lying amongst the ordure of the shed, she suffered with closed eyes. Her arms and legs were extended flaccidly; her body was pressed into the steaming dung and plastered with drying mud. Moans of pain broke from between her clenched teeth; a damp sweat beaded her forehead and trickled slowly over her shut eyelids; her features, disfigured by filth and distorted by her insupportable experiences, were rigidly set, but around her head the emanation of her sufferings seemed to have condensed in a faint, translucent radiance which encircled her dying face like a nimbus.
The inactive intervals of her pains grew shorter whilst the paroxysms lengthened. When a pain abated the passive anticipation of the next was torture. Then it would begin, graspingly envelop her, permeate her with agony, and squander itself through her every nerve. Her cries were combined with the shriek of the ever present wind. Everything she had undergone was as nothing compared to her present torture. Her body writhed about the stone floor feebly; blood mingled with the sweat and dirt about her. She prayed for death. Dementedly she called upon God, on Denis, on her mother. She besought the clemency of her Saviour in gasps, which broke in anguish from between her clenched teeth. In answer to her cries only the wind responded. Rising up, it shrieked and mocked at her as it rushed above the shed. She lay abandoned until, at last, when she
could not have lived through one further exacerbation, the gale rose to its loudest, highest pitch and, amidst the culmination of the storm, she was delivered of a son. Till the last torture abated she was conscious. Then, when there was no more pain for her to endure, she relapsed into the deep well of forgetfulness.
The child was small, puny, premature. Bound still to its insensible mother it clawed feebly at her, and at the empty air, with its diminutive fingers. Its head sagged upon its frail neck. It rested there, scarcely breathing, while the mother lay slowly blanching from a slow, seeping haemorrhage. Then it cried with a weak and fitful cry.
As if in answer to that call the door of the shed opened slowly and the rays of a lantern dimly penetrated the darkness. An old woman came into the byre. A thick, plaid shawl was wrapped around her head and shoulders; her wooden, solid clogs clattered as she walked. She had come to reassure herself as to the safety and comfort of her beasts and now she went to them, smoothing their necks, patting their sides, talking encouragingly to them. 'Eh, Pansy lady,' she muttered. 'Come up, Daisy! Come awa', Belle; come up, leddy, leddy! Come, leddy, leddy! But what a night! What a storm! But dinna steer, dinna fash, ye're a' richt, my hinnies! You've a good, stout roof abin ye; ye maunna be frichted! I'm near enough tae ye.
You'll be ' Abruptly she broke off, and raised her head into a listening attitude. She imagined she had heard within the byre a faint, puling cry. But she was old and deaf and her ears rang with the echo of the hurricane, and, mistrusting her own perception of the sound, she was about to turn away and resume her task when she distinctly heard the slight, plaintive call repeated.
'Guidsakes! what is't at a', at a',' she murmured. 'I'm shair I heard something Something unco' like a wean greetin'.' With an unsteady hand she lowered her lantern; peering about in the darkness; then suddenly she paused, with incredulous, awestruck eyes,
'The Lord save us!' she cried. 'It's a bairn and and its mother.
God in Heaven, she's deid! Oh! The nicht that this has been! What a thing for ma auld een to see!' In a second she had placed her lantern on the stone floor and was down upon her aged knees. She had no fastidious delicacy as she plied her coarse hands with the adept, experienced movements of a woman of the soil to whom nature was an open book. Quickly, but without flurry, she disengaged the child and wrapped it warmly in a corner of her plaid. Then she turned to the mother and, with an expert pressure, at once evacuated the womb, and controlled the bleeding. All the time she spoke to herself, while she worked:
'Did ye see the like! She's nearly gane! The puir thing! And her so young and so bonnie. I maun dae ma best for her. That's better though. Why in God's name did she no' come to the house, though. I would have letten her in. Ah, well, 'twas the will o' the Almighty I cam' out to the beasts.' She slapped Mary's hands, rubbed her cheeks, covered her with the remainder of the plaid, and hastened off.
