"Oy'll tell un."
"Because Lizarann's coming back—that's what you've got to tell. Who is it's a-coming back, hey?"
"L'woyzara-ann."
"My little maid, d'ye see?"
"Yower little may-ud."
"That's a likely young customer. Now mind you tell your brother Jack just that and nothing else, Matthew Read." And Matthew Read departed with his pails, leaving Jim all the happier for having, as it were, substantialized and filled out his hopes by this little performance.
The pipe Jim lighted with a vesuvian after discharging a few more water-claims, now and then recurring to the subject nearest his heart with the more talkworthy claimants, was as happy a pipe as he had ever smoked. As the sun rose higher, a full-blooded southern Phœbus with no stint of heat in his veins, he could rejoice in the evident influence of this mysterious St. Augustin, of whom he had never heard before, but who clearly could make a summer for him and his little lass. It was coming, and so was she. She would not, maybe, be her old self for a bit. But, then, no more had old David been. And that was eighty-four years ago—over half a century before Jim was born! Any number of glorious expectations might entrench themselves behind such a precedent—making a fortress in his soul against Despair.
Who says tobacco cannot be enjoyed in the dark? Jim had heard that story, and thought to himself as he cleared his pipe of ashes that he could tell another tale. But what was that pipe to the pipes he would smoke when his little lass was back, to make all this caution in lighting them needless? It was as good as having eyes himself to have the child beside him. But suppose now he had been blind from birth! Think of what it would have been like to have never a tale to tell to his little lass! He had so lost himself in his love for the child that this little bit of optimism came spontaneously, without a shade of bitter comment about being thankful for small mercies.
It was curious to him now—admittedly so—that he had shrunk from hearing again the sound of the waves, seeing he was actually looking forward to hearing Lizarann tell of them. It was on one account a disappointment to him, that since she was taken away to Chalk Cliff the weather had been so calm. It was true that the one letter she had written him—just at the time of that slight fluctuation upwards in the first week of her stay—had told of a rough sea, with such big waves; but then it had told also of how a pleasure-boat had been shoved off and a lady got wet through. Would that rough sea help him to tell her, better than before, what the waves were like when he was on that steamer in the China seas, and a typhoon swept the decks clear?
Talking was going on, down the road. Somebody was referring to the Rectory, speaking of it as the parsonage. Jim listened. Pa'arson had coom whoam yesterday. That was all right, but had no one else come to the Rectory? Yesterday was exactly six weeks and a day since Lizarann's departure. But Jim had hedged against despair with constant self-reminders that her not having come need mean nothing. So he could ask questions, equably.