Chapter XL…

Chapter XL

HOW MISS FOSSETT WENT TO ROYD. ON SUSPENSION OF OPINION. ANXIETY ABOUT LIZARANN. A VISIT TO JIM, AND A RETROSPECT. HOW MISS FOSSETT MADE A NICE MESS OF IT

A hot July was drawing to a close, and Athelstan Taylor and his friend Gus's sister Adeline Fossett were out early in the Rectory garden, and had many things to talk about. It was the Saturday morning of a Friday to Monday visit, which could not be prolonged, on any terms, till Tuesday.

One of the things they had to talk about was sad, as anyone could have told from their voices, without hearing a word distinctly. Because they were speaking with such very resolute cheerfulness of it; putting such a good face on it; each of them evidently thinking the other wanted an ally.

"I go by Sidrophel." It was Athelstan who said this. "Taking a man out of London to live on the south shore of the Mediterranean is like giving meat and drink after a diet of poisons. You'll see Gus's first letters will say he's well. He won't be, of course; one mustn't expect miracles. But it will seem like that--to him."

"I think that's very likely. But when I said I wished I had been able to go with him, I didn't mean that. I don't believe he'll want any coddling or looking after out there. What I was thinking of was the poor boy being so lonely, all by himself." But Athelstan laughed out at this: the idea of a pastor of a flock being lonely!--the last thing in the world! The lady admitted this, and helped it a little. "Yes--and, after all, it isn't as if we had seen each other every day when he was in London." Then she reflected a little, and added: "Besides, I couldn't have gone, anyhow, because of mother." Of whom this story can report nothing, no questions having been asked. "Mother" must have her place in it as the reason Miss Fossett could not go to Tunis.

Something came to the Rector's mind which provoked a cheerful laugh. "I suppose," he said, "poor Challis would say we were bringing an indictment against the Almighty."

"I wonder you call him 'poor Challis,' Yorick. I've no patience! I've heard all about it from the other side, you know. But what did you mean he says?" The question is asked stiffly. Challis is evidently not in favour.

"He says that resignation, as practised, always seems to be meant as an indictment against the Almighty. It's true he said he was referring to venomous resignation. We must hope ours is t'other sort."

"I won't laugh at anything Mr. Challis says, Yorick. I've no patience with a man who behaves so to his wife. My cousin Lotty knew the whole thing from the beginning, and it's quite impossible she should be mistaken.... Oh yes!--I know what you're going to say. That little bit of Latin...."

"Well!--it's a very good little bit, as far as it goes. Audi alteram partem! Nobody ever bursts from bottling up his judgment until he has heard both sides."

"My dear Yorick, I agree with you _ab_solutely about the principle as a general rule. But in this particular case I do think you are unreasonable. How is it possible Lotty should be mistaken, when Mrs. Challis is actually living at her mother's at Tulse Hill? Oh no! I do think you're quite wrong!"

"But I'm only refusing to form an opinion. I'm not expressing one."

"Well, if you don't see that Mr. Challis must be in the wrong, you never will see it. Don't be ridiculous and paradoxical, Yorick dear, because you know perfectly well you agree. Now don't you?"

"Can't say I do." And the conversation ran for some distance on the same pair of wheels, the lady always maintaining that in this one particular case suspension of opinion, pending production of evidence, is the merest affectation, and the gentleman resolutely refusing to make any exceptions. However, Miss Fossett had not produced all her arguments.

"Besides, Yorick dear, you know Mr. Challis did tell you all his side of the story." A head-shake. "No?--well, he had the opportunity of telling you, and he didn't, which is the same thing."

"No--no, Addie, not the same thing--not the same thing! You know I had a long talk twice with him about it. I went to see him on purpose, and neither time would he say a single word in self-defence...."

"Because he couldn't!"

"Oh no--no! Indeed, you're unfair to him. When I say audi alteram partem, in this case, I really mean wait till we are certain we have heard all there is to be said on the other side. I am as sure as that I am standing here that the poor chap was tongue-tied by chivalry to his wife. I wish she would have seen me when I went...."

"You did go?"

"Oh yes--I went at once after seeing him, and only succeeded in seeing her mother, a horrid, religious old woman...."

"Yorick dear!"

"Well--you know what I mean. The old woman as good as told me I was a disgrace to my cloth, because I spoke of marriage with a deceased wife's sister as an open question. You know that question comes into Challis's affair--comes very much in...."

"I know. I know all about it. Only it's not the chief part ... a ... but you know, of course?"

"Yes--yes!--what it was--of course!" And then each nods and looks intuitive. If Charlotte Eldridge had been watching them then through a telescope, she would have been able to spot the exact moment at which a lady and gentleman--an unsanctioned brace, that is--came on the tapis.

How far can they be legitimately discussed--by us who know the lady? That's the point! Miss Fossett bites a thoughtful lip about it. Mr. Taylor utters a succession of short "hm's" and one long one; then says in a by-the-way manner that accepts a slight head-shake as an answer: "Didn't Judith Arkroyd speak to you?... Oh, I fancied she did;" adding, in a reserved tone of voice: "You know, I dare say, that she herself wrote to Mrs. Challis." And this speech seems to have the singular effect of removing a padlock from Adeline Fossett's tongue.

"Handsome Judith?" she says, oddly lighting on Marianne's term for her bête noire. "Oh, I know!--I quite understand."

"But what do you understand? Come, Addie dear, don't be ... don't be female about it. Do say what!"

The impression or suggestion that she might have married which we fancy this story referred to when she first came into it seemed to mellow and mature in Miss Fossett as she replied, "Oh, Yorick, dear old boy! What an Arcadian shepherd you are!" And then she laughed, and repeated, "Handsome Judith!"

"But she showed me the letter--she showed me the letter!" cries the Rector, in a kind of frenzy with his friend for her persistence in being female, as he calls it. "Come, Addie, what could she do more?"

The above-named suggestion seems to mature until it all but insinuates that Adeline might marry still, if she chose. The thought just reaches the Rector's mind, and leaves it as she repeats, in answer to his question, "What more, indeed? But what did she say, I should like to know?"

"Ah!--that's the point. And we think we're going to be told, do we?" The Rector laughed a big good-humoured laugh. He detects in himself, and is puzzled by it, a new-born disposition to treat Addie as if she were in her teens, entirely caused by her excursion into feminine paths hard to explain or classify.

But she unexpectedly forms square to repulse patronage; harks back, as it were, to her thirties or forties--scarcely the latter yet--and says gravely, "No, dear old boy! I won't try to pry into any confidence. Don't tell me anything."

"I would as soon tell you as anyone"--he is looking at his watch--"a ... yes ... sooner than anyone--now Gus is gone." If the last four words had not been spoken, a hearer--Mrs. Eldridge, say--might have built an interest on what had preceded them. Those four made the speech fraternal.

* * * * *

Miss Fossett had come to Royd Rectory to pay a visit of consolation, following close on her brother's recent departure for Tunis. But it was also a visit to Lizarann. Her affection for the child was manifest from the fact that, when she arrived last night, before ever she ate a scrap of anything, after all that long journey, she went to look at her where she was asleep. It was nurse who made this mental note, and who remarked also, when Miss Fossett left the child's bedside, that she looked that upset you quite noticed it. Also that when the visitor said, "Is she always like that?" she seemed asking to enquire, like.

"And what did you say, Ellen?" said Miss Caldecott, in nurse's confidence. "I hope you didn't frighten Miss Fossett."

"Oh no, miss! I was careful not. I said the doctor took a most favourable view, and had all along. I told what he said about perspirations, and not to take too much account of temperatures, and improving symptoms. Oh no, I wasn't likely!" And Ellen is a little wounded at the bare suggestion that she should have any such a thing--her own phrase in speech with another confidante next morning.

And yet Miss Fossett was frightened! And when the Rector's voice intercepted the above colloquy from below, saying, "Bessy, come down and tell Addie what Dr. Pordage said about Lizarann," it was because Miss Fossett had gone to her very late refection quite white, and had said, referring to her visit upstairs, "Why, my dear Yorick, the little thing's in a perfect bath of perspiration!" And then she only had a little soup, and Cook took away the things, because Rachael had gone to bed with a toothache.

However, next day in the sunshine, walking through the fields with the children to pay a visit to Lizarann's Daddy at Mrs. Fox's, she felt encouraged when she saw the little person running about in the highest spirits, gathering blackberries, with a beautiful faith that her Daddy would appreciate them.

"That wasn't a coft at all, Teacher," said Lizarann, when taxed with coughing. "I didited it myself."

"Then that was!"

"Only because I very nearly stumbled down," said Lizarann. She had a high colour in her cheeks, and her eyes looked very large, and her face wasn't thin--only her fingers. But her spirits were all that could be desired; so Miss Fossett had to be content with hoping all would go well, if she was stuffed with preparations of malt, and syrup of hypophosphites, and so on. But how about the winter? Was there no possible Tunis? For Miss Fossett's affection for the small waif went any lengths in projected antidotes to phthisis. If it was money that was the difficulty--well!--Yorick would have to get it from Sir Murgatroyd; none of his conscientious nonsense!

However, it might be all unnecessary. Just look at the child tearing down the hill with Phoebe, to get to her Daddy three minutes sooner, and shouting out "Pi-lot!" in defiance of orders. And such an accolade as she gave her father did not look, at this distance, at least, like either extract of malt or hypophosphites.

Miss Fossett intended to make use of this visit to Jim to get from him, if she could, some information about the medical record of Lizarann's family. She had the old-fashioned faith that consumption is hereditary. It would be very nice to hear that it had never shown itself among her little protégée's ancestors. She had herself seen very little--almost nothing--of the blind man, and was curious to make his acquaintance, after hearing so much of him from the Rector.

Jim was not in the summer-house, but in Mrs. Fox's kitchen that opens on the garden. It is lucky none of the party is six-foot-six. But there is plenty of room, laterally.

Jim has to remind Lizarann of her social duties. "Ye'll have to name the good lady for me to know, little lass." And Lizarann shouts out "Teacher!" vehemently.

"Miss Fossett, at the school, you know, Mr. Coupland," says the owner of the name. "Lizarann's one of my best pupils, and she's going to get quite strong." There was an error in tact here: she should have recollected that Jim would be a stranger to the medical discussions over his child's lungs. A slight misgiving crossed her mind.

"Quite strong--the lassie? Aye, to be sure!" says Jim in a puzzled sort of way. But the lassie herself supersedes the point, doing violence to the conversation. "So's Daddy's leg," she says, wrenching in a topic of greater importance. "Daddy's going to walk on it, quite strong, more than free miles, and no scrutches. Yass!"

Certainly no conversation such as Miss Fossett wished for would be possible as long as the children were here. Consultation with Mrs. Fox developed a scheme for their temporary suppression.

Suppose the two young ladies and Lizarann--the distinction is always nicely marked--were to go with her just three minutes' walk up at the back of the house to see the swarm of bees in Clyst's orchard. The supposition is entertained, and they go.

Miss Fossett admits to Jim that she has covertly sanctioned and encouraged this move, that tranquillity should ensue. But she nearly repented, she says, when she heard of the bees, lest they should sting. She hopes it's all right? Oh yes, Lard bless her, that's all right enough! Jim will go bail for the bees. Look, he says, at the many a chance they've had to get a turn at him in his summer-house--he seems to have appropriated it--and never gave him a thought! Besides, Jarge would be there, and he'd say a word to the bees and tell them.

"Ye see, mistress," Jim continued, "it's a trade with Jarge. He's a bee-master--so they call him--or you might say a bee-doctor; the folk round about send for him, miles."

"I want to talk about Lizarann directly," said Miss Fossett. "But tell me about George and the bees."

"Ah, Lizarann!... But I can tell about the bees, and soon done with. It was martal queer about George, when he was a youngster. The bees nigh stung him to death, for pinching of 'em inside the deep flowers when he got a chance. They were making a mistake, though; for it wasn't he did it, but another young shaver of his inches. So they cast about for to make him some amends."

"You don't mean they found out their mistake?"

"Ah, but I do! They're a sly race, and full of knowledge. How they did it between them I can't say, but there it is!--they've come to the understanding. And what's the queerer is that George himself don't above half-understand what's said to him by a Christian. It's only bees he can tackle!... What was you kindly going to say about Lizarann?"

Miss Fossett, rendered cautious by the lapse she had so nearly made, saw no way of approaching the subject she was curious about. So she chatted on about Lizarann, hoping it might come into their talk accidentally. Jim was eloquent about his gratitude for all that had been done for himself and his child. "But for you and the master," said he, "I'd have been selling matches in the streets still. That was before my accident. But you won't say anything of that to my lassie." His hearer understood him. No--she would say nothing of his begging days to Lizarann. He thanked her again. "But," he added, "I wish you and the Rector-gentleman could have seen me eight year agone--no!--barely seven year. I might have been grateful to some kind of purpose then. I'm little use now!" Pride without a trace of vanity was in his voice as he added: "There was a fine man in my place in those days, and you'd ha' said so, lady." The waste remnant was speaking of its former self.

Adeline Fossett succeeded in none of the things she tried to say. It did not matter. He would be sure to talk of the past, and she would glean all she wanted. He took for granted, as part of the conversation in the interim, the fact of his wife's death.

"That was it, ye see: her mother died. She would have been the eldest."

"I understand. The little one herself told me of your accident, and how you came back...."

"Aha!--my little lass! In coorse she would tell it! And she told about the Flying Dutchman, I'll go bail." Jim laughed joyously at the image his mind formed of Lizarann telling her inherited legend dramatically. As to the incredulity, he knew it would exist in some minds; so let it pass! "I came back, lady," he continued, "and I found Lizarann. But I was all in the dark, and no sight of my wife's face. And there was no hiding it from her about my eyes--no chance! I never ought to have gone a-nigh the house. But she might have died, too...."