Back in her comfortable kitchen she shouted to her son, who sat before the huge crackling log fire:
'Quick, man! I want ye to run like fury to Levenford for a doctor. Ye maun get yin at a' costs. There's an ill woman in the byre. Go, in God's name, at once, and no' a word frae ye. It's life or death.'
He stared at her dully. 'What,' he cried stupidly, 'in our byre?'
'Ay,' she shouted, 'she's been driven in by the storm. If ye dinna hurry, she'll be gane. Haste ye! Haste ye awa' for help.'
He got up mazedly and began to struggle into his coat.
'It's the maist unheard-o' thing,' he muttered; 'in our byre. What's wrang wi' her, ava', ava'?'
'Never mind,' she flared; 'gang awa' this meenute. Never mind the horse. Ye maun rin like fury.'
She hustled him out of the door, and when she had assured herself that he had gone, took a pan, poured into it some milk from a jug on the dresser, and hurriedly heated it upon the fire. Then she took a blanket from the kitchen bed, her own bed, and rushed again to the cowshed, with the blanket on her arm and the hot milk in her hand. She wrapped Mary tightly in the blanket and, raising her head gently, poured with difficulty a few drops of hot milk between her blue lips. She shook her head doubtfully.
'I'm afraid to move her,' she whispered; 'she's gae far through.'
Taking the infant in the crook of her arm, she removed it to the warm kitchen, and returned with a clean, damp cloth and another blanket for Mary.
'There, ma bonnie, that'll hap ye up warm,' she whispered, as she encompassed the limp form in this second covering. Then, tenderly, with the cloth, she wiped the mud from the white cold face. She had done all that was possible, and now she waited patiently, crouching down, without once removing her eyes from Mary, from time to time chafing the lifeless hands, stroking the cold brow beside her.
For almost an hour she remained thus.
At last the door was flung open and a man entered the byre in a bluster of wind and rain.
'Thank God ye've come, Doctor,' cried the old woman. 'I was feared ye wouldna.'
'What is the trouble?' he demanded abruptly, as he advanced towards her.
In a few words she told him. He shook his head dispassionately and bent his tall, spare form down beside the figure on the floor. He was a young man, this Doctor Renwick, skilful in his work, but new to Levenford and anxious to build up a practice, and this had drawn him out on foot on such a night when two other doctors approached before him had refused to go. He looked at Mary's pale, sunken face, then felt her soft, fluttering pulse; whilst he contemplated the second hand of his watch with a serene tranquillity, the old woman gazed at him anxiously.
'Will she die think ye, Doctor?'
'Who is she?' he said.
The old wife shook her head negatively.
'I dinna ken, ava', ava'. But what a bonnie, wee thing to suffer so much, Doctor.' She seemed to entreat tm to do all he could.
'The baby?' he enquired.
'In the kitchen! 'Tis alive the now, but 'tis a puir, feeble bit bairn.' The physician in him looked coldly, critically at the inert figure before him, but the man in him was touched. He seemed to trace, with his experienced eye, the record of all her sufferings, as though the history of these was indelibly delineated upon her features. He saw the pinched nostrils of the thin straight nose, the sunken rings of her dark eyes, and the piteous droop of the pale, soft lips. A feeling of compassion awoke in him, tinctured by a strange, flowing tenderness.
He took up again the frail, relaxed hand and held it in his as though to transfuse a current of life from his vital body into hers; then, as he turned the hand and saw the gash which transfixed the palm, he cried, in spite of himself,
'Poor child! She's so young and helpless.' Then, ashamed of his weakness, he continued roughly, 'She's in a bad way. Haemorrhage, bad hemorrhage, and shock.
Shock from God knows what misery. It's a case for the Cottage Hospital,' he added finally.
At these words the young farmer, who had been silent in the background, spoke from the door:
'I'll have the horse in the shafts of the cart in a minute if ye like, Doctor.'
Renwick looked at the old woman for confirmation. She nodded eagerly, her hands supplicating him.
'Very well, then!' He braced his shoulders. In this case he saw no chance of fee, only its difficulties and danger, and a hazard to his unformed reputation. But he was moved to take it. He felt he must take it. His dark eyes lit with a flashing desire to save her.
