"Beautiful! beautiful!" he mused, when Pam had finished, and was looking with a timid, sub-radiant eagerness from one to the other. "There 'll be a scandal, of course. That 's the proper penalty for not having confided your trouble into the care of Holy Church." Here the Doctor made a savage thrust with the poker through the gratebars, and stirred and stirred up the red coals till they glowed to incandescence. "But better late than never. Leave it to me. Leave it to me, dear child. Our spiritual Mother never yet turned away from any supplicant that sought her with true faith and humility. We 'll do our best for you. Of course, the business is not so bad as it would be if it had been unexpected. But fortunately, we 've been prepared for it. No mistaking the symptoms."
And the tale, as Ullbrig will tell it to you to this day, goes on to relate how Pam would not return to the Post Office, but took up her post as nurse by the Spawer's bedside, and could hardly endure to let a bite pass her lips thereafter, for her care of him, till he made the mend.
And that same morning, news traveled to Ullbrig that the schoolmaster had been found, roaming and raving like a madman, in the neighborhood of Prestnorth—where a married cousin of his was living—and was in bed now at her house, with brain fever. Not likely to get better, the rumor said, but therein it proved false, for a fortnight later he resigned the mastership of Ullbrig School, and wrote, at the same time, to Miss Morland, requesting that his effects might be despatched to him by carrier as soon as she could conveniently find leisure to undertake the commission. Another letter accompanied it, addressed to Pam in his clear Board School script. In proclamation it was a penitential acknowledgment of his sins; in effect it was a cacophonous outburst of reproach, love, despair, and recriminations. She sorrowed for the man and his hard lot—for if he had loved her so torturingly it was no fault of his own, but he had taught her to fear him, and sympathy can never truly subsist in the same bosom where fear is.
There were those in Ullbrig at first, as Father Mostyn had predicted, who, with their sharp tongues, whittled the affair to a fine point of scandal; those who considered the schoolmaster an ill-used man, and Pam a conscienceless hussy who had jilted him under circumstances that would not too well bear the stress of investigation; those who whispered; and those who nodded their chins with compressed lips of meaning. But they had the melancholy dissatisfaction of fearing, each one in his own heart, that these things might not after all be true. Before such a man as Barclay it would never have been politic to repeat this primitive creed at any time. A champion of Pam's from the beginning—when he cried reproof upon them for their uncharitableness towards the child—he was doubly her champion now; strode up and down over the district like a mighty sower, spreading seed of her heroism broadcast from both his hands. And so it came to be that the real history of the girl burst its early grain of scandal, as though it had been sprouting wheat, and sent up its produce into the clear blue heaven of truth. To-day, when Ullbrig tells you of that Monday midnight, it only gathers breath of proud inflation to breathe how one of its daughters—by name Pam—went down the cliff for the man she loved, and how Barclay saved them both.
CHAPTER XLIV
But for Pam and the Spawer, the true tale of their history only began after the terrible events that give Pam her place among the heroines of the district. They used its remembrance as a steel on which to sharpen the blades of their present bliss, but it was not an inherent part of their story. That commenced when the horror of this was over; when the Spawer woke up finally, with a lasting wakefulness, on his bed, and saw Pam, and smiled.
Ah! What a beautiful opening chapter that was—full of a golden tremulousness on the girl's side, as of timid sunlight peeping through the curtains of a May morning when a great day is in the balance. For there had crept into the girl's heart while she watched him a strange little dark bird, that fluttered ... and was still, and fluttered again ... and again was still, gathering its strength and grew, and was fledged and flew up—almost into the clear skies of her reason, though not quite—and sang plaintive melodies to her; among others, that the man she thought of as Maurice had made love to her in his madness; that he was not free; that he had never loved her; that she was only tending him back to consciousness for the cruel happiness of finding that his consciousness on the intellectual side meant unconsciousness on the emotional; that he would remember nothing of his delirious words, and that his love had been but the outcome of bodily weakness. Last of all, she grew to dread his waking for the news it might tell her. When he stirred ... she closed her eyes momentarily, with swift apprehension of the worst. When he lay a long while still, she prayed he might wake promptly and put her out of her misery.
For it was become a long misery of suspense. All her happiness was laid aside like fine raiment; she dared not look at it or think of it; her heart made ready to wear mourning. And oh, the anguish of that moment, when at last—while her swift blood turned suddenly turbid in her veins, and the very breath in her lungs curdled thick to suffocation—he came out of his sleep, and his eyes opened incomprehendingly upon her ... and she, drawn back in apprehension, with her hands clasped up to her lip ... met his gaze, and knew not how to respond to it.
And then that glorious burst of certainty when recognition woke in him wanly and illuminated him like pale glad sunlight, and he struggled to free his arms of their coverings, and held them out to her ... and she had gone into them like a dove descending ... and put her own red, moist lips to his dry ones ... and kissed his lingering soul back to life and happiness.
Ah! To have lived that one brief moment, as Pam lived it, was to have lived a lifetime abundantly. Now indeed that she knew he loved her for certain, and had had the true sign and seal of it, she was ready to die forthwith, if need were. It was enough to have held his love once in her own soul's keeping, as a child treasures the moment's confidence of some precious breakable vase. Pam was not greedy. She would have been quite content with no more.