That night a great storm rose. Mahony, sitting reading after everyone else had retired, saw it coming, and lamp in hand went round the house to secure hasps and catches; then stood at the window to watch the storm’s approach. In one half of the sky the stars were still peacefully alight; the other was hidden by a dense cloud, which came racing along like a giant bat with outspread wings, devouring the stars in its flight. The storm broke; there was a sudden shrill screeching, a grinding, piping, whistling, and the wind hurled itself against the house as if to level it with the ground; failing in this, it banged and battered, making windows and doors shake like loose teeth in their sockets. Then it swept by to wreak its fury elsewhere, and there was a grateful lull out of which burst a peal of thunder. And now peal followed peal, and the face of the sky, with its masses of swirling, frothy cloud, resembled an angry sea. The lightning ripped it in fierce zigzags, darting out hundreds of spectral fangs. It was a magnificent sight.
Polly came running to see where he was, the child cried, Miss Tilly opened her door by a hand’s-breadth, and thrust a red, puffy face, framed in curl-twists, through the crack. Nobody thought of sleep while the commotion lasted, for fear of fire: once alight, these exposed little wooden houses blazed up like heaps of shavings. The clock-hands pointed to one before the storm showed signs of abating. Now, the rain was pouring down, making an ear-splitting din on the iron roof and leaping from every gutter and spout. It had turned very cold. Mahony shivered as he got into bed.
He seemed hardly to have closed an eye when he was wakened by a loud knocking; at the same time the wire of the night-bell was almost wrenched in two. He sat up and looked at his watch. It wanted a few minutes to three; the rain was still falling in torrents, the wind sighed and moaned. Wild horses should not drag him out on such a night! Thrusting his arms into the sleeves of his dressing-gown, he threw up the parlour window. “Who’s there?” The hiss of the rain cut his words through.
A figure on the doorstep turned at the sound. “Is this a doctor’s? I wuz sent here. Doctor! for God’s sake . . .”
“What is it? Stop a minute! I’ll open the door.”
He did so, letting in a blast of wind and a rush of rain that flooded the oilcloth. The intruder, off whom the water streamed, had to shout to make himself audible.
“It’s me — Mat Doyle’s me name! It’s me wife, doctor; she’s dying. I’ve bin all night on the road. Ah, for the love of —”
“Where is it?” Mahony put his hand to the side of his mouth, to keep his words from flying adrift in the wind.
“Paddy’s Rest. You’re the third I’ve bin to. Not one of the dirty dogs’ull stir a leg! Me girl may die like a rabbit for all they care.”— The man’s voice broke, as he halloed particulars.
“Paddy’s Rest? On a night like this? Why, the creek will be out.”
“Doctor! you’re from th’ ould country, I can hear it in your lip. Haven’t you a wife, too, doctor? Then show a bit o’ mercy to mine!”
“Tut, tut, man, none of that!” said Mahony curtly. “You should have bespoken me at the proper time to attend your wife.— Besides, there’ll be no getting along the road to-night.”
The other caught the note of yielding. “Sure an’ you’d go out, doctor dear, without thinkin’, to save your dog if he was drownin’. I’ve got me buggy down there; I’ll take you safe. And you shan’t regret it; I’ll make it worth your while, by the Lord Harry I will!”
“Pshaw!”— Mahony opened the door of the surgery and struck a match. It was a rough grizzled fellow — a “cocky,” on his own showing — who presented himself in the lamplight. His wife had fallen ill that afternoon. At first everything seemed to be going well; then she was seized with fits, had one fit after another, and all but bit her tongue in two. There was nobody with her but a young girl he had fetched from a mile away. He had meant, when her time came, to bring her to the District Hospital. But they had been taken unawares. While he waited he sat with his elbows on his knees, his face between his clenched fists.
In dressing, Mahony reassured Polly, and instructed her what to say to people who came inquiring after him; it was unlikely he would be back before afternoon. Most of the patients could wait till then. The one exception, a case of typhoid in its second week, a young Scotch surgeon, Brace, whom he had obliged in a similar emergency, would no doubt see for him — she should send Ellen down with a note. And having poured Doyle out a nobbler and put a flask in his own pocket, Mahony reopened the front door to the howl of the wind.
The lantern his guide carried shed only a tiny circlet of light on the blackness; and the two men picked their steps gingerly along the flooded road. The rain ran in jets off the brim of Mahony’s hat, and down the back of his neck.
