"It was their reproach from the beginning...."
"Yes—yes! But suppose this Act would, but for me, have conferred legitimacy retrospectively...."
"How 'but for you'?"
"Why—clearly! It might include in its retrospective action only such marriages as were held valid by one or other party at the date of the passing of the Bill. Mumps and Chobbles might be legitimate or no, according to my attitude towards their mother about our separation. It seems to me that my having refused to acknowledge it might make all the difference...." Challis paused awkwardly. For he had suddenly become aware that he was adducing reasons in plenty why he should not marry Judith at all. He had not meant his argument to go that length. He was only showing one form the Nemesis of Repentance might take in the event of the immediate passing of the Act. He was losing sight of the fact that if the Bill was thrown out, all his reasonings would apply just as much to a more leisurely union during the twelvemonth of respite.
The fact is he wanted to eat his cake and have it too—to get the advantage of the Act for his children and to avoid the guillotine himself. If he and Judith were not married in time, either their project would be made impossible, or at best the problem of justice or injustice to the children would stand over sine die, with all its present difficulties unsolved. If, on the other hand, they got married, the Act could only benefit his children by affirming his marriage with their mother a lawful one, and declaring Judith the second wife of a bigamist. Unless, indeed, a dexterous special clause in it gave his rupture with Marianne the validity of a divorce. Not a very likely provision of legal ingenuity!
How little idea the old lady gathering sticks must have had of what the gentleman was talking—talking—talking about to the lady, whose undisturbed beauty seemed to make no response, or barely a word now and then! Her centenarian mind probably thought it was only the usual thing—the use of eighty odd years agone, when she first knew of it; and so till now, except folk were changed since then.
But the gentleman would have done well to say less. None of his earnestness, none of his perturbation—none of his Law, none of his Logic—made matters a bit better. In one way they made it worse. A sense of a painful contingency crept in that had hardly had sufficient consideration. How if in the labyrinth of possibilities that sheer Legalism can construct over the grave of Fair Play there was really hidden a possible indictment for bigamy? If Challis married Judith, his first wife being still alive, with the reservation that the latter wasn't his wife at all, how then? Could he even obtain a Special Licence at Doctors' Commons? He would have to declare that no legal impediment existed, and to satisfy the Archbishop of Canterbury that his reasons for wanting it were sound. Perhaps his Grace would be crusty, and refuse it, to spite him for marrying his Deceased Wife's Sister. However, the idea of a piqued Prelate hitting below the belt in this way relieved a growing tension, and brought a smile into the matter.
Challis was glad to shift away from a perplexity. After a pause of silence he said: "Do you remember how we walked here—more than a year ago—and you told me you had given up the idea of Estrild?"
Judith replaced the hand she had taken away. "Oh, so well!" said she. "I was so sorry. But it seems to me that if my dearly-beloved family are going to quarrel with me about my marriage, I deserve to play Estrild as a set-off. I shall think about it."
They came to the coppice-wood, and the half-shade of its light and shadow-chequered path was grateful; for the sun was mounting, and his heat beginning to tell. Saladin brushed roughly past them, to see—at a guess—that all the tree-stems were in order. Judith leaned a little more on the arm she held.
"Do you remember," said she, "how I called you Scroop, and how funny it made you look? Oh dear, how strange it does all seem!"
"I remember. And how I couldn't well call you Judith back. Would you have been offended?"
"Should I ever have been offended at anything you did, dear love?" Her hand was pressed between his arm and the other hand, that had come across to caress it.
The two of them had the little secluded path well to themselves; certainly Saladin didn't count. Now was the time for those kisses that had waited, and others, if need were. Challis, as he took Judith Arkroyd to his heart, felt his own past grow insignificant and dim. This was Life!
A phantasmagoric presentment of Great Coram Street and Wimbledon ran rapidly across the background of his mind. It was wonderful how many images he could feel the dimness of at once. Even so, the man who fell off the Monument marvelled at the incredible grasp of his powers of recollection, stung to a paroxysm of self-assertion. Why need so many things appeal to be forgotten; each one a bygone to itself; a faint spark, surely, but craving a separate extinction? He could feel—oh yes!—he could feel—that the nourishments of his life in those days were the merest refreshments. This was a banquet! He had attained to a satiety of Love. But why need those all-but-forgotten satisfactions of an unpretentious past thrust in their claims for recollection, each with its ill-timed reproach—"You did not despise us then!"?
There was no need for him to forget Kate. She was little more now than a bad misadventure of his early life. But there was many a little memory of Marianne in the earlier days that he would have to oust from the future unless his every hour was to be cross-textured with a weft of self-reproach. One little paltry thing went near to madden him with its importunity. Could he never touch the damask cheek of his enchantress of to-day without an intrusion into his mind of—Marianne's mole? Too ridiculous!—many will say. But there it was—the mole—back in this man's inner vision, to plague him with a reminder of that long-ago when he rallied its proprietor—Marianne was eighteen then—on its possession, but congratulated himself at the same time that it was not in the best place.
The story knows Challis too well to attempt to make the oddities of his mind plausible; it can only vouch for them. About minds it cannot vouch for, only speculation is open to it. It makes no pretence to know the inner heart of the beautiful woman whom he conceives to be so entirely his own. Whether what followed was, on her part, schemed to make all wavering on his impossible, and to bind that skein of his life fast in hers, or whether it was really what it seemed, she alone could tell. The story has no blame for her, mind, if it was the former! She was within her rights—every woman's rights.
"Oh, Scroop—dear Titus—dear love! Let's have done with it and forget it all—all! It can never be, and we both know it." He had released her waist at some sound of footsteps approaching them as they stood in the pathway, but had kept her hands in his. Whoever it was was not in sight yet.
"'Odsbodikins, dearest, why—why—why? Why this of a sudden, out of the blue?"
"No—dearest—no!—it is truth. I am in earnest, indeed. It cannot be!" He would have taken her in his arms again, but her outstretched hand on his breast repelled him. "It must come to an end, and we know it.... No—do not!..."
"Then tell me, darling, quietly; why not—why now!"
"Listen, Scroop! I see it all so clearly. Yorick is right—good, clear-sighted man! If we get married in a mad hurry, under pressure, just to avoid this legislative Bill business...."
"Cutting the ground from under our feet? Yes!"
"We may, as he says, live to repent it. After all, we are human!" The footsteps drew nearer—became a passing boy—caused a pause, and died away, leaving Judith to continue: "Suppose that all goes ill, and our fruits turn out Dead Sea apples, and so on! Suppose that you are disappointed in me!..."
"Never!"
"Foolish man, how can you tell?... However, this you can see: that if we fell out, you and I, anyhow, it would be a bitter thought to you that you had sacrificed your girls for my sake, as you would have done! You said so yourself, and I see it."
"The blame would not be mine." Challis got it said, but only just. He knew at least that he was dishonest in shirking his share of the blame. He went on to excuse, and, of course, accuse, himself. "What right had Marianne to imagine infidelities for me?... Yes!—I grant you 'infidelity' is a long word. But see what I mean, and think of it Marianne had not a particle of evidence that ... that you were to me ... anything that any other lady is not. She was just as wrong in building false constructions on no grounds at all...."
"On no grounds at all? Be fair to Marianne!"
