HOW LIZARANN WAS TAKEN TO MISS FOSSETT'S, BUT HAD A STITCH IN HER
SIDE, AND WASN'T TO GO TO DADDY TO-DAY. HOW THE RECTOR WENT TO JIM IN
THE HOSPITAL, AND JIM WAS DISAPPOINTED ABOUT HIM
If Lizarann had had no grounds for looking forward to a reappearance
of the curious New Policeman who had rescued her, she would have been
more on the alert about the events of the previous night that concerned
Uncle Bob. But she had no doubt her rescuer would come back. And this
anticipation, as well as the hopeful tone in which he had spoken of
Daddy's prospects at the Hospital, set her mind quite at rest about
everything but the thing which presented itself to her merely as
exaggerated domesticity. It was Uncle Bob, only rather more so.
Seen from her point of view, the events that had preceded Uncle Bob
were that Daddy had been in collision with a Pickford's Van, and had
suffered, but not murderously, from the accident; that he had not been
able to walk, because of his leg; and that he had been carried away
by well-disposed officials to an institution that promoted soundness
of wind and limb, and had even been known to make its _bénéficiaires_
musical. A child's mind knows no proportion; and the last item, which
was really a gratuitous invention of the boy whose name was not Moses,
gained credence with Lizarann slowly, and ended by throwing every other
particular into the shade. Further, she knew that Uncle Bob, considered
as an infliction, had been worse--for he was to her merely an endemic
disease that increased or diminished, like gout--and that he had run
out in the snow. Nothing abnormal in that; besides, the police, new
and old, had run after him, to say nothing of the doctor-gentleman
from the house with "Surgery" wrote up big, where you could get a
supply of medicine if you said where you come from, and took back an
exhausted bottle with a surprisingly high number on it, considering
its pretensions. And these events having passed muster as normal, what
followed was only natural.
Her aunt had shown at first dispositions to join the chase, but had
desisted in consequence of remonstrance from neighbours, who had begun
to be aware that history had been in the making during the night at
Steptoe's; he, though chronic the previous evening, having become acute
in the small hours of the morning. Mrs. Hicks and Mrs. Hacker, and
others, having trooped round the vortex of excitement, had counselled
Aunt Stingy to remain where she would be of some use, and not go
canterin' over the buildin' land with no object, in the manner of
speaking. Wasn't three plenty?
Jimmy 'Acker, told off to follow the trail in the snow and bring back
word if he see 'em coming, had come back uneasy and evasive, had
told contradictory stories about what he see, and had confirmed the
public belief in the untrustworthiness of boys. Questioned, during
ostracism, by his sister and Lizarann, his replies had been mysterious,
and his refusal to make them less so unintelligible. The expression,
"Just you wait and see if what I told you ain't k'rect," laid claim
to having said something, sometime; and no effort of his hearers'
memory confirmed his having done so. Other emissaries departed to get
information, and did not come back.
This state of uncertainty had been ended by the reappearance of the
policeman and the doctor, who climbed back over the fence followed by
straggling units from among those who had witnessed the scene at the
lock. Everyone can read something written about Death on the faces of
those who have just seen him.
"Now which of you women was this man's wife?" That was what Lizarann
had heard the policeman--the old sort; she looked in vain for her
glorious friend--say to wifehood within hearing. Whereupon Aunt Stingy
became on a sudden hysterical, and was helped, gasping and crying, into
the house. Lizarann wanted to go too, moved by pity for she knew not
what--for something folk were speaking under their breath about to one
another, not to her; nodding about, pointing about, to something past
or present, beyond the railway-arch; drawing morals about and referring
to their own foresight about. Then she had heard the voice of the
doctor-gentleman:
"Which of you youngsters is his little girl?... Hadn't got a little
girl, hadn't he?... Oh ah!--of course he hadn't.... I should
say--which is the little girl whose dad's hurt his leg and gone to the
Hospital?... Ah, to be sure!--Lizarann. Now, Lizarann, suppose you get
your bonnet and wrop yourself up as warm as you can and come along o'
me to Teacher at the School, just till Mr. Taylor comes to go to see
Daddy with you. The big gentleman?... just him, and nobody else. Come
along!" Which Lizarann did, with alacrity. Daddy was in view again.