"You mean she would not have recovered, perhaps, if you had stopped away."

"Ah--if I had, ever so! But I was mazed with the longing to hear my girl's voice again, and maybe I never gave her the thought I should have done. I was a bad young man in those days, and suited myself when I might have done others a turn, many's the time. It's over and done with now." And his old self had vanished with it; so completely that the voice of its derelict, now speaking, had no consciousness in it of the way his narrative affected his hearers, as he continued, replying to a word of inquiry from her: "My accident--ye'll have heard all that from the lassie? My mates, they got me off to the Hospital, and the doctor there, he dressed my face. And, do ye know, mistress, it wasn't till the dressings and strappings was removed I knew that I was blind. Nor my mates. And they had to tell me--mind you!--that the last strap was off. I couldn't have guessed it. I was thinking I should see. But it was all dark, and the doctor, he says: 'Sorry for you, my lad, but the sight's gone. Ask 'em in London; they'll tell you the same.' So my mates, they brought me away; and there was the sun, by the heat. But I could only see black, and I judged the doctor would be in the right of it, in the end. My mate Peter Cortright, he says, 'Never you fret, Jim; it'll all come right. Give 'em a week or so, and wear a pair o' blue spectacles a while, and you'll soon be forgetting all about it.' So I says to him, 'What did old Sam Nuttall say ten days a-gone?'"

"What did Peter say?" asked Miss Fossett.

"Well, ye see, Peter, he knew! My ship's owners, out at Cape Town, they were sorry, but in course no responsibility lay with them. I'd myself to blame. They gave me my passage home, and home I came, in the dark! Aboard of an old screw-collier from Liverpool, one o' the sart they call 'tramps.' Not fit for sarvice, and underhanded. And on to that dysentery, and half the crew down in their berths, doctorin' each other the best they might. Well!--I'll tell ye." Jim seems amused at this narration. "I was passing the time nigh to the binnacle, where the master and a young man with a fractured arm were steering at the wheel; for the rudder-chains, they'd fouled and got jammed, and there was nothing for it but to run a file through 'em and free the rudder, so they could work the starn-wheel, kept as a resarve. Ye see?... Well!--the master, he'd been thirty-eight hours at it, and he just gave out. So I made bold to suggest he should go to his berth, and I should put a bit of force on the handles, and young O'Keeffe--that was the young man's name--had a pair of eyes in his head, and we'd make it out between the two of us. 'Keep her off two points when you see the flashlight,' says the master, and off he goes to his berth. And from then on, mistress, ye'll believe I did a stroke of work at that wheel, just clapping on at the given word. But that's the last bit of work, to call work, ever I did, or ever I shall do this side o' the grave." Jim's voice rang its saddest note till now, over the dire knowledge that had come to him that the joy of work could never be his again.

Miss Fossett thought, in the silence that followed, that Jim was dwelling on thoughts of old times brought back by his old story. The fact was that her unfortunate reference to Lizarann "getting quite strong" had been slowly gathering force in a mind that found it hard to receive, and was beginning to call aloud for explanation. He began uneasily: "When you mentioned, lady, just now...." and stopped.

She saw what he meant, and saved him further words. "About Lizarann's health?" she said.

"Ah! Is anything amiss?"

"Oh no--nothing amiss!" She had begun too confidently. She had to retract somewhat. But there was nothing to cause the least uneasiness. A fatal word that! She saw its marked effect on Jim, and, though she felt about for some reassuring phrase that would not suggest the question, "Why reassure?" she found nothing she felt confident of getting to the end of successfully. When she did begin, Jim cut her short:

"Are ye keeping something back from me, lady?" His voice was firm and collected.

Adeline Fossett saw that it would have to be told in the end, and Jim would have to bear it. Better to rely on his manhood, but make the least of it. She replied with what was effectively an admission that something had been kept back. She said that the Rector had wanted to tell Jim the whole story at once, and exactly what the doctor had said, but Miss Caldecott had dissuaded him. What the doctor had said came to no more than this--that the child would want a good deal of care while she was growing. This phrase, which she had invented for the occasion, seemed good to her; it implied such confidence that Lizarann would grow. She decided against repeating the doctor's exact phrase, "She'll outgrow it with care--oh yes!" as it seemed to her somehow weaker, as a hopeful expression.

Jim was very silent over it, and Miss Fossett felt that nothing would be gained by fragmentary attempts to soften her main fact. Having said it, best leave it to be looked in the face. If it could be safely diluted, the Rector's testimony could be relied on to do that later. Rather than dwell on the subject, she preferred to wonder why the bee-inspection was so long on hand.

"I'm thinking maybe the young folk are too many for the old mother," said Jim. "But I doubt we shall hear the lassie sing out one o' these minutes." Then he went on quietly asking questions about Lizarann; as how long had the "uneasiness" been felt; to which the true answer, which was not given, would have been, "from the beginning." For Dr. Ferris's stethoscope had not given an absolutely clean bill to the child's left lung. Then, what did the Rector himself really think? "Would he be minded to tell me himself, if I made bold to ask him?" said Jim.

"Tell you at once, of course!" said Miss Fossett. "He would have talked about it before, only he didn't want to alarm you. Next time you see him, ask him." This was much the best line to go on. But it was rather a relief when the bee-party came back, elevated by natural history, and anxious to impart new discoveries. "I never did shouted out 'Pi-lot,'" said Lizarann, "because Teacher said not to." And she was rather offensively vainglorious over this achievement, referring to it more than once.

* * * * *

When Miss Fossett returned to the Rectory, she said to Athelstan Taylor: "A nice mess I've made of it, Yorick!"

Said Yorick then, laughing: "What's the rumpus?"

"I've told Jim Coupland about Lizarann's chest."

"Hm-hm-hm! Ah well!--he's got to know. How did he take it?"

"Very well--but...."

"But, of course! Never mind, Addie. Don't you fret. I'm going round that way after lunch, and I'll call and see Jim."

This was about a month after Challis and his wife parted. But is it necessary to synchronize the events of the story so closely?

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter XLI

HOW JIM FOUND A MISSION IN LIFE, AND LIZARANN MOVED TO MRS. FORKS'S COTTAGE. OF A FINE AUTUMN, AND HOW ALL WAS RIGHT TILL SOMETHING WENT WRONG. OF A SEASIDE SCHEME, AND ITS EFFECTS ON JIM

If you stand up at the rifle-butts when they are not shooting, and look away from Royd village towards the Hall, you will see a sharp curve in the road, maybe a mile from Mrs. Fox's cottage on your left. You will identify that by the little shop built out from it towards the road, and the covered arbour where Jim smoked his pipe, over a year ago now at the date of the story. He continues to do so when not professionally employed. For Jim found an employment, strange to say, shortly after he talked to Adeline Fossett about Lizarann's health, and got his first scare about his little lass.

It is just within that curve of the road that his vocation is plied. Not for gain--nothing so low as that! His is an official appointment, in the gift of the Rector of Royd, and there is a parish fund of ij shillings a month, with the additional emolument of a fat capon at Christmas, for the man at the well-head. The Charity Commissioners have never found it out; and the Rector has long since appropriated the fund, and turned it into four shillings, with appendices and addenda; while a composition has been effected in the matter of the capon, the holder of the office receiving instead as much barker as is good for him, all the year round, whether actively employed or not. For the employment Jim had the luck to step into is one that may have to be suspended during hard winter weather, being, in fact, the turning of the well-handle whenever applicants come for water.

It was through Miss Fossett hearing that tale of Jim's, about how his blind strength had come in so mighty handy in that steerage business aboard of the undermanned coal-tramp. She recollected it when, on the afternoon of next day, it came out that the office of water-drawer was vacant, the last man at the well-head having retired at eighty-seven years of age. Not that he had turned the handle himself for a long time past. He had only given official sanction to the efforts of customers; who, when very small, had to way-ut till soombody else coom for t' wa-ater. Obviously, Jim was made for the place, and the place for Jim. And he--poor chap!--for whom all personal life had merged in solid gloom and hampered movement, felt like the prisoner in solitary confinement whom the boy threw his pegtop and string to, through the bars.

It is hardly a fair comparison, though, for the lonely gaol-bird had to spin his top with never a soul to speak to, day or night, and Jim had constant intercourse with his species; for as soon as the cottagers round became alive to the fact that they could send little Mary or Sally with a pail to t' wa'all, with a reasonable chance of return in half-an-hour, his services were in constant requisition. Royd village is at least five hundred feet higher than Grime; and the light soil, though good for the beech-woods, is bad for the water-supply. That is why the Abbey Well, so-called, has a clear bucket-shoot of fifty fathoms before it strikes the water. So, even in answer to Jim's effective appeals, the supply came slowly; and there was plenty of time, before the responsible bucket came in sight, to hear family history from Mary or Sally, or the latest news from seniors with two large pails stirruped on a shoulder-saddle.

Besides, there was Jim's chief resource, to which all these were as nothing. There was his little lass. Whenever she was not complying with the Education Act, and whenever the weather permitted, the child was pretty sure to be with her father in the little semi-enclosure, half-hidden by hawthorns, where the well with its interesting parclose--some of it as old as the thirteenth century, if you choose--tempts the passing excursionist to stop and be antiquarian for five minutes; and to put a little jewel of a memory in some close corner of his brain, to be found there on a winter's night in the days to come, when all the excursions are over and the merry year is dead.

The fine warm months that followed Jim's entry on his duties were surely the halcyon months of his broken life. Because for all that he and Lizarann, with a sort of ex-post-facto optimism, had decided to construct an image of a glorious past from their memories of Bladen Street and Tallack Street, misgiving of the soundness of its materials would creep into his mind, at least; never to the child's. That image was all beaten gold and ivory to her. Tallack Street, that would have seemed to you and me a sordid avenue of hovels, grudgingly complying with a Building Act, and enclosing imperfectly a rich atmosphere of Lower Middle Class families, was to Lizarann an illuminated stage on which moved the majestic figures of the heroes of her past, into which flitted at intervals visions of delights now extinct: organs with a monkey, that played slow, not to tax the nervous system of their obsessor; organs without, that played quick, so you could dance to it--played music-hall airs that had three phases apiece, and lent themselves to being done over and over again, and nobody any fault to find; the man with the drum that couldn't raise his voice to holler, and potatoes he run out of unless you looked sharp; and, above all, that pre-Wagnerian contrivance without a name, that you could set on and go round for a halfpenny all through the tune, and no cheating--so "Home, Sweet Home" was more popular than the National Anthem, along of the hextry at the end. And the highroad itself, that took two policemen to get them children safe acrost after Board-School! What a scene of maddening--more than Parisian--gaiety it was Saturday nights! And what a mysterious antechamber to some Institution undefined, but with a flavour of Trinity House or the Vatican, was that corner where it was wrote up, "Vatted Rum, fivepence-halfpenny!"

Jim lent himself, you may be sure, to gilding these remnants of bygone glory, whatever doubts he may have felt about them himself. Through that happy season when Lizarann could be so frequently his companion--for Dr. Sidrophel said the child couldn't be too much in the air: it would do her good rather than otherwise--recollections of Tallack Street and Vatted Rum Corner rang the changes on tales of the high-seas and the Flying Dutchman. Lizarann had never seen the sea! Wouldn't she just like to it! Patience! Lizarann was to see the sea in time.

Her domicile at the Rectory came to an end a week or so after her Daddy got his appointment. It had begun with what was intended to be a stay long enough to get rid of that bad inflammatory cold caught in London; had been prolonged at the petition of Phoebe and Joan till that half-a-mile-off tea-party at Royd Park. After this it consisted of postponements, due to reluctance that she should run risks from moving till quite strong again, but growing shorter and shorter as Dr. Pordage laid more and more stress on the definite character of the chest-delicacy, and the modern belief in its communicability. And the fact was that Aunt Bessy, and, indeed, the Rector, were not a little ill at ease about the constant association of the children. The Rector tried to fence with his own uneasiness, and made but a poor show.

"I don't know!" said he to his sister-in-law. "Only a few years since doctors were treating the idea with derision. Now it's all the other way. You never know where to have 'em--never!"

"Do as you like, Athel! But I'm for being on the safe side, if you ask me." And the Rector was obliged to admit to himself that accepting the advice that enjoins caution is a very different thing from running a risk on permission given. The doctor said that if all disorders were accounted infectious until the contrary was shown to be the case, it would be a good thing for the public, but a bad one for the profession and the bacilli. A man must live. So must a bacillus, from his point of view.

Discussion was afoot at one time about the possibility of sending Lizarann to Tunis, where the ex-incumbent of St. Vulgate's would take her in hand and look after her. He was sending highly-coloured reports of his own progress. But these schemes never fructified. The fact, though it was admitted, that it would have been an excessive interpretation of Samaritan good-nature had less to do with their rejection than the inevitable separation of the child from her father. "She'll never come back to England if she goes," said Dr. Sidrophel; meaning that she would only be safe in Africa if she did outgrow her symptoms. But would she be sure to outgrow them?--said Athelstan Taylor, Miss Fossett, and Miss Caldecott, all at once. "That's more than I would swear to," said the doctor. It was a relief, because you know what a stiff job this sending patients abroad is. Most of us do.

But, short of sending Lizarann to be nursed in an antitubercular climate, everything was done for her that could have been done in Samaria itself, with additions up-to-date, such as ozone, peptone, hypophosphites, and several other "ites" and "ones."

So dexterously was her removal to Mrs. Fox's cottage brought about that neither she nor her Daddy ever had a suspicion of the truth. Obviously, so everyone thought, the reason was that she should guide her Daddy to the well-head every morning before going to school, and bring him back in the evening. Lizarann's rejoicing over her importance made up to her for her separation from Phoebe and Joan. The whole manoeuvre was executed without a mishap, and Lizarann started in the summer weather to install her Daddy in safety, and to return for him in the course of the afternoon, duly calling out "Pi-lot!" at a chosen point. Phoebe and Joan gave her up with reluctance, but acknowledged the force of the reasons for the change. They were plausible.