"Well—on very little!... She was just as unjust in using what she did know to condemn me as if the things she did not know had never happened. The accident of the postscript might have happened a thousand times with any stranger. As to anything else that had passed between you and me, Marianne chose to take action without a particle of proof, and she is to blame for the consequence. Yes, Judith; if Marianne hadn't acted as she did, I should have locked you out of my heart, and gone my way in silence."
"Would you?" asked Judith. It might have been reproach; but, then, it might have been mere questioning of his words. Challis gave himself the benefit of the doubt, and let Judith go on. "And if you had, do you think Marianne wouldn't have found you out? Oh, Scroop, Scroop, do you think women have no eyes?" She had a half-laugh for what she ended with: "You and your proofs and particles of evidence!"
He gave up the point. "Then let us whitewash Marianne," said he, "and make it all my fault. How much nearer are we—how much nearer to plain sailing? It seems to me I have to choose between a chance—only a chance, mind you!—of a legal sanction for the babies ... and, really, dearest, it's not a thing I have ever fretted much about...."
"But you ought to have. What's the other choice?"
"... Between a chance of legitimacy for them and a certainty of not losing you. Can you wonder that I, thinking as I do of these legalities, should choose the last?"
"Listen, Scroop, and don't puzzle me with any more arguments. You make my head spin. I can only see the thing as I believe any woman would see it. This Parliamentary business may cut us asunder for ever; because you know if the Bill passes you won't be able to divorce Marianne. If I am to give you up, I want to do it here and now—to get it done and part at once, for good...."
"I cannot give you up...."
"And we cannot linger on through a life of miserable uncertainty. Fancy it!—next year the whole question over again—the same doubts—the same arguments! No—let us part and have done with it!"
"You do not mean what you say."
"Perhaps not. Perhaps I am only flinching like a coward from a life that might be unendurable. I would rather have my tooth out altogether than have it ache for a twelvemonth. So what can I say now? I am ready, if it can be arranged—that I don't know about...."
He interrupted her. "And I am ready—more than ready!" And this time she did not repel him as he took her in his arms.
"But mind, dearest," said she, "if it were a certainty about the little girls, I should still say we ought to hesitate. But...."
"But it isn't certainty—even if the Bill passes ever so!" He sealed the compact on her lips—on her cheeks. It was a fait accompli.
But nothing could keep all those memories of the past quite, quite in the background. They were all in evidence—dim evidence; yes!—even that confounded mole on Marianne's cheek.
The day had become quite hot when the centenarian faggot-binder saw the lady and the great dog say adieu to the gentleman in the light summer suit, and noted with some satisfaction that the adieu was a loving one. The gentleman seemed to watch the vanishing sunshade, in such request against the heat, across the little bridge and out of sight, to the last; then lit a cigar, and, passing near her, said "Good-morning," and unprovokedly gave her what she thought a welcome sixpence. That old lady and her great-great-grandchild called at the Hall next day to say the gentleman had given her half-a-sovereign by mistake, and, inquiry connecting the gentleman with Miss Arkroyd, procured the opinion of the latter that of course the gentleman meant old Mrs. Inderwick to have it. Who thereupon consigned it to a Georgian purse, and departed with benedictions.
But before Challis and Judith parted they had planned their campaign. And it only just came short of a prompt marriage by special licence. Concession was made on two points; one was regarded as almost out of court—namely, the chance that such a union could be regarded as bigamous. For was it conceivable that a law that quashed his paternity of his own children could indict him for his marriage with their mother? It seemed grotesque; but was worth a word, in view of the pranks of Themis.
The other point was this: So great a certainty might exist among political informants that the Bill would be thrown out in the Lords as to make the proposed step a ridiculously strained precaution, and needless under the circumstances. Unanimity of one or two strong Parliamentary authorities would be practical certainty, if they held to their opinions up to the brink of the division. If the political sky changed, causing them to waver, prompt action might be necessary.
In any case Challis was to procure a special licence, to be used or otherwise, at discretion, the date chosen being as late as he should think safe under the circumstances. Several minor difficulties had to be disposed of, but the only point necessary to the story is that Judith was to hold herself in readiness to become a bride at a short notice, and that Challis was to be answerable for time and place and the making of all the necessary arrangements. Trousseaux, travelling gear, and the like, did not need consideration at present. For, in fact, both parties distinctly understood this marriage to be a mere precautionary measure, legally irrevocable, but otherwise nil. The bride would return to her paternal hearth, and might even make no allusion to the little event of the morning. The birds would not nest, but their names would be entered as man and wife on some parish register.
Challis said nothing to Athelstan Taylor of this scheme. He did not wish to put his friend to the necessity of either concealing it and assenting to it, or declaring it and fighting it. It seemed to him that the Rector would be compelled to an attitude of protest by his position, and that the most prudent as well as the fairest course for himself would be to hold his tongue.
So he finished his visit at the Rectory, and said farewell.
CHAPTER XLVI
HOW LIZARANN SAW THE SEA, AND A CHINESE LADY WROTE A BAD ACCOUNT OF HER TO HER FRIENDS. HOW IT NEVER REACHED JIM, AND MISS FOSSETT WAS WIRED FOR. HOW THE RECTOR HAD TO GO TO CHIPPING CHESTER.
The tide was coming in at Chalk Cliff, and the Children, meaning thereby all those on the coast at the time, were little glowing spots of perfect unconcern; entire freedom from care, from memory of the past and apprehension for the future; things as unencumbered of responsibility and pain as tracts of smooth and furrowed sands, beneath a broiling July sun, with endless pools at choice awaiting the returning flood, and little boats to navigate them, and nets to capture prawns, and sand-castles and spades and wooden panniers you could pat the sand into, could make them. And the Children were paddling in the pools, and insuring swift and prosperous passages to the vessels under their control by pushing them—for there was never a breath of wind—and chasing elusive prawns and unknown specimens beneath the rocks, and putting their fingers in anemones, and molesting crabs, and not succeeding in removing limpets suddenly from their holdings, because the limpets were too sharp for them. Also they were hard at work, the more purposeful ones, erecting sand castles the very self-same shape as the limpets, and meeting in the middle, when they—the Children—burrowed from opposite sides to complete the said castles with four or even more tunnels, essential to perfect structure; and, ending with their country's flag, in tin, upon the summit, contentedly awaited the coming of the tide to wash it all away, and leave them new clean spaces for to-morrow.
Why is Lizarann content to watch the Children in the sun, to be dissociated from them as she lies upon the sand in the shade of that big white umbrella a guardian nurse manipulates in her interest? Why does she not seize the glorious opportunities of Life at its best; of Life those babies yonder, too happy now to measure their own happiness, will look back on one day not so very far hence as a sweet Elysium of the past, a heaven of unquestioning content the clouds of the years to come will never let them know again? Why does Lizarann—our Lizarann!—prefer to lie still and converse with the good woman who has charge of her?
Well!—you see, she got tired with the journey yesterday. That's all. You'll see she'll pick up when she's been here a few days, and the sea air has had time to tell. Besides, it is notorious that its first effect on you is always enervating; and then you take quinine, and it gives you a headache.