Then had come a very pleasant phase of what had really seemed more a
dream than a reality, all along, to Lizarann. She had found herself
being fed and washed and dressed and generally succoured by Miss
Fossett, otherwise Teacher, at her private residence next door to the
School, after the departure of the doctor-gentleman who left her there.
She couldn't for the life of her make out whether it was good news or
bad news he had been telling Teacher under his breath. All she knew
was that she was somehow appointed to go to Daddy in the Hospital,
and that nothing else mattered. Even had she known the tragedy of the
morning, it would only have been the fact of Death that would have
appalled her--not the loss of the man who died. Practically, the grave
was already closing over the remains of Uncle Bob, or the chief part
of them. Decision on that point scarcely rests with ignorance though;
who shall say that even Alcoholism can efface a soul? Nips won't,
however frequently took; a germ always remains. At least, that is our
experience, or an inference from it.
It is always pleasant to feel at liberty to over-indulge a child,
and Miss Fossett, a good-natured woman that might have married--that
describes her--interpreted something the doctor had told her about
Daddy as a licence to do so in this case. So Lizarann enjoyed herself
thoroughly--may almost be said to have been pampered--in the interval
between the doctor's departure and the arrival of the Rev. Athelstan.
When the latter came, as promised, Miss Fossett had said something to
him with concern, under her breath, and he had replied in a strain as
of reassurance, to judge from his tone: "Never you mind the doctor,
Addie. Like enough he was mistaken. Besides, he said he thought they
might save it." Which, half-heard by Lizarann, only left an impression
on her mind of the hospital staff on its knees hunting in the gutter
for poor Jim's takings in coppers, spilt from his pocket last night
when he met with this accident. Also at the moment Lizarann was doing
some arithmetic by herself, _hors de concours_, and honestly believed
she was conferring a real kindness on Teacher by adding up rows of
figures for her. She would have done them quicker, only she had to stop
to lick and rub out each carried cipher after writing in the next one.
Also, when she got the values wrong in an eight, which is difficult,
she had to rub it out and do it all over again.
"Lizarann says two and two make four, but fifteen and twelve don't make
twenty-seven." Lizarann thought Teacher said this rather maliciously.
But she was prompt in self-justification.
"Not of theirselves. Not till you do them in a sum. Like this...." And
she did it.
"Quite right, Lizarann! Of course they don't. But two and two will
make four if you leave 'em alone ever so. Isn't that it?" Thus the
gentleman--a sympathetic soul!
"Yass!" And the little woman felt that justice had been done. But she
didn't know why maturity should laugh, as it did.
"They may save it, of course," Miss Fossett continued. "I don't see
what's to be gained by taking the child to the Hospital, myself. Only
make her miserable! It won't be half as bad if it's a wooden leg and
he's up and well, as seeing him in a hospital ward. Besides, Dr. Ferris
said he couldn't be certain they'd let you see him."
"I fancy they would. I know a man there who would manage it, regular
hours or no!"
"I don't mean that. I mean it might not be safe for the man himself.
Just think!--suppose they have had to amputate both." Of course
Lizarann heard none of this. They were in the next room, having left
her engaged in arithmetic.
"Yes--he may be betwixt life and death. After all, we know nothing.
When did Dr. Ferris say he would be at the Hospital? Is that the child
coughing?"
"Is that you coughing, Lizarann?" Teacher raised her voice to ask, and
Lizarann replied that she had "a stiss" in her side whenever she licked
the slite. She licked it to try, and the experiment was crowned with
success. She then tried to readjust something out of gear inside her
by short coughs and wriggles. This did not seem so successful. Teacher
lowered her voice again: "Mucous membrane," said she, "or muscular."
"Very likely. She's had a deal of exposure though, snow and all. Let's
keep our eyes on her." But Lizarann didn't cough again, that time.
Nevertheless Miss Fossett seemed not quite easy in her mind about
that cough, and when Mr. Taylor remarked that he ought to be thinking
about starting, if we were to get to the Hospital by four o'clock, she
said--only she pretended it was quite a sudden idea of hers--that if
she spoke the truth she would really be much happier to have the child
not go out of doors in all this terrible cold and slush. For it was a
thaw, and an enthusiastic one; and, you see, Miss Fossett had come by
her knowledge of mucous membranes and so forth in a sad curriculum of
two courses; one of nursing a sister through phthisis to death; and
the other, which was incomplete, of doing the like at intervals for a
brother, with only a poor hope that it would end otherwise. So she knew
all about it.
