by Paul Gallico
MacDhui replied more quietly, “Aye. I have.”
An involuntary sigh escaped from Mr. Peddie. The veterinary looked his friend in the eye. “I did not attempt bribery,” he said.
The anger was drained out of Dr. Strathsay, as MacDhui tenderly laid the child back in the bed and accompanied him to the door. The doctor said, “If you think there is something more I can do, call me—at any hour—and we will try.”
Oddly, MacDhui found himself wishing he could reassure and comfort the old practitioner, and wondered where from himself this new emotion of compassion welled. What repeated anguish and agony was the share of those who dealt with sickness and health, life and death! And he knew the deep lines of the face to have been etched by the lifetime of sentences pronounced upon so many, greatly loved by others who could not bear to see them go.
He appreciated that Strathsay would not speak those words to him that banished all hope, but in his way was telling him that the child would not live out the night.
When the doctor had departed MacDhui returned to the room and said, “It will not happen yet,” to Mrs. McKenzie and Willie Bannock. “I will call you.” They left. Mr. Peddie lingered a moment, preparing to leave himself when the animal doctor nodded to him and said, “Stay, Angus—if you like—”
The minister asked, “You went to the glen?”
“Aye. I had hoped—if Lori could come— If Lori would but once hold her to her heart—”
“Yes. I see. And she would not?”
“I rang the Mercy Bell. She would not come forth. She must have known it was I. Then—then I lost my head, and made off. She will not come. It is all over now.”
Peddie shook his head decisively. “No,” he said, and then repeated it. “No. It is not too late. Perhaps—” He studied his friend. “You said you had prayed, Andrew.”
“Aye.”
“Were you helped?”
“I don’t know,” said MacDhui.
“Will you try again, Andrew, and I will join you?”
The look that MacDhui threw his friend bore a trace of the old, truculent, unbeaten agnostic, but it was compounded more of the shame and embarrassment of a man who has just come to the discovery that self-sufficiency was not enough, whose old, hard crusts of disbelief had been penetrated but not yet sloughed off.
The Reverend Peddie had one of those rare and inspired flashes of insight that made him what he was. He read the thought behind MacDhui’s brow, now flushed fiery red, knew the words that were forming at his lips—“I will not bend the knee, Angus”—and himself spoke swiftly to prevent their being said, lest by the tenets of his creed and Church he be forced to insist upon what would lose him this sorely tried man.
He spoke from a heart filled with divine and human pity. “You need not abase yourself, Andrew. You will be heard upon your feet as well as upon your knees. You need not even join your hands. Mercy and love are not dependent upon gestures or attitudes.”
MacDhui felt a sudden warmth of both gratitude and love toward this man and he thought he understood for the first time what his God meant to the Reverend Peddie and the manner in which he tried to serve Him on earth. He felt at ease with his friend. As for himself, ever since he had stumbled upon the grave in the glade he had been possessed by that conviction of which Peddie had once spoken and which he knew had been present within him in spite of himself for more years than he could tell. Yet the old habits were hard to break. He said, “It is hard for me, Angus. I do not know how to pray. What shall I say?”
Strange, MacDhui thought, how the small, rotund figure of the minister suddenly seemed to grow and fill the room as he said, “Say? Keep silent. But feel. Feel what is in your heart and let it go out from you. I will do the same.” Then Peddie, with infinite tact, turned his back upon his friend and went to the window and looked out upon the now empty street and the dark, heavy cloud lowering in the west.
MacDhui crossed to the bed of the child, who seemed to have slipped off into a doze, and looked down upon the pale, transparent countenance. Even the hair appeared to have lost some of its color. Within himself he thought silently, Sir—might she perhaps be spared? Punish me as I deserve, but I beg of you to let her live her life—
The two men turned and regarded one another. MacDhui said, “Yet what if it is already written. Strathsay said—”
“You will be prepared to accept that verdict too. Yet nothing is written that cannot be erased; there is no process that cannot be reversed—”
“Tell me, Angus; do you truly believe in the possibility of miracles?”