Whatever the cause, Lizarann accepted the effect, and was content to watch the Children in the middle zone of best building sand, not too wet and not too dry, all working hard to be ready for the tide that was heralding its coming in a major key, as is the manner of tides that have died sadly away to sea, six hours since, in a minor. A false musical metaphor to him whose hearing goes no deeper than the surface of sound—true! But not to Lizarann, though she knew as little as we how to word the difference rightly between the joy of the sea returning and the lament of its departure. For this is written because Lizarann wanted to ask the lady in charge of her questions about this varied sounding of the waters, noted by her in the wakeful hours of her first night at the nursing-home.
This lady was benevolent, Lizarann was convinced. But for all that, she was like the stout Chinese carved in wood who sat all day long in the window of the tea-shop Aunt Stingy bought a quarter of a pound at a time at, nearly opposite Trott Street. Only then this image was evidently a portrait of a benevolent Chinese, of whom no little girl would have been afraid to ask questions about the tides. Lizarann reasoned on the position before she ventured on speech. Then she said: "I heard that all the time I was in bed. Yass!—through the open window."
"Poor little woman!" said the lady. "Yes, my dear, that's the water. It's the sound it makes."
"It didn't kept me awike," said Lizarann, anxious not to reflect upon the sea, of which she knew her Daddy had a high opinion. But the lady had said, "Poor little woman!" on general principles; not, as the little girl supposed, with reference to wakefulness caused by it.
"Some little girls like it very much," was the comment.
Lizarann wished this lady had thrown out a hint, for her guidance, as to whether these were good little girls or bad little girls. She would have to risk something, evidently. "I like it very much, please," she said tentatively. "Please, ma'am, don't you?"
"I can't say I do, my dear. It fusses me. But then I sleep at the back." Lizarann was disappointed. She had, in fact, been cherishing an idea that the Mandarin-like, placid seeming of this lady had resulted from the soothing lullaby of the ocean, heard night and day. Clearly it would be safest to leave personal experiences and speak of Physical Geography. Lizarann had a question to ask:
"Did it went on just like that when my Daddy went viyages aboardship?"
"Did it go on just like that? Yes, dear! It went on just like that. More so, sometimes!"
"Louderer and louderer? And then it blowed a gale?"
"And then it blew a gale. I dare say." The Mandarin looked benevolently round at her patient, and added: "We're very nautical."
Now Lizarann missed the last syllable, and therefore thought that she and the lady, for some reason unknown, were very naughty. Of course, the lady knew best; and, as she herself was inculpated, would never be so dishonourable as to tell. So Lizarann asked for no explanations. But she wanted to know about the tides, and some points in navigation. Presently an incident supplied a text.
"Why did the lady ran away from the water?"
"Because she didn't want wet stockings." Yes—that was clear enough. But why did the water run after the lady?—Lizarann asked, recasting her question. "Because the tide's coming in," said her informant.
Explanations followed—not embarrassingly deep ones; the moon was left out altogether. The water would come right up to where we were at two o'clock because it was spring-tide. Then it would go back again for the same reason; which seemed inconsistent to Lizarann, who was no politician. But she was not really keen about the physical questions involved. As soon as courtesy permitted, she reintroduced her personal interest.
"When my Daddy was sarving aboardship"—it was funny to hear the child repeat her father's words, said the Mandarin after—"did he seed the water go in and out, like we do?"
"If he was on the coast."
"Are we on the scoast?"
"We are at Chalk Cliff, and Chalk Cliff's on the coast." Lizarann didn't see why we should wash our hands of the coast, and throw the whole responsibility on Chalk Cliff. But she accepted this too; only, further definition would be welcome.
"Those are ships?" she half asked, half affirmed, looking out to sea.
"Those are ships. Some big, some little."
"Are they on the scoast?"
"Oh dear no!—miles away." Then Lizarann was beginning, languidly, a demonstration that her Daddy, when voyaging on board ship, could not also be on the coast and observe the tides, when the Mandarin—good, well-intentioned woman that she was—must needs feel her patient's pulse, and say she mustn't talk too much and make herself cough, and advised her to lie quiet, and even go to sleep. Lizarann repudiated sleep, as she wanted to watch the life around, and was only wishing she hadn't got so tired with that railway-journey yesterday. It would have been so nice to catch prawns and make sand-castles, like the Children. But she acquiesced in inaction, to her own surprise; and to her still greater surprise waked suddenly, shortly after, from a dream of Bridgetticks and her small self building sand-castles in the gutter in Tallack Street, and terribly in dread of the Boys.
Still, through it all, the little patient saw nothing strange in her own readiness to submit to being nursed. She was first and foremost among the disbelievers in the seriousness of her malady, and ascribed all the solicitude that was being shown about her to an epidemic of public benevolence, more or less due to misapprehensions set on foot by Dr. Spiderophel's imperfect auscultations. It was a whim he had inoculated a kind-hearted world with; and she felt, for some reason she could not analyze, that it was easiest to indulge it.
So when her eyes opened again on the glorious vision of the great wide sea her Daddy had told her of so many a time, as she nestled to his heart by that dear bygone fireside in the London slum, with Uncle Bob ending the day in a drunken drowse, and Aunt Stingy adding a chapter to her long chronicle of her world's depravity and her own merits, she made no effort towards movement—just lay still unexplained, and watched the flood coming nearer, ever nearer, to a grand sand-castle just below; and listened to the music of its ripples, and wondered at the builders' exultation over the coming cataclysm, the wreck of their morning's work. It seemed illogical, that shout of joy when a larger wavelet than its fellows glanced ahead of them, and catching sight of the majestic structure, rushed emulously on to be the first to undermine it. But not illogical neither, to be proud of the gallant stand that castle made against the seas; a miniature Atlantis dying game, protesting to the last! Nor when the final effort of the British Channel made of it mere oblivion—an evanescence in sand and foam and floating weed—to mingle a general concession towards going home to dinner now, with resolutions to come at sunrise, or thereabouts, and build a bigger one still to-morrow.
The Mandarin lady was conversing with a family when Lizarann opened her eyes, and all were looking towards the patient. But if what they said was overheard by her, it was not understood; it was to the child only a part of the general goodwill the World seemed bent on showing towards herself.
"Very quick sometimes," said the lady, who couldn't have been really Chinese, or the family wouldn't have called her Miss Jane. Then the family's mamma, whose beauty seized on Lizarann so, almost, as to take her attention off the sand-castle, said, "Poor, darling little thing! How sad!" And then the castle was overwhelmed, turrets, battlements, and flag; and if Lizarann had heard that much, she certainly heard no more, and attached little meaning to that.
Besides, a very succulent little boy, who could not speak for himself yet, owing to his youth, who had been interpreted as anxious to show his prawn to the little girl, was being urged by his nurse to that course, he having to all seeming suddenly wavered, and resolved to conceal the prawn—who was lukewarm and unhappy from being held too tight—in a commodious crease under his chin. Lizarann's attention was at the moment divided between solicitude for the prawn's welfare and an affection for this little boy she could not conceal, in spite of his callous indifference to the lifelong habits of his prisoner.