"I really should feel easier, Yorick," she repeated. And Lizarann
looked up from the slate to see who else was in the room, that Teacher
could be speaking to. But seeing no one, and being a sharp little girl,
she perceived that it was her friend the gentleman that was addressed.
Only, of course, she couldn't guess that it was a sort of nickname,
given, years ago, to her brother's schoolfellow by her friend the lady.
"_I_ should, a good deal. It's not the right sort of day at all for
little girls with coughs. How shall we console her?"
"_You_ must."
"I suppose I shall have to, Addie. I always have to do all the dirty
work." This metaphor distracted Lizarann's attention from two uneven
numbers, one of which had to be took off the other and wouldn't come
out right. Did the New Police scrub underneath the beds, clear the
flues of sut, scour out the sink, and so on? Impossible! He went on:
"Look here, Lizarann! You're a good little girl, aren't you?"
"Yass!"
"And you're not going to cry--that's about it, isn't it?"
"Ye-e-e--yass!" She is not quite so confident about this, but will
conciliate public opinion to the best of her ability.
"Well, Lizarann, the doctor says we mustn't see Daddy till--till a
day or two." The small face clouds over pitifully. The disappointment
is bitter. But Lizarann won't cry--well!--not _yet_, anyhow. Yorick
continues: "I shall go to the Sospital to hear about Daddy, and come
back and tell. But you mustn't go yet, because it would hurt Daddy." He
conceals his consciousness of the background of tears to the child's
Spartan resolution.
"You'll see it will come, though," says Miss Fossett, saying good-bye
at the street-door. "She'll have a good cry about it when you're
gone.... But oh dear!--what a lot of stories you have told that child,
Yorick."
"Of course I did. You put it on me, Addie, and then you sneak out! _I_
call it mean. But oh dear!--what a lot of stories one does have to tell
children!"
"You never tell them stories about anything you think serious. I know
you don't."
"Yes, I do. I tell them as matter of knowledge what I know to be only
matter of belief. They wouldn't believe it if I didn't say I knew it."
"But _you_ believe it?"
"I do. But I don't know it. Good-bye, Addie! I shall keep my promise
about the Hospital, though, and bring the news back. Cosset over the
little woman and console her." Which Teacher really did to the best of
her ability, but the fact is that though Lizarann was brave, she was
inconsolable. And--what was bitterest of all--she felt that faith had
been broken with her; which, coming home too late to Miss Fossett, made
her think that it might have been better to tell a child of Lizarann's
character the real reason why she wasn't to go to Daddy. It was a
doubtful point, though. Besides, it was far from certain, after all,
that she could have seen Daddy if she _had_ been taken to the Hospital.
It would have been the worst result of all to fail in that, and have
all the exposure for nothing.
So the Rev. Athelstan--or Yorick--certainly thought, as he started
to walk to St. Brides, meaning to avail himself of a townward-bound
hansom if one should overtake him before he got to the tram. Omnibuses
were all full, apparently, inside and out; and the opportunity of
enjoying a rapid thaw was open to those who had for three weeks been
praying for one. Streets overwhelmed with insufferable slush, and what
was beautiful clean snow only a few hours since turned to torrents of
an inkiness defying explanation. Roads that made even the sufferer
by the slides we so enjoyed the making of in the early morning wish
that he, too, was on our side, and could benefit by them, and knock
double-knocks on them and never tumble. And see them now, turned to
mere ill-mixed morass--floating pea-soup ankle-deep! Scavengers'
carts that seemed to spill more than they removed, and persons of low
ideals of energy losing sight of the objects for whose attainment
they had been entrusted with brooms and rakes, and contented to do
nothing particular with them, in rows. Malignant persons on roof-tops
discharging wicked accumulations on unsuspecting heads, and shouting
out "Be-low!" at the moment of impact. Butchers' carts coming as
close to you as possible, to splash mud in your mouth and inside your
collar, and reaching the horizon long before you become articulate to
curse them. And then that saddest of all depressing sights, the skater
who has been warned off the ice that won't be dangerous for another
hour at least, and is going home swinging his skates and doubting the
benevolence of his Maker.
