the bargain!”

  “Try not to think of their quarrel, Mrs. Campbell,” Christine implored. “It can’t do any good, and we have to think of their need now—what we can do for them in the shortest possible time. Recrimination isn’t any good ... afterward,” she added as she slackened her steps to keep pace with the old woman who seemed to be relying upon her for confidence and direction. “If you will see to blankets and a mattress and tell me where I can find things in the kitchen, we should be back there within a quarter of an hour. You see—speed might make all the difference between ... between...”

  She could not utter the words. There must be no outward expression of the dreadful fear that hammered at her heart, but her limbs seemed numbed by the horror of it as she urged them into a final effort of speed and her breath was hot and dry in her throat.

  The details of the next ten minutes were never very clear to her afterward, her only conscious memory being of driving the car recklessly down the win
ding driveway and across the glen road into the great cavern of the quarry where the men still stood about in groups.

  She drove the station wagon right up to the office door, getting down to help Jessie lift her bundles out of the back, and when she turned toward the hut her father was standing there waiting for her.

  “You’ve been quick.” In that one, brief statement he had acknowledged the full extent of her effort. “Things might have been worse for young Treverson,” he added briefly. “He’s lost a lot of blood, but I’ve done some rough surgery on his back, and he should be all right now.”

  She felt her breath drive freely between her lips in a great sigh of relief and a terrible swaying lightness took hold of her. For a moment the hut and the quarry and even the bright sunlight were blotted out, and then she tightened her grip on the bundle she carried and followed her father through the office doorway.

  They worked for half an hour, transferring the prostrate form of the old man carefully onto the mattress and covering him with blankets while Mrs. Campbell produced hot water for the bottles from the stove in the corner that had been hastily lit. Christine felt that she could not bear to look at old Ben, yet she could not believe that the fixed stare in his eyes held accusation. It seemed more like appeal, as if he would implore her father to give him back the use of his speech in order that he might say something of extreme importance. From experience she knew that such a feat was beyond her father’s powers. Time might work the miracle, and meanwhile all that they could do for him was being done as quickly as possible.

  And all that they could do for Huntley? She looked across to his still form, a beam of sunlight slanting across his dark face and outlining the autocratic nose and high forehead against the rough pine wall above his head. Her heart contracted painfully at the thought of the events leading up to this day’s happenings. His mouth, as he lay there believing himself unobserved while they worked with his uncle, was grimly compressed and his eyes, under their heavy lids, gazed straight before him. She shivered at the thought of her father’s “rough surgery,” realizing that he had probably been given only a local anesthetic, but she knew that it was not pain alone that disturbed him now and that he did not demand their pity. When he looked around and saw her watching him his eyes told her nothing, remaining remote and strangely concealed under the heavy lids.

  “I must take that young man up to Glenavon,” her father said at her elbow. “I can leave you here with old Ben for half an hour and Caitland will keep an eye on things, though I don’t think there will be any change. Don’t let him try to talk, that’s the main thing. He would only be exciting himself needlessly.”

  “Do you think—?”

  “I don’t know. At the moment it could go either way.”

  He had never tried to keep the truth from her, and Christine knew that he would not do so now. She found herself praying wordlessly for Ben Treverson’s release with a strange sense of its utmost importance hammering in her mind.

  Huntley looked at her once as they carried him out to the car, and she put her hand gently over the heavily bandaged one on the stretcher in a gesture of quiet friendliness. Why was it that nothing could break her confidence in him? She loved him, but that was not all. It was something in the man himself that made them akin ... two of a kind.

  The men gathered outside the hut made way for them, standing aside almost reluctantly, and as Huntley was transferred to the car a murmur ran around the group that sounded almost menacing. Christine heard it with a rapidly mounting resentment in her heart, and when the car had pulled away she turned and faced half a dozen of Ben Treverson’s older employees.

  “You can do more to help than just standing there—much more!” she told them, trying to keep the scorn out of her voice as she spoke. “We need wood—plenty of wood. The fire must be kept on in the office night and day now while Mr. Treverson remains here. Surely,” she appealed, “you won’t refuse to help?”

  “We’ll help the old man now that the other fellow has gone,” a grisly old hewer returned surlily. “We’ve no time for newcomers who give orders like they were the boss and then try to change them when it’s too late.”