And then the beach and its glories had passed away, and Lizarann was aware that she had been carried indoors from a donkey-carriage she had accompanied other patients home in, and was lying down indisposed for food she recognized as nice; but trying to eat it too, to oblige Miss Jane, the Mandarin, who seemed to have taken a great fancy to her. Only she couldn't the least account for why it should be such an effort to eat her dinner; and ended by putting it down to the absence of her Daddy, and wanting sorely to be back with him at Mrs. Fox's; or—strange preference!—bringing him home from Bladen Street an intact Daddy as of old, albeit eyeless by hypothesis, and all the dreadful accident a dream.
There were reservations, though, to the way she let her heart go back to those sweet stethoscopeless days. To make none would have been disloyal to Teacher and to Mr. Yorick—oh yes!—and to Phœbe and Joan, and Mrs. Fox, and even to Aunt Bessy, though the latter was not a really well-informed person, and Dr. Spiderophel, who was more sinned against than sinning, the victim of a fraudulent black pipe! If she were still the little pilot of her eyeless Daddy through the crowded streets, what would she now be to Teacher, who had got to be a sort of mother to her?—what but one of a swarm of little girls in time, or otherwise, for religious instruction at a quarter-to-nine, and breaking loose in possession of two hours' more secular information at twelve, except Saturday? What but an unknown unit of a crowded slum to Mr. Yorick? Just think!—if there were no Mr. Yorick...!
"I think we may put it down to the fatigue of the journey yesterday. You'll back me up in that, doctor?"
But the head physician of the Convalescent Home, who answered Miss Jane, the Mandarin, wasn't a firmly outlined character. "I see no objection to that," he answered. "But there's very strong feebleness—very strong feebleness! Shouldn't say too much about anything."
"I see," said Miss Jane. And that was all she said. But Lizarann, who heard more than she was supposed to hear, this time, formed a very low opinion of her new medical adviser. As if she had anything the matter with her! She had a better opinion of Miss Jane; and when that lady asked her, referring to a letter she wrote that afternoon to Adeline Fossett—who was a friend of hers, it seemed—what message she was to give on Lizarann's behalf, the patient had no misgiving about entrusting a full cargo of loves and kisses for delivery to her.
As she lay and listened in a half-dream in the sunny room, with the air coming in from the sea, to its distant murmur mixing with the drone of those untiring flies on the ceiling, and the scratching of Miss Jane's pen near at hand, the recent arrival at the Home had no suspicion how serious a report of her case that lady was framing. She lay and wondered when that long letter would come to an end, and looked forward to the sweet experience of rejoining her Daddy, and talking more to him about the sea he had known so well in the days when there was no Lizarann. She knew it now too; and was going to know it better still to-morrow.
"We shall have to make up our minds, Bess," said Athelstan Taylor two or three days later to his sister-in-law, at Royd.
"To...?" said Miss Caldecott, in brief interrogation.
"We shall have to make up our minds what to say to Jim Coupland. You see what Addie thinks?"
Aunt Bessy saw, she said. But after reflection hit upon an escape from painful inferences. Didn't Addie sometimes look on the worst side of things? "Perhaps she does," said the Rector, and felt more cheerful over it. Then he got sundry letters from his pocket, and re-read them. His little access of cheerfulness seemed chilled by the reading, for when he had ended he shook his head, in his own confidence, and sighed as he refolded the letters.
"Let me look at them again," said Miss Caldecott. Both knew the contents of these letters perfectly, and each knew the other knew them. But it looked like weighing them in a more accurate pair of scales than the last, every time of reading.
"Make anything of them?" the Rector asked, but got no answer. The letters were being read slowly. Justice was being done to the question.
But the truth was Aunty Bessy was suppressing her inspirations because she couldn't trust her voice with them. She was a dry and correct lady, but affectionate for all that; and it was her affection for Lizarann that had got in her throat, and would have to subside before she could screw herself up to pooh-poohing the letter Miss Jane the Chinese had written to Adeline Fossett, with such a bad account of her patient. This was the letter we left Lizarann listening to, as she lay looking forward to the sea, next day.
Presently the answer came, following on a short cough or two connected with the throat-symptom:—"I do think people of that sort are often very inconsiderate. Don't you?"
"Which sort?"
"People who are constantly in contact with this kind of thing—matrons of hospitals—nurses—all that sort! However, you know best."
"Miss Fanshawe's a very old friend of Addie's, and tells her the truth perhaps more freely because of her own experience—knows about Gus, and remembers Cecilia." The name of the Chinese, then, was Fanshawe. Cecilia was the sister that died.
"Perhaps," said Miss Caldecott. "Isn't the post very late?"
The post was audible without, with a powerful provincial accent. After debate—which accounted for the post's lateness—its boots departed down the garden gravel-path, and Rachel brought in the letters, and said, "Shall I shut up, miss?" as Pandora's box might have said, if willing to oblige.
The Rector was keen on one letter; the others might wait. Miss Caldecott said, "Addie, I see," and waited also to read her own letters. Then the usual course was followed in such cases. The Rector read, and said, "All right! Directly," and, "Just half-a-second!" in response to, "Well?" which came at intervals, like minute-guns with notes of interrogation after them. Then expansive relief followed in his voice. "Oh yes!—that's very satisfactory. Now I shall be able to tell Jim." Then he surrendered one letter and read the other, saying as he neared the end, "Ah well!—it's substantially the same. I'm so glad we got them to-night."
"I thought it was that," said Miss Caldecott. "Naturally, people who see so many cases of this sort get frightened at every little thing." She read the letter aloud, making selections: "'Was up and walked about on the beach this morning.' You see, Athel? 'Sea air very often has that effect at first'—oh, that's what Addie herself says—'expect the Vim Æthericum will do wonders.' Some new medicine, I suppose. What does Miss Fanshawe's own letter say?"
"Only what Addie reports. But I don't quite like...."
"What?"
"You'll see at the end there. 'Must be thankful she suffers so little'?"
"Oh, Athel! Now you are begging and borrowing troubles."
"Well—I didn't like the wording of it. However, I think I shall be justified in not reading that bit to her father. Poor Jim!"
This was in July, a fortnight or thereabouts before Challis paid his visit to the Rectory. It is a good sample of the sort of thing that had gone on in the interim. The sort of thing only very young or very lucky folk are unfamiliar with—the bulletin-foundry's intense anxiety to make the most of every little scrap of nourishment for Hope, on the one hand; on the other, the amazing capacity of Hope for growing quite bloated on starvation diet.
All the news that reached Jim about his dying child—the words give the truth, brutally; but what does the story gain by flinching from them?—was what a succession of kind hearts had tried to make the best of, each without a particle of conscious wish to falsify or suppress. What wonder that when Challis saw him at the well that day, Jim was using the mere letter of the daily tidings he received to silence the misgivings that were whispering to his heart? But they were there for all that, making deadly forecasts in his mind of a life he would have to live, he knew not how—a life that was darkness now, but still had a light shining in that darkness that it heeded—a light that helped oblivion of the cruel past. What would be left for him if that solace were withdrawn?