So onward, through abating suburb and increasing town, to the zone
of the Effectual. Of impatient carts that won't wait for the snow to
thaw, but snap it up and carry it away without offering to account for
their conduct; of mowing-machines fitted with Brobdingnag revolving
hair-brushes that will have to be washed now to be put to their proper
use again, after sweeping up all that equivocal mess parallel with the
kerbstone; of turncocks looking happy from human appreciation in great
force, and alone able to cope with obstructions or relaxations in the
bowels of the earth whose nature we outsiders can only dimly guess at.
So travelling onward, on foot and by tram, the Rev. Athelstan arrived
at his destination, and slipping the fare he had provided for the cab
he had discarded into the contribution-box at the gate, entered St.
Brides Hospital.
"I didn't know you were in these parts, Taylor," said his friend, the
House Surgeon. "Haven't seen you for a century.... Yes!--I know I am
right. It's two years next Lady Day. How's the family? How's Miss
Caldecott?... all right, are they? That's well. Now let's have a look
at you. Turn round to the light...."
"I'm all right."
"Didn't say you weren't. Let's have a look! Turn well round and show
yourself ... h'm!"
"Well!--what's the matter?"
"I thought as much! You've been dissipating, my man. _Your_ sort of
dissipation! What was it this time? You've been up all night, my good
sir! It's no use your trying to deceive me."
"'I will not deceive you, my sweet!'" Mr. Taylor quoted Mrs. Gamp,
and was understood. "I chanced upon a bad case of _delirium tremens_
threatening its lawful wife with a knife, and I stayed to see it out.
Poor fellow!"
"H'm--why poor fellow?"
"Because I locked him up and went for the doctor round the corner.
He said he knew you. Man of the name of Ferris. Good sort of little
chap...."
"I know him. Saw him yesterday--came to see a patient here. Well!--what
did he say to your man?"
"He never saw him alive. While I was away the poor fellow escaped
out of the room, ran a mile and a half through the snow, and pitched
himself into a canal-lock.... Oh yes!--he was fished out dead from
under the ice...."
"Rather a good job, I should think.... However, perhaps I oughtn't to
say that...."
"Glad to hear you say so, Crumpton! It sounds hopeful."
"I didn't mean that way. I meant he might have been an interesting
case. Anyhow, there's an end of _him_!"
"I wish I could think that. But suppose I tell you what brings me here
now: we can quarrel about the human soul after. I want to hear about a
man that was brought in yesterday night, a blind sailor-beggar that was
run over. Have you seen him?"
"Rather! I helped to get his leg off, just above the knee. A very good
case--a very good case!"
"What does that mean!--a very good case?"
"Means that if the limb hadn't been taken off on the nail, septic
poisoning might have set in--yes!--already!--By the merest chance
Brantock was here when he was brought in--he's our visiting
surgeon, you know--and he operated immediately.... Save it? Not a
chance--arteries all torn--circulation stopped--nothing for it but
the knife! The other leg we may save. He has a splendid constitution.
Couldn't have kept him so long under chloroform else."
"The other leg?"
"Compound comminuted fracture of tibia and fibula, with extensive
laceration of soft parts. Much extravasation. But vitality retained. Oh
yes!--we may save that one. It's in plaster of Paris. He was removed
into the surgical ward an hour ago. Do you want to see him?--he can't
talk, I fancy, and he'd better not try. He's had a good deal of opium
to allay pain, you see."
"_May_ I see him? I should like to say I have to his little girl.
Poor child! The _delirium tremens_ case was her uncle, and she has no
mother. She's the poor chap's only child."
The House Surgeon put a book he had been looking into as he talked,
inside a desk and locked it; wrote with extreme rapidity on half a
sheet of note-paper as people write on the stage; handed it to a chubby
nurse who seemed to have been indulging optimism while waiting for it;
remarked to her, "That's three hundred and forty-nine. I'll see about
the other presently;" and said to the Rev. Athelstan, briefly, "Come
along!"