Mrs. Fox put her to sleep in a sweet little room under the thatch, with a lattice-window you could stand open and hear the wind in the trees all night. And a bed with a white tester and a fringe, and a white vallance all round underneath. Only the curtains were chintz, with roses done on them, shiny-like; and the counterpane was made of pieces of everything sewn together. Wherever anyone could have got 'em all from Lizarann couldn't think.

From underneath which counterpane the occupant of that bed continued an early riser throughout those three satisfactory months. Because Lizarann had nothing the matter with her. Ridiculous! Why shouldn't she cough if she chose? That was her view. And why shouldn't she go to the window to see how the sunflower was getting on! The sunflower grew on a giant plant that had shot up flush with the roof--a record in growth. Lizarann looked out at it every morning, and wondered how big ever was it going to get. She didn't know which she liked best, the back or the front of that sunflower. Sunflower-backs are very fascinating.

She had a little triumph over her Daddy and Mrs. Forks about that window. For they belonged to the old school of nursing, which went for suffocation, and had told her not to go to the window at six in the morning in her nightgown. Dr. Sidrophel, when appealed to, said: "Hurt you to go to the open window? Not a bit of it! More open windows the better!" So Lizarann kept on looking out at it until the rime frostis come in October; and then Jarge coot it off for her, not too high up to the coop, and Lizarann's prevision that it would be as big as her head was shown to be very, very far short of truth.

"There, now, Daddy," said the convalescent, on her way to the well, with her convoy in tow, after Dr. Sidrophel had endorsed the views of the new school so vigorously. "Dr. Spiderophel said I was-s-s-s-S quite well!" The climax of a prolonged sibilant, crescendo, burst like a shell against the coming initial, and stung its adverb to vigorous action.

"Who said you warn't, lassie?" said her father, affecting indignation.

"Phoebe and Jones. And Mr. Yorick, he's always for asking what did the doctor said."

"Vary right and proper, little lass! Wouldn't ye have him know? Nay-tur-ally, such a good gentleman likes to know you're well. That's where the enquiring comes in. He'd be martal sorry to hear the lassie was ill. What do ye make out the young ladies said?" Jim's tactics of raising false issues were compatible with an attempt at a side-light on public opinion.

"Phoebe and Jones said--nurse said--Dr. Spiderophel said"--here concentration became necessary--"that simpsons was favourable, but to continue the medicine two stable-spoonfuls free times a day." She then corrected herself, as though the pronunciation might vitiate the treatment. "No!--three times a day." And added corroboratively, "Yass!"

Jim knew that the sky-sign of an engineering firm in the neighbourhood of Tallack Street was responsible for a confusion of the little lass's ideas, or at least speech. He accepted the name, to escape discussion, saying: "If Simpson's is favourable, and the medecine's nice, what more can a lassie want? In coorse you're quite well, with such like medecine. When little lass's medecine's nasty, that's when they're ill."

Optimism in any form was welcome on such an autumn morning, with such a many larks afloat in the blue above the shorn stubble-fields--more songs than Lizarann could count, in token of a million more unheard--and the Royd church-bell striking seven a mile off, and some sheepbells making it difficult to hear if it struck right; and the same bees as last month making the same noise about an entirely new supply of honey. Besides, Daddy had to be guided through the sheep, who were filling up the road on ahead, and repeating themselves sadly, though in a variety of keys. Sheep ought never to come in the opposite direction, because no dog can influence them to leave other people space to pass. This time they would have been enough alone to knock medical discussion on the head, even if there had been no other distracting combinations.

During just that fine perfect autumn time no one who was not in the confidence of that useless implement of Dr. Sidrophel's, that you could neither play on nor see through, would have picked out Lizarann as a patient at all. The change came with the chill of the year. Not the first morning frost of all; that, when it scatters diamond drift, every speck of which means to be a mirror to the great sun it knows is coming--coming from beyond the Eastern red, to quench the glow of the Morning Star--is but a fall of temperature, with repentance to follow. It is all right again after breakfast. But the real chill of the year comes soon--too soon! And then there is sunshine at Westminster; and it's going to snow, and does it. And you have fires, and catch cold.

It all happened just as usual that year. Only something had gone wrong with Lizarann. She was no longer the Lizarann of Tallack Street, to whom the first frost that meant business, the first fog that meant to interrupt it, the first fire we did without and the first we didn't--a day or five minutes later, according to our powers of endurance--were one and all mere annual incidents, fraught with holly and mistletoe and intensification of butchers. In those days Lizarann's greeting to winter was to go out in the snow and avail herself of it as ammunition, or develope it as slides. In these, as often as not it was doubtful whether she would be allowed out at all. And even if it was only to the little schoolroom near the church, not unless she was wropt up real careful, and her red woollen comforter round and round and round, like that. The way was never so in Tallack Street.

Lizarann herself confused between cause and effect. She ascribed her cough to mixtures, and a place in her chest, that prevented her coughing and done with it, to its location by that malign little stethoscope. It was either that or the linseed meal of Teacher's careful slow poulticing that had done it all. She considered that the linseed meal had penetrated through that vermilion disc on the area she called her chest, which had afforded her such unmixed amusement seen in Miss Fossett's little hand-mirror. She was haunted by the flavour of that linseed meal; was convinced it had got through and stuck. But these were views she kept to herself. She tolerated the strange scientific fancies and fallacies of the grown-up world, recognizing in them the benevolence of its intentions.

But the something that had gone wrong never made any real concession. It seemed to have made up its mind which direction it would take, and jogged on without remorse. Now and again it may have sat down by the roadside, and set the credulous a-thinking that it might turn back and start again and go right; but it always went on again refreshed in the end. Sometimes it travelled slowly--came to a hill, perhaps? But the road was a give-and-take road, only just a little more downhill than up. It always is, in this complaint.

Dr. Sidrophel gave the Rector very little hope of any real success. He did not say the child would die. Nobody ever says that. He only said she would never make old bones. He probably thought her skeleton would not reach its teens. He continued the treatment; was in favour of plenty of air, plenty of nourishment, the last new chemical elixir vitæ--wasn't it called "Maltozone," and didn't every teaspoonful contain an ox from Argentina?--and so on. The cottage smelt of iodine; and dear old Mrs. Fox's lozenges, which had been active in the early stages of the complaint, had to die away before the new agencies and real prescriptions that had to go to the village apothecary to be made up. Even so the parish engine, that the fire took no notice of, has to give way to the brigade from the nearest station. If only the metaphor would hold good a little farther! If only the parallel could be found for the efficiency of the waterblast that comes so swiftly on the heels of their arrival--steam at high-pressure panting to show its elasticity to advantage--blood-horses that have touched the last speed-record--serpent-coils of hose that mean salvation; if only the latest rescue-powers of Science were on all fours with these! But.... Well!--we must hope.

When Sir Rhyscombe Edison, the great London physician, paid a visit to the Hall just before the Family started to go abroad--no one was ill there: it was the head of Thanes Castle he was summoned to consult about--Lady Arkroyd begged him to overhaul a little patient she and the Rector were interested in. He made as careful an examination of Lizarann as he had done of the Duke; was as encouraging to the one patient about her chest as he had been to the other about his hemiplegia; and was nearly as explicit in his second verdict to her ladyship and the Rector as he had been in his first to the family at Thanes. It was a well-marked characteristic case, but one lung was free, so far; and as long as that was so the duration--by which he meant the duration of the patient--was a thing the ablest pathologist in the world could not pronounce upon. The little thing might live to be an old woman--at Davos. He instanced cases of one-lung life in the high Alps going on to old age. But in England, no!... Still, she might go on for a year or so. Sea-air would be the best thing. Anywhere on the south coast.

Do not suppose that any means were left undiscussed that could be reasonably entertained of sending Lizarann to live by the sea. The higher Alps did not come into practical politics. But there were sea-possibilities. Inquiry discovered nursing homes, havens of convalescence, where a very moderate payment would obtain sea-breezes and good food and medical supervision for a patient either curable or doomed--either would do. But the separation of the child from her father would have been almost inevitable. The thing worked out so; all details would want too much telling. Besides, Lizarann's friends flinched from sending her to live among "cases" confessed and palpable. It had too much of the character of surrender. How could the truth be softened to her father, if it came to that?

It had come out through Mrs. Fox, who held a roving commission to tell Jim things gradually, that a scheme was under consideration for packing off both together, father and daughter, to a cottage by the seaside. It had been pronounced quixotic, and condemned, before Mrs. Fox had an opportunity to report its effect on Jim; so what she told of had no influence in procuring its rejection. But it made its impracticability less to be regretted.

"It would just be like to carry on, Mr. Coupland." So the old woman, extenuating absence from Royd in any form. "It might be a bit lonesome, and I would miss your pipe of an evenings--so I tell 'ee! But what is three months, after all, when you come to name it?" Mrs. Fox, with true tact, ignored the main evil, the cause of the whole, and chose her own loss as the thing to dwell upon.

"It's not a big turnover of time," said Jim. A moment after he said, referring back: "That's very kind of ye, mother, about the pipe. Thank ye kindly!"

"You've no need to thank me, Mr. Coupland. All the fill-out of the smoke's away up the big chimney in the thoroughdraft, when there's a bit of flare to help it. I like to watch it find its way. Summer-time the gap of the little window scarcely favours the letting of it out. More by token, too, I can mind the many that's gone, by the very smell. My husband, he would always have a yard o' clay ... ah!--that name he gave it...."

"I know 'em, mother. Churchwa'ardens they call 'em."

"That sort. And my Daniel, he'd none of 'em, but just a cherry-wood. I can hear the voices of them now, in the smoke."

"Thank ye, mother, for leave given, too! But I'd bring ye back the little lass, safe and sound. Afore the end o' January would be the time."

"'Tis nothing to speak of. But this I do tell 'ee, Mr. Coupland: I shall have a fair miss of the little maid, with her clack."

"Ah--the little lass! But she'll have the more to tell ye, mother, when she comes again in the spring-time. All set up and hearty, hay?"

It was then that the dear old thing, with the best of intentions, made a mistake. She must needs refer--bless her!--to the length of time that had passed since ever Jim had seen the sea. Then, concerned at the sound of the blind man's "Ah, mother!" she misinterpreted her mistake, conceiving it to have been in the reference to sight. Poor old lady! How hurt she was when she found it out!

Jim was equally concerned on her account. He understood what her thought had been almost before she had begun to explain. "Oh no, no, no, mother!" he cried out, filling the little cottage with his big voice. "Never you think it was that! Where should we be if I couldn't bide to hear a word about my own bad luck? It don't make it neither more nor less, ye know! And it might just as easy have been anybody else." Jim's meaning was that the sum of human misery had been arranged, and this tribulation had to be borne by someone, to balance. If he had it, someone else escaped. "No, no," he continued; "that's not to be thought on, mother!"

But there had been a something, very distinct; and it was equally clear that Mrs. Fox would like to know what, without asking intrusively. Besides, Jim wanted to make that wrong guess a thing of the past. He would try to explain why he was so moved. "It's none so easy, mother, now and again, to say just what you have an inklin' to say. Not if the other party's to understand, mind you! But ... did ye never see the sea, mother?" No--Mrs. Fox had never seen the sea. But she had been in Worcestershire, to her uncle's, many was the time. Jim declined Worcestershire, but gently, not to seem scornful. "It might be a far-off sight," he said. "Not like seafaring folk see it, from sun-up to sun-up; just a fair offing all round ye, and the sky overhead." However, Worcestershire had only been referred to that the old lady might not seem quite untravelled. So Jim returned to his explanation. "It was just a queer feel I had," said he, "about the sound of it again, after such a many years."

Mrs. Fox's slip of the tongue had given her a fright, and she sat silent. A log tumbled on the great open hearth, and a shower of sparks went up the chimney to whirl away in the wind that was roaring down it about the cold white drift of the winter night. Jim sat and thought of his watches out upon the sea, and the same wind whistling through the shrouds, and his strong arm and keen eyesight in the days gone by. All gone--for ever! Nights by the galley-fire, or in some warm corner of a steamer's 'tween-decks, welcome in the spells of look-out duty, when the look-out was for icebergs in the Atlantic--the sort that wait till a ship is well alongside, and choose a clever moment to turn turtle and catch her in the nick. Nights in sailing traders--there are some left still--on a still sea in the tropics, with not a breath of wind below, and strange activity of meteors in an unresponsive universe of stars above. Nights of battle with the storm-fiend--of whirling spray-drench and decks swept by the torrent of the crested seas, all vanished in the past, with that little wicked reason in between that lay in ambush for Jim's eyes on the quay at Cape Town, in the bunghole of an oil-cask.

And then the broken sailor said to his heart: "Can we bear it, you and I?--we that have borne so much; we that must live perforce in dread of so much more still left to bear; we that may even have to say good-bye to the little voice that has been the stronger half of our strength till now? But this--oh, this!--to stand again in hearing of the sea; to know it as of old by the endless intermittent rush of the shoaling beach in its caress, by the music of the curling ridge of its wavelets, nearer, nearer to the shore; to breathe the scent of it in the landward wind--and then!... What then? Just to go mad in an aching void of darkness, and cry out in agony for but one glimmer of the daylight that has been once and shall never be again, just one momentary image of the living world that void can never know."