“Yes,” replied Peddie with finality.
MacDhui said, “You have given me hope.”
“That is what Strathsay had in mind when he asked whether you had prayed, for you had none before.”
After Peddie had departed, MacDhui went about his duties eased in spirit somewhat, but dreading the coming of nightfall and in particular those early hours of the morning when the hold of the body upon the animating spirit is the weakest and the weary heart gives up its beat.
All through the afternoon it became increasingly oppressive and thundery. Pre-storm stillness, charged and nervous, settled over the town and the loch. At six, when MacDhui closed up his office and walked the short path to his dwelling, the path where it seemed years since a redheaded sprite in pinafore and holding a limp ginger cat draped over her forearm had stood at the door to welcome him, the first distant mutter of thunder in the darkening west was heard.
The sound filled MacDhui with renewed uneasiness; he felt his scalp prickle and a fluttering at his stomach and he wondered whether the forces of nature were to be arrayed against him as well, with flare of lightning and crash of thunder to accompany the ghost of his child from one world to the next.
Mrs. McKenzie appeared to greet him. Her vigils had rendered her thinner and more gaunt and MacDhui saw that she had grown older in the past weeks. He seemed to see her with different eyes now. She had been there all of the time, prepared to give a Woman’s love and comfort to this child and his jealousy had not permitted it. He said, “You badly need a rest, Mrs. McKenzie. Lie down for a while. I will watch.”
“ ’Tis you that needs the rest,” she cried. “Mon, when were ye last in yer bed?”
He said, “It doesn’t matter.”
“At least,” she said, “let me bring you a tray.” She suddenly gripped his arm and looked into his face, crying, “The guid Lord willna’ take the bairn away from us—wi’ her as innocent as the Lord was himsel’.” Then she turned and fled into the kitchen.
MacDhui went into his study, whence he could look across the hall into Mary Ruadh’s room, and pondered all the Gods he had encountered that day—Dr. Strathsay’s, the Doctor of Last Resort, who stepped in where medicine failed; Mrs. McKenzie’s guid Lord, who liked hymns sung at him through the nose and was a kind of policeman, Santa Claus, Lost and Found Bureau, and Pardoner all rolled into one; and the gentle Friend and Employer of Mr. Peddie.
As to the One who without warning had sprung into being in his own heart, the animal doctor did not know, and he was content not to look further for the moment, but he thought there must be something of Lori’s in Him, and of Mr. Peddie’s too. He felt the same warm rush of affection as he reflected upon the fat little minister with his jolly face and deeply concerned eyes. But when he thought of Lori and his own folly that day he was filled with such deep sadness that it was all he could do to master it.
Mrs. McKenzie came in with a tray. “Wud ye no’ gie yersel’ a few hours sleep after yer dinner?” she said. “I’ll bide wi’ the wean.”
The mutter of thunder came closer and then receded again as though the storm were visiting about the neighborhood, first calling in upon other valleys before releasing its long-pent-up summer fury upon Inveranoch.
MacDhui replied, “I would have you get some rest. When the storm breaks there’ll be no sleep for anyone—we’ll all be needed.”
He heard her retire to the kitchen
, next to which were her quarters. He ate a little, then lit his pipe and sat sucking on it in the gathering darkness, nor did he make any light when the advancing storm blotted out the late northland glow.
The stillness seemed more oppressive than ever. Not a gull was a-wing or mewing, and the chimes from the church tower striking the hour of nine, a quarter of a mile away, sounded as though from next door. He could hear the wireless crackling and playing in some neighbor’s house. The loch was motionless and glassy.
MacDhui went into Mary Ruadh’s room. Earlier, Mrs. McKenzie had been unable to tempt her with food. He placed his hand on hers and said, “Don’t leave me, Mary Ruadh.” He thought to see a momentary flicker in the sunken eyes. “Ah, Mary, Mary, my Mary!” he cried. And then it was gone as though she no longer had the strength to maintain even so much and the eyes went dull once more.
