OF THE APPROACH OF LIZARANN'S RETURN, AND HOW JIM'S HOPES WERE FED BY OLD DAVID. HOW JIM DID NOT CURSE A MOTOR-CAR. HOW LIZARANN DIED OF TUBERCULOSIS
So it had come about that for weeks past news of Lizarann, that none could doubt the meaning of, came to the Rectory, and that all of it that passed on to her Daddy reached him corrected out of all knowledge—the sting withdrawn.
Had he been able to read the letters that contained it himself, this would not have been possible. Some may have a stone ready to cast at Athelstan Taylor for this. The story has none. It was a question with the Rector of allowing poor Jim a few more days of false hope in order that he himself might be beside him in the first of his despair. His own easiest course, far and away, would have been to read Adeline Fossett's last letter to the poor fellow aloud, say, "God's will be done!" and so forth, and get away to Chipping Chester. But he had it in his mind to go to Jim when the use of the knife became inevitable, and remain with him, if Mrs. Fox were still away, at least until the day of her return. He shrank from leaving him alone in the cottage, a tortured soul in a sunless universe, within reach of a razor.
Had he conceived for one moment what the speed of events would be, his course might have been different. But the letters that he could not read aloud to Jim were misleading on one point. The writer caught constantly at the only easement words could be found for, that the actual hour or day, or even week, of Death could not be forecast. The dear little thing was not actually dying; she might live for weeks, even months. But the doctor here—said Miss Jane Fanshawe—who really had had immense experience, thought the case could only end one way. Still, the temperature was half a degree lower to-day, and we thought the air was beginning to tell. We should be able to see better when she was got back home, with her old surroundings. She fretted a good deal about her Daddy. That was the general tone of the penultimate letter. Then came the one Miss Fossett enclosed on with the telegram which followed it. It came too late for the Rector to modify his plan of operations.
So Jim lived on by himself, and thought of his little lass, counting the days to her return. He spoke with no one, water-customers apart, except a neighbour who had undertaken to see to his needs in Mrs. Fox's absence. His dog was under the impression that it was he that was doing this, and there can be no doubt that he actually did conduct his master to and from the well. But nobody, except his canine self, believed that he had any share in cooking the dinner or making the beds.
Each long day that went by was a day nearer to the blind man's hearing of his child's voice. It would come, and would be hers once more—many times more than once. His reason might whisper to him of one end, and one alone, in some vague terrible future, to this insidious plague that had stolen on him like a thief in the night, to rob him of his happiness—the one jewel his darkness and his crippled limbs had left him. But that the hour was at hand, and the word spoken, that the light in his heart should be utterly quenched, and leave his soul to a darkness blacker than the void his eyesight had become—this was an idea it was not in him to receive, a thought that nature rose against.
No!—her return would be very soon now, and he knew how it would come. He had nothing to guide him to the day or the hour beyond his knowledge of the term first fixed—six weeks from the day of her departure. But he knew what would be his first hearing of it. She would call out to him—he was sure of that—the signal he had taught her to greet him with, in the old days of Bladen Street; the word he had listened for so many a time as he felt his way, touching with his stick the long blank wall he had to pass before he could feel her little hand in his. He dreamed and dwelt upon the moment when he should hear that call again, "Pi-lot!"
The villagers coming to the well for water were a great solace to him; a mine of robust hopefulness in which the choke-damp of misgiving was unknown. Often when Jim was downhearted about the little lass—had got a hump about her, as he phrased it—some village matron's voice would come to him like a breath of fresh air. "Yow'ull be having yower little maid back again vairy soon now, Master Coupland!" And the sympathetic confidence bred in Jim's own voice would help him to a conviction that it was well-grounded, as he answered, "Aye, mistress, sure! But a very little time to run now!" Even when the slight insecurity implied in the addendum, "Please God!"—making the little lass's return conditional on anything—weakened the robust language of unqualified Hope, Jim received it as a mere concession to the prejudices of Society. Besides, he and his Maker were on better terms now, since his initiation into church-music.
No note of alarm had reached the villagers; in fact, the Rector and his sister-in-law kept their information to themselves. Even Phœbe and Joan, when they paid Jim visits of consolation—every other day or thereabouts—were a reassuring element; though so near sources of better, or worse, information. They—poor little souls!—knew nothing of death close at hand, though alive to funerals, somewhat as a counsel's children might be alive to law-suits.