Presently Mrs. Fox rose, saying quietly, "It's the remindin' brings it back," and busied herself to get some toddy for her tenant. She condemned a lemon-scrap as too dry; her stimulated pity for poor Jim suggested a new one from "the shop," and she disappeared to get it. Jim sat on in the glimmering firelight he did not know from sunshine, thinking of the sea. He did not put his consolatory pipe down; it was something, if not much, against thoughts that ran close on the lines the story guessed for them, if not word for word. But it could not stop the tears that would come from the eyes that were good now for nothing else but to shed them.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter XLII

HOW A NAUGHTY LITTLE GIRL CAME OUT IN THE COLD AND TALKED TO HER DADDY. AND HOW WINTER MADE HER WORSE. OF A TALK BETWEEN THE RECTOR AND MISS FOSSETT, AND A SUGGESTION SHE MADE TO HIM

A little bare foot came stealing down the twisted oak stair at the far end of the room, which leads straight up to Lizarann's eyrie where Jarge got the sunflower through the window for her not three months ago. The little white figure in a nightgown is taller than the Lizarann whom we saw, also in her nightgown, rushing out into the snow last winter to summon the police to Uncle Bob. But the robust look of childhood has given place to what is at least an entire unfitness to be out of bed in the cold. If Mrs. Fox had not been lemon-hunting in the shop, she would have sent the delinquent back in double-quick time. Jim's sharp ears caught the patter of the shoeless feet.

"That's the lassie, I lay," said he. And Lizarann, who didn't care, was on his knee before he had got a proper reproach ready. All he could say was, "A little lass out of her bed in the middle of the night! Where's the police, hay?" He affected inability to deal with the case in the absence of the civil authority.

"I come down because it wasn't cold," said Lizarann. "I come down because the stackace is mide of wood. I come down for to kiss my daddy very often." She did so.

Jim called to Mrs. Fox, without. "Mother! Ahoy! Here's a young charackter come out of her bed in the cold."

Mrs. Fox testified to her horror and surprise, saying substantially that, even in the most depraved circles she had mixed with, such a thing as a little girl coming out of bed in the middle of the night was quite outside her experience. Jim suggested that a blanket would be useful as protection, inside which Lizarann could watch him through his toddy, after assisting in its preparation. Mrs. Fox went for the blanket.

"'Tin't cold," said Lizarann. "And there hin't any cold wind outside in the road. Only in the chimbley.... I'm thicker than I was, Daddy." This last was in response to Jim's explorations about her small limbs in search of flesh. Dr. Sidrophel had been a little hopeful about the possible effect of the ones and ites, if persevered in.

"Where's the flesh you was going to put on, the doctor said? Hey, lassie? Sure you haven't put it on some other little lass?"

Lizarann seemed very uncertain--perhaps didn't understand the question. "Old Mrs. Willoughby, lives near the Spost-Office," she says, "medgers eighteen inches round, and her son Gabriel does the horse-shoes." This is not irrelevance; its object is to show that fat is not always an advantage. Jim misunderstands its drift, and conceives that Mrs. Willoughby is brought forward as an example of slimness and its robust consequences.

"That's no great shakes, anyhow," says he; "for round an old lady's waist...."

But Lizarann interrupts. "I didn't sye wyste," she says. "Round her arms with string above the elber. She hin't got a wyste. She's all one piece. Yass!" Then Mrs. Fox returns, and throws a light on old Mrs. Willoughby. She is her cousin Catharine, and is dropsical. What set the child off on her, she asks?

Jim explains. "The lassie wasn't so far out, mother," he says. "You may have too much of a good thing. Only...." But he doesn't finish.

And Mrs. Fox, when she afterwards told Athelstan Taylor things about Jim, recalled how, at this interview, she could see him always feeling, feeling gently, about the little feet and hands that came out of the blanket she had wrapped about the child. "I did all I could to give him heart," she said then. "But I couldn't say too much about looks, because he could see with his finger-tips, as you might say."

In fact, old Mrs. Fox could offer very little in the way of reassurance, and had to fall back upon a resource that had already been freely drawn upon--the growth of little girls and the attenuation that was alleged to accompany it, though really an appeal was being made to conditions of development that belong to growing children over eight years old. Probably Jim saw through all this. But he did not want to discourage those who wished to give him hope. What though it were to be hope against hope--by which one means hope against fear, with despair in the bush--was not their goodwill as good, whatever foes were in league against him?

But, except it were just this once, Jim never allowed his fears to leak out. He could lock them up in his own bosom, and endure life to the end. If he lost his little lass, why!--that was the end of things. He looked forward to it, if it was to be, as a believer in the possibility of his own extinction may look forward to the guillotine. Only, the knife-edge of this guillotine of Jim's was to touch his neck and spring back, then do the same again, then just draw blood and spare him--a guillotine-cat at play with a human heart. But as for showing his fears to the little lass--no more of that!

This was in January. The child was then still enjoying life, with the drawback of that nasty cough. It was only a few weeks since she had been up in the early morning to see her Daddy to his field of operations. Why was that stopped, and why was Lizarann so ready to surrender, and even to remain in bed till the day got warm and she could go out? It was all put down to the winter days. But who ever gave a thought to the winter days in Tallack Street? She firmly believed in her heart that, if only the medicine-bottles were flung on a dust-heap, and she and Daddy were to go back to their old lives, she would still be able to wait his coming in the cold, and perhaps tell all about the Flying Dutchman again to old Mother Groves, and hear more of the strange experiences of the Turk. She identified her old health with her surroundings at that time, and credited them with claims for gratitude really due to it.

However, the exhilarating bygone time had disappeared. Perhaps it was the healthy, bracing influence of Aunt Stingy that she missed, and the occasional stimulus, when Jim was afar, of a strap or a slipper? Perhaps it was Uncle Bob? Perhaps it was The Boys? If she and Bridgetticks were shouting defiances to them--now this moment, through the snow--would it make her cough? She scouted the idea. It never used to it. Indeed, she did not feel sure that Bridgetticks might not prove, if fairly tried, worth quarts of Chloric Ether. A dream hung about her waking consciousness of Bridgetticks and the Turk, mysteriously visitors to relatives in the neighbourhood of Royd, and of a wild escapade to the highest ridge of a hill in the neighbourhood, in the snow. At the end of that dream an imaginary self passed through the mind of the little pale dreamer, a robust young self and a rosy, that broke in upon an image of Daddy at his hour for leaving the well-head, with, "Me and this boy and Bridgetticks, we been right up atop of Crumwen, and I haven't coftited not wuntst, the whole time!" A little of that sort of thing would set her up. But she wasn't going to say so. She loved the big Rector and Phoebe and Jones, and Mrs. Forks, and even poor Dr. Spiderophel, with his scientific delusions, far too much to hint that they could be mistaken. They should have it all their way, they should!

Athelstan Taylor became quite hopeful about the little girl during that January and February. He paid Lizarann a visit at intervals--very short ones when her absences from school were frequent. According to the reports he carried to Miss Caldecott and his own little girls, the patient took a decided turn for the better so often that a very few weeks should have sufficed to qualify her to practise as an Amazon. Phoebe and Joan were quite satisfied that when papa and aunty took them up to town in autumn Lizarann would come too, and then they would all go to see Madame Tussaud's, Westminster Abbey, and Tallack Street. Especially the last. But this expedition never came off.

When Teacher from London came again about Easter time she was disappointed. She did not find what she had been led to suppose she would; not by any conscious exaggeration of the Rector's, but by his genuine over-hopefulness, backed by groundless mis-statements of fact from the little woman herself contained in very well-written letters enclosing hieroglyphs that meant kisses. Adeline Fossett took the first opportunity of finding out whether the patient was still a self-acting Turkish Bath in the small hours, or dry. Her observations were not satisfactory. But there!--you know all about cases of this sort; at least, we expect you do, though we hope you don't.

"I wish we could get her to the seaside," said she. "Any of those places would do. You know, Yorick, you are just as anxious to save the little person as I am. Every bit!"

"My dear Addie!--of course I am. The idea! But we mustn't talk of saving her, yet. I should say losing her, perhaps; but you know what I mean. We can talk to Sidrophel--see what he says."

So the doctor was referred to, and his opinion amounted to this: that if the child went away by herself to any sort of hospital or home, she would either have to be indoors with the other patients, or exposed to all the windy gusts of spring on the sea-beach, or perhaps in a shelter with a fine sea-view. People were always hunting climates that didn't exist, and inflicting horrible hardships on themselves in the chase. When summer by the sea was a certainty, send her, by all means. After midsummer, he should say; no sooner!

This was in early April, just when a misleading rush of crocuses into a treacherous few days of sunshine had set folk off hoping for a real spring this year; like when we were young--like Chaucer--like Spenser. Some mistaken nightingales arrived, and must have felt foolish. Infatuated orchards promised themselves a crop of pears; it even went as far as that!

"We may be thankful for one thing, at any rate," said the Rev. Athelstan to Miss Fossett two or three weeks after. "We did not pack off that little wench to the seaside. In weather like this she's best where she is, on the whole. Sidrophel's right. He often is."

"He was right this time. Just look at it!" Sleet was the thing referred to.

"Werry bad state the roads are in, sir," says a third party in this conversation. "Bad alike for 'orse and man. Thankee, sir!" He was a cabman, and he had just driven this lady and gentleman over five miles, so he knew. He departs with the postscript sixpence his last words procured, as an extra concession after an over-liberal fare, and his late tenants pass in at the door of the little house that is part of the school-building where Lizarann developed that first inflammatory cold months ago. The story is back for the moment on the Cazenove Estate, and the Rector is going presently to walk over to the new incumbent at St. Vulgate's, who will house him to-night, and tell of his few sheep and many goats. He can stay for a cup of tea now, and get there by seven.

"Yes, the doctor was right. She's just as well off under Mrs. Fox's thatch. Better! When the warm weather comes we'll send her for six weeks to Chalk Cliff, and give her a good set-up!" But his hearer only sees her way to silence on this point.

The story has told, but very slightly, the strange rapport between these two, that had lasted through so many years. For over twenty they had elected to pose as brother and sister. During all that time the mind of each had referred to the other as in some sense the principal person; that is the only way to express their thought. When Athelstan first adored the fascinating Sophia Caldecott, he really could hardly have said which he wanted most, that young person herself, or Gus's sister's sympathy about her. But so blind was he at the time, so blind had he remained through all the years of his married life, that he never conceived that, midmost among all her memories of the past, a lurid star outshining all the others, was the record of that hour when the young man she thought and spoke of as a boy, remembered so well, came to her father's house intoxicated with a new-found joy, to tell her chiefly and above all others that he was affianced to--well!--to the wrong sister; not the friend she had set her heart on!

As they sat there by the fire in the half-dark, resting after their journey, his mind, like hers, went off on old times. Presently he shook off his own burden of memories with, "Well!--I suppose I ought to be on the move."

"Don't hurry away. It's not much past five yet, and they can make dinner half-past seven. You've plenty of time."

The flicker of the fire has the best of what is left of the light of a dull day; it shows two faces serious enough, certainly, but not sad. They are dwelling on the same past, each from its own point of view; but their owners are really happy to eke out a little more time in the half-light, each knowing the heart of the other. They are glad dinner at St. Vulgate's can be half-past seven; it is half-an-hour longer to be together, and really those people in the train had made it impossible to talk.

"I shan't see you again for ever so long, Yorick, unless you and Bessy change your minds and come up earlier."

"You must manage a visit to Royd in July."

"If I can!--it depends. But...."

The Rector glanced shrewdly up. "But anything particular?" said he.

"Well, Yorick, yes! Something particular. Only I don't know how to say it." As she sits there, a little flushed--or is it only the firelight?--one hand a face-rest, the other coaxing the burning coals into groups with a persuasive poker, the question that suggests itself is the old one--how comes she to be an old maid? A six-and-thirty maid, at any rate!

"I know what it's about, Addie. It's the Bill, and the Bishop."

"Yes, dear old boy." This was a great relief. "Now, do tell me, what shall you do?"

"You mean if the Bill passes?"

"Yes."

"I shall do nothing. Why should I?"

"Not even if Dr. Barham...?"

"Dr. Barham can do nothing. He can only remonstrate. What was it he said to Lady Arkroyd?"

"That if the Bill passed it would be his duty to point out to you that your relations ... well!--your relation with Bessy had altogether changed since the Act; and that for a clerk in holy orders to keep house with any single lady not his sister by parentage would be ... well!--would not do at all."

"And what did Lady Arkroyd say to the Bishop?"

"Not herself; it was the Duchess. Only she told me. What the Duchess said was, 'I hope if you do, the Reverend Athelstan will bring a suit against you for libel, and make you smart for it.' Dr. Barham won't speak to her Grace now."

"Dr. Barham would be quite within his rights. No action for libel could possibly lie. Any remonstrance on a matter of morality within his diocese must be a Bishop's privilege. Besides, a written letter would hardly constitute publication...."

"Dear old Yorick! I wonder why men are so fond of talking law to women, as if they knew by nature and women didn't. Never mind the law! It isn't that.... Don't you see how disagreeable it would be for Bessy?"

"No--I don't know that I do. I don't see why Bess need bother herself about it...."

"Hm...!"

"Oh--well--yes! Yes, I do--of course I do! It would be detestable for Bess."

"You see I'm right?"

"Oh yes, absolutely. It was only my perversity." A self-excusing, deprecatory shoulder-shrug. Peccavit confitetur is its import. Then he breaks into a good-humoured laugh. "After all, you know, there's always a way out of the difficulty."

Something brings a sudden exclamation from Adeline Fossett. "Yes, what?--but go on!" She has risen from her seat, and stands with her hands pressed close together, and eyes of expectation fixed on his. "Oh, Yorick!--is it--is it.... Oh, I do hope ... is it the one I've thought of?" She hesitates. He hesitates.

"That depends on what you have thought," he says at last. But with a suspicion that they may have thought alike, too.

"Oh, if I dared guess!... I don't know; dare I?...--yes, I will--I don't care!..."

"Go on!"

"If the Bill passes, you know ... then ... then ... you and Bessy to get married! Was that your idea, Yorick? Oh, do tell me!"

"Why, of course it was."