The fearful stillness that followed as he stood there in the dusk with the small, cold hand inside his was broken by the jangling of the doorbell. MacDhui went into the hallway and switched on the light. He called, “I’ll go, Mrs. McKenzie,” for he was certain it would be the Reverend Peddie come by once more. But it was not. When he went to the door and opened it he saw that it was Lori.
At first he thought that his eyes had been deceived by the queer light beneath the lowering gloom and that it was surely a neighbor’s woman come to call. Then all in a rush, he recognized the cloak as the one she had worn the night before, with cape thrown back from the copper hair, the glowing eyes and the peculiar tenderness of the mouth.
“Lori!” he cried.
Her usually pale face was flushed—perhaps from the long walk from the glen. She said, “I came as quickly as ever I could, Andrew. I had to feed the animals and lock them up.”
“Lori!” he repeated hoarsely. “Come in—oh come in, Lori, quickly, before you vanish like a dream—”
She did not think what he said odd, but passed inside before him while he shut the outer door. When he followed her she turned to him and said, “Ah, Andrew—why did ye not tell me that ye had a bairn that was so ill?”
Now that she was there he stared at her, not quite believing. “Lori,” he cried, “was it God who sent you to me?”
“No,” Lori replied truthfully. “It was Mr. Peddie, the minister. He came to see me and told me.”
Now that the miracle of her presence was so simply explained, a strange kind of peace seemed to fall upon the house and upon MacDhui as well, as of things suddenly finding themselves sensibly in order, and a smile came to his lips as he thought of the practical side to the religion his friend pursued and the bustling, cheerful man who set out to do what he could from his end, asking no more of his God than that He should be an ally and a consolation rather than a Mr. Fixit and general last-resort extricator from impossible situations of lives that had gone agley. And for an instant MacDhui felt himself warmly in communication with such a One.
She was watching him now, the ruefully tender expression returned to her face as she regarded him. She said, “Ye made a great noise outside my house this morning, Andrew. Are ye then always so impatient? Had ye not gone away, I should have come forth in the end—”
He neither knew what to do nor say in the face of such utter simplicity, nor even did he understand the meaning of it wholly then. In the next room his daughter stirred faintly and drove all else from his mind. “Come Lori—” he said and took her by the hand and led her inside.
Lori slipped from her cape. She was clad in some soft stuff the color of old moss, and against it her hair and eyes gleamed. She went to the bedside and knelt, but at first she did not attempt either to speak or touch the child who lay there and whose tired eyes now turned to her. It seemed minutes to MacDhui that they thus regarded one another and that Lori was holding her and speaking to her with and through her eyes. Finally she asked softly, “What is her name?”
“Mary. Mary Ruadh.”
In her soft, gentle voice, Lori called down to the child, “Mary Ruadh—wee Red Mary— Do you hear me?”
MacDhui said, “She cannot answer you. She has been stricken du—she has lost the power of speech through shock. It was of my doing—”
“Oh, Andrew.” The look that Lori turned upon him was filled with pity. Then she asked, “May I take her?”
His voice hoarse again with his great desire to see his child pillowed against Lori’s healing breast, he cried, “Ah yes. Take her. Take her Lori. Do not let her go.”
Andrew MacDhui thought that his heart would break from the grace and tenderness and the sweet inclination of Lori’s head as she bent and gently lifted the girl out of the bed. She sat curled upon the floor and held her to her, laying her cheek upon her hair, just as MacDhui had seen it in his mind’s eye, though he had not by a hundredth imagined the sweetness or the beauty of it, or the love names that Lori would murmer, the little rocking movements, the caresses, the little cries in the throat, the love that poured forth in unstinted measure, the things that happened to her mouth as she touched the hair and cheek of the ailing child with her lips and then the ancient, haunting, lullaby that she sang to her in a voice of piercing sweetness as she rocked:
“Hush-a-ba, babby, lie still, lie still;
Yer mammie’s awa tae the mill, the mill;
Babby is greetin’ for want o guid keepin’;
Hush-a-ba, babby, lie still, lie still—”
She was in the middle of the second strophe when she broke off suddenly, the child held still more closely to her, and turned an anguished face to the father. “Andrew!” she cried, and to MacDhui her voice seemed full of tears, “Andrew! There is so little of her left—”
Cold panic gripped at MacDhui’s vitals and the sweat broke out upon his brow. Then the last battle was not yet joined. Perhaps Mary Ruadh had already slipped away from them too far. Perhaps it was too late and not even Lori could hold her or bring her back.
