“You will excuse me for keeping you waiting so long, but the truth is my grandchild—the little girl you saw at the table the other night—is not very well, and we have thought it advisable to send for a doctor. I thought she had only caught a little cold, but now she has lost her voice and can only speak in a whisper, and seems, besides, to be in a state of high fever as well. Oh, if anything should happen to her, I could never get over it. She is only ten, and the last one left to us.”
Johnston offered a few commonplace words of a soothing nature, and then adroitly turned the conversation to the subject of the letters from the “deacons.”
“Oh, I have got answers from both, and they are satisfactory in every respect,” said Mr Cooper, rousing himself a little, and producing the two letters concocted and posted in the West by Johnston himself, and frankly placing them in the hands of that arch-rogue. “You may read them for yourself, and consider it settled that I shall give you the assistance you require—a passage to the Cape. Willingly would I give twice that sum to see that poor child well and strong as usual——”
A ring at the door-bell interrupted the speech, and Mr Cooper started up and again left Johnston alone, with the words, “Ah! at last, there is the doctor.”
The intending criminal sat there and heard the doctor admitted and led to the bedroom of the sick child. Then there was a long stillness, and at last the footsteps sounded in the lobby; the doctor whispered for a time with Mr Cooper, and finally the front door closed and the carriage drove off. Some slow and feeble footsteps then came in the direction of the parlour door, and in a moment or two Mr Cooper stood before Johnston, ghastly pale, and tottering, and with the tears gathering thick in his eyes.
“Oh, my friend, the worst of news!” he at length found voice to say, as he sank feebly into a seat and covered his face with his hands. “The doctor says it is not a simple ulceration of the throat, as we imagined—the trouble is diphtheria! and—and it is so far gone that he does not believe she will recover!”
Before that awful grief and those flowing tears Johnston was stricken dumb, and he uneasily began to wish himself a mile from the spot. In broken accents the stricken old man proceeded to describe the nature of the disease—how a kind of fungus had begun to grow across the windpipe, which would shortly choke the breath out of the young body as surely as if a strangulating cord had been tightened about the neck, and how the child, though still chatting cheerily and brightly in its hoarse whispers, was actually within a few hours of death and heaven. Johnston felt more uncomfortable than ever. He started round not to see the grief-stricken face, and something heavy hit him sharply on the leg. It was the leaden-headed neddy in his coat pocket, with which he had been prepared to deal out death to any one opposing him in robbing the man before him. The blow on the leg, however, was nothing to the knocking which was at that moment going on in his heart.
“Oh, my friend! you—you are sent to me as a blessing from heaven in my hour of sore trial!” exclaimed Mr Cooper at last, starting up and clasping Johnston’s hand in his own, and welling it over with his warm tears. “Little did I dream of this when I first thought to help you. God has a purpose in everything. You will come with me to my darling child; you will pray with her and speak to her of heaven. How could I pray when my whole heart is rising in rebellion against God taking the dear child from us? Forgive me! forgive my wickedness—but she is the only one left—the only one!”
If Johnston had been asked to go up to a cannon’s mouth, that he might be blown into a thousand fragments, he would have gone more cheerfully than to the task required. His pale cheeks crimsoned—the first blush that had visited them for many a day—then he as swiftly became a ghastly white. He tried to speak, but the words choked him, and the hand which grasped that of his benefactor was nerveless and feeble, and cold as ice.
“Excuse me,” he at length managed to falter forth, “but I’d rather not. I had a girl of my own once who was taken away much in the same way, and to go through the same experience again would tear my heart open;” and he sank down in a chair and abjectly covered his face with his hands.