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Page 12
CHAPTER III.
THE DOCTOR GIVES POLLY A PRESCRIPTION.
As the summer wore away, Mrs. Oliver daily grew more and more languid,
until at length she was forced to ask a widowed neighbor, Mrs.
Chadwick, to come and take the housekeeping cares until she should feel
stronger. But beef-tea and drives, salt-water bathing and tonics,
seemed to do no good, and at length there came a day when she had not
sufficient strength to sit up.
The sight of her mother actually in bed in the daytime gave Polly a
sensation as of a cold hand clutching at her heart, and she ran for Dr.
Edgerton in an agony of fear. But good "Dr. George" (as he was always
called, because he began practice when his father, the old doctor, was
still living) came home with her, cheered her by his hopeful view of
the case, and asked her to call at his office that afternoon for some
remedies.
After dinner was over, Polly kissed her sleeping mother, laid a rose on
her pillow for good-by, and stole out of the room.
Her heart was heavy as she walked into the office where the doctor sat
alone at his desk.
"Good-day, my dear!" he said cordially, as he looked up, for she was
one of his prime favorites. "Bless my soul, how you do grow, child!
Why you are almost a woman!"
"I am quite a woman," said Polly, with a choking sensation in her
throat; "and you have something to say to me, Dr. George, or you would
n't have asked me to leave mamma and come here this stifling day; you
would have sent the medicine by your office-boy."
Dr. George laid down his pen in mild, amazement. "You are a woman, in
every sense of the word, my dear! Bless my soul, how you do hit it
occasionally, you sprig of a girl! Now, sit by that window, and we 'll
talk. What I wanted to say to you is this, Polly. Your mother must
have an entire change. Six months ago I tried to send her to a
rest-cure, but she refused to go anywhere without you, saying that you
were her best tonic."
Two tears ran down Polly's cheeks.
"Tell me that again, please," she said softly, looking out of the
window.
"She said--if you will have the very words, and all of them--that you
were sun and stimulant, fresh air, medicine, and nourishment, and that
she could not exist without those indispensables, even in a rest-cure."
Polly's head went down on the windowsill in a sudden passion of tears.
"Hoity-toity! that 's a queer way of receiving a compliment, young
woman!"
She tried to smile through her April shower.
"It makes me so happy, yet so unhappy, Dr. George. Mamma has been
working her strength away so many years, and I 've been too young to
realize it, and too young to prevent it, and now that I am grown up I
am afraid it is too late."
"Not too late, at all," said Dr. George cheerily; "only we must begin
at once and attend to the matter thoroughly. Your mother has been in
this southern climate too long, for one thing; she needs a change of
air and scene. San Francisco will do, though it 's not what I should
choose. She must be taken entirely away from her care, and from
everything that will remind her of it; and she must live quietly, where
she will not have to make a continual effort to smile and talk to
people three times a day. Being agreeable, polite, and good-tempered
for fifteen years, without a single lapse, will send anybody into a
decline. You 'll never go that way, my Polly! Now, pardon me, but how
much ready money have you laid away?"
"Three hundred and twelve dollars."
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