* * * * *
Poor Jim was worse now, as far as his own feelings went, than when he
spoke to Lizarann off of the hospital-barrer. _Then_ he was, in his own
eyes, a chap that had been knocked over and come by some damage to his
legs, which a week in hospital would set right. Pain enough!--ah, to
be sure!--and what might you expect? Not for to lie up in cotton-wool
all the days of your life. As a Spartan, and as against pain, with the
normal courage of his healthy hours upon him, Jim was matchless. Add
to that, that when he said those few words to his little lass, all
the pain was as nothing in itself, measured against the need that she
should not know it.
It was that nasty suffocating stuff that knocked all the heart out of
a man, getting at his innards and stopping his clock. For when the
time came to shift Jim from the couch he was first laid on to the
operating-table, and to place him under chloroform as a preliminary,
he was conscious enough of much that was going on--had drawn his own
inferences from the rapid undertone of consultation ending in a raised
voice: "Perfectly useless to try for the left. May save the right!" In
that instant he gave no thought to his own share in the matter; all
he could think of was the coming of the knowledge to his child that
her Daddy was legless as well as eyeless. Three things made up his
universe--his little lass, a crushed and spoiled thing on a couch, and
that mysterious thing, Jim's Self, independent of both, but mad with
anxiety for the former--until the chloroform came and made all three
things Nothing.
However, Jim never knew he was Nothing, because he had no sooner
swallowed the nasty stuff into his lungs than he was feeling very bad,
and sick-like, on a bed he had never been moved to at all, to his very
certain knowledge. And he was able to guess, although he could not
move his limbs to test it, that he was in the form in which he was to
fossilize. Then, as the slow rally of a splendid constitution against
the shock began, there grew with it an intense longing to know what
manner of figure he was going to cut when reinstated. Would it be one
wooden leg or two wooden legs? Would he be able to walk at all? Would
he, in short, be in trim to persuade his little lass that he was on the
whole rather better off than before his accident? He really thought
of nothing else when awake. But he chiefly slept, rousing himself for
dexterous doses of nourishment at short intervals. And when he slept,
he dreamed, as folk dream whose pain opium has half quenched.
He would have done very well in his dreams if he could only have had
them to himself, and been free from an awful _something_ that ran
through them all. Whereof the only certainty was that it was always the
same, and a curse. Preferably, as to form, it was cubic and immovable,
but of hideous weight. But then, it was by no means certain that it
was not a continuous sound, a sustained hoot of appalling power and
persistency that struck terror to the heart, and jarred the brain. Or
was it a wild beast, that kept the ship's crew from going ashore? Or
an evil fire Jim was hard at work to crawl away from, but could not,
seeing that it could follow him on wheels? Or, hardest to describe of
all--when he woke from his dream to recognize a fact he had recognized
fifty times uselessly, that it was merely his pain and nothing
else--was it a strange concerted action of malignant battalions,
always coming nearer, never in sight? It made him sick to know that it
was each and all of the others, just the same. Now if he could only
have enjoyed his dreams--for, look you, he could see in his dreams,
plain--he wouldn't have minded the pain, if he could only have kept it
square and intelligible. It was just the confusion that made him so hot
and dry, so unable to get properly _rangé_.
For instance, there was a dream of eight years back with Dolly in it.
Dolly was Lizarann's mother, and the reason Lizarann was not called
Dolly was that Aunt Stingy had always thought it such a _selly_ name,
and it had appeared to Jim that it couldn't much matter what anything
so small was called. Its size was all he knew of it, and a milky
flavour, and some squeaks. And Jim was in the dark, and Dolly in her
grave, and nothing mattered.
Jim was in the dark now, with a vengeance; but he could dream Dolly out
of her grave, and did it, in this dream. It was a dream of the day he
met her, when he came off his first voyage, a mere boy, and a perfect
stranger to her. There was the bar he and his mates off the _Pera_ had
trooped into for refreshment, just paid off and feeling good, with
money in their pockets. There were the square bottles with names on
the glass, and the round ones all over labels, and the pump-handles
in a row that Dolly's red-faced cousin Jane, the barmaid, was in the
confidence of, but which everyone else would have pulled wrong. There,
too, was the girl that came in behind the bar and berthed up alongside
the red-faced cousin, just as Murtagh O'Rourke called back to him
through the swing-door, "We're lavin' ye behind, James, me boy," and
vanished. And the girl was Dolly--Dolly herself. Jim didn't know in his
dream that he had married Dolly since, and that she was dead--not he!