Miss Fossett throws herself back in her chair again, with a deep sigh as of relief. "Oh dear, how nice that would be!" she says. But she is taking it all to heart, and her eyes are full of tears. The Rector is very cool over it.

"It would be a way out of the difficulty," he says. "Not a bad one, perhaps. Better, at any rate, than Bess having to turn out and leave the children. They are quite like her own, you see. And it wouldn't make any difference." This is not quite understood, apparently, and he adds: "Everything would go on exactly as usual."

Miss Fossett had a sort of feeling that it might be possible to parade an unlover-like attitude too far. Athelstan surely might warm up a little. He had spoken as he might have done if marriage were a new hat. It would, or wouldn't, fit. "You would ... like it, though--wouldn't you?" she asked, in a rather frightened sort of way.

"It would suit me very well. I shouldn't like the only other expedient--marrying somebody else to make up a possible housekeeping. We both should know exactly why we had done it, and we should gain the end proposed. It would rather be for Bess to decide if she would like such a very prosaic arrangement."

"You mean chilly?"

"No, I don't. We're not chilly now, Bess and I. And we never quarrel. The temperature wouldn't go down because we had deferred to the opinion of our diocesan." He drew out his watch, "I must go.... Don't think I'm not in earnest, Addie. If the Bill passes, I might have to ask Bess to settle the point. I should do it for the sake of the children. The worst of it would be that if she negatived the idea, we might be uncomfortable afterwards. As for her leaving the children, of course that's out of the question. And I couldn't have her carry them off, like poor Challis's wife.... I must go." He got up to depart.

"I'm disappointed, Yorick," said Adeline.

"What at, Addie?"

"Why, of course she wouldn't have you on those terms."

"Just consider! If you were in her place?"

"Well--I wouldn't! Not on those terms." She seemed to mean every syllable.

The Rector stood in the passage, buttoning his overcoat. "Poor Challis!" said he, going back on the conversation. "They've made a knight of him! I shall go and look for him before I go back. I fancy he's back in town."

"You know I don't agree, Yorick?"

"What about?"

"About 'poor Challis.'" These words were said in inverted commas. "I told you, don't you remember, that I had heard all about it from the other side--from Charlotte Eldridge."

"Yes, but you were biassed against him, because of his deceased wife's sister marriage. You know you were!"

"Well!--wasn't I right?" But there is an amused twinkle in the Rector's eye, which is understood. "Oh no, Yorick, no!--it's quite a different thing...."

"Before and after an Act of Parliament, is that it?"

But Adeline has run her ship on the sands, and must back off. "It's impossible to compare the two cases," she says. "Do you know, if you are to be at St. Vulgate's by seven-thirty, you'll want a cab. You can't carry what you're pleased to call your little valise and get there by then. Do take a cab, Yorick!"

"Fifty-five minutes does it," says Yorick. "And I've got fifty-seven. I've a great mind to spend the odd two reading you a little homily about consistency...."

"Go away. Good-bye." A cordial shake of the hand is all that forms permit, and it seems such a shame!

* * * * *

One reason why it was impossible to compare the two cases was a perfectly clear one, to the thinking of Miss Fossett's innermost heart. But she kept it tight locked up there.

In the old days, when all her forecasts of life took her own practical exclusion from it for granted, and wrote celibacy large on every page of her record-volume, her great dream had been to unite her beloved friend Bessy Caldecott to that dearest of all possible young fellows, her brother Gus's friend Athelstan. Adeline was a little prone to playing at Providence, and--don't you see?--Bessy was so good and sound, and so much better altogether than that showy little sister of hers. So, what wonder, when Athelstan led the family minx, Sophy, to the altar, that Adeline rather than otherwise wished that the earth would open and swallow the altar? She would have resented the idea that any personal feeling entered into the matter.

Even so in these new days, with all this change, she could and did believe that she could see her old girl friend the wife of her old boy friend, without any feeling but sheer rejoicing that Yorick had married the right sister after all. And this feeling entered strangely into her real views on the Deceased Wife's Sister question. Catechized closely, she might have confessed to a belief in real wives, with a sub-creed that marriage with a sister of one was somehow a worse desecration of a sacrament than marriage with a second cousin, for instance, or a mere female undefined. There was no evidence to show that Challis hadn't married the right sister first. If he hadn't, of course the "living in Sin" business had come off in the first act of his drama, and nothing was needed but an Act of Parliament to qualify the parties to live in purity, ungrundied.

At any rate, those were the lines on which Miss Fossett would have justified her friend's defiance of his Bishop. And when Yorick had referred to that other way of solving his problem--marriage with the female undefined--she had shut any hint of that female being defined as herself into the very core of her heart with a snap.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter XLIII

CHALLIS'S VISIT TO THE RECTORY. A VISIT TO JIM AT THE WELL. HOW LIZARANN WAS AT THE SEASIDE. ST. AUGUSTIN'S SUMMER. HOW THEY MET SALADIN. HOW CHALLIS TOLD ALL

"Have him down here if you like, Athel," said Miss Caldecott to her brother-in-law on the first of August, a little over three months later. "I shall be in London with Phoebe and Joan. So it can't matter to me. Only I think he ought to be on honour."

"How do you mean, aunty?"

"You know what I mean. On honour not to."

"Not to what?" But Aunt Bessy wasn't going to answer questions on the subject, whatever it was. So she closed her eyes in harmony with an expressive lip-pinch, and said finis dumbly to this chapter of the conversation. However, she began another.

"Apart from that, I don't like his tone," said she.

"I know you don't." This meant that the Rector didn't want the second chapter. He harked back to the first. "Perhaps Sir Challis will promise not to," said he.

"I don't see how you can ask him." This was said very dryly, and the speaker indicated that it was an ultimatum by going on with a letter she was writing.

For Miss Caldecott was a sort of inverse Charlotte Eldridge. To the latter lady, as we know, the mention of a lady and gentleman, as such, and such only, was as the sound of battle to the warhorse. The former was very apt to petrify if the conversation went outside the limits of the neuter gender without stipulating for a strict neutrality on the part of the other two. A hint of what Mrs. Protheroe called "going on" on the part of properly--or improperly--qualified masculines and feminines was enough to make Aunt Bessy discover that we must be getting back, and begin looking for those children's gloves.

Why Adeline Fossett had yearned to link the lives of this lady and her friend Yorick was very difficult to guess. That, however, does not belong to the story at present. Its business is with the lady and gentleman responsible for the little bit of frigidity it has just recorded.

When Athelstan Taylor called at the Hermitage in April, just after Challis's arrival in England, he threw out, in thoughtless hospitality, a suggestion that the latter should pay him a visit in the Autumn. The invitation was jumped at, and the Rector perceived afterwards that there might have been a reason for this, to the possibility of which he was at the moment not sufficiently awake. But he was too honourable to go back on his word.

If he had felt sure enough of his ground he might have spoken frankly to Challis, and put him off till some time when Judith's absence from the Hall was a certainty. But he had not enough to go upon for that. He found out the poverty of his case by attempting a letter to Challis. "My dear Challis--You know me, and I know you will excuse my speaking plainly...." And then had to think what the plain speech was to be. He considered "I know that you and Miss Arkroyd are quite within your rights when, etc.," and "I think your wife's strange conduct has left you free to take advantage of what I should otherwise regard as a legal shuffle, etc."; and "I know you would not avail yourself of my hospitality to, etc."; and even "I can't have you making love to Judith Arkroyd while you are staying at the Rectory, etc."; but concluded by rejecting them all--he liked the last best--and tearing his letter to fragments.

He ended by saying to himself: "These are not young people, to be chaperon'd and guardianed. If they are in earnest, they will not be kept apart by not having Challis at my house. And the more I see of Challis the better my chance of influencing him towards the wiser course." A little sub-commune with his soul as to whether he was quite sure he was not being influenced by his relations with the county-families and the Bishop confirmed him, and Challis came down to Royd Rectory early in August. Thus it had come about that the Rector and his guest, one day in the middle of that month, were walking about in an early-morning garden--breakfast is very early at the Rectory when its master is by himself there--using up their subjects of conversation; or, rather, perhaps we should say, chat.

You know what a fool one always is about that, when one goes to stay with a friend; how one gets gravelled for lack of matter, and the old subjects have to do a second time, and more. Challis had come down from London by a late train the night before--too late to indulge in arrears of common topics then and there. That slaughter of the innocents had been postponed till next day.

"How's our poor friend blind Samson and his small daughter?" The recollection of Lizarann--more than a twelvemonth past, mind you!--twinkles in the speaker's face as he blows a cloud from his invariable cigar.

"Lizarann's getting on capitally, according to the latest accounts. Samson's become a public character, and is making himself useful as a sort of human pump. Do you want a large bucket of water?"

"Not at this moment. But I may some time. Why?"

"When you do, Samson will wind you one up from under the chalk, as fine a bucket of water as you'll find in the country. It isn't good for gout, certainly. But otherwise it's perfect. Not the ghost of a microbe!"

"Perhaps the microbes were gouty, and died of it. An image of a well presents itself to me, with Samson everlastingly raising water, and villagers bearing it away in pails."

"You've got it exactly. We'll pay Samson a visit."

"Of course we will. I like the idea of Samson at the well-head.... But, I say, Reverend Sir!..."

"What's the question?"

"How about the little wench? Samson's little wench."

"I told you. She's getting on capitally...."

"That's just what I mean. What business has a little wench to be getting on capitally? Has she been ill?"

"I should hardly put it that way. No--I think I may say she hasn't exactly. But this chest-delicacy made the womankind and the doctor a little uneasy. On the whole we thought it best to send her down to Chalk Cliff to get a good dose of sea air. It appears to be setting her up."

Challis glanced shrewdly at the Rector's face of discomfort. "Sea air's the thing," he said. "Does wonders!" And both felt very contented with the effect of imaginary sea air on imaginary human lungs.

That remark we made, a page ago, about the way one uses up one's material for talk so heedlessly, was made with a reservation. It should only be applied to causeries, not to serious debate of deep interest. There are two distinct strata of conversation with all people; the things that interest us generally are the top stratum; those that touch us are the second. Go a little deeper, and you will reach those that put us on the rack. Only, when it comes to that, is it conversation any longer? What is it?

These two men had plenty to talk about in the top stratum--enough to fill the day out had they chosen. But the Rector had no intention of leaving the second untouched, and no fear of digging down to the third, if need were. There was, however, no need for either yet awhile. Both might remain in abeyance, under a silent pact, as long, at least, as the sun shone. Serious talk-time comes with lamps and candles. Once in the day Challis was conscious of the thinness of the crust of the second stratum. On their way to visit Jim's well-head he asked his companion whereabouts it was. "Half-way between the village and the Hall," was the reply--"perhaps rather nearer the Hall than the village. Oh yes--certainly nearer!" Challis asked--to make talk, for he knew the answer to his question--whether the family were there now. "Miss Arkroyd isn't," said the Rector.

"I have never seen blind Samson, you know," said Challis. "Only the little cuss." The recollection of Lizarann brought a twinkle to his face. To his companion's, none. Who, however, says gravely: "She was a dear, amusing little thing."

Blind Samson is on duty. The blaze of a sun, low enough to make long shadows, shows the wreck of a man, his face bronzed now by its glare through a hot summer and the congenial effort of the well-handle. A little way off you would not know the eyes saw nothing, but for their never flinching from the sunlight that strikes full upon them. Going nearer, you would know them for dead. So too, if his legs were hidden as he leans on the bearing-post, puffing placidly at his pipe, you would judge him a fine sample and a strong, well cast indeed for the part of Samson.

"Jim's a popular chap in these parts," says the Rector as they draw near. "Our barber in the village tells me he always looks forward to Mr. Coupland's weekly visit. Every Saturday Jim goes to him--in spite of a fiction he indulges in that he can shave himself--to be ready for church on Sunday."

"I thought you said the other day--I mean last April--that he was a worse heathen than myself?"

"So he is. But he has made a compromise with his Maker--whom he disapproves of strongly otherwise--on the score of music. He is a tremendous addition to the village choir. I fancy he was always musical, but his blindness has developed the faculty."

"Well--it must be water in the desert for poor Jim. Here we are, I suppose?"

A dog came down the path of worn bricks, set on edge, that leads to the well. He is Jim's dog, and very important, for he conducts Jim to the well and back daily, in Lizarann's absence. But the actual importance of this dog, though great, is as nothing compared to his conviction of it. This, if it does not amount to a belief that he turns the well-handle, lays claim to reserved powers of veto over, or permission conceded to, Jim's interference with the water-supply. He smells every applicant for water carefully, to see that all is right, and he glances into every bucket before it leaves the well-head, and occasionally tastes the contents, as though in search of microbes. In his opinion it is entirely owing to him that the well has not been poisoned by bicyclists, who are afraid to stop and effect their wicked purposes because of the promptitude with which he runs out and barks at them. He appears to sanction Challis and the Hector, and to explain them, obligingly, to his principal--or perhaps we should say employee.

"I caught the sound of ye, coming down the road, master," says Jim. "You're a glad hearing to a man, a marning like this. A sight for sore eyes, as the saying is." Which was said with such a serene, unconscious confidence that it almost imposed on his hearers. Jim didn't let the Rector's hand go at once. "Nothing further, I lay?" said he anxiously.

"Not since yesterday, Jim. I thought the letter a good one. I've brought it back in my pocket.... We're talking about his little girl, Challis, down at Chalk Cliff.... This is Sir Alfred Challis, Jim, a friend of Lizarann's."

Jim seemed puzzled for a few seconds, perhaps not recalling the name in its present form; then experienced illumination. "Ay, sure, sir!... I lost my bearings for the moment.... The little lassie, she's talked of you many's the time. But that'll be a while back?"

"Over a twelvemonth, Jim," says Challis, and his inner soul adds, "And what a twelvemonth!" But he has to talk about the child. "I'm sorry she's not here, Jim," he says, and means it. "We made great friends, your little lassie and I did. She said she liked me better than she did her aunt."

Jim laughed delightedly. "There never was love lost between the lass and her Aunt Priscilla. They weren't cut out for berth-mates." Nevertheless, he didn't want to leave his sister quite out in the cold. "Priscilla's a good-hearted woman, ye know, too, when all's told. But she's had some bad times ... a bad husband...." He hesitated on his condemnation, and went for palliation instead. "Well!--perhaps that's too hard a word. Poor Bob Steptoe!--he'd have made a better end but for his drawback. He took a good rating as a cobbler." Jim paused, perplexed by some reminiscence. "I don't hear much nowadays of my sister Priscilla; not since I come down here. I make out she's in service with a lady at Wimbledon." The fact is, Jim and Aunt Stingy were drifting apart by tacit consent.

Challis ought to have been able to contrive a reminder that Aunt Stingy was his cook. He began by saying: "Of course--with my wife. She's our cook at the Hermitage." That wouldn't do, clearly. Try again! "She's our cook at home." He wasn't at all sure this wasn't worse. He decided on, "She cooks for me, you know, when I'm in London," but threw up entrenchments against possible surprises by changing the subject. "So your little maid's gone to the seaside?"

Jim forgot Aunt Stingy with avidity. "Ah! for sure she has!" said he. "My little lass! But she's coming back early next month. Ask the master!"

"Early next month, Jim. That's the fixture." Is there a trace of cheerful reassurance in the Rector's voice? Yes--just enough to produce misgiving in Jim. It has to be stifled in its birth. Jim treads bravely over the cinder-traps--the fires smouldering underground. "Ye see, gentlemen," he says, "it's this way: If my lassie comes back afore September, there'll maybe be a spell of sunshiny weather fit for a lassie to see her Daddy a mile down the road. Belike, too, stop a little to bear him company, in the best o' the day. Many a September month have I known, early morning apart, to compare with the rarest days of the summer."

"They call it a summer, you know, Jim. St. Augustin's summer." So says Challis; and he is ready to supply any climatic record to please Jim. "Sometimes the thermometer has been known to stand at ninety in the shade."

Jim is greatly impressed, and very happy over this. He sees before him, in imagination, a fortnight or three weeks of matchless weather, with Lizarann beside him. His soul laughs; indeed, his lungs join chorus. "What did the doctor say again, master?" says he.

But Athelstan's face is one of concern. The doctor's report had been, alas! that the effect of the sea air would very likely begin to tell on the patient when she got back. She would, no doubt, be better when she got back to her father, about whom she was fidgety. This doctor kindly vouched for the same thing having happened several times in like cases.

Challis watched his friend as he made out the best tale he could. Do you remember Challis's first appearance in this story, and how we spoke of him as perceptive? He was that, and all sorts of little intimations constantly reached him, by mysterious telegraphies, of concurrent events--things many would miss altogether. No wonder he read between the lines of Athelstan Taylor's version of the doctor's report! No wonder!--for any but a blind man would have detected in the Rector's serious face how little he believed the well-worn forms of speech folk use to keep the hearts of others alive, in case--just this one time--a real change for the better should come, or the last new remedy should fulfil the promises of the ream of testimonials it was wrapped in when we bought it. But the Rector threw as much hope as he dared into his telling, and did well, on the whole. And Jim was satisfied for now.

A little later, when the two were starting to go back to the Rectory by a roundabout way, having left Jim attending to the demands for water of an influx of applicants, Athelstan Taylor said to Challis: "I felt quite ashamed of myself just now.... What for? Why, for talking all that stuff to Jim about poor little Lizarann! But what can one do? There's nothing to be gained by plunging the poor fellow in despair, as long as any hope remains of her outgrowing it."

"You mean there is some hope, then?"

"Some." That was all the Rector said.

"I see. But is it to be a long job?"

"Probably not--probably not. But she may live for some little time yet--with care. I don't know how much Jim knows or suspects."

"Where is she now actually?"

"It's called the Browne Convalescent Home, at Chalk Cliff, in Kent. Sidrophel--I should say Pordage--said he saw no object in sending her to a mild lowering place at this time of year. What she wanted was the sea-air, and he is very much in love with Chalk Cliff. Well!--one smells the seaweed there."

"It's the iodine, I suppose." Challis's mind travelled to his own children, who were, he hoped, soaking in the iodine, wallowing in the sand, wading in the shallows, and not keeping their things out of the water. Should he ever see Mumps and Chobbles again? Possibly. Suppose he were to meet them years hence, lengthened and completed, at Girton, perhaps--even engaged; who can tell?--would they know him again? His thoughts rushed swiftly, more suo, to the construction of all sorts and conditions of social horrors, beginning with an improbable evening party with Chobbles in the foreground, and her married sister, and a fiendish necessity for explaining to a dazzling lady who was charmed with both of them, that they were his children by his former marriage--the very identical Mumps and Chobbles he had so often told her about! But that dream was soon sent packing, although the dazzling lady said, with a pleasant, graceful contempt for all correlatives of Grundy: "You must come and see me, you two dear girls! Do let's be German, and take no notice of things. Never mind the orkwidities, as my husband calls them." A worse phantasm followed. Two girls in mourning beside a grave, and "Marianne, daughter of James and Sarah Craik," on the headstone. So vivid was the impression that the words were on his lips: "Mumps and Chobbles, don't you know me?" He shook it off, denouncing its intrinsic absurdity, even while he admitted he had no justification for doing so. Marianne would die, and so would he, and neither would be beside the other when the hour came.

"Am I going too quick for you?" said the Rector. He had broken into his tremendous stride, as he was always apt to do when not checked. Challis admitted his limitations, and suggested that they might go easily up this hill. As this hill was a short-cut across a curve of the road, and the path over it was zig-zagged, and landslipped, and fern-grown, besides seeming to consist almost entirely of rabbit-holes, it was not a hill to go up easily, in any literal sense. But Challis had only intended to suggest moderation. He gave his whole soul to avoiding burrows, and reached solid ground alive. As he approached the top, alongside of his companion, he was aware of a huge dog, blue-black against the sky, on the ridge in front of them. Saladin appeared to be waiting for them, and to have time on his hands. Whistled to, he condescended to trot towards them, the sooner to meet. Interrogated as to his reasons for being there by himself, he kept silence, but smelt his questioners.

Perhaps he wasn't by himself. Surmise inclined to the supposition that the carriage was in the neighbourhood; probably Lady Arkroyd, driving back from Thanes, said the Rector. But attentive listening established carriage-wheels on the road from Furnival--the opposite direction.

"It's Miss Arkroyd coming from the station. She was coming by the two-forty from Euston." So spoke Challis.

The Rector looked full at him. "How did you know?" said he. He seemed a good deal surprised.

"Because she told me," said Challis. He in his turn seemed surprised at the surprise of the other, and interrogation remained on the face of both. Saladin seemed able to wait.

After a moment the Rector said suddenly: "Because she's been away at her sister's--Brayle Court, you know--the Felixthorpes'."

"Yes; why not? She told me three weeks ago she was coming to-day. She drove to Bletchley from Brayle."

Athelstan Taylor's face was a funny mixture of perplexity and mild reproach, not without confidence in his companion. "But why didn't you say so?" said he.

"You mean when you mentioned her just now--just before we came to Jim? Well!--because I didn't want to spoil our walk.... There's the carriage!"

The carriage was there, in the road some distance below, and was whistling for Saladin. He appeared to accept the whistle as a courtesy on its part, intended to keep him au fait of its movements and whereabouts. Otherwise he had a short time at his disposal, and would pass it in giving sanction and encouragement to his present companions. The horses' hoofs and the whistle passed and grew less in the distance, but Saladin remained undisturbed and statuesque.

"No," said Challis; "I didn't want to spoil our walk. Indeed, I'm in two minds if I shouldn't do better to say nothing at all about it."

"About what?"

"Well!--that's just the point. However, as I've leaked out this much, I suppose I may as well tell. About myself and Judith Arkroyd."

"Oh dear!" said the Rector, "I had been supposing--I mean I had been beginning to hope--that was all at an end...."

Saladin had no more time to spare for nonsense of this sort. He went with a rush--the rush of a sudden whirlwind--crashing through mere valueless briar and fern like gossamer; but suggesting that it was for their sakes, not his, that he steered clear of timber-trees. The carriage, still audible, became aware of him, and stopped whistling.

"I want to tell you all about it on my own behalf. And I suspect Judith will on hers." So Challis spoke, when the lull came. He then went on to tell all that this story has told, and it may be more. And the narrative lasted all the way back to the Rectory.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter XLIV

THE RECTOR'S OPINION, AND WHY IT CARRIED NO WEIGHT. OF THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER, AND WHY CHALLIS DOUBTED IT. YET THE RECTOR TOLERATED HIS IMPIETY

The Rector sat in his usual chair in the library smoking his usual after-dinner pipe, his only concession to tobacco. It served a turn now--harmonized his life with that of his friend, who, of course, sat on the other side of the rug, that both might be conscious of an empty grate. One pays this tribute in the summer, to the comfort the warmth would have been had it been winter. Or is it a survival of some ancestral fire-worship?

It was Challis's second pipe in the day that he was lighting, but his fourth smoke. He looked as though something narcotic were wanting, if he were to sleep in the night ahead of him. His forehead throbbed, the Rector felt convinced. Else why did that restless, nervous hand skim it over, from side to side, then press the closed eyelids below as though to squeeze a pain out?

He had told the whole of his story, ending it up during dinner, and doing poor justice to the efforts of the Rectory cook. Athelstan Taylor had listened nearly in silence, not saying how much he had already heard, or had guessed, of the way things had gone since his attempted intercession with Mrs. Challis. Challis's absences from England, and the chance that their London visits never coincided, had kept them apart until his visit to London three months since. On that occasion they did little more than arrange that Challis should visit the Rectory "as soon as he could get away." And he couldn't--or at least didn't--"get away" till August. But nothing that he had told his friend had occasioned the latter the least surprise.

"Well!--that's all," said he, as he lighted his pipe.

The Rector's face was all strength and pity as he sat looking at his storm-tossed friend. He remained silent awhile over it. Challis could not hurry him to speech. However, there was the whole evening ahead.

At last he spoke. "That's quite all, is it? Very good. Now, I can't and won't recommend any course to you, because, my dear man, you are under an hallucination, and you wouldn't pay the slightest attention to anything I suggested. But I'll tell you, if you like, what I shall say to Judith Arkroyd if she comes to me for advice."

"What?"

"I shall say, 'Don't!'"

"Don't go on with it, that is?"

"Exactly. I shan't mince matters. I shall tell the girl flatly that I think she's doing wrong...."

"But why--but why? Surely if she is, I am. Or more so! Far more so!"

"Do you suppose I regard you as a responsible agent?"

"I don't think you do. But I am one, for all that. What shall you say to Judith?"

"That I do regard her as a responsible agent. I shall entreat her not to consent to such a mad scheme. I shall try to make her see the folly of acting under panic in a matter of such vital importance. I shall tell her plainly, as I told you an hour ago, that I think your wife's action has been justifiable, although it has been violent and exaggerated. I admit that, you know...."

"And I think that it has been violent and exaggerated, but admit that it has not been altogether unjustifiable. Isn't that the difference between us, Rector?"

"Precisely. Well!--I shall say so to Judith. And I shall put it this way to her. 'If before God and your conscience you can disclaim all share in what has come about, if you have never by word or look been guilty of an attempt to make this man's plighted faith to his wife a wavering one, then it may be you may marry him and not live to repent it. But if it is otherwise, you may be sowing by such a marriage the seeds of a remorse that may last you a life-time.'..."

Challis interrupted him. "Judith is absolutely unconscious...." he began.

"Exactly, exactly, exactly!" said the Rector, nodding in a comfortable, we-understand-all-that sort of way. "But, about this sort of thing, sometimes a young lady's standard of unconsciousness is low. You must excuse me if I try--it's a toss-up if I succeed--to make her probe her soul to its lowest depths."

"My dear Yorick!--excuse my boning Miss Fossett's name again; but it does suit you so exactly--My dear Yorick, whatever you do or say will be right--shall be right. That's the rule of the game. All I say is, don't make Judith imagine herself to have been guilty of a treacherous scheme that never entered her mind. She assures me...." He hesitated.

"Yes!" from the Rector.

"Well!--she assures me that until that unfortunate--or mind you!--it may prove fortunate--failure in self-restraint ... suppose we call it!..."

"Call it anything you like, as long as you feel properly ashamed of it."

Challis accepted the rule of the game he had just laid down loyally, and continued, "Until that moment she had not the slightest idea that I had ever entertained...." Again a hesitation.

"Precisely!" said the Rector. Both went as near a laugh as the contexts permitted, and then Challis said, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, "Well!--it's no use talking." But his friend meant to say more. "It may be no use," said he. "But I've picked up--in the pulpit, I suppose--the old vice of the sermon-monger, and I like to have my say out...."

"I didn't mean you were to stop," interjected Challis.

"Then I shall go on, as per contract." He appeared to put semi-levities aside with the finished pipe he laid down, and stood facing Challis as he sat. Standing so, he looked so much the build of a soldier that his cloth, so obnoxious to Challis, almost became regimentals. He resumed, very earnestly, "I shall say this, too, to Judith--no!--don't be afraid I shall be cruel to her. Why!--haven't I known her since she was a little tot, and sat on my knee?... I shall tell her that to me marriage is a sacrament just as solemn as any mutual undertaking where each party is in earnest and believes in the earnestness of the other ... yes!--even as contracts about darling money--and that no antecedent relation of the couple can flaw the pledge once given ... yes!--I am prepared to go any length; but never mind that now.... And I shall tell her this:--that however obstinate and wrong-headed your wife's conduct may have been, just in so far as it has been provoked by any misconduct of yours or hers--just so far are you morally guilty in contemplating any step which will make the position irretrievable."

