It Never Can Happen Again

by William De Morgan

So the doctor was referred to, and his opinion amounted to this: that if the child went away by herself to any sort of hospital or home, she would either have to be indoors with the other patients, or exposed to all the windy gusts of spring on the sea-beach, or perhaps in a shelter with a fine sea-view. People were always hunting climates that didn't exist, and inflicting horrible hardships on themselves in the chase. When summer by the sea was a certainty, send her, by all means. After midsummer, he should say; no sooner!

This was in early April, just when a misleading rush of crocuses into a treacherous few days of sunshine had set folk off hoping for a real spring this year; like when we were young—like Chaucer—like Spenser. Some mistaken nightingales arrived, and must have felt foolish. Infatuated orchards promised themselves a crop of pears; it even went as far as that!

"We may be thankful for one thing, at any rate," said the Rev. Athelstan to Miss Fossett two or three weeks after. "We did not pack off that little wench to the seaside. In weather like this she's best where she is, on the whole. Sidrophel's right. He often is."

"He was right this time. Just look at it!" Sleet was the thing referred to.

"Werry bad state the roads are in, sir," says a third party in this conversation. "Bad alike for 'orse and man. Thankee, sir!" He was a cabman, and he had just driven this lady and gentleman over five miles, so he knew. He departs with the postscript sixpence his last words procured, as an extra concession after an over-liberal fare, and his late tenants pass in at the door of the little house that is part of the school-building where Lizarann developed that first inflammatory cold months ago. The story is back for the moment on the Cazenove Estate, and the Rector is going presently to walk over to the new incumbent at St. Vulgate's, who will house him to-night, and tell of his few sheep and many goats. He can stay for a cup of tea now, and get there by seven.

"Yes, the doctor was right. She's just as well off under Mrs. Fox's thatch. Better! When the warm weather comes we'll send her for six weeks to Chalk Cliff, and give her a good set-up!" But his hearer only sees her way to silence on this point.

The story has told, but very slightly, the strange rapport between these two, that had lasted through so many years. For over twenty they had elected to pose as brother and sister. During all that time the mind of each had referred to the other as in some sense the principal person; that is the only way to express their thought. When Athelstan first adored the fascinating Sophia Caldecott, he really could hardly have said which he wanted most, that young person herself, or Gus's sister's sympathy about her. But so blind was he at the time, so blind had he remained through all the years of his married life, that he never conceived that, midmost among all her memories of the past, a lurid star outshining all the others, was the record of that hour when the young man she thought and spoke of as a boy, remembered so well, came to her father's house intoxicated with a new-found joy, to tell her chiefly and above all others that he was affianced to—well!—to the wrong sister; not the friend she had set her heart on!

As they sat there by the fire in the half-dark, resting after their journey, his mind, like hers, went off on old times. Presently he shook off his own burden of memories with, "Well!—I suppose I ought to be on the move."

"Don't hurry away. It's not much past five yet, and they can make dinner half-past seven. You've plenty of time."

The flicker of the fire has the best of what is left of the light of a dull day; it shows two faces serious enough, certainly, but not sad. They are dwelling on the same past, each from its own point of view; but their owners are really happy to eke out a little more time in the half-light, each knowing the heart of the other. They are glad dinner at St. Vulgate's can be half-past seven; it is half-an-hour longer to be together, and really those people in the train had made it impossible to talk.