“Yes, but, plainly, you were never weak,” and as Bernard did not answer at once, “Old-fashioned severity used to be the rule with lads, but it seems only to alienate them now and make them think themselves unjustly treated. What is one to do with these boys?”
A question which Bernard could not answer, though it carried him back with a strange yearning, yet resignation, to the little figure that had curled round on his knee, and the hopes connected with the hands that had caressed his cheek.
He thought over it the more the next week, when he was called to sit by Wilfred, who was getting better and anxious to talk.
“My father is very kind,” he said. “Oh, yes, very kind now; but it will be all the same when I get well. You see, Bear, how can a man be always dawdling about with a lot of girls? There’s Dolores bothering with her science, and Fergus every bit as bad; and Mysie after her disgusting schoolchildren; and Val and Prim horrid little empty chatterboxes; and if one does turn to a jolly girl for a bit of fun, their tongues all go to work, so that you would think the skies were going to fall; and if one goes in for a bit of a spree, down comes the General like a sledge-hammer! I wish you would take me out with you, Bear.”
The same idea had already been undeveloped in Bernard’s mind, and ever on his tongue when alone with his wife; but he kept it to himself, and only committed himself to, “You would not find an office in Colombo much more enlivening.”
“There would be something to see—something to do. It would not be all as dull as ditch-water—just driving one to do something to get away from the girls and their fads.”
This was nearly a fortnight from the night of crisis, when Wilfred, very weak, was still in bed; when Primrose and Lily were up and about, but threatened with whooping cough. Thekla much in the same case, and very cross; and little Lena weak, caressing and dependant, but angelically good and patient, so much so that Magdalen and Angela were quite anxious about her.
CHAPTER XXVI—NEW PATHS
“I’ll put a girdle round the earth
In forty minutes.”—Shakespeare.
The visitation had not been confined to the High School. The little cheaply-built rows for workmen and fishermen had suffered much more severely, owing chiefly to the parents’ callous indifference to infection. “Kismet,” as they think it, said Jane Mohun, and still more to their want of care. Chills were caught, fevers and diphtheria ensued, and there was an actual mortality among the children at the works and at Arnscombe. Mr. Flight begged for help from the Nursing Sisterhood at Dearport, and, to her great joy, Sister Beata was sent down to him, with another who was of the same standing as Angela, and delighted to have a glimpse of her; though Angela thought it due to her delicate charge, and the Merrifields, not to plunge into actual nursing while Lena needed her hourly attention, and was not yet in a state for the training to do without it to continue. Paulina, however, being regarded as infection proof, was permitted to be an attendant and messenger of her dear Sister Beata, to her own great joy. She was now nineteen, and her desire to devote herself to a Sisterhood had never wavered, and intercourse with Sister Angela had only strengthened it.