Only that Mr. Larkin was altogether the man he was, I think he would have cursed freely.
CHAPTER LXIX.
OF A SPECTRE WHOM OLD TAMAR SAW.
Little Fairy, all this while, continued, in our Church language, 'sick and weak.' The vicar was very sorry, but not afraid. His little man was so bright and merry, that he seemed to him the very spirit of life. He could not dream of his dying. It was sad, to be sure, the little man so many days in his bed, too languid to care for toy or story, quite silent, except when, in the night time, those weird monologues began which showed that the fever had reached his brain. The tones of his pleasant little voice, in those sad flights of memory and fancy, busy with familiar scenes and occupations, sounded wild and plaintive in his ear. And when 'Wapsie' was mentioned, sometimes the vicar's eyes filled, but he smiled through this with a kind of gladness at the child's affection. 'It will soon be over, my darling! You will be walking with Wapsie in a week again.' The sun could as soon cease from shining as little Fairy from living. The thought he would not allow near him.
Doctor Buddle had been six miles away that evening with a patient, and looked in at the vicar's long after the candles were lighted.
He was not satisfied with little Fairy—not at all satisfied. He put his hand under the clothes and felt his thin, slender limbs—thinner than ever now. Dry and very hot they were—and little man babbling his nonsense about little boys, and his 'Wapsie,' and toys, and birds, and the mill-stream, and the church-yard—of which, with so strange a fatality, children, not in romance only, but reality, so often prattle in their feverish wanderings.
He felt his pulse. He questioned his mamma, and cross-examined the nurse, and looked grave and very much annoyed; and then bethought him of something to be tried; and having given his directions to the maid, he went home in haste, and returned in half an hour with the something in a phial—a few drops in water, and little man sat up, leaning on his Wapsie's arm, and 'took it very good,' his nurse said, approvingly; and he looked at them all wonderingly, for two or three moments, and so tired; and they laid him down again, and then his spoken dreams began once more.
Doctor Buddle was dark and short in his answers to voluble little Mrs.
Wylder—though, of course, quite respectful—and the vicar saw him down
the narrow stairs, and they turned into the study for a moment, and, said
Buddle, in an under tone—
'He's very ill—I can say nothing else.'
And there was a pause.