He had always an undercurrent of suspicion that the evil was being made the best of, for his sake. And in the greatness of his heart—for Jim had a great heart—he felt pity for those who had to be the bearers of ill news; none of them cut out for indifference to the suffering of its hearers. If he lost his little lass, the Master—so he still called Athelstan Taylor—would have to come and tell him; and Jim would have been glad he should be spared the pain, after so much kindness to himself and the lassie. Only, that pain would not be outside the range of pity; a practicable human pain that could be thought of and dealt with—not a pain like his own if the lassie followed her mother. Or rather, that last pain would be no pain at all; merely the dumb extinction of a soul. Or would it be like the anæsthetic that multiplies suffering tenfold, and leaves its victim inexpressive—just mere adamant? So much the better! Death would come the sooner.
But all the information Jim received was softened down, and he knew it. A murmur he could not have found voice to speak aloud was always in the inmost chambers of his mind, prompting doubt of the reports that reached him. But he never showed a sign of his growing consciousness of the gathering cloud, unless it were that he listened to his news, as he got it, more and more in silence.
"How would he be the better if we did send him?" said Athelstan Taylor to his sister-in-law, less than three weeks later. "He might just arrive to find her dying. How would he know his little lass? Not 'by the feel' now! Addie says she's gone to a mere shadow. Not by the voice...." His own broke, and he stopped. Aunt Bessy sobbed in a window-recess, and thought she dried her tears unnoticed.
They had been walking to and fro and about the room in restless perturbation, she interlacing the uneasy fingers of hands that wandered to her brows when free, then interlaced again; he somewhat firmer, but with lips not quite within control. He held the yellow paper of a telegram to hand an hour since, and kept re-reading the twenty-odd words that made it up, failing always to read any new and better meaning into the heart of their brevity. It had come enclosed in a letter from Adeline Fossett, who had the day previously been wired for suddenly by Miss Jane, the Chinese lady at Chalk Cliff. A short and grisly summons she knew the meaning of at once, following as it did on a forewarning letter thirty-six hours ago—a letter that teemed with excruciating assurance that there was no "immediate danger," but that when there was the writer would send a telegram at once. She had kept her word.
That letter, forwarded promptly on to the Rectory, had made heart-sick discussion between Athelstan Taylor and Aunt Bessy since its arrival by this morning's post. What ought to be said?—what could be said to the father of the dying child, who was now looking forward to her near return home, building still whatever structures of hope the hesitating, irresolute tidings of a month past had left a weak foundation for? Who was to say to Jim that the time had come to give up that sweet vision he to this hour was trying hard to cherish, of a miraculous late summer and his little lass again, beside him at the well-head, in the sunshine? Who was to shatter the thin crust of artificial hopes that still kept under the fires of his misgivings, and leave them free to break loose through the crater of a volcano of despair?
"How would he be the better?" the Rector asked again presently. "And if I say to him now, 'Lizarann is dying, but you cannot be beside her when she dies'—why—will not that be quite the worst thing of all? I can only judge by imagining myself in his position. Poor Jim!"
"You must do as you think best, Athel dear," said Aunt Bessy. She was not a tower of strength in a crisis, this good lady; but she wouldn't hinder, though she couldn't help. Only, there are ways and ways of not hindering. Her brother-in-law would have liked another sample, this time one with less flavour of protest.
"Just look at it this way, Bessy," said he. "If I could say to Jim, 'The doctors are sending bad accounts of the little one, and you must come with me straight away to see how things are going'—well!—that would be quite another thing. But to prepare him for bad news, and the rest of it, and then leave him alone in the cottage...!"
"He will be alone in the cottage. I had forgotten that. But it won't be so soon ... surely...?" The hushed voice shows what is referred to—the "arch-fear in a terrible form" on whose face Europe at least cannot bear to look. How rarely does even the bravest among us speak of the grim terror by name, with reference to a particular case! What does it matter? Ways of saying the same thing are provided by conventions that seem quite alive to the whereabouts of the sting of Death, of the victory of the Grave. If the language of the daily press is any evidence on the subject, the Immortalism of the Creeds is only skin-deep. Disorders terminate fatally; folk breathe their last; they share the common lot; they succumb; none is so old and weary with the storms of Fate that the vernacular forecast of his release will not "anticipate the worst." But nobody dies, except paupers, in contemporary speech. Did you ever hear of a disorder "terminating fatally" in a workhouse? Or perhaps insolvents die—was one ever known to succumb?
Aunt Bessy was flinching before the inexorable, and pleading for useless respite. "I know what it means," said the Rector, "when telegrams like this begin. The old story!" He put the point aside with a sigh. "Ah well!—anyhow, Jim may be alone for some days. It isn't even as if I could be with him now and again. I must go to this Memorial business at Chipping Chester, and I can't get off stopping to marry Audrey: she would never forgive me." He enumerated other engagements—things that would keep him absent a week—even longer. They were matters quite outside the story.
"When do you suppose old Margy will be back?"
"How can I tell? When do you suppose her niece's baby intends to be born?"
CHAPTER XLVII
OF THE APPROACH OF LIZARANN'S RETURN, AND HOW JIM'S HOPES WERE FED BY OLD DAVID. HOW JIM DID NOT CURSE A MOTOR-CAR. HOW LIZARANN DIED OF TUBERCULOSIS
So it had come about that for weeks past news of Lizarann, that none could doubt the meaning of, came to the Rectory, and that all of it that passed on to her Daddy reached him corrected out of all knowledge—the sting withdrawn.
Had he been able to read the letters that contained it himself, this would not have been possible. Some may have a stone ready to cast at Athelstan Taylor for this. The story has none. It was a question with the Rector of allowing poor Jim a few more days of false hope in order that he himself might be beside him in the first of his despair. His own easiest course, far and away, would have been to read Adeline Fossett's last letter to the poor fellow aloud, say, "God's will be done!" and so forth, and get away to Chipping Chester. But he had it in his mind to go to Jim when the use of the knife became inevitable, and remain with him, if Mrs. Fox were still away, at least until the day of her return. He shrank from leaving him alone in the cottage, a tortured soul in a sunless universe, within reach of a razor.
Had he conceived for one moment what the speed of events would be, his course might have been different. But the letters that he could not read aloud to Jim were misleading on one point. The writer caught constantly at the only easement words could be found for, that the actual hour or day, or even week, of Death could not be forecast. The dear little thing was not actually dying; she might live for weeks, even months. But the doctor here—said Miss Jane Fanshawe—who really had had immense experience, thought the case could only end one way. Still, the temperature was half a degree lower to-day, and we thought the air was beginning to tell. We should be able to see better when she was got back home, with her old surroundings. She fretted a good deal about her Daddy. That was the general tone of the penultimate letter. Then came the one Miss Fossett enclosed on with the telegram which followed it. It came too late for the Rector to modify his plan of operations.
So Jim lived on by himself, and thought of his little lass, counting the days to her return. He spoke with no one, water-customers apart, except a neighbour who had undertaken to see to his needs in Mrs. Fox's absence. His dog was under the impression that it was he that was doing this, and there can be no doubt that he actually did conduct his master to and from the well. But nobody, except his canine self, believed that he had any share in cooking the dinner or making the beds.
Each long day that went by was a day nearer to the blind man's hearing of his child's voice. It would come, and would be hers once more—many times more than once. His reason might whisper to him of one end, and one alone, in some vague terrible future, to this insidious plague that had stolen on him like a thief in the night, to rob him of his happiness—the one jewel his darkness and his crippled limbs had left him. But that the hour was at hand, and the word spoken, that the light in his heart should be utterly quenched, and leave his soul to a darkness blacker than the void his eyesight had become—this was an idea it was not in him to receive, a thought that nature rose against.
