THE prophets of evil were not deceived; when a kind of general impression arises in respect to an invalid that a crisis is approaching, it almost always is justified by the event. During that very night there was a sudden alarm; Mr. Trevor’s bell rang loudly, awakening all the house. Lucy flew from her room, hastily gathering her dressing-gown round her, with her light hair hanging about her shoulders, and Mrs. Ford appeared in a night-cap, which was an indecorum she recollected long afterward. The maids naturally, being less interested, were harder to rouse, and it was Mr. Ford himself who issued forth in the penetrating chill of the early morning, still quite dark and silent, not a soul astir, and buttoning himself into his warmest overcoat, went out in the cold to seek a doctor, who, for his part, was just as unwilling to be roused out of his slumbers in the middle of the night. Jock, roused by the sounds, sat up in his little bed, with wide-awake eyes, hearing the bell still jar and tinkle, and sounds of people running up-and down-stairs, which half frightened, half reassured him. To hear other people moving about is always a comfort to a child, and so was the reflection of the lamp at the gateway of the Terrace, which shone into his room and kept it light. Jock sat up and gazed with big eyes, and wondered, but was too much awed and alarmed by the nocturnal disturbance to move; and, indeed, as it turned out after, there was not much need for any one to be disturbed. Old Trevor’s explanation was that he had woke up with a loud singing in his ears and a sense of giddiness, and he could not articulate at first when, they rushed to his bedside, so that everybody believed it to be a “stroke.” But when the doctor came he declared that, though the patient’s blood was running like a river in flood, yet there was nothing very particular the matter, and that a day or two’s quiet would make him all right. Mrs. Ford, in her night-cap, remained by the newly lighted fire in Mr. Trevor’s room to take care of him, but the rest were all sent back to bed, and when the breakfast-hour arrived the patient pronounced himself as well as ever. He got up at his usual hour, and would not even allow that, as Mrs. Ford suggested, he felt “shaky.”
“Not a bit shaky,” he declared, putting out one shrunken shank to show how steadily he stood on the other; “but I thought my time was come,” he said. “I’ll allow I thought I had reached it, after looking for it so long. It was a queer feeling. I am just as well pleased to put it off a bit, though it must come soon.”
“That is true,” Ford said, shaking his head; “we must all die; but the youngest may go off before the oldest, as happens every day.”
These were the words that little Jock heard as they came into the drawing-room, the old man leaning on the arm of the other. Where was the youngest to go off to? He understood vaguely, and a momentary thrill ran through his little veins. Was it he that might “go” before his father? it was a thing which seemed to lie between the eldest and the youngest Jock’s mind was full of the plague and all its horrible details, and the wonder and mystery of thus going “off” chimed in with this gloomy yet fascinating study; the recollection of the bell tinkling through the streets, the dead-cart stopping at the door, scared yet excited him. But there was no plague, no dead-cart, no tinkling bell at Farafield. After awhile the impression died out of the child’s mind, but scarcely so quickly as it did out of the mind of his old father, who already chuckled to himself over the fright he had given the house. Mr. Trevor did justice to the people who surrounded him.
“When it really comes they will be sorry,” he said; “but it was a disappointment.”
He liked to think he had disappointed them; even in getting better, a man can not but feel that his own superior sense and strength of character have something to do with it. Another man would not have rallied, would have been capable of dying perhaps, and cutting short all the interest of his story; but not John Trevor, who knew better what he was about.
The night alarm, however, soon became known over Farafield, and many people had sufficient interest in the old man and his daughter to come or send, and make inquiries. Among these he had one visitor who amused and one who angered him. The first was a stranger, who sent up a card with the name of Mr. Frank St. Clair, and a message from Mrs. Stone, who begged to have the last news of the sufferer. “Show him up, show him up,” old Trevor said, his keen eyes twinkling with malice and humor; but when the large figure of the young barrister (for that was Mr. Frank St. Clair’s profession) entered the room, the old man was impressed, in spite of himself, by the solidity and imposing proportions of Mrs. Stone’s nephew and candidate; there was an air of respectability about him which compelled attention. He was handsome, but he was also serious, and had that air of a man who has given hostages to society, which nothing confers so surely as this tendency to a comfortable and respectable fullness of frame. Old Trevor acknowledged to himself that this was no young dandy, but a man, possibly, of weight of character as well as person; his very tendency (to speak politely) to embonpoint conciliated the old man. Schemers are seldom fat. Mr. Frank St. Clair looked respectable to the tips of his well-brushed boots, and as he looked at him, old Trevor was mollified in spite of himself.
“Yes, I gave them a fright,” he said. “I thought myself that matters were coming to a crisis; but it was a false alarm. You may tell your aunt that I am as well as ever, and as clear in my intellects as ever—such intellects as I have.”
“Nobody would doubt that, I think,” said St. Clair; and indeed Mr. Trevor flattered himself that nobody could doubt it. He was as clearly aware of the effect upon a stranger of his own keen eyes and vivacious wide-awake aspect as any one could be.
“There’s no telling,” said the old man; “some people think they can take me in—which is a mistake, Mr. St. Clair—a great mistake.”
“I should think so,” said St. Clair, with easy composure. “If you will let me, I will sit down,” he said; “if there is nothing to occupy you for the moment, I wonder if you will let me ask your advice about a little money I have?”
Again the malicious gleam awoke in old Trevor’s eyes, a mixture of suspicion, admