“Specific ones? Fear of some definite event?”
“Yes; I’m afraid I have gone as far as that. I have had fears of some violent access of error coming upon him, and I have no reason for fearing. Because if it did occur I should know quite well what to do. There couldn’t be anything to fear really. I guess he’s been getting well so quickly and smoothly that I have allowed myself to wonder whether it could be true, though, of course, I knew it was. But that’s so like feeble mortal mind! The very fact that our needs are answered so abundantly and immediately makes us wonder if it is real!”
“What would you do if he had a relapse?” she asked.
“I couldn’t say now, and I certainly mustn’t allow myself to contemplate it. But if it came, it would surely be made quite clear to me how to demonstrate over it. We are never left in the lurch like that; it’s only the devil who plays his disciples false, and lets them have fits of remorse just when they want to amuse themselves.”
The flames on the hearth leaped up or died down in response to the great blasts outside which squalled and trumpeted over the house, or paused as if to listen in glee to the riot that they caused. The wind was like a wild creature that, with frightened hands, rattled at the fastenings of the windows as if seeking admittance, till a tattoo of sleet silenced it or drove it away. Then a low, long-drawn whistle of alto note would sound in the chimney, and suddenly rise siren-like to a screech of demoniacal fury, or, like a passage for drums, the rattle of the leafless branches of the tortured trees mixed with the sound of the surf a mile away seemed to portend some deadly disaster. All hell seemed loose in this infernal din of the elements.
Bertie Cochrane drew his chair close to the fire with a little shudder of goose-flesh.
“I was awfully frightened by a storm once when I was a little chap,” he said, “and it has left a sort of scar on my mind which is still tender. I always have to demonstrate to myself when there’s a gale like this; I don’t seem to be able to get used to them. My father died in the middle of that awful storm ten years ago, too. What a confession of feebleness, isn’t it? But I don’t think you would have guessed how I hated storms if I hadn’t told you.”
“No, I don’t think I should,” she said. “But I am so sorry. I am just the opposite. There is nothing I love so much as a gale like this—a maniac. There, listen to that!”
An appalling blast swept by the house, full of shrieks and cries, as if the souls of the lost were being driven along in the pitiless storm, and it seemed as if some window must have burst open, or some door communicating with the night and the tempest have come unlatched, for the thick double curtain which served instead of door between the billiard-room where they sat and the hall outside was lifted a clear foot from the ground, and a flood of cold air, strong as a wind, poured in, making the candles flicker and stream, and stirring the carpet as if a ground swell had passed beneath it. Cochrane jumped up.