No!—her return would be very soon now, and he knew how it would come. He had nothing to guide him to the day or the hour beyond his knowledge of the term first fixed—six weeks from the day of her departure. But he knew what would be his first hearing of it. She would call out to him—he was sure of that—the signal he had taught her to greet him with, in the old days of Bladen Street; the word he had listened for so many a time as he felt his way, touching with his stick the long blank wall he had to pass before he could feel her little hand in his. He dreamed and dwelt upon the moment when he should hear that call again, "Pi-lot!"
The villagers coming to the well for water were a great solace to him; a mine of robust hopefulness in which the choke-damp of misgiving was unknown. Often when Jim was downhearted about the little lass—had got a hump about her, as he phrased it—some village matron's voice would come to him like a breath of fresh air. "Yow'ull be having yower little maid back again vairy soon now, Master Coupland!" And the sympathetic confidence bred in Jim's own voice would help him to a conviction that it was well-grounded, as he answered, "Aye, mistress, sure! But a very little time to run now!" Even when the slight insecurity implied in the addendum, "Please God!"—making the little lass's return conditional on anything—weakened the robust language of unqualified Hope, Jim received it as a mere concession to the prejudices of Society. Besides, he and his Maker were on better terms now, since his initiation into church-music.
No note of alarm had reached the villagers; in fact, the Rector and his sister-in-law kept their information to themselves. Even Phœbe and Joan, when they paid Jim visits of consolation—every other day or thereabouts—were a reassuring element; though so near sources of better, or worse, information. They—poor little souls!—knew nothing of death close at hand, though alive to funerals, somewhat as a counsel's children might be alive to law-suits.
It was near the close of a cloudless day in the fourth week of that August that Jim, undisturbed by applicants for water, was enjoying his last pipe before starting for home. He was not alone. One of the very old men one knows so well in every village was with him; a survival of the past who will tell you tales of your grandfathers, and end them up with some memory of a grandchild of his own, then living. Death is keeping them in mind, be sure!—will not forget them in the end, even though they may tax his recollection for another decade. This one could remember his childhood better than the events of yesterday, and though he could tell but little of it, was not quite without a record of Waterloo. For he could recall how his father held him up, a child of five, to see the blaze on Crumwen Beacon yander, when they loighted up fires all round about for the news that had come of the great battle across the water. But as for Nelson and Trafalgar, inquired about keenly by Jim, as pages from the same book, he could say nothing of them; they were afower his time. But he minded when they painted up the sign of the Lord Nelson on the roo-ad to th' Castle, with an empty sleeve to his cwo-at; and the painter of un didn't know his trade, and put stoof with th' payunt to ma'ak it show up gay, and look at un now!
"It's a tidy bit o' time too, Master David," said Jim. "Many a year afore ever I was heard tell of."
"Aye well—that's so! But you'll be quite a yoong ma'an, coo-unting by years. Why, I lay you'll be yoonger by many a year than Peter Fox's widow—she that's gone to her sister in Loon'un."
"My old mother at the cottage? Ah, she'll be my age twice told, and a spell thrown in."
"Aye—aye! She's getting on, forward, now you ne'am it. But I mind her when she first came to these parts—just a yoong wench, not long wed—more by token my power missus lay dying at the time.... Noa!—I'd been marrud woonce afower then—marrud to Sarah Tracey—you may ree-ad her ne'am on the sto'an in the graveyard. But for Peter Fox's widow, she was a coomly yoong wench, shooerly!"
He wandered among domestic events, until the dog, feeling he was being taken too little notice of, remonstrated. The substance of his communication, interpreted by Jim, was that it was time to be getting back home. On the road, his opinion was they were going too slow, and he endeavoured to drag his master at a trot. Old David commented on the restlessness of youth.
"But you won't be needing th' yoong poop soon, Master Coupland. That little maid of yowern she'll be coomin' ba-ack, I lay, none so many days ahead."
Here was a chance for Jim to reassure himself.
"For all I could say," said he, "the lassie may be up at the Rectory now. She'd come with her lady, as I make it out; just for the first go off, seeing the old mother's not handy for to nurse her up. Not that there'd be the need for it, to my judgment. These here doctor's stories...."
The old man interrupted him, stopping in the road to speak, with an uplifted impressive finger. "Do'ant ye hearken to none o' they, Master Coupland. They be a main too clever, that they be! Why, I'm not the only ma'an with a tale to tell about they doctors?"
"What might your tale be, Master David?"
"My tale? Now I only say this to ye, Master Coupland. Just ye look at me.... Aye—be sure!—I should ha' said, feel hold of my arm.... There now!—where do ye find th' hospital pa'atient in that? Towerned o' ninety-nine year, last Whitsuntide! What'll your doctors ma'ak of that?"
"Won't they give you a clean bill, Master David?"
"Couldn't roightly say, Master Coupland, without consooltin' of 'em. And I can tell ye this much, they'll have to make shift without me; you may tell 'em so! Now, you hearken to me, not to they." The voice of the old boy, so nearly a centenarian, rose quite to vigour as he worked up his indignation against leechcraft. "That little maid of yowern, she has a bit o' cough o' nights?"
"Aye, aye!—a fair sort of a cough—comes and goes by the season."
"Ah!—and I lay, now and again o' nights, she'll sweat like to sop a flannel shirt through, like a spoonge?"
"And that's true, too!"
"And happen she's thinned doon a bit?—happen she hasn't...?"
"To the touch o' my hand, belike! But I'm an onsartain judge—and that's the truth."
"Now I'm telling ye this." The old man stood still to make his tale the more impressive, his thousand wrinkles and his few grey hairs all fraught with emphasis that was lost on his hearer; though the sight of them in the afterglow might have held a passer-by, and made him listen. He repeated: "I'm tellin' ye this, Master Coupland. If ye could have handled me when I was a yoong lad of mebbe fowerteen year, or fifteen, you would just have felt through to th' boans. And the cough, night and mowerning—my word! You might well ha' thowt yower little maiden's just a gay trifle.... What said th' doctor?" The old man laughed scornfully, if toothlessly. "Said to my moother she might let the oonderta'aker measure me for my coffin. And she was that simple she took his word for it, and vairy nigh did ... ah!—you may be laughin'—but vairy nigh she did! And there was I the while, just turned off my food and drink for a spell! Groo-wun I was, I ta'ak it. And to hear doctor cha-atterin', cha-atterin'! Such a maze o' wo'ords, it passes thinkin' where he could have gotten so ma-any. Ha—ha—ho!" And the old man resumed his walk with, "Eighty-fower year agone, Master Coupland, and me here, hale and hearty, to tell the tale!"
And no doubt a good deal of the tale was true, and the good-will of its narrator past all question. But he was making the most of it for the sake of the pleasure it gave him to cheer up the blind man's loneliness, without thinking quite enough of his responsibility to truth. When he wished Master Coupland sound sleep and pleasant dreams at the gate of the little cottage, and went slowly on to his own home in the village, he was saying good-bye to a man only too ready to give the rein to the horses of the chariot of Hope, even without an excuse. And here he had one, surely.