It was all new and young again, and in a moment he would hear Dolly say
what she did then, when after some chat--during which the eyes of each
saw the other solely, Dolly's flinchingly, Jim's greedily--the red face
was called away and left them. Yes!--he knew what she would say, "You
never daren't come across to me," and that he in defiance of all Law
and Order would be over that bar like a shot, and then would be driven
forth by the righteous rage of the returning barmaid, with the remains
of a kiss on his lips, the spoil of war in this audacious enterprise.
And all the sequel of the story--how Dolly ran after him to say he
might come back, under reserves; and the lightning speed of their
unsophisticated courtship, under none--all this he knew in the dream
beforehand, but did not wonder why he knew it--took it as a matter of
course.
It never came off, though, for the dream never got as far as the kiss,
to Jim's bitter disappointment. Jane, the cousin, instead of clearing
out and leaving the introduction to nature, swelled and became redder
still and very hot, and ended inexplicably by becoming the pain that
had passed through so many vicissitudes. Whereupon Jim was awake in
the dark, somewhere. And a man's voice, one good to hear, was saying,
"I'll sit down by him and wait till he wakes, nurse. I promised little
Lizarann I would see him."
"That's my little lass!" said Jim faintly. And the nurse said, "I
thought I heard him speak." Then Jim felt that a big man came and sat
beside him, who asked him what he had said. So he repeated, "The name
of my little lass at home, master," and then had said all he could,
and went off again in a drowze, and was far away in a new dream in two
seconds. In perhaps five he woke again with a start and said: "Have ye
been here long, master?" But his mind must have travelled quick from
the dream he was in, and his place in it. For he had to come back to
bed No. 146 at St. Brides Hospital from Singapore--from the hold of a
ship a Malay sailor had hidden himself in, after running amuck through
the decks, wounding right and left. And Jim and Ananias Driscoll, the
second mate, were the only men who would dare to ferret him out in
the dark, with a horn lantern and loaded revolvers, to use in earnest
if need was. And, mind you!--the fugitive might have put fire to the
ship, as lief as not, except they caught him. Now the bilge in this
ship, or something broke out of a cask in the hold, had a powerful bad
smell with it, that had a mortal strange effect on your legs. And when
Jim said so to Driscoll, a voice came that was not Driscoll's, and Jim
became aware that he was somehow in a trap, and woke just in time to
escape it. But the smell of that bilge was the pain of Jim's foot; for
the foot was there still, for all it had been cut off and carried away
in a pail. And the voice that had seemed Driscoll's, which was quite an
unnatural one for a sailor with earrings, and a crucifix tattooed on
his chest, was identified half-way by Jim's waking sense, and Singapore
had melted.
"Scarcely a minute," said the man who sat beside him, completing
Driscoll's speech. Which seemed incredible to Jim, after that affair
at Singapore. But he let it pass, the more so that at that moment the
nurse brought him something in a cup, which made him feel better.
"You was so good as to mention, master...."
"Your little girl? Yes--I saw her, an hour since.... Look!--I'll put
my ear down, close. Needn't try to raise your voice!" For Jim had
something he wanted to say badly.
"You'll not be mentioning any matters to my little lass, sir," said he
slowly. And then, as though he felt his words were a little obscure:
"You might chance to be saying something regarding of the matter of my
fut. Ye see, master, a young child don't take these-like things as
easy as we do, and my little lass's heart will be just abroke about her
Daddy's fut. I'd take it very kind of ye if ye'd make any sart of a bit
of contrivance like, only for a short spell o' deception, just till I
get the heart in me to make a game of it all. It's the chloroform done
it. A fair casuality don't knock all the heart out of a man...."
"Your little girl will have to know about it in the end."
"Ah!--in the end--yes! But then ... a wooden leg! See the difference!
Why, I can most hear the lass laughing at it." Jim paused a few seconds
to enjoy Lizarann's imagined hilarity, then added: "Ye'll keep it snug
about my fut, master? A stump's a stump, ye know."
"She shan't be told any particulars yet, Coupland. Don't try yourself
talking too much." For Jim's long speech has made his breath come
short, and his last words are almost inaudible. He submits to
listening. "The doctor has told me all about the accident. You'll
have to have a wooden leg. Let me tell you about Lizarann." The way
the speaker, whoever he is, accents the child's name, makes a family
friend of him at once. Jim, with a vague picture in his mind of a sort
of guardsman with quiet manners, moves his own big right hand, hot and
weak now, as it lies on the coverlid. It is taken by another as big and
the image of the guardsman is confirmed. Its voice suits the hand, and
continues: "We thought it best for her not to come--Miss Fossett and I
did. You know Miss Fossett, at the National School."
"Sure!" Jim's intonation acknowledges Miss Fossett, with approval in
it. Athelstan Taylor had made up his mind how much it would be safe to
tell of last night's work, so he continued:
"Your little maid and I made friends early this morning. I was passing
by your house, and she came running out. Her uncle had been drinking,
and his behaviour had frightened her.... What's that?" He stoops down
again to hear, and Jim tries for clearer speech:
"The Devil he'll take Bob Steptoe one of these odd-come-shortlies, or
I'm a liar. Only I wish he'd...."
"Wish he'd what?"
"Be alive about it--look a bit smarter! What was his game this time,
master?"
"He was drunk and violent, and I had to control him. He's quiet now.
I'll tell you more, Coupland, when you are stronger."
"Very right, sir!"
"I'll tell you now about Lizarann. I carried her off to Miss
Fossett's--with her aunt's consent, of course. The poor little woman
had had a bad time, you see. She wanted consolation badly after your
accident, and not being able to come to you. And her aunt's a good
woman, but...."
"She ain't that sort of good woman ... t'other sort!"
"Well, perhaps! Anyhow, I made her wrap Lizarann up, and trotted her
off to the School. Miss Fossett's got her there now, and she's in good
hands...."
"You mustn't spin it out too long, Taylor." Thus the Doctor's voice, as
his footsteps stop by the bed-end. He comes to the other side of the
bed, and lays his finger on the near pulse. "Magnificent constitution!
Everything in his favour! Splendid case--pity to spoil it! Give you
seven minutes more by the clock. Look in to say good-bye as you go." He
is gone, and Jim is conscious of the slight rustle of a nurse, on the
watch to pounce, hard by.
"I must tell you what I came for, Coupland. Of course I wanted to find
how you were, and take back word to Lizarann." Mr. Taylor has to speak
quickly. "But I wanted to ask something of you."
"Give it a name, master!"
"I wanted to ask your consent to our keeping her--I should say to Miss
Fossett keeping her--at the School till you are about again. She shall
be well cared for. I know I am asking you to trust...." He stopped;
Jim's lips were moving.
"You're the School-lady's brother, belike?"
"Not quite, but that sort of thing! Her brother and I were at College
together. He is doing my work in the country, and I am doing his at St.
Vulgate's at Clapham."
"That parson-gentleman--he'd be her brother. Him I heard cough?" For
the brother and sister, interested in Lizarann, had visited Tallack
Street, and interviewed Jim.
"Him you heard cough. That's it!"
"But _he_ can't do no work, poor chap!--not work in the country."
"My work in the country is the same as his in London. Only not so hard.
And the country air does his cough good."
"Oh, master!--ye never mean to say _you're_ a parson!" Jim's voice
rises with the poignancy of his disappointment. To him, every cleric is
the Rev. Wilkinson Wilkins, the spiritual adviser of Aunt Stingy.
"I'm not a very bad one, Coupland. At least, I hope not." There is
humility in the speaker's tone, and recognition of the aggressive
and objectionable character of Cures of Souls, but a germ of a
good-humoured laugh buried in it. The seven minutes are near their end,
and the nurse, considered as a rustle, is increasing. She means action
in a moment.
"I'll be your bail for that, master." But Jim cannot quite conceal
his disappointment. He had formed such a high ideal of his visitor.
Still, he can and does show his faith in him by spending the rest
of his available speech-strength on a few words of gratitude to
Lizarann's protectors, and assenting without conditions to the proposed
arrangement. But when will he be "about again"? The nurse throws eight
weeks, somehow, into her expression, without speech, and the forgiven
parson interprets for the blind man's hearing.