Challis broke into his momentary pause. "Do you really mean, soberly and seriously, that you think Marianne's dragging the children away--my Chobbles was like your Joan, you know, Yorick!--do you think her catching at a legal pretext to deprive me of them has not given me a free hand? What right has Marianne to condemn me to a loveless and lonely life...?"

"Stop, Challis--stop! Stop on the legal pretext! At what age of the world has man, the strong, scrupled to catch at legal pretexts to secure the betrayal and confusion of woman, the weak? Legal pretexts, mind you, whose iniquity stinks in every legal phrase that relates to her, in every statute that he has framed and she has had no hand in! How many legal pretexts are there in the whole of them that a woman can catch at to her own advantage? One turns up now and again, in a rare conjunction of circumstances, and hey presto!--we are all on the alert to blame the woman who does it."

"You're quite right," said Challis ruefully. "It's melancholy to think how keenly alive one is to other folks' sinfulness when one suffers by it personally; loses one's Chobbles, for instance. I was fond of the young person, you see, Yorick! Besides, there's Mumps. And even Bob she contrives to stint me of. Either that, or the boy drifts away from his sisters."

"You should have thought of all that when you...."

"Made a fool of myself?"

"Quite so. By-the-bye, Challis, have you asked yourself--supposing that you ratify this folly of yours, as I understand you propose to do--what you mean to tell Bob to account for the new order of things?"

"Yes, frequently."

"And have you answered the question?"

"No, I have not."

"Do you see any prospect of answering it?"

"None whatever!"

"Very well, Challis! Now listen. It appears to me that you are going to take a step you are this much ashamed of, that you cannot look your own son in the face about it. And you are doing this confessedly in case the passing of an Act of Parliament should make that step impossible at a future time. You know perfectly well that--Judith apart--you would welcome that Act of Parliament, because it would give you back your children, and at least pave the way to a reconciliation with their mother.... Yes, it would! The 'living in Sin' twaddle would die a natural death before an Act of Parliament; your excellent mother-in-law's teeth would be drawn, and your wife would come to her senses as soon as the two little girls were delivered at Wimbledon by a judicial order. Once you two were face to face--just think of it!--do you suppose old times wouldn't come to the rescue?"

The Rector was hitting hard. He could see it in the compressed lips, the nostril and eyelid and brow that would not be still, in the face that was hard to control at the best of times. Why could he not keep to his artillery? Why send his troops into the enemy's country, bristling with ambuscades? Why bring Judith's image back, when all the strength of his case lay in revival of the days gone by?

But he did, possibly because he could not conceive of a passion for one woman dwelling in the same heart with an affection for another. He could not measure the force of the personal factor in Judith. He had never been under fire.

"And see," he went on injudiciously--"see what it is you look to gain when you have cut yourself finally adrift from almost everything that has been precious to you in the past. What are the chances of happiness for a couple so assorted? Think of your difference of age!... well!--perhaps that's the least important point ... think of the difference in the habits of a life-time, of the sort of life Judith has been accustomed to, of the way her pride may suffer ... and not only hers--yours too--yours too, my dear Challis, in a thousand ways! Consider this too; what right have you to take for granted that she will ever be forgiven by her family? You say they are now at daggers drawn. What claim have you to ask such a sacrifice of her as the surrender of her relations with her parents and all the associations of her childhood? Think of it!"

A moment after he perceived he had pushed his argument too far. Challis said firmly, "I accept Judith's readiness to make this sacrifice as a sure proof of her feelings towards myself. I see in it a guarantee of a happiness far beyond my deserts. It is because she is ready to give up so much for me and risk her whole life in my keeping that I am rushing the position. I cannot have her think hereafter that our union was made impossible by my remissness--by my fainéantise--at a critical time."

The Rector walked uneasily about the room. "Oh dear," said he, "I wish to Heaven that Bill would get itself brought into the Lords and rejected, tout à l'improviste, before you could arrange this madness. Then you would have a cool twelvemonth to think it over in. And perhaps you would both come to your senses."

"And perhaps--d'autant plus à l'improviste--that Bill would pass the Lords and become law. How should I seem then to the girl who is ready to throw all away for me now? Do you conceive that I should be able to console myself for the wrong I had done by dragging back to my home a wife whose jealousy ... I must call it so--poor Polly Anne!..."

"What else can you call it?"

"There's no other word in the dictionary. What was I saying? ... oh, a wife whose jealousy would by that time have every justification. Where would the happiness be in all that, and for whom?"

"In no case can you hope for an immediate reconstitution of your old home life. You, Challis--excuse me--have stirred up too much mud for the pool to become clear in a moment. But remember Disraeli's phrase--the 'magic of patience.'"

"A good phrase, a very good phrase! I am game for any amount of Hope, dear Yorick--hypothetical Hope, of a state of things that will never come about! If it did, I might get some sort of consolation out of it. What would Judith?"

The Rector was handicapped by his disbelief in Judith, whom he did not credit with overmuch heart; certainly not with one that would break on slight provocation. He could not say anything of this to this passionate fool of a man, over head and ears in love. Or he might have replied, "Don't you fret about Judith. She'll be all right enough." As it was, he could only keep closed lips, and pace about the room. Challis continued:

"And, after all, we are leaving the most probable possibility of the lot quite out in the cold. Suppose the mad scheme--Judith's marriage with me--does not come off, and the Bill passes. Suppose that I am inconsequent enough to jump at the new-fledged legal powers of depriving Marianne of her children, after damning her uphill and down for doing the very same thing herself; suppose me with my family back on the hearth--crying and frightened probably--and never a mother to see to them! Suppose, in fact, that Marianne stands to her guns! How then?"

"Other men have been in the same position before now." Perhaps the speaker was thinking of himself.

"Can you name a case in which no substitute for the mother existed, and the father was not at liberty to provide one? Please exclude salaried employees from the answer."

"Oh, I wasn't going to go that length. Heaven forbid!"

"You must observe," Challis continued, "that divorce a vinculo is only available if my wife arranges about the co-respondent. I can't!" He added in a voice that showed how strangely racked his feelings were, "Poor Polly Anne!--she wouldn't the least know how to set about it."

"I'm horribly sorry for you, Challis," said the Rector. "I am indeed! I would go the length of wishing that bigamy could be sanctioned, in certain cases, only that you are quite the wrong man for it. You wouldn't enjoy it."

"Have I not a foretaste of its horrors?" said Challis. "You see, Yorick dear, when Love comes in at the door, Patriarchal ideas fly out at the window. Jacob was a cucumber. I'm not!"

"Well!--Jacob must have loved Rachel, after a fashion. Seven years!... consider!..."

"Oughtn't it to be read 'weeks,' perhaps? Criticism is very accommodating about the seven days of Creation. Make it weeks." The conversation became irrelevant.

But after a good deal more talk of the same sort, an hour later, Challis said, "You're not a consistent Rector, do you know! You said when we began that you couldn't and wouldn't advise me. And you have substantially advised me to tell Judith to-morrow that we must leave the forelock of opportunity alone, and just take our chance of a permanent veto on matrimony, if that Bill goes through the Lords."

"Well!--yes! At least, it comes to the same thing. It has leaked out in conversation what I should have said to you if I had thought you would take my advice...."

"Which would have been...?"

"Which would have been, 'On no account take an irrevocable step under pressure.' Believe me, Challis, if you do this thing, and this Bill never becomes law at all, and then you live to repent of the knot you have tied indissolubly, the thought hereafter that you gave way to a needless panic will make remorse tenfold more bitter."

"Are not you, when you say that, allowing a disbelief in the Bill's passing to influence you?"

"I may be, a little. But not nearly so much as I am by a belief I must try to explain to you ... well!--it's none so easy. But I thought I had succeeded in explaining it to myself too." He paused a few seconds, then got clearer. "It's something like this. I can't conceive that any retrospective clause of the Act could declare valid a marriage the illegitimacy of which the parties themselves had acknowledged during the period of its legal invalidity. Do you see?... You would very likely word it more clearly than I can."

"No--that's as clear as daylight. But I am not prepared to acknowledge the illegitimacy of my marriage with Marianne."

"How can you act upon it, to the extent of marrying another woman, without acknowledging it?"

"If I were not under compulsion to acknowledge it, should I ever have thought of marrying the other woman? I plead coercion. Marianne dissolved our marriage. I had no hand in it."

"Coercion or no," said the Rector, "it comes to the same thing. No retrospective clause could declare valid a marriage that had been voided by one of the parties yielding to a coercion quite within the rights of the other to impose. Not that I'm sure there isn't a sort of general legal usage, that no one can claim legal advantage from the illegality of his own action."

"I see," said Challis. "Heads, deceased sister's husband wins. Tails, deceased wife's sister loses! But how would such an interpretation of retrospective action affect me and Judith?"

"Why, clearly! If the Bill passed ever so, your marriage with Marianne would remain void. It would class with any other contract, illegal at the time, whose illegality had been subsequently acknowledged and acted on. I heard once of a curious case in point. Two young people had got married, knowing nothing of a consanguinity between them, owing to an old family quarrel. The girl was really a very much junior aunt of the young man; their respective mothers, daughters of the same father, having been born forty years apart. Of course, the children of this atrocious marriage were illegitimate."

"Did they part when they found it out?"

"Oh dear no! They brazened it out--said the meaning of the term 'aunt' was clear. Aunts had fronts, and so forth. The gentleman calls his wife aunty to this day, I believe. Perhaps you've seen the people? They've a large property in the South Riding of Yorkshire."

But Challis hadn't, and didn't know their name when mentioned. He seemed more interested in his own affairs. "If I understand you," said he, "your advice is--not to marry, in view of the possibility of this new enactment not acting retrospectively in cases of couples disunited by mutual consent, at a time when law held that no union existed. Let's pretend my consent was given, this time, for argument's sake."

"You have stated the case admirably. That is my advice. Wait!"

"You have a beautiful confidence, Yorick, in Acts of Parliament--before they are made! Would it be reinforced or weakened, I wonder, by a perusal of the Statutes at Large? Doesn't an element of hopefulness come in?"

"Hm--well--perhaps! That's my advice, anyhow. And that's the advice I shall give to Judith Arkroyd, if she comes to consult me. I shan't volunteer anything."

"I wish I could think as you do--about the effect of the Act. I mean." Challis's manner was to the last degree fitful and uneasy. "I mean I wish I could be sure it would leave the question open."

The Rector, returning to his friend's side after one of his walks about the room, laid his strong hand on his shoulder, and the sense of its strength was welcome. "Challis, Challis!" said he, earnestly, "can you not read in your own words how well you know that you are acting under panic? Ask your heart--ask your conscience--if a wish for an extension of time would be possible in a mind really made up--a mind really believing such a step as you propose to take a right and honourable one! Confess that the reason you would be glad of a respite is that you are none so sure, after all, that what you do is the wisest course for either yourself or your wife; or, for that matter, for Judith."

Challis seemed for a moment puzzled about his meaning. Then he said, "Do you mean that you doubt the reality of my--of my love for Judith?" He seemed half ashamed of it, too!

"I mean that I think you are besotted about her--bewitched by her woman's beauty--the slave of an inclination you may live to repent one day in sackcloth and ashes. Well!--one can understand it all, down to the ground. You are not the first...."

Challis flushed a little angrily, and began, "Do you mean that Judith is...." He hesitated.

The Rector caught his meaning, and interrupted him. "A flirt?" said he. "No--I didn't mean that; though, mind you, I can't give the young lady complete absolution on that score. What I meant was that mighty few men in the world get through life without knowing all about this sort of thing from experience. Perhaps your catching the fever so late in life, after two marriages, makes the case exceptional. However, as I told you, I don't regard you as a rational being at present; so I won't preach."

He had not removed his hand from Challis's shoulder, and the action of the latter as he turned away and, crossing to the window, looked out at the starlit night, had its shade of protest in it, though it could not be said that he had exactly shaken the hand off.

Athelstan Taylor waited a moment, looking half sorry, half amused, but not the least disposed to weaken his words. Then he followed his friend to where he stood looking out, and said as he replaced his hand--only that this time he laid his arm fully across the shoulder--"Remember the compact, my good man, remember the compact! I'm to say what I like."

"You are to say what you like, dear Yorick, and soften nothing. You think me a fool, and I am one. But the fact that my folly is carried nem. con. won't get me out of the difficulty it has got me into. Blame it as you will--but your blame won't answer the question I ask myself every hour of the day: what sort of value will Judith set on the love of a man who hung fire about carrying out his pledges till it was too late, on the miserable plea that it was ten chances to one another twelvemonth of vacillation might be possible? What right has any man to put expediencies, calculations of chance, the unforeseen outcomes of this or that, against the well-being of the woman he is all the while coolly asking to give herself away to him? No, Yorick, I haven't got it in me to go and say to Judith, 'I love you; it is true. But if I wed you now, while we know we are free to wed, and then some time repentance comes, it will be a bitter thought to me that--had I waited' ... et cetera--don't you see?"

"My dear Challis, I am no match for the eloquence of a gifted author who is pleading the cause of his own inclinations...."

"Even when he ends up with 'et cetera'?"

"Even then. But remember this--that what I am saying to you now is scarcely meant as urging definite action upon yourself. It may have seemed so in form, but my actual meaning has been to show the sort of advice I shall give Judith if I have the good fortune to speak with her in time; if, that is, she gives me the right to speak by speaking first herself. I shall do the same with the Bart. and her ladyship. If they don't take me into their confidence, I shall presume they don't want me to share it."