So, through his lonely supper—for, granting it cooked and placed on the table, Jim had a marvellous faculty of shifting for himself—he was building a sweet castle in the air with the materials so good-naturedly placed at his disposal. He imagined to himself as a thing to be to-morrow, if it had not already come to pass to-day, a journey home of a reinstated Lizarann, all eagerness for her Daddy. Not an exorbitantly robust little lass—he would not be unreasonable—but one perceptibly better than the one that left him a month since; whose kisses he could still feel, was soon to feel again. As he lighted his pipe in the garden with a vesuvian—for he never lit it in the house when alone, for safety's sake—and sat smoking under the stars in the clematis arbour, now beginning to lose its glory, it glowed in unison with the fire of a stimulated hope the old man's tale had kindled. If old David had been worse off eighty-four years ago than Lizarann, why should not the child have many a long year of life before her—aye!—even after he, Jim, had borne the last of his troubles, and was laid beside Dolly in the grave? Short of that, why should not he at least treasure the hope of the month to come, with Lizarann herself beside him in the warmth of that late summer the gentleman had all but guaranteed? For this castle in Spain owed a great deal of its vividness to Challis's obliging meteorology. He had vouched for "St. Augustin's Summer," and it sounded well.
Then a painful thought came to him. It had fretted him before this, at intervals. How if that grave where Dolly lay could not be found? What did he know about it? Little enough! Priscilla knew; she had arranged all that—as Jim, for all his good-nature, suspected—with a certain ghoul-like joy. But suppose, when he himself came to an end, Lizarann wished to place as much as was left of him beside her mother, where was the Lizarann of that day to find her? Well!—he could do nothing about it now. He would speak to the master, and make a clear chart, for the lassie's sake. No question came in here of how he might be the survivor, and have to place her in her mother's grave. Old David's tale had been an opiate to thoughts like that, and his heart rested on it.
Oh yes!—Lizarann was due, to-morrow or next day at furthest. She would tell him about the sea. He could bear to hear of it from her—his lassie who had seen it—though he had fought shy of actually hearing what he could never see again himself.
He was so happy in his dwelling on her near return, and the glamour he had clothed it with, that he could smoke there beneath the starlight he could not see, and think of his old nights on ship-board without a pang. Little things came back to him, long forgotten; one particularly, slight enough in itself, but so unlike Tallack Street and the spurious match trade! A wandering ice-floe from the Antarctic Circle, as the ship passed the Falkland Islands; and upon it, clear in the light of a great golden moonrise, a huge white she-bear with one young cub. They were drifting northward—ever northward—to the heat, and the seeming firm ground beneath their feet would melt quicker and quicker each day, to fail them altogether in the end, and leave them to die hard—the strong swimmers—in the deadly warmth of some tropic sea. Jim wondered at the thoughtlessness of his young day of brute courage and heedless energy, and how he never had a thought then for the mother-bear and her despair of saving her child in that plain of immeasurable waters; while now, for some unexplained reason, it was quite a discomfort to him to think of it, there in old Margy's arbour under the clematis. But presently he suspected a reason why he felt a new feeling over it. How if his hold over his child, his precious possession, was melting—melting away! He brushed the intolerable thought aside! Could he not feel for the poor soul on the iceberg, bear though she was, without that? Oh yes!—Lizarann would come to-morrow.
All this trouble, and doctoring, and the like, makes a man raw, thought poor Jim to himself, seeking for apologies for his failure to attain a Spartan ideal. 'Tain't like then-a-days, when you might be in a high sea any hour of the day or night, and be whistled up to take in sail—as he was, to be sure, out of a dream about Dolly, that very time he saw the Flying Dutchman, and lost his sight the week after.... There now!—where was the use of going back on bygones, when Lizarann would be here to-morrow, to hear him tell again about the Dutchman, with all her added knowledge of the sea to help.
But it was true, for all that, that a man got soft with nothing to rouse him up like, and keep him off of nursing up his old grievances, with ne'er a soul nigh to throw a word to. Jim never felt any too sure, neither, that his new cult of music was not an enervating luxury. Undermining musical phrases crept into his practice as a chorister that made him no better—mind you!—than a cry-baby. There was one in particular that was almost cruel to him in its beauty—it was as a matter of fact an adaptation by the Rector of that Ave Maria of Arkadelt that you know as well as we do—and he sang it aloud to the night-wind stirring in the trees, and the owls, for by now night was over all, in a kind of bravado, to show that he could bear it. But his voice broke on the last cadence, do what he might. "There, ye see!—just come of being so lonesome!" Jim spoke aloud to the darkness and the owls, to feel his solitude less if it might be.
But what did it matter when his lassie was coming to-morrow—coming to-morrow!
How the time was passing! There went the cottage clock again the third time since Jim lighted his first pipe after supper. Surely he must be mistaken!—it would stop on the stroke of ten. He counted the deliberate strokes, each with its long preliminary warning; and on the eleventh said to himself that he must have counted wrong. Could he possibly be within an hour of the day that was to bring him Lizarann? Listen for the church-clock of the village, and make sure! He could hear his own heart beating in the stillness, even through the monotone of a cricket somewhere close at hand. Old Margy's clock was a bit fast always....
There!—sure enough this time, the first stroke on the wind. Jim counted steadily to the tenth, and all but made quite certain he had heard the last, so long did the pause seem to his anxiety, when yet another came. No mistake this time. Eleven! Bedtime.
Was it true? One hour more, and he might be asleep, to wake up to the day that would bring him back the thing that was dearer to him than the light no day would ever bring again. Only an hour!
His little dog, sharper of hearing even than he, caught a coming sound afar, and started up in sudden indignation, dog-wise, that something, somewhere, was presuming to exist without consulting him! Whatever it was, Jim thought a restraining finger in his collar a good precautionary measure; with a slight admonition that a smothered growl, for the present, would meet all the needs of the case. It continued to express, under protest, a deep, heart-felt resentment as of a wrong too great to be endured, and still Jim could not spot the cause. At last a motor-horn, somewhere, perhaps, on the far side of the village—two miles away, say!
Loud and faint, by turns, through the village; then clearer on the open road, and then the noise of wheels at great speed. The little dog, probably catching the blinding glare of the lamps, lost all self-control at those two great unheard-of wrongs to his kind, and gave way to his feelings without reserve. Then a rush and a dust-cloud, left to do its worst, at leisure, to the lungs of man and cattle and plants, and a stench to poison the sweet air of heaven. And then a couple of folk had been carried, quicker than need was, from Thanes Castle to Royd Hall, with the execrations of a small population behind them.
Jim was too happy at heart to curse even a motor-car. Besides, he remembered how once this very car had given his little lass a ride. He owed it a benediction rather. He felt his way to his couch, and had got his wooden leg off, and found his pillow, before the reek of petrol had died away, and was asleep almost as soon as the little dog beside him. Was it his last sleep there before he should hear his little lassie's voice again?
The gas was turned down low, almost to extinction, in the ward of the Chalk Cliff Nursing Home, where Adeline Fossett was preparing to pass the night beside her little invalid's bed. There was no other patient in the room. Miss Jane, looking worn and sad, was just saying good-night, with a small hand-lamp in her hand, whose green shade was no help to the pallor of either lady. Both knew what was pending; neither knew how soon.