Having climbed into the buggy they advanced at a funeral pace, leaving it to the sagacity of the horse to keep the track. At the creek, sure enough, the water was out, the bridge gone. To reach the next bridge, five miles off, a crazy cross-country drive would have been necessary; and Mahony was for giving up the job. But Doyle would not acknowledge defeat. He unharnessed the horse, set Mahony on its back, and himself holding to its tail, forced the beast, by dint of kicking and lashing, into the water; and not only got them safely across, but up the steep sticky clay of the opposite bank. It was six o’clock and a cloudless morning when, numb with cold, his clothing clinging to him like wet seaweed, Mahony entered the wooden hut where the real work he had come out to do began.
Later in the day, clad in an odd collection of baggy garments, he sat and warmed himself in the sun, which was fast drawing up in the form of a blankety mist the moisture from the ground. He had successfully performed, under the worst possible conditions, a ticklish operation; and was now so tired that, with his chin on his chest, he fell fast asleep.
Doyle wakened him by announcing the arrival of the buggy. The good man, who had more than one nobbler during the morning could not hold his tongue, but made still another wordy attempt to express his gratitude. “Whither me girl lives or dies, it’ll not be Mat Doyle who forgits what you did for him this night, doctor! An’ if iver you want a bit o’ work done, or some one to do your lyin’ awake at night for you, just you gimme the tip. I don’t mind tellin’ you now, I’d me shootin’-iron here” — he touched his right hip —“an’ if you’d refused — you was the third, mind you,— I’d have drilled you where you stood, God damn me if I wouldn’t!”
Mahony eyed the speaker with derision. “Much good that would have done your wife, you fathead! Well, well, we’ll say nothing to MINE, if you please, about anything of that sort.”
“No, may all the saints bless ‘er and give ‘er health! An’ as I say, doctor. . . .” In speaking he had drawn a roll of bank-notes from his pocket, and now he tried to stuff them between Mahony’s fingers.
“What’s this? My good man, keep your money till it’s asked for!” and Mahony unclasped his hands, so that the notes fluttered to the ground.
“Then there let ’em lay!”
But when, in clothes dried stiff as cardboard, Mahony was rolling townwards — his coachman, a lad of some ten or twelve who handled the reins to the manner born — as they went he chanced to feel in his coat pocket, and there found five ten-pound notes rolled up in a neat bundle.
The main part of the road was dry and hard again; but all dips and holes were wells of liquid mud, which bespattered the two of them from top to toe as the buggy bumped carelessly in and out. Mahony diverted himself by thinking of what he could give Polly with this sum. It would serve to buy that pair of gilt cornices or the heavy gilt-framed pierglass on which she had set her heart. He could see her, pink with pleasure, expostulating: “Richard! What WICKED extravagance!” and hear himself reply: “And pray may my wife not have as pretty a parlour as her neighbours?” He even cast a thought, in passing, on the pianoforte with which Polly longed to crown the furnishings of her room — though, of course, at least treble this amount would be needed to cover its cost.— But a fig for such nonsense! He knew but one legitimate use to make of the unexpected little windfall, and that was, to put it by for a rainy day. “At my age, in my position, I OUGHT to have fifty pounds in the bank!”— times without number he had said this to himself, with a growing impatience. But he had not yet managed to save a halfpenny. Thrive as the practice might, the expenses of living held even pace with it. And now, having got its cue, his brain started off again on the old treadmill, reckoning, totting up, finding totals, or more often failing to find them, till his head was as hot as his feet were cold. To-day he could not think clearly at all.
Nor the next day either. By the time he reached home he was conscious of feeling very ill: he had lancinating pains in his limbs, a chill down his spine, an outrageous temperature. To set out again on a round of visits was impossible. He had just to tumble into bed.
He got between the sheets with that sense of utter well-being, of almost sensual satisfaction, which only one who is shivering with fever knows. And at first very small things were enough to fill him with content: the smoothness of the pillow’s sleek linen; the shadowy light of the room after long days spent in the dusty glare outside; the possibility of resting, the knowledge that it was his duty to rest; Polly’s soft, firm hands, which were always of the right temperature — warm in the cold stage, cool when the fever scorched him, and neither hot nor cold when the dripping sweats came on. But as the fever declined, these slight pleasures lost their hold. Then he was ridden to death by black thoughts. Not only was day being added to day, he meanwhile not turning over a penny; but ideas which he knew to be preposterous insinuated themselves in his brain. Thus, for hours on end he writhed under the belief that his present illness was due solely to the proximity of the Great Swamp, and lay and cur............