“I suppose I’ve broken some of my bones,” said Colin; “it would be real kindness if you would tell me what is the matter. Will it take a long time to mend me? I should be glad to know, at least, what it is.”
Impelled by his looks and his tone, Lady Frankland burst into her statement at last. “You have broken some of your ribs,” she said, “but I don’t think that is of so much importance; Sir Apsley, when he comes, will tell us. He is coming to-day and you are looking so much better. It was old Mr. Eyre who gave us such a fright yesterday. He said your lungs had been injured somehow, and that you might never—that it might be a long time—that it might keep you delicate; but even if that were the case, with care and a warm climate—oh, Mr. Campbell! I think he is mistaken; he is always such a croaker. I think—I hope—I am almost sure Sir Apsley will set you all right.”
Again Colin had risen in his bed with a little start. This time he was scarcely sensible of the pain which every motion caused him. He fancied afterwards that for that moment his heart stood still in his bosom, and the pulses in his veins stopped beating. The shock was so strange, so sudden, so unlooked-for. He sat up—struggled up—upon his pillows, and instinctively and unawares faced and confronted the new Thing which approached him. In that moment of strange consciousness and revelation he felt as if the intimation was true—as if his doom was sealed and his days numbered. He did not look at the anxious woman who was wringing her arms by his bedside, nor at any external object; but with an irresistible impulse confronted dumbly the new world—the changed existence. When he laid himself down again it seemed to Colin as if years had passed over his head. He said some vague words of thanks, without being very well aware what he was saying, to Lady Frankland, and then lay silent, stunned and bewildered, like a man who had received a blow. What she said to him afterwards, or how long she remained in the room, he was scarcely aware of. Colin belonged to a race which had no weak members; he had been used to nothing but strength and health—wholesome rural life and vigour—all his days. He had even learned, without knowing it, to take a certain pride in his own physical gifts, and in those of his family, and to look with compassionate contempt on people who were “delicate” and obliged to take care of themselves. The idea that such a fate might by any possibility fall to himself had never once occurred to him. It was an impossible contingency at which, even a week ago, the strong young man, just entering upon the full possession of his powers, would have laughed, as beyond the range of imagination. He might die, no doubt, like any other man—might be snatched out of the world by violent disease or sudden fever, as other strong men had been; but to have his strength stolen from him while still his life remained, had appeared a thing beyond the bounds of possibility until now.
But as Colin lay helpless, stunned by this unlooked-for downfall, there came before his eyes, as vividly as if he saw them in actual presence, the sick people of his native district—the young men and the young women who now and then paid, even on the sweet shores of the Holy Loch, the terrible toll which consumption takes of all the nations of the north. One of them, a young man about his own age, who like himself had been in training for the Scotch Church, whom Colin had pitied with all his kind heart—with the deepest half-remorseful sense of his own superior happiness—came before him with intense distinctness as he lay struck silent by the cold shadow of fate. He could almost have thought that he saw the spectral attenuated form, with its hectic cheeks, its thin, long, wasted hands, its preternatural length of limb, seated in the old, high-backed easy-chair in the farmhouse parlour. All the invalid’s life appeared to him in a sudden flash of recollection; the kindly neighbours’ visits; the books and papers which were lent him; the soup and jellies which the minister’s wife and the other ladies of the parish, few in number as they were, kept him provided with. Colin could even remember his own periodical visits; his efforts to think what would interest the sick man; his pity, and wonder, and almost contempt, for the patience which could endure, and even take a pleasure in, the poor comforts of the fading life. God help him! was this what he himself was coming to? was this all he had to anticipate? Colin’s heart gave a strange leap in his breast at the thought. A sudden wild throb, a sense of something intolerable, a cry against the fate which was too hard, which could not be borne, rose within him, and produced a momentary sickness which took the light out of his eyes, and made everything swim round him in a kind of dizzy gloom. Had he been standing he would have fallen down, and the bystanders would have said he had fainted. But he had not fainted; he was bitterly, painfully conscious of everything. It was only his heart that fluttered in his breast like a wounded bird; it was only his mind that had been struck, and reeled. So much absorbed was he that he did not hear the voice of the nurse, who brought him some invalid nourishment, and who became frightened when she got no answer, and shook him violently by the arm. “Lord bless us, he’s gone,” exclaimed the woman; and she was but little reassured when her patient turned upon her with dry lips and a glittering eye. “I am not gone yet,” said Colin; “there is no such luck for me;” and then he began once more to picture out to himself the sick man at the Holy Loch, with the little tray on the table beside him, and his little basin of soup. God help him! was this how he was to be for all the rest of his life?