"Talk to Judith by all means. But Judith won't counsel delay--I feel sure of it--if she supposes that I shall think she has done so for my sake. She knows perfectly well that the readier she is to sacrifice herself for me, the keener I shall be to confiscate the knife. If she were to plead against this hasty action that she herself felt insecure in it--would rather run the risks, on the chances--that would be quite another matter. But she won't do that."

"If it comes to cross-fires of reciprocal misgivings and misunderstandings--or understandings, if you like--between you and Judith Arkroyd, I give up, and there's an end on't!" The Rector's laugh made the atmosphere happier. "But I'm afraid my general conclusion is that man is never at a loss for good reasons for doing anything he wants to do, especially when it involves a lady."

"You may be right. But it's a horrible perplexity."

Athelstan Taylor was lighting candles for bed. For it was past midnight. As he took Challis's hand to say good-night, he said to him: "We superstitious, old-world, out-of-date folk, priests and the like, are in the habit of praying to be guided right in horrible perplexities. Is it any use...?"

"Well!--plenty of use as far as my good-will to feel with you is concerned? But to my inner vision, none! To my thought, Omnipotence is already doing everything--everything everywhere--and I don't see how I could put up a prayer to the Top Bloke ... pardon my using an expression you object to...."

"Not at all. Go on."

"... A prayer to guide me right without appearing to suggest either that He was already guiding me wrong, or that the Bottom Bloke--no one can possibly object to that--had usurped his functions."

Strange to say, the Rector seemed not the least shocked. On the contrary, he laughed. "All right, old chap," said he. "You leave yourself in the hands of the Top Bloke. He'll see to it all right. Good-night!" But he looked back as he opened his bedroom door to say, "Keep the gas on till you have the electric light."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter XLV

HOW CHALLIS AND JUDITH MET AGAIN AT TROUT BEND, AND TALKED IT OVER. HOW SHE CRIED OFF, FEELING SECURE. AND OF THE ARRANGEMENT THEY MADE. OF A CENTENARIAN WHO GOT HALF-A-SOVEREIGN

It was early morning at Trout Bend, and the man who sat on the moss-grown beechen root this story told of--more than a year ago now--was turning over in his heart all that had come about in that short time, and trying to say to himself point-blank that it was no fault of his own. He succeeded in saying it--said it aloud in words, that there should be no doubt at all about it. He said it twice, in fact, and seemed in the end dissatisfied.

Every little incident of the day's life seemed to throw doubt on the point. The discordant jay that shrieked in the thicket as good as cried out "Liar!" and fluttered away disgusted. The squirrel that paused half-way up the beech-trunk had an air of shocked reproach in his very large and startled eye, and when he moved again seemed to want to get out of the way as soon as possible, and to mix with sincere Society again. The fish that leaped in the pool had come to the surface this time, clearly, to say to Challis: "We have met before, and my life has not changed. Yours has, and you have only yourself to thank for it! Why need you leave your native waters uncompelled?"

Challis denied the suggestion his own mind had made. He had had to share in what followed; his exodus from those waters had been compulsory. Or, rather, was it not true that the waters had drained away from him, and left him to find another pool downstream, or die unnourished on the dry sands? But it was a metaphor that rang false, and he dismissed it impatiently; the more so that some mental distortion, akin to the one he invented the strange name for, must needs intrude an unwarranted image of an angler with rod and line, and rouse him to an indignant denial of that angler's identity. Whose fault soever it was, it was none of Judith's.

And as he thought this, there she was herself, crossing the little plank bridge where the convict dropped the ring, and found it again so many years too late.

He was on his feet in a moment, and on his way to meet her. He had a double-barrelled kiss ready on his lips, supposing the coast clear at the moment of their meeting. Saladin, who was present, was in confidence, and didn't count. Botheration take that old woman gathering sticks!--did she matter?

Judith thought so, evidently, and payment had to wait. "Company!" said she. She was looking as beautiful as ever--more so! "She's a hundred and two, I believe," she added. "But one has to lay down a rule in these matters, and stick to it." She was referring to the old woman, who most likely neither saw nor heard, or if she did, only harked back to eighty years ago, and thought, "Why not?"

All Challis's cloud of doubt and self-reproach vanished as her consolatory hand lay in his arm. Something of her masterful nature was in the touch of it, communicable through nerve-currents. It reassured him, and he could respond to its pressure, old woman or no!

It was an arranged meeting: much taken for granted. Conversation to go on presently where our last meeting left it. Meanwhile, short recognitions of current event.

"When did you come?"

"The day before yesterday."

"The voice of gossip cannot say you followed me down here. Not that it would matter!"

"I fancy we are pretty transparent." Challis dismissed the matter as a slight interest only. "Are we peaceful at the Hall?"

"Oh--well! One short row--a very small one! It's rather unfortunate that some people who were expected have cried off. And another gang had just gone. So my dear parents ... to whom I am really devoted; and they are so good and upright and that sort of thing ... what was I saying about them?--oh yes!--my dear parents and I were alone. It was unlucky." Challis threw up his eyebrows very slightly, and made a barely audible note of interrogation through closed lips. She replied to it: "Yes--the usual sort of thing." And they walked on slowly arm in arm, not speaking.

Presently the lady resumed, seeming always the more talkative of the two: "Compulsory truce this evening, I suppose. Most likely Sibyl and Frank, who, I understand, is ridiculous about Sib. Besides, Mr. What's-his-name is coming ... what is his name?"...

"Tell me who he is, and I'll see if I know."

"Oh dear!--man that talks metaphysics...."

"Brownrigg?"

"Of course! Brownrigg. Well!--he's coming this afternoon, so we've only time for a very short allowance of Family Life. I suspect Brownrigg of having an Attraction down here, but I can't for the life of me find out who it is!"

"Attractions are feminine?"

"Always."

"Otherwise I should have thought it might be the Rector."

"The Reverend Athelstan--dear good man! Oh no--it's a lady! It always is. But did the Reverend speak of Broadribb--Brownrigg?"

"I've got an impression that he has been at the Rectory more than once--considerably more. Couldn't exactly say why?"

"There's nothing feminine there--at the Rectory."

Challis was beginning, "Oh yes!--there's ..." when Judith's outburst of laughter cut him short.

"Dear Aunt Bessy! She's forty.... Oh yes, I know she's worthy!" She laughed more than need was; then recovered her gravity, and said, as though she feared her laughter might have grated on her companion: "Not to laugh at the good lady?--is that it? Very well." Judith's mockery for once seemed just short of charming to her lover, to whom it was usually one of her happiest contrasts to Marianne's unsympathetic reverence for so many things her husband's derision classed as beadledom. This time he would have preferred that the time-honoured practice of making game of old maidenhood should have been touched with a lighter hand. There was suggestion of a consciousness of this in Judith's next words: "It was your fault, you know, Titus, for hinting at Brownrigg. It was quite too funny."

Her fascination reasserted itself; indeed, its wavering had been of the slightest, and had not lasted long enough for acknowledgment. "I admit it was a laughable notion," said Challis. "However, I don't think an enchantress is necessary in this case. Athelstan Taylor would account for anything, and you know he is liberality itself towards all new ideas. He told me yesterday he thought Graubosch a most interesting personality."

"Did you--you say you had come yesterday?"

"No--the night before."

"You and the great Yorick--isn't that what his friend Miss Foster calls him?--haven't been talking of Graubosch all that time?"

"Fossett. Oh dear no! We have been talking chiefly of...." A pause. "... Well!--of our affairs."

"Meaning yours and mine. Eh bien!--and what says Sir Oracle?... No, no!--no irreverence, indeed!... oh no!--you said nothing. But you have such a mobile countenance." A shade of protest had been detectable, presumably, in Challis's face, and he had disclaimed it.

"Meaning your affairs and mine," said he, with only a pooh-pooh smile for the sub-colloquy. "Sir Oracle is in opposition."

"I knew he would be--dear good man! You'll tell me I'm sneering, I know--but I'm not--if I say...."

"What?"

"That his is such a beautiful unworldly character. I can tell you exactly what he said to you."

"Then, dearest, I needn't tell you. Fire away!"

"He said we must on no account take an irrevocable step in a hurry; and must trust to Providence to keep His eye on the Lords when the division comes, and make sure of a majority against the Bill."

"He said something not very unlike it. A good shot! But he never suggested that Providence was disposed to consider our interests. I must admit that I don't see why Providence should. My own attitude has hardly been conciliatory." Challis then went on to give a fairer version of what the Rector had said. As he spoke, a touch of scorn came on the beautiful face beside him, and grew and grew. And he fancied the pressure of the hand on his sleeve lightened.

"A thorough business man's view!" said Judith, when he stopped. "Scarcely so unworldly on the whole as our good Yorick generally is! I don't know, though, whether I ought to say that. Beautiful unworldly characters manage their affairs unselfishly only because...."

"Because they think Providence will act as their agent? Is that what you were going to say?"

"Well!--they always boast that it pays best in the long run. Anyhow, this clearly was the business view. To the business mind, with its faith in Law and Order and Representative Government and things, nothing can be clearer. You and Marianne have cried off a compact Law and Order condemned, while you still had a right to do so. Is it creditable that the New Act will tie you together again, willy-nilly?"

"Dearest!--try to see my difficulty. Don't think me cowardly or politic; only believe that it is a difficulty to me, and a serious one. Suppose us wedded--to-morrow--before the passing of the Act, anyhow! Suppose that when it comes it legitimates retrospectively every marriage that was not acknowledged void by both parties while it was still an unlawful one!"

Judith withdrew her hand and looked away. "Have you not acknowledged the illegitimacy of yours?" she said coldly.

"In a sense I have." Challis was evidently flinching under his consciousness of his position.

"I do not like 'in a sense,' Titus. Is Marianne your wife or not?"

"Listen to me, dearest!" He would have replaced her hand in his arm, but she withstood his doing so, partly qualifying her resistance by a pretence of finding Saladin's whistle. He continued pleadingly: "Think what it would be for me if at some future time my two little girls were to suffer from a reproach their brother does not share, and charge me with giving my boy a better hold on the world than they could lay claim to...."

"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.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

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 Phoebe 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?"

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

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 Phoebe 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.

Then for the watcher another deadly doze, of jerks and nightmares. And then another waking to the sound of the little patient's voice, curiously full of life this time.

"When I'm took home to my Daddy, Teacher, where Mrs. Forks is...."

"Yes, dear!"

"Shall the children go on digging and spaddle in the water, just the same like now?"

"Yes, darling, just the same, till it's too cold. Then they'll go home and go to school."

"And fish for sprawns just the same?"

"Just the same."

"And when they've gone to school and no one's on the beach to see, will there be high water?"

"High water? Yes, of course, dear--every day, just the same as now ... what?"

"And low water?"

"And low water too."

"Like when my Daddy went sea-viyages?"

"Like when your Daddy went sea-voyages." But this has been a long talk, and has gone slowly against obstacles of speech. So when Lizarann ends with a half-inaudible, "I sould tell my Daddy that," the torpor is returning, and it may be she really sleeps, for all that the breathing is so difficult. She has persisted that she suffers no pain; so Miss Fossett tries for satisfaction on that score. But the fear is that having no pain may only mean that the pain eludes description. Still, there is room for hope, of a sort.

* * * * *

"I've heard many cases talk like that, quite brightly, just before," says Miss Jane, standing by the bed. She has come to relieve guard, and has heard her friend's report of her night's watching. Lizarann has not moved since she spoke last, an hour ago, and still lies in what may be sleep, breathing heavily. The jerks in the breathing do not wake her, strangely.

"She was almost chattering, one time," says Miss Fossett. "Poor little darling!"

"About her Daddy?"

"Yes, and about the high and low tides, and how he went sea-voyages."

"Fancy that! The little soul! But no delirium?"

"I think none. Just a little feverishness--in the half-waking. Not delirium."

"You go to bed now. I'll call you if there is anything."

"Promise to!" A nod satisfies the speaker, who goes away to lie down. As she looks out, from a window on her way, across a sea without a ripple, she understands why the tide was unheard. Even now, scarcely a sound! She pauses a little to look at the planet blazing above the offing, and its long path of light upon the water--wonders is it Venus or Jupiter?--and passes on to rest. How callous is the bed one lies down on in one's clothes, with something over one, to get a few hours' sleep! And how hard they are to get, sometimes!

* * * * *

Adeline Fossett had had over three hours when she waked with a start in response to a hand on her shoulder. "I should like you to come," said Miss Jane, who then returned at once.

Lizarann, or the shadow that had been she, was propped up with pillows on the bed when Miss Fossett followed her friend two minutes later. "Is that Teacher?" was what she seemed to say. But speech was very faint indeed.

"I don't think she sees you," said Miss Jane.

"Can you hear what I say, darling?" Yes, apparently; and knows it is Teacher who speaks. What is it we can get for her? For the feverish movement of the hands, and the constant effort to articulate, have all the usual effect of baffled speech, with much to say.

Miss Fanshawe's wider hospital experience makes her less receptive of the idea. She waited, silent, while Miss Fossett asked the question more than once, before any intelligible answer came.

Then speech came suddenly to Lizarann. She wanted to get up now, and go to her Daddy. Yes!--she sould like to have her new flock on and go to her Daddy. Mustn't she go, Teacher? To which Teacher replied: "Yes, darling, you shall go, very soon. But it's night now, and Daddy's in bed."

"But I shall go?"

"Yes--indeed you shall! Very soon." Then Miss Fossett looked up at Miss Jane, who merely said, "Not very long now." But how strong the voice was for a moment! Yes--that would be so sometimes--sometimes even louder than that. Wasn't she speaking now?

Miss Fossett stooped to listen again. "I shall see my Daddy," is all she hears. Yes--Lizarann shall see her Daddy--it's a promise! What is that she's saying now? Be quiet and listen!

"When I see my Daddy--when I see my Daddy...."

"Yes--darling! What?"

"When I see my Daddy I shall call out, 'Poy-lot!'"

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us