“O, Hannah! what is it? O, Heaven! he is not ill! Tell me he is not ill!” and she strove to steady herself by clinging convulsively to the old servant’s arm.
“Hush, my dear, hush! You mustn’t take on so. I thought you’d a’ known that master was lying in the fever, or you wouldn’t, maybe, be here. But come in, there’s a dear. This is the fifth day, and Doctor Kempshall says there’ll be a chrisus, I think he calls it, soon, but whether for life or death, the God that rules us only knows.”
Hannah, who was a pious woman, and one who held to the belief that no misfortunes happen to us by the power that is lightly called chance, spoke the last words with almost devotional earnestness, adding thereby to the wild alarm that Honor was beginning to entertain.
“In danger!” she cried, “and I never knew it! O, John, dear John!” and she was hurrying to the stairs, when another step treading still more softly, and a voice more whisperingly low than even Hannah’s, checked her progress.
“You musn’t go, my dear,” said Mrs. Beacham, for she it was who, looking like the ghost of her former self, pressed Honor’s white cheek to hers. “You must not see John now. The fever may, the doctors say, be infectious, and if it please God to spare his life, why—” with a very sad smile, but one that was meant to be reassuring—“we may want you yet.”
This reception, and the unlooked-for kindness of the broken-down old woman, was too much for Honor. Falling on her knees, and with a feeble cry of, “Forgive me! O forgive me!” she buried her face in her mother-in-law’s gown, and sobbed as if her heart would break.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE USES OF ADVERSITY.
Two more days and nights sped by—a time passed almost literally by Honor in tears and fasting—when the anxiously-looked-for crisis came at last; came in fear, and passed away in tearful hope, and the joyful news went forth that John Beacham was out of danger. Out of danger, and certain (humanly speaking) to walk forth again amongst his fellows; certain too—ay, of that there could be no doubt—that his duty to God and to his neighbours would be, to the best of his powers, as simply and faithfully performed by this honest, simple-hearted man as it had been in the days before sorrow came, and shame had visited his house. Shame, but not guilt. Ah, in that lay John’s best consolation, when, with his head a little lower than had been his wont, he for the first time, with languid step and sadly altered face, sauntered in his garden between the lines of fragrant roses, leaning upon Honor’s arm.
They were serious, as well as sad, those two, between whom there had been so perfect a reconciliation, and on one side a forgiveness so entire and unqualified. Honor’s sweet young face looked older, paler, and far more thoughtful than of yore. She could not forget, neither could the chastened man beside her, that through their faults tribulation had fallen upon the innocent, and that a motherless infant, a bereaved father, were left to bear witness to the terrible fact that they had failed, grievously failed, in their duty to God and to their neighbour. Through all their lives the memory of these calamities would darken their joys, and cast a cloud even while the sun shone brightest, and the sky was bluest above their heads. Never again would Honor be the bright, light-hearted girl who had first won John’s love when she played with the merry children in the woods, laughing and shouting in their joyous mirth. Never again would he, secure in his home happiness, and with a conscience not only void of offence towards God and towards man, but with a heart unburdened by a sense of wrong done to any soul that lived, wear upon his kindly face the genial smile which gladdened his many acquaintances, men as well as women, young as well as old, when he waved them a cordial greeting on his onward way. The zest, the freshness which makes life a thing to be enjoyed as well as endured, was over for ever; over, not only for the man verging on middle-age, but for the woman who, on the very threshold of existence, had looked out on coming storms, and had learned to dread the distant warning of the tempest.
But if not happy—happy, that is to say, with the bliss which, like the joys of childhood, is simply the result of ignorance, and sometimes the consequence of want of feeling or want of sense—there were yet sufficient elements of happiness remaining in John Beacham’s home for hope to crop out greenly from the arid sands of past regret. Not yet had the time, the dreary time when no pleasure is taken in any created thing, arrived for them; not yet had the hour struck when in the voice of Nature there is no joyful sound, when the opening spring, the song of birds, the murmur of the rippling water, appeal to the heart in vain, and when the man who has striven through life to do his duty, and has failed to reap the reward of peace and the fruition of content, tells himself, in bitterness of spirit, that from the first step in life he had chosen the wrong path, and whispers sadly to his heart that it is all too late, alas, to retrace his steps.