Chapter Thirty Two.

Peace at Hightoft.

Neil Elthorne had not been a month at the West Coast settlement before he began to find that the funds placed at his disposal by the home authorities would be utterly inadequate for the great work on hand. He was already crippled, and upon taking the sharer of his enterprise into his confidence he fully realised for the first time that he had married a wealthy wife, and that the accumulations of years of her large income were waiting to be utilised as he thought best.

This gave the necessary impulse to his task, and for the next five years the warfare was carried on. With wonderful success? Yes. To achieve all that he and Lady Cicely desired? No. But they fought on, unscathed by disease, which swept away its hundreds, leading, as it were, a charmed life, till reason forced it upon his busy brain that the time had come when he must return.

He had done far more than the most sanguine had expected, and thousands lived to bless his name, and that of the brave, true woman ever working at his side.

His departure was sudden. Weakness and a strange languor had attacked his wife. She had hidden her sufferings from him lest she should hinder him in his work, but his practiced eye detected her state; and as soon as the necessary arrangements could be made, the low, miasmatic tropical shore was left behind, and in a vessel rapidly making its way north, the change was almost magical.

“So well, dear,” said Lady Cicely one bright morning, as the vessel rushed onward into purer air, and beneath brighter skies, “that I feel as if we ought to return.”

“No,” he said, taking her hand; “we have done our work there. We have laid the foundation of a new régime of comparative health for our colonies, and the inhabitants of that dreadful place; other hands must carry on the work. I shudder now as I think of all that we have gone through, and wonder that we are still alive to begin some other task at home.”

There had been plenty of changes since they had left England, but Sir Denton Hayle, apparently not a day older, still paid his visits to the ward which bore his name; while Ralph Elthorne, vigorous in health, though helpless as a child, was at the station to welcome back his children, as he called them, to the old home, where Aunt Anne, grown more grey and placid, still kept house, and ignored all the past as she took her niece in her arms.

Alison was no longer there. He had consoled himself a year after his brother’s departure by marrying Saxa Lydon, instead of Dana, and residing at the Grange. For the younger sister preferred her outdoor life, spending half the year at her old home, the other half in travelling in so strong-minded a manner that Aunt Anne declared she was quite shocked. As for Saxa, when she decided to be Alison’s wife, she endowed him with her masculine habits as well as her fortune, for a couple of sturdy little facsimiles of her husband brought her to the way of thinking that an English wife should be motherly and wise, so that on Neil’s return a wonderfully warm intimacy sprang up between the brothers’ wives.

There was another couple at the old home to welcome the sun-burned travellers, for Sir Cheltnam Burwood never entered Ralph Elthorne’s doors again, but passed out of sight entirely, living, it was said, in Paris and Baden. So that when the vicar’s son came to Hightoft as Captain Beck, his welcome was warm as he could wish, and his patience met with its reward.

“That’s the worst of it, my dear,” said Ralph Elthorne, wrinkling up his brow, as he wheeled himself along the drive in the bright sunshine. “I don’t want nursing, only helping about, and yet, now you are here, I feel sometimes as if I should like to be ill again, to wake up and see your dear face watching by my side. And so Sir Denton resigns his post at the hospital to Neil, eh?”

“Yes; and we must go up at once.”

“Tut, tut, tut! you seem only just to have come. Here is Neil. I say, my dear boy: about this hospital. You don’t want money?”

“No, father; certainly not.”

“Then throw it up. Come and settle down here. I can’t spare Cicely. I can’t, indeed.”

“I’m afraid you must, sir,” said Neil, laughing, “unless she says I am to go to work alone. Not a habit of hers, eh, my dear?”

“Bah! You two are children. Anyone would think you had been married five days ago, instead of five years. Then look here: I shall give up the old place and come and live in town.”

“No,” said Neil; “only to visit us now and then. You could not exist healthily away from your gardens and your farm. Besides, Isabel and Saxa.”

“And your grandchildren,” said Lady Cicely. “There again,” the old man cried testily, “that’s the worst of you two: you are always right. Is a man never to have his own way here?”

“Never, father,” said Neil, taking his wife’s hand. “Nature says it is not to be done.”

“And somehow, my boy, in spite of all our planning, and vexation at being thwarted,” said the old man, almost in a deprecating way, “things do happen for the best.”

“That has long been my faith, father, which means my dear wife’s too.”

“Yes, my boy, and mine too, now at last. Here, hi! Ralph, you young rascal, come and push grandpa’s chair.”

Alison’s curly-headed little fellow came scampering up, to begin batting hard behind the light wheeled chair in which the old man sat; and as Neil and his wife saw the old man’s glee, there was a faint touch of sorrow in the husband’s heart, as he thought that it might have been his son who was sturdily pushing along the old man’s chair.

He turned and looked half shrinkingly at his wife, as he saw that her deep eyes were fixed on his, and the next moment he knew that she could read the very secrets of his heart.

For she laid her hand on his, and said softly:

“Our children are waiting yonder, Neil, under the black clouds of the great city—our children, love—the poor, the suffering, and the weak, waiting, waiting for the healing touch of my dear husband’s hand.”

“And for their pillows to be smoothed by their tender nurse—true woman—dearest wife.”

The End.