It Never Can Happen Again

by William De Morgan

And no doubt a good deal of the tale was true, and the good-will of its narrator past all question. But he was making the most of it for the sake of the pleasure it gave him to cheer up the blind man's loneliness, without thinking quite enough of his responsibility to truth. When he wished Master Coupland sound sleep and pleasant dreams at the gate of the little cottage, and went slowly on to his own home in the village, he was saying good-bye to a man only too ready to give the rein to the horses of the chariot of Hope, even without an excuse. And here he had one, surely.

So, through his lonely supper—for, granting it cooked and placed on the table, Jim had a marvellous faculty of shifting for himself—he was building a sweet castle in the air with the materials so good-naturedly placed at his disposal. He imagined to himself as a thing to be to-morrow, if it had not already come to pass to-day, a journey home of a reinstated Lizarann, all eagerness for her Daddy. Not an exorbitantly robust little lass—he would not be unreasonable—but one perceptibly better than the one that left him a month since; whose kisses he could still feel, was soon to feel again. As he lighted his pipe in the garden with a vesuvian—for he never lit it in the house when alone, for safety's sake—and sat smoking under the stars in the clematis arbour, now beginning to lose its glory, it glowed in unison with the fire of a stimulated hope the old man's tale had kindled. If old David had been worse off eighty-four years ago than Lizarann, why should not the child have many a long year of life before her—aye!—even after he, Jim, had borne the last of his troubles, and was laid beside Dolly in the grave? Short of that, why should not he at least treasure the hope of the month to come, with Lizarann herself beside him in the warmth of that late summer the gentleman had all but guaranteed? For this castle in Spain owed a great deal of its vividness to Challis's obliging meteorology. He had vouched for "St. Augustin's Summer," and it sounded well.

Then a painful thought came to him. It had fretted him before this, at intervals. How if that grave where Dolly lay could not be found? What did he know about it? Little enough! Priscilla knew; she had arranged all that—as Jim, for all his good-nature, suspected—with a certain ghoul-like joy. But suppose, when he himself came to an end, Lizarann wished to place as much as was left of him beside her mother, where was the Lizarann of that day to find her? Well!—he could do nothing about it now. He would speak to the master, and make a clear chart, for the lassie's sake. No question came in here of how he might be the survivor, and have to place her in her mother's grave. Old David's tale had been an opiate to thoughts like that, and his heart rested on it.

Oh yes!—Lizarann was due, to-morrow or next day at furthest. She would tell him about the sea. He could bear to hear of it from her—his lassie who had seen it—though he had fought shy of actually hearing what he could never see again himself.

He was so happy in his dwelling on her near return, and the glamour he had clothed it with, that he could smoke there beneath the starlight he could not see, and think of his old nights on ship-board without a pang. Little things came back to him, long forgotten; one particularly, slight enough in itself, but so unlike Tallack Street and the spurious match trade! A wandering ice-floe from the Antarctic Circle, as the ship passed the Falkland Islands; and upon it, clear in the light of a great golden moonrise, a huge white she-bear with one young cub. They were drifting northward—ever northward—to the heat, and the seeming firm ground beneath their feet would melt quicker and quicker each day, to fail them altogether in the end, and leave them to die hard—the strong swimmers—in the deadly warmth of some tropic sea. Jim wondered at the thoughtlessness of his young day of brute courage and heedless energy, and how he never had a thought then for the mother-bear and her despair of saving her child in that plain of immeasurable waters; while now, for some unexplained reason, it was quite a discomfort to him to think of it, there in old Margy's arbour under the clematis. But presently he suspected a reason why he felt a new feeling over it. How if his hold over his child, his precious possession, was melting—melting away! He brushed the intolerable thought aside! Could he not feel for the poor soul on the iceberg, bear though she was, without that? Oh yes!—Lizarann would come to-morrow.

All this trouble, and doctoring, and the like, makes a man raw, thought poor Jim to himself, seeking for apologies for his failure to attain a Spartan ideal. 'Tain't like then-a-days, when you might be in a high sea any hour of the day or night, and be whistled up to take in sail—as he was, to be sure, out of a dream about Dolly, that very time he saw the Flying Dutchman, and lost his sight the week after.... There now!—where was the use of going back on bygones, when Lizarann would be here to-morrow, to hear him tell again about the Dutchman, with all her added knowledge of the sea to help.

But it was true, for all that, that a man got soft with nothing to rouse him up like, and keep him off of nursing up his old grievances, with ne'er a soul nigh to throw a word to. Jim never felt any too sure, neither, that his new cult of music was not an enervating luxury. Undermining musical phrases crept into his practice as a chorister that made him no better—mind you!—than a cry-baby. There was one in particular that was almost cruel to him in its beauty—it was as a matter of fact an adaptation by the Rector of that Ave Maria of Arkadelt that you know as well as we do—and he sang it aloud to the night-wind stirring in the trees, and the owls, for by now night was over all, in a kind of bravado, to show that he could bear it. But his voice broke on the last cadence, do what he might. "There, ye see!—just come of being so lonesome!" Jim spoke aloud to the darkness and the owls, to feel his solitude less if it might be.

But what did it matter when his lassie was coming to-morrow—coming to-morrow!

How the time was passing! There went the cottage clock again the third time since Jim lighted his first pipe after supper. Surely he must be mistaken!—it would stop on the stroke of ten. He counted the deliberate strokes, each with its long preliminary warning; and on the eleventh said to himself that he must have counted wrong. Could he possibly be within an hour of the day that was to bring him Lizarann? Listen for the church-clock of the village, and make sure! He could hear his own heart beating in the stillness, even through the monotone of a cricket somewhere close at hand. Old Margy's clock was a bit fast always....

There!—sure enough this time, the first stroke on the wind. Jim counted steadily to the tenth, and all but made quite certain he had heard the last, so long did the pause seem to his anxiety, when yet another came. No mistake this time. Eleven! Bedtime.