"Ring if you have the least doubt about it, dear," said Miss Fanshawe. "But my own impression is this will go on a day or two longer. I can't say, but I think if there's a change you'll see it."
"I won't scruple to call you. But I suppose there's nothing to be done that I can't do?"
"Nothing at all. No one can do anything now. Good-night, Adeline!" As she opened the door to go, a muffled clock outside struck midnight. "It's twenty minutes fast," said she, as she closed the door. Then, as Miss Fossett sat in the half-darkness in the large chair by the bedside, she could hear two sounds—the interrupted breathing of the little patient on the bed, and the rapid, irritating ticking of her own watch, laid by chance on something resonant. It would become maddening, she knew, in the growth of the stillness, as the night took its hold upon her; so presently she rose and quenched it. Then, being up, she went to the window, just open for ventilation, and feeling the soft air, warm for late August, opened it gently to its width, and leaned out. The voice of the water was a bare murmur now, away off over half a league of sand; and the wind must have changed, for the bells of a church a mile inland were striking twelve at leisure, and were clear through the silence; till, a railway-yell cutting them off at the tenth stroke, they wavered, lost heart, and died. These were sounds new to the day at Chalk Cliff, bathed for forty-eight hours in a southwest wind, off the sea.
"What did you say, darling?" She closed the window gently, and went back to the bed, to hear.... "Why can't you hear the waves? Is that it? Because the tide's going out. Because it's gone out as far as it can go."
"Can't it go no furver?" asks the voice from the pillow, through a breath that goes heavily.
"Not to-day. Next time it goes out it will—at least, I think so." The speaker was not sure on the point, but she had caught sight of a three-quarter moon, and that would do to quote in case of catechism. She turned on the light slightly, to talk by; then sat by the bed again. But Lizarann's days of scientific inquiry are over. She listens for the sea though, because her Daddy once went sea-voyages, still.
"Mustn't I be took to my Daddy in free dyes, by the rilewye?" The sound of the railway-whistle through the window has helped to this.
"Yes, darling; in three or four days you shall go to Daddy. There's a big grape with the skin off for you to suck. Such a big one! Try if you like it."
Lizarann gives her old nod, with the grape in her mouth. She is refusing other diet now, and it was clear two days since that nourishing food and stimulants had been given every chance and failed. She is to be allowed to die in peace, being in good hands.
"I do love you, Teacher, very, very much!"
"So do I, darling.... There are no pips to spit out, because I took them all out. Another?... No?—very well, dear; then I won't bother you.... The counterpane?—it's too heavy? Very well, dear, we'll have it off ... so!"
Which of us, over five-and-twenty, has the luck to be still a stranger to the penultimate restlessness of coming Death—to the hands that will still be weakly seeking for God knows what!—the speech that cannot frame some want its would-be speaker may be helpless to define, but will not give up attempting? Lizarann is nearing that stage fast—faster than Adeline Fossett thought when Miss Jane left her but now.
But her mind is quite clear still on the great main point of her small life. The words "Only Daddy most!" show the continuous current of her thought, coming as they do a long pause after her apostrophe to "Teacher."
"Of course Daddy most, darling child!" says the latter. "But Mr. Yorick very much too!"
The name arouses enthusiasm. "Oh, very, very much too!" But this is too great a tax on the poor little lungs, tubercle-gripped, and an attempt to follow with a schedule of loves deserved and granted fails, and quiet is imperative.
Adeline Fossett turned down the light again, and remained silent, listening to the heavy breathing, with its ugly little spasmodic jerk now and again. She was unhappy in her mind, over and above grief. Here was this little thing with only a few days at most to live—she was convinced of that—and utterly unconscious of her state. Was it right—was it fair—to leave her so? All the traditions of her religious cult from youth upward said no; according to them, the dying were to prepare, or be prepared, for death. But when the patient was simply slipping almost painlessly away—seeming at least to suffer only from an inexplicable feverish unrest, never from acute pain that could not be denied at will—what was to be gained by thrusting on a childish mind a demand to face the black contingency, to make a formal acknowledgment of the grave? Would it not be safe to give one little soul Godspeed into the Unknown, whose only care was now that each of her many loves should be known to their recipients, each in its right degree? Would not those very loves be as garments to shelter the new-born soul in the world beyond, whether the date of its arrival was now or hereafter? She was shocked at the venturesome impiety of the question she half-asked herself:—Could she not trust God for that? A happy inspiration hinted at a half-answer in the affirmative, and biassed her to silence.
Another anxiety, perhaps more pressing still, took the place of that one. Ought she not to have written more explicitly to the Rectory about the child's state? On her arrival, in answer to Miss Fanshawe's telegram, she had found nothing to warrant prediction of the days, or even weeks, that the tension might be prolonged. All she could say with certainty was that Lizarann was at present quite unfit to be moved, but that it was impossible to foresee. We must wait on events. But she said never a word to set any hopes afoot. She had written almost daily; once in answer to a letter of Athelstan Taylor, telling how he might have to go away for a few days, and of his resolution of silence with respect to Jim. She was, at first, inclined to disapprove this course, but later saw that it was unavoidable, and wrote to that effect. Still, the idea of Jim in ignorance, nourishing hopes, perhaps, while his little lass lay there dying, was an excruciating one. She said to herself repeatedly that it was merely an idea; that the co-temporaneousness of a death with far greater unconsciousness of its possibility than Jim's was an everyday occurrence. What would the wife, who now hears of her husband's death months ago, have gained by the knowledge of her widowhood, had the news come sooner? She pictured other instances to persuade the idea away. But it remained.
Miss Fanshawe, to whom this case was only one of a hundred, said to her, "If you could spirit the child's father down here to be with her when she dies, that would be another matter. But you say that's impossible. Why give him ups and downs of anxiety? Tell him what you like by way of preparation, but not till it's all over." Miss Fossett felt the truth of this view, but the position grated on her moral sense. However, she felt she must submit to the discomfort of a sense of untruth for awhile. It was not to last long.
She must have been dozing, and for longer than she could have believed possible, when she waked suddenly to reply to the child, who had spoken, with, "Yes—darling! What did you say?"
"Aren't you going to bed, Teacher?"
"Yes, dear, presently."
"'Tin't night?"
"Yes, it's night. But that doesn't matter. I shall go to bed presently."
"When shall you go to bed?" After a pause, this.
"Presently, when Miss Jane comes. She'll come very soon." Then, in response to something only audible to close listening, "No, darling, you're not to have the nasty medicine—only the nice one. It's not time yet for either.... Why mustn't you have no medicine?... Well, darling, you know we all have to take medicine when the doctor says so...."
"Did the doctor said I was ill?"
"Yes, dear, the doctor said you were ill, and to stop in bed till you were quite well ... what?"
"And then go home to my Daddy where Mrs. Forks is?"
"And then go home to your Daddy where Mrs. Fox is." A phase of coughing comes upon this; alleviation is tried for with the nice medicine. But stimulants and sedatives have had their day in this case. Adeline Fossett is becoming alive to the fact. However, the nice medicine can still soothe a little; and in half an hour a lull comes, and a kind of sleep.