"Quite a month, Coupland. But I will bring your little girl to see you
the moment the doctors will allow me. Now, good-bye!"
Alas, poor Yorick! He had been so enjoying his company--company that
had neither respect for his cloth, nor contempt for his cloth, nor
indifference to his cloth; that, in fact, knew nothing about his
cloth--and rejoicing in Jim's free speech, that would have been cramped
here and crimped there had the speaker known he was addressing a
parson-gentleman. It was like stepping back into the old days before
he took clerk's orders; days when he was still uninsulated, still one
with his kind. And yet there was never a man with a more earnest belief
in his inherited mission to fight the Devil in any of the half-score
of Churches that look askant at one another, and waste good powder and
shot over the creeds their congregations shout in unison, knowing all
the while that one or more of the chorus may be--must be--uttering
a lie. Athelstan Taylor had donned the cloth he wore simply because
it was the uniform of his territorial regiment in the army that, as
he conceived, was being for ever enrolled in the service of Ormuzd
against Ahrimanes. In his enthusiasm to fight beneath the banner of
his division of the army, the Cross, he had ridden roughshod over a
hundred scruples on petty details; and the consequence was that his
most earnest admirers were often fain to shake their heads over his
lawless expressions of opinion on sacred subjects, and to lament that
Taylor, with so many fine points in his character, should be on vital
points of Doctrine so painfully unsound. It was an open secret on the
part of both Augustus Fossett and his sister that they prayed for
Athelstan; the former with a belief as real as he was capable of that
the wanderer would be guided; the latter with a practical misgiving
that a very large number of thoughtful persons had _not_ been guided,
or so many samples would not be to be found outside the Communions of
the English--and Roman--Churches. For too many of her brother's idols
had "gone over" for it to be possible to pool the latter in the sum
total of orthodox, heterodox, and cacodox dissidents. Of which last, in
connection with this brother's and sister's petitions to the Almighty
to guide Athelstan into their way of thinking, the one they preferred
to call Socinianism was the most poisonous and insidious. A creed
baited with mere veracities, to get a bite from the unwary!
As for Athelstan, every time he came to take his friend's burden off
his shoulders in London he felt more clearly than before how apt he was
to lose sight of even Ormuzd and Ahriman in a blind struggle against
the brutalism and debauchery, and filth and disease, of a London
outskirt well up to its date. Encouraged at first by the tidiness of
the last-built bee-lines of bricks and mortar, he had half hoped a
compromise was being found between purchasing a sense of Christianity
for the rich at the cost of indefinite multiplication of the poor, and
passing sentence of death on those unable to enjoy living on nothing,
or to give anything in exchange for something. But as soon as he began
to get behind the scenes his poorer parishioners were enacting, he saw
and heard every day things that had dashed his hope; and by the time of
the story had quite come to the conclusion that the small population
whose souls he was supposed to be looking after were as vicious as
the Court of Charles the Second, and so idle as to affirm the right
of male mankind to sixteen hours out of twenty-four to eat, drink,
sleep, and do nothing in--slight exceptions to the last, to nobody's
credit, being allowed for. Of course it was an exaggerated feeling on
Athelstan's part; one thing was that he could not reconcile himself to
the ubiquitous _foetor_ of the beer in which, speaking broadly, his
flock--who didn't acknowledge him as their shepherd at all--lived and
moved and had their being. Under exasperation, he thought of them in
that way ... and forgave them!
Miss Fossett interrupted a reverie to this effect, by saying to him, as
he arrived, after striding five miles in an hour through the slush and
drizzle: "I've had to put that child to bed."
"Hullo!--nothing bad, I hope?" What a damper! And he had looked forward
so to the small anxious face, and the consolation he was going to give
it. All his clients were not so nice as Lizarann.
"Dr. Ferris said he wasn't sure if it was pleurisy. It might be
pneumonia."
"Doctor's been, then?"
"Oh yes!--I sent for him. She's been poulticed ever since."
"Hope it's all a fuss about nothing."
"I hope so. Here's a visitor, Lizarann. Now don't you jump up!"