The Greatest Historical Novels & Stories of D. K. Broster. D. K. Broster

behind him, a young man whom he did not know, who put out a hand and laid it on the steel, and the steel shivered into atoms at his touch. Ewen tried in wrath to seize him, but there was no one there, and he held only the fragment of a blade from that lost battle on the moor. He woke; and in an hour had forgotten his dream.

      CHAPTER V

       KEITHIE HAS TOO MANY PHYSICIANS

       Table of Contents

      (1)

      Still rather pale, and wrapped about in a voluminous shawl, little Keith was nevertheless to be seen next afternoon, sitting up in bed making two small round-bodied, stiff-legged animals of wood—known to him as ‘deers’—walk across the quilt.

      “First one goed in front, then the other goed in front, then they comed to the loch, and one putched the other in—spash!”

      “Oh, Keithie, no!” begged the now repentant and shriven Donald, who was sitting beside him. “Let’s play at something else. Let the deer have a race to the bottom of the bed; I’ll hold one, and yours shall win!”

      “Can’t. Mine deer is drownded now,” returned the inexorable Keith, and, to make the fact more evident, he suddenly plopped the animal into a bowl of milk which stood on the table by him. As his mother hurriedly removed it the door opened, and her husband and Doctor Cameron came in.

      “Ought he to be sitting up like this, Doctor Archibald?” she asked. “He seems so much better that I thought . . .”

      Doctor Cameron came and took Donald’s place. The small invalid eyed him a trifle suspiciously, and then gave him his shy, angelic smile.

      “He is much better,” pronounced his physician after a moment. “Still and on, he must have another dose of that draught.” He got up and poured out something into a glass. “Here, my bairn—no, your mother had best give it you, perhaps.” For even a fledgling seraph may revolt at a really nauseating drink of herbs, which at its last administration had, indeed, been copiously diluted with his tears. So Doctor Cameron handed the glass to Alison.

      With refusals, with grimaces, and finally with an adorable sudden submission Keithie drank off the potion. But immediately after he had demolished the consolatory scrap of sugar which followed it, he pointed a minute and accusing finger at its compounder, and said, “Naughty gentleman—naughty, to make Keithie sick!” with so much conviction that Alison began anxiously—“Darling, do you really——”

      It was precisely at that moment that the door was opened and “Doctor Kincaid from Maryburgh” was announced.

      The three adults in the room caught their breaths. None of them had ever imagined that Doctor Kincaid would come now. “Tell the doctor that I will be with him in a moment,” said Alison to the servant visible in the doorway; and then in a hasty aside to Ewen, “Of course he must not see——” she indicated Doctor Cameron on the other side of the bed.

      But there was no time to carry out that precaution, for the girl, fresh from the wilds, and ignorant of the need for dissimulation, had brought Doctor Kincaid straight up to the sick-room, and there he was, already on the threshold, a little uncompromising, hard-featured man of fifty, overworked between the claims of Maryburgh, where he dwelt, of its neighbour Fort William, and of the countryside in general. There was no hope of his not seeing Doctor Cameron; still, the chances were heavily against his knowing and recognising him. Yet who, save a doctor or a relative had a rightful place in this sick-room . . . and a doctor was the one thing which they must not admit that guest to be.

      So completely were the three taken by surprise that there was scarcely time to think. But Ewen instinctively got in front of his kinsman, while Alison went forward to greet the newcomer with the embarrassment which she could not completely hide, murmuring, “Doctor Kincaid . . . how good of you . . . we did not expect . . .”

      “You are surprised to see me, madam?” asked he, coming forward. “But I came on a brither o’ yours the nicht before last in a sair plight by Loch Treig side, and he begged me to come to Ardroy as soon as possible. But I couldna come before; I’m fair run off ma legs.”

      “How is my brother?” asked Alison anxiously. “I heard of his mishap, but with the child so ill——”

      “Ay, ye’d be thinking of yer wean first, nae doot. Aweel, the young fellow’s nane too bad, having an unco stout skull, as I jalouse your good man must hae kent when he left him all his lane there.”

      “But I arranged with the farmer at Inverlair——” began Ewen.

      “Ou ay, they came fra Inverlair and fetched him, and there he bides,” said Doctor Kincaid. He swept a glance round the room. “Ye’re pretty throng here. Is yon the patient, sitting up in bed?”

      “Well, Doctor, he seems, thank God, so much better,” murmured Alison in extenuation of this proceeding. As she led the physician to the bedside she saw with relief that Doctor Archibald had moved quietly to the window and was looking out; and she thought, “After all, no one could know that he was a doctor!”

      Doctor Kincaid examined the little boy, asked some questions, seemed surprised at the answers (from which answers it appeared that his directions had been anticipated), but said that the child was doing well. And since not even a middle-aged physician in a bad temper could resist the charm of small Keith, he gave a sort of smile when he had finished, and said kindly, “There, my wee mannie, ye’ll soon be rinning aboot again.”

      The flower-like eyes were upraised to his. “Then My not have no more nasty drink like that gentleman gived Keithie?” observed their owner, and again a small finger pointed accusingly to Archibald Cameron—to his back this time.

      Doctor Kincaid also looked at that back. “Ah,” he observed sharply, “so yon gentleman has already been treating the bairn—and the measures ye have taken were of his suggesting? Pray, why did ye no’ tell me that, madam?”

      Ewen plunged to the rescue. He had been longing for Archie to leave the room, but supposed the latter thought that flight might arouse suspicion. “My friend, Mr. John Sinclair from Caithness, who is paying us a visit, having a certain knowledge of medicine, was good enough . . . Let me make you known to each other—Doctor Kincaid, Mr. Sinclair.”

      ‘Mr. Sinclair from Caithness’—Ewen had placed his domicile as far away as possible—turned and bowed; there was a twinkle in his eye. But not in Doctor Kincaid’s.

      “Humph! it seems I wasna sae mickle needed, seeing ye hae gotten a leech to the bairn already! But the young man wi’ the dunt on his heid begged me sae sair to come that I listened to him, though I micht hae spared ma pains!”

      Alison and Ewen hastened in chorus to express their appreciation of his coming, and Ewen, with an appealing glance at his kinsman, began to move towards the door. One or other of the rival practitioners must certainly be got out of the room. And Archie himself now seemed to be of the same opinion.

      “A leech? no, sir, the merest amateur, who, now that the real physician has come, will take himself off,” he said pleasantly.

      “Nay, I’m through,” said Doctor Kincaid. “Ye’ve left me nae mair tae do.” And, as he seemed to be going to leave the room in ‘Mr. Sinclair’s’ company, Alison hastily appealed for more information about a detail of treatment, so that he had to stay behind. Doctor Cameron, followed by Donald, all eyes, slipped out. Ardroy and his wife, most desirous not to invite or answer any questions about their medically skilled guest, now became remarkably voluble on other subjects; and, as they went downstairs with Doctor Kincaid, pressed him to stay to a meal, hoping fervently that he would refuse—which, luckily, the doctor did.

      But outside, as he put a foot into the stirrup, he said, pretty sourly, to Ewen, “I’m glad the wean’s better, Ardroy,