"Well—I didn't like the wording of it. However, I think I shall be justified in not reading that bit to her father. Poor Jim!"
This was in July, a fortnight or thereabouts before Challis paid his visit to the Rectory. It is a good sample of the sort of thing that had gone on in the interim. The sort of thing only very young or very lucky folk are unfamiliar with—the bulletin-foundry's intense anxiety to make the most of every little scrap of nourishment for Hope, on the one hand; on the other, the amazing capacity of Hope for growing quite bloated on starvation diet.
All the news that reached Jim about his dying child—the words give the truth, brutally; but what does the story gain by flinching from them?—was what a succession of kind hearts had tried to make the best of, each without a particle of conscious wish to falsify or suppress. What wonder that when Challis saw him at the well that day, Jim was using the mere letter of the daily tidings he received to silence the misgivings that were whispering to his heart? But they were there for all that, making deadly forecasts in his mind of a life he would have to live, he knew not how—a life that was darkness now, but still had a light shining in that darkness that it heeded—a light that helped oblivion of the cruel past. What would be left for him if that solace were withdrawn?
He had always an undercurrent of suspicion that the evil was being made the best of, for his sake. And in the greatness of his heart—for Jim had a great heart—he felt pity for those who had to be the bearers of ill news; none of them cut out for indifference to the suffering of its hearers. If he lost his little lass, the Master—so he still called Athelstan Taylor—would have to come and tell him; and Jim would have been glad he should be spared the pain, after so much kindness to himself and the lassie. Only, that pain would not be outside the range of pity; a practicable human pain that could be thought of and dealt with—not a pain like his own if the lassie followed her mother. Or rather, that last pain would be no pain at all; merely the dumb extinction of a soul. Or would it be like the anæsthetic that multiplies suffering tenfold, and leaves its victim inexpressive—just mere adamant? So much the better! Death would come the sooner.
But all the information Jim received was softened down, and he knew it. A murmur he could not have found voice to speak aloud was always in the inmost chambers of his mind, prompting doubt of the reports that reached him. But he never showed a sign of his growing consciousness of the gathering cloud, unless it were that he listened to his news, as he got it, more and more in silence.
"How would he be the better if we did send him?" said Athelstan Taylor to his sister-in-law, less than three weeks later. "He might just arrive to find her dying. How would he know his little lass? Not 'by the feel' now! Addie says she's gone to a mere shadow. Not by the voice...." His own broke, and he stopped. Aunt Bessy sobbed in a window-recess, and thought she dried her tears unnoticed.
They had been walking to and fro and about the room in restless perturbation, she interlacing the uneasy fingers of hands that wandered to her brows when free, then interlaced again; he somewhat firmer, but with lips not quite within control. He held the yellow paper of a telegram to hand an hour since, and kept re-reading the twenty-odd words that made it up, failing always to read any new and better meaning into the heart of their brevity. It had come enclosed in a letter from Adeline Fossett, who had the day previously been wired for suddenly by Miss Jane, the Chinese lady at Chalk Cliff. A short and grisly summons she knew the meaning of at once, following as it did on a forewarning letter thirty-six hours ago—a letter that teemed with excruciating assurance that there was no "immediate danger," but that when there was the writer would send a telegram at once. She had kept her word.
That letter, forwarded promptly on to the Rectory, had made heart-sick discussion between Athelstan Taylor and Aunt Bessy since its arrival by this morning's post. What ought to be said?—what could be said to the father of the dying child, who was now looking forward to her near return home, building still whatever structures of hope the hesitating, irresolute tidings of a month past had left a weak foundation for? Who was to say to Jim that the time had come to give up that sweet vision he to this hour was trying hard to cherish, of a miraculous late summer and his little lass again, beside him at the well-head, in the sunshine? Who was to shatter the thin crust of artificial hopes that still kept under the fires of his misgivings, and leave them free to break loose through the crater of a volcano of despair?