The room was filled by a blinding glare followed by an appalling peal of thunder and rush of wind. Then the heavy drops of rain began to patter down, to turn into a steady roar as the storm at last broke in earnest over the valley.
2 9
Ha ha! How do you like my storm?
Shall I make you a confession? I don’t. I hate it. I am frightening myself to death. I loathe storms. They make every hair on my back stand up; I can’t think properly and I crackle with electricity from nose tip to tail.
I promised you that when I was God again I would show you something of what I can do. Mine is the power to loose the rain, the thunders, and the lightnings. But I didn’t mean quite to invoke SUCH a storm.
This is not the first time I have been terrified by the god-things I can do. Do you find it strange that the gods should know fear? YOU created us in your image and in the image of the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. What did you expect?
God I have been—God I am. But quite frankly, sometimes it is all just a little too much for one small cat. The demands made upon me!
Ofttimes, in the old days in my own holy temple of Khufu in the jeweled city of Bubastis, I used to get sick to death of the whole business, the crowds thronging the temple courtyards, the foolish men and women prostrating themselves and forcing gifts upon me, all the shouting and singing and the incense and the clamor.
Do you know what I used to do sometimes when it was all going on with the most frightful hullabaloo in the temple forecourt, with tambours, flutes, cymbals and sistra and my priestesses singing and dancing and waving palm fronds? I’d just sit on my gold and emerald throne in my inner shrine and wash and forget about the whole business. And when they came and asked me to work miracles for them I wouldn’t.
I wish I could forget my own storm now. Lori has gone away. She fed us and locked us in—ME in the house of course and the others in the barn. The lightning is flashing in at the windows and the thunder deafens my sensitive ears. I started this storm to help the Man with the Red Beard, but it is terrifying me. I suppose I was so pleased to have
my god power back again I used too much of it. And like all magic, it isn’t reversible. We can turn it on but not off. If I were not a god, I should go upstairs and hide under Lori’s bed. Whatever I have said, or whatever you may think, gods do NOT hide under beds.
Oh! that awful flash of lightning. I think I will just go up the stairs and look—
Do you know what I have found?
I have located the source of that sweet, the wonderful, that ineffable, that nostalgic fragrance that gave me those sad and dear dreams that night when first I was allowed abovestairs into Lori’s bedroom. And at the same time I have found the perfect hiding place from my dreadful thunderstorm—one where I need not sacrifice my dignity—our kind of a hiding place.
It is in Lori’s chest. She must have hurried when she dressed to go away this evening, for she left one of the drawers open—just enough for me to get inside.
And there was the fragrance. I do not know what it is, for I never smelled anything like it in Egypt. But it comes from some kind of herb and is contained in a little bag. I smelled it and smelled it and it filled me with the most intense rapture and satisfaction.
There are some soft clothes in the drawer to lie upon; the lightning cannot get in here, and the thunder does not boom and crash so loudly.
Am I or am I not a clever God?
I shall sleep, for I want once more to dream those dreams that come with this wonderful scent. I am comfortable. I am warm. I am no longer frightened, but getting drowsy. My nose is right up against the bag of fragrance and I am purring all through my body. Rage on, then, O my storm, for all that Sekhmet-Bast-Ra cares—
3 0
A purple flare of lightning was followed by a shattering of thunder, as though a great brass gong in the sky had been struck with an iron hammer. The echo went booming and pounding away through the hills, descending to even deeper notes of concussion until the final one rattled all the doors and windowpanes.