  “I haven’t time to listen to that kind of talk just now,” Christine told him with her heart like lead within her. “These things are irrelevant when we’re fighting for someone’s life, but if you are suggesting that Mr. Huntley did anything underhanded, I refuse to believe you.” Her voice grew strong and confident, and she was suddenly sure of what she said in spite of the rough jeers from the back of the group. “He would do what he considered right and just. This has been an accident.”

  There were further mutterings, but the group had already begun to thin out, and she could see that the better element among the men was already on its way in among the trees in search of the wood she had requested. She wasted no further time with the remnant that was left, dismissing it as the inevitable troublemakers and of very little consequence at the moment.

  She went back into the hut to find Gordon Caitland bending over old Ben, who now appeared to have dropped into some kind of coma, and while the young doctor sat watching his patient she tried to make the hut more comfortable and draft-proof. She knew that her father would not move old Ben until he was quite sure about the hemorrhage. The journey to Glenavon would be an unnecessary risk and one they could not afford to take.

  “I wonder how it happened?” Gordon Caitland mused. “Some of the older quarrymen seem to be grousing about young Treverson, arguing among themselves about his methods of running the place.”

  “Whatever he did,” Christine answered decisively, “it would be with the interests of Glenavon at heart.”

  “There was a suggestion that the face they were blasting was more or less worked out.”

  A spark of anger showed in her eyes.

  “Old Mr. Treverson knew that, too,” she said. “It was more or less common knowledge, and Huntley’s main work was at Druim Alaig. The face hasn’t been opened up there yet, but it will be shortly—”

  “And meantime they worked this one too far?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” she answered unhappily. “There certainly seems to be plenty of people willing to make the accusation.”

  “I’m sorry,” he apologized, seeing that he had upset her. “I didn’t really mean it that way.”

  “Do you know if Rhona went home?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “Yes, I dropped her at the house. Your mother was anxious to know what had happened, and Rhona said she would cycle up later.”

  “I think I’ll phone them.” She glanced at the instrument in the corner and then at the improvised bed under the window. “Will it disturb him, do you think?”

  Gordon Caitland shook his head.

  “Nothing would, at the moment.”

  When she got through to the house Rhona had already left for the quarries, but her mother was glad to know that both the doctor and his assistant were on the scene.

  “You don’t know when you’ll be back?” she asked.

  “No.” Christine was wondering if she might help to nurse old Ben. “I’ll see what dad says when he comes back from Glenavon. He’s taken Huntley up there, but I really think it is his uncle who is most ill. You said you had contacted the nurse, didn’t you, mother?”

  “She should be on her way, and if there’s anything I can do for Mr. Treverson—” Georgina began, but Christine interrupted her.

  “Dad will probably need a substantial meal by the time he gets home,” she suggested.

  Nurse MacMillan was making her way across the quarry when she hung up the receiver, and she went to open the door for her with a sense of keenest relief. Another pair of professional hands were always welcome, although the men who had rendered first aid at the beginning had undoubtedly done a grand job.

  “Your sister is just behind me, cycling up the brae,” the nurse told her, going quickly inside to hear what Dr. Caitland had to say about their patient, an
d Christine hurried out to meet Rhona with the thought in her mind that she might cycle up to Glenavon and offer her services there.

  Halfway to the quarry entrance, however, she saw the Glenavon wagon come swinging down the hill, and her father leaned out from the driver’s seat as he brought it to a standstill.

  “I see Rhona coming up the brae,” he said. “One of you had better go to Glenavon and help out up there.” He looked directly at Christine. “Do you want to go, my dear?” he asked.

  “I’ll ... leave it to you,” she said quietly.

  “Jessie Campbell’s all right with the cooking, but there will be bandages to change and the nurse can’t be in both places at once,” he reflected. “You’ll have to take a firm hand with that young man. He’s about as determined as his uncle, and I’ve a notion there’s something behind this accident that’s making him far more difficult to deal with than he might have been.”

  “You don’t mean that he feels ... guilty?” Christine asked in a voice that was little more than a whisper, her face suddenly white and pinched-looking. “I’ll go,” she added, “whether you think it or not.”

  “It’s our duty to do what we can for them both,” John answered noncommittally, a perplexed frown creasing his brow. “It’s not a doctor’s business to argue right or wrong.”