“I have no thought of turning back,” said Allison.
“That is well. And to go on you will need faith and patience, and ye’ll also need to have a’ your wits about you. You’ll need perfect health and your natural strength, and ye’ll just do my bidding in all things, that you may be fit to meet all that is before you—since it seems to be God’s will that this work is to fall to you.”
Allison went at the doctor’s bidding. She wrapped herself up and went down to the sands, to catch the breeze from the sea. It was more than a breeze which met her. It was almost a gale. The waves were coming grandly in, dashing themselves over the level sands. Allison stood and watched them for a while musing.
“And each one of them falls by the will of the Lord. A word from Him could quiet them now, as His ‘Peace, be still,’ quieted the waves on the Sea of Galilee so long ago. ‘Oh! ye of little faith!’ said He, ‘wherefore do ye doubt?’ As He might well say to me this day, for oh! I am fainthearted. Was I wrong from the beginning? And is my sin finding me out? Have I undertaken what I can never go through with? God help me, is all that I can say, and though I must doubt myself, let me never, never doubt Him.”
And then she set herself to meet the strong wind, and held her way against it till she came to a sheltered spot, and there she sat down to rest. When she turned homeward again, there was no strong wind to struggle against. It helped her on as she went before it, and it seemed to her as if she had come but a little way when she reached the place where she had stood watching the coming in of the waves. The weight was lifted a little from her heart.
“It is only a day at a time, however long it may be,” she told herself. “It is daily strength that is promised, and God sees the end, though I do not.”
Yes, daily strength is promised, and the next day, and for many days, as she went into the dim room where the sick man lay, Allison felt the need of its renewal. It was not the silence which was so hard to bear. It was the constant expectation, which was almost dread, that the silent lips might open to speak the recognition which she sometimes saw in the eyes, following her as she moved. There were times when she said to herself that she could not long bear it.
“In one way he is better,” said the doctor. “He is coming to himself, and his memory—his power of recalling the past—is improving. He is stronger too, though not much, as yet. With his loss of memory his accident has had less to do, than the life he had been living before it. He has had a hard tussle, but he is a strong man naturally, and he may escape this time. From the worst effects of his accident he can never recover. As far as I can judge from present symptoms, he will never walk a step again—never. But he may live for years. He may even recover so as to be able to attend to business again—in a way.”
Allison had not a word with which to answer him. The doctor went on.
“I might have kept this from you for a while, but I have this reason for speaking now. I do not ask if you have ‘counted the cost.’ I know you have not. You cannot do it. You have nothing to go upon which might enable you to do so. Nothing which you have ever seen or experienced in life, could make you know, or help you to imagine, what your life would be—and might be for years,—spent with this man as his nurse, or his servant—for it would come to that. Not a woman in a thousand could bear it,—unless she loved him. And even so, it would be a slow martyrdom.”