She crossed the threshold then and Geordie watched her run to the box with quick, lithe steps that had in them something of the movements of the deer. She knelt, her hands folded in her lap for an instant and peered down into the box. Then she reached in and removed the wearing, injured, palpitating little creature.
She held it gently in her hand and the broken leg spilled from the side of it and hung limp. Carefully she probed it with a finger and looked into its beady yellow-green eyes and the odd space between her nose and upper lip twitched most movingly as she lifted the frog and held it to her cheek for an instant while she said: “Was it the angels or the Little Folk who brought you here to me? Poor wee frog. I’ll be doing what I can for you.” Then she arose and disappeared into the house, shutting the door after her.
The cottage slept again, its eyes tightly shut. The two cats and the dog retired whence they had come. The whirring birds quieted down. Only the squirrel in the tree who knew where Geordie was continued to scold. Geordie felt as though the greatest load he had ever known in his life had been lifted from him and he was free at last. The frog was safe and in good hands. His heart filled now almost to bursting with a new and strange kind of joy and singing, he left the shelter of the bracken, and as fast as his legs would carry him hop-skipped and jumped along the path alongside the foaming burn, downhill towards Inveranoch and home.
The same summer’s morning, Mr MacDhui, finishing with his waiting list of clients, motioned with his head to his friend Mr Peddie, who had waited until the last, to go inside with his groaning animal. He followed him remarking: “Come in, Angus. I am sorry you have had to wait for so long. These fools with their useless pets seem to take up all of my time. Well, what is the trouble? Have you been overfeeding the beast on sweets again? I warned you, did I not?” He seemed hardly aware he had included his friend in the category.
Mr Peddie, who really did not have the proper physical aspect for it, contrived to look both guilty and sheepish. He replied: “Of course you are right, Andrew, but what am I to do? He sits up and begs so prettily. He is mortally fond of sweets.” He looked fondly upon the pug dog who lay belly flat upon the enamelled examining table with an occasional belch disturbing his normal wheezing. He rolled his creamy eyes pleadingly in the direction of Mr MacDhui, who, memory and experience told him, possessed the formula to pardon over-indulgence.
The vet leaned down to smell the dog, wrinkling his nose in distaste; he probed his belly and took his temperature. “Hmph!” he grunted. “The same complaint – only aggravated …” He stuck his chin out and bristled his beard at the divine and mocked: “A man of God, you are, speaking for the Creator, and himself having no more self-control than to stuff this wretched animal with sweets to his own detriment.”
“Oh,” replied Peddie, squirming uneasily, his usually joyous moon face exhibiting the sadness of the scolded child: “Not really a man of God, though I do try. No more than an employee of His in the division of humans who must make up in love what they lack in brains and grace.” He made a deprecating gesture – “So many men, good men, go into the army, or politics, or law, He is often compelled to take what He can get.”
MacDhui grinned appreciatively and looked at his friend with affection. “Do you think He really enjoys all this sycophancy, flattery, bribery and cajoling that you chaps seem to think necessary to keep Him good-tempered and tractable?”
Mr Peddie answered immediately and with equal good humour: “If ever God inveigled Himself into error it was when He let man imagine Him in his own image, but I rather think this was man’s rather than God’s idea since it has been more flattering to the former.”
MacDhui barked like a fox, flashing his strong white teeth through the red line of his full lips. He loved the running battle with Peddie which had been going on between them ever since he had moved from Glasgow to Inveranoch at his behest, and which they carried on almost whenever and wherever they encountered one another. “Oh, no,” he said. “Then you admit that man has endowed God with a full set of his own faults and spends most of his praying time catering to them?”
The minister stroked the head of his little dog lovingly. “I suspect the real punishment for the sin in Eden,” he said, “was when He made us human, when He took away the divinity He had loaned us and made us kin and blood brothers with –” and here he nodded with his head towards the suffering pug dog – “these. You must admit the sentence contains an element of humour, something for which God is rarely given credit.”
For once Mr MacDhui was caught without a retort, for with a university cunning, his friend had suddenly made use of some of his own best arguments.
“But you won’t even admit that relationship,” the minister continued, cheerful at having extricated himself from the position where MacDhui could lecture him, “whereas I love this little fellow foolishly and consider him as important as myself when it comes to indulgence. Tell me, Andrew, do you not at all come to love these suffering animals you treat? Does not your heart break when they look at you so helplessly and trustingly?”
MacDhui turned his aggressive beard upon the pastor and regarded him with mingled truculence and pity as he replied: “Hardly. Even if I am only a vet I am still a doctor. If every doctor permitted himself to become emotionally involved with each of his patients or relatives of his patients, he would not last long. I am not sentimental, nor can I abide this indulgent affection wasted upon useless animals.” And he thrust out his beard again.
The Rev. Angus Peddie nodded his round, smooth face as though in understanding and agreement and quite suddenly attacked from another quarter. He asked: “Was there then nothing you could do as a doctor for that poor old woman’s dog – I mean Mrs Laggan’s? The one you persuaded her to have put away, and I doubt not have done so by now.”
Mr MacDhui turned as red as his hair, and his eyes grew hard and angry. “Why, has she complained to you, or said anything?”
“Do you find that so strange then? No, she did not complain, but she could not conceal her desolation. I saw her eyes as she went out. She is now all alone in the world.”
MacDhui continued defiant. “You thought I was hard on her, did you? Well, and what if I could have kept the animal alive for another three weeks, or a month, or even two? The end result would be the same. She would still be alone in the world. And besides, I offered to procure her another dog. People are always wishing me to find homes for all sorts.”
“But it was that poor, wretched, wheezy dog she loved and whose presence and friendship gave her comfort – just as this little fellow here fills a part of my life. Don’t you believe in the power of love at all to make our tour of duty here a little more bearable?”
MacDhui shrugged and did not reply. He had loved and wooed and would have devoted his life to the profession of medicine and it had been denied him. He had loved Anne MacLean, his wife, and she had been taken from him … Love was a snare and love was a danger. One was better off without it, if one could avoid it, which was not always possible, and he thought of Mary Ruadh and his love for her. Simpler perhaps to be a stick or a stone, or a tree and feel nothing.
Mr Peddie was ruminating with his brow knitted in a frown. “There must be a key, you know,” he said.
“Key to what?”
“Perhaps it IS love. The key to the relationship between man and the four-footed, the winged and the finned creatures who are his neighbours in woods, field and stream, and his brothers and sisters on earth—”
“Tosh!” snorted MacDhui. “We are all part of the gigantic cosmic accident that put us here. We all started even, you know. We developed the upright position and the thumb and they lost. Bad luck for them.”
Peddie regarded MacDhui keenly through his spectacles and said with a smile – “Ah, Angus – I did not know you had come so far already. To admit we were put here seems to me a weakening of your position you can ill afford. And who, may I ask, arranged this cosmic accident? For surely you are not so old-fashioned as to believe