'Oh yes, better for a time. Not for long, thank God!'
David looked at him with painful emotion. Several times during these eight years had he seen Ancrum emerge from these mysterious crises of his, a broken and shattered man, whom only the force of a superhuman will could drag back to life and work. But he had never yet seen him so beaten down, so bloodless, so emaciated as this. Lung mischief had declared itself more than a year before this date, and had clearly made progress during this last attack of melancholia. He thought to himself that his old friend could not have long to live.
'Has Williams been to see you?' he asked, naming a doctor whom Ancrum had long known and trusted.
'Oh yes! He can do nothing. He tells me to give in and go to the south. But there is a little work left in me still. I wanted my boys. I grew to pine for my boys—up there.'
'Up there' meant that house in Scotland where lived the friends bound to him by such tragic memories of help asked and rendered in a man's worst extremity, that he could never speak of them when he was living his ordinary life in Manchester, passionately as he loved them.
They chatted a little about the boys, some of whom David had been keeping an eye on. Five or six of them, indeed, were in his printing-office, and learning in the apprentices' school he had just started.
But in the middle of their talk, with a sudden change of look, Ancrum stooped forward and laid his hand on David's.
'A little more, Davy—I have just to get a little worse—and she will come to me.'
David was not sure that he understood. Ancrum had only spoken of his wife once since the night when, led on by sympathy and emotion, he had met David's young confession by the story of his own fate. She was still teaching at Glasgow so far as David knew, where she was liked and respected.
'Yes, Davy—when I have come to the end of my tether—when I can do no more but die—I shall call—and she will come. It has so far killed us to be together—more than a few hours in the year. But when life is all over for me—she will be kind—and I shall be able to forget it all. Oh, the hours I have sat here thinking—thinking—and gnashing my teeth! My boys think me a kind, gentle, harmless creature, Davy. They little know the passions I have carried within me—passions of hate and bitterness—outcries against God and man. But there has been One with me through the storms'—his voice sank—'aye! and I have gone to Him again and again with the old cry—Master!—Master! —carest Thou not that we perish?'