This was how he sustained the first physical shock of the intimation which poor Lady Frankland had made to him with so much distress and compunction. It is hard enough at any time to receive a sentence of death; yet Colin could have died bravely had that been all that was required of him. It was the life in death thus suddenly presented before his eyes that appalled his soul and made his heart sick. And after that, Heaven knows, there were other considerations still more hard to encounter. If we were to say that the young man thus stopped short in the heyday of his life bethought himself immediately of what is called preparation for dying, it would be false and foolish. Colin had a desperate passage to make before he came to that. As these moments, which were like hours, passed on, he came to consider the matter in its larger aspects. But for Harry Frankland he would have been in no danger, and now Harry Frankland was safe, strong, and in the full enjoyment of his life, while Colin lay broken and helpless, shipwrecked at the beginning of his career. Why was it? Had God ordained this horrible injustice, this cruel fate? As Colin looked at it, out of the clouds that were closing round him, that fair career which was never to be accomplished stretched bright before him, as noble a future as ever was contemplated by man. It had its drawbacks and disadvantages when he looked at it a week before, and might, perhaps, have turned out a common-place life enough had it come to its daily fulfilment; but now, when it had suddenly become impossible, what a career it seemed! Not of selfish profit, of money-making, or personal advantage—a life which was to be for the use of his country, for the service of his Church, for the furtherance of everything that was honest and lovely, and of good report. He stood here, stayed upon the threshold of his life, and looked at it with wonder and despair. This existence God had cut short and put an end to. Why? That another man might live and enjoy his common-place pleasures—might come into possession of all the comforts of the world, might fill a high position without knowing, without caring for it; might hunt, and shoot, and fall asleep after dinner as his father had done before him. In the great darkness Colin’s heart cried out with a cry of anguish and terrible surprise to the invisible, inexorable God, “Why? Why?” Was one of His creatures less dear, less precious to Him than another, that He should make this terrible difference? The pure life, the high hopes, the human purpose and human happiness, were they as nothing to the great Creator who had brought them into being and suffered them to bud and blossom only that He might crush them with His hands? Colin lay still in his bed, with his lips set close and his eyes straining into that unfathomable darkness. The bitterness of death took possession of his soul—a bitterness heavier, more terrible than that of death. His trust, his faith, had given way. God sat veiled upon his awful throne, concealed by a horrible cloud of disappointment and incomprehension. Neither love nor justice, neither mercy nor equal dealing, was in this strange, unintelligible contrast of one man’s loss and another man’s gain. As the young man lay struggling in this hour of darkness, the God of his youth disappeared from him, the Saviour of his childhood withdrew, a sorrowful shadow, into the angry heavens. What was left? Was it a capricious Deity, ruled by incomprehensible impulses of favour and of scorn? Was it a blind and hideous Chance, indifferent alike to happiness and misery? Was it some impious power, owning no everlasting rule of right and wrong, of good and evil, who trampled at its will upon the hearts and hopes of men? Colin was asking himself these terrible questions when the curtain was softly drawn, and a face looked down upon him, in which tenderness and grief and pity had come to such a climax as no words could convey any impression of. It was his mother who stood beside him, stretching out her arms like a pitying angel, yearning over him with the anguish and the impatience of love. Sometimes, surely, the Master gives us in the fellowship of His sufferings a human pang beyond His own—the will to suffer in the stead of those we love, without the power.
CHAPTER XX.
“They’re awfu’ grateful, Colin—I canna but say that for them,” said Mrs. Campbell; “and as anxious as if you were their own son. I’ll no undertake to say that I havena an unchristian feeling myself to Harry Frankland; but, when you’re a’ weel and strong, Colin,”—
“And what if I am never well and strong?” said the young man. His mother’s presence had subdued and silenced, at least, for a time, the wild questions in his heart. She had taken them upon herself, though he did not know it. So far human love can stretch its fellowship in the sufferings of its Master,—not to the extent of substitution, of salvation temporal or spiritual, but, at least, to a modified deliverance. She had soothed her son and eased him of his burden, but in so doing had taken it to herself. The eagle that had been gnawing his heart had gone to fix its talons in hers; but she carried it like the Spartan, under her mantle, and smiled while it rent her in twain.
“Whisht, whisht!” she said, in her martyrdom of composure and calm looks, and took her boy’s hand and held it between hers—God only could tell how fondly—with a firm, warm grasp that seemed to hold him fast to life. “Colin, my man, it’s a’ in God’s hands,” said the Mistress of Ramore; “whiles His ways are awfu’ mysterious. I’m no one that pretends to read them, or see a’thing plain, like some folk; but I canna think He ever makes a mistake or lets anything go by hazard. We’ll bide His time, Colin; and who can tell what mercy and goodness he may have in His hand?”
“Mercy and goodness, or, perhaps, the contrary,” said Colin. If he had not been a little comforted and eased in his heart, he would not have given utterance to words which he felt to be unchristian. But now, with his longing to be soothed and to accept the softening influence which surrounded him, came an impulse to speak,—to use words which were even more strong than his feelings. As for his mother, she was too thoughtful a woman, and had in her own heart too heavy a burden, to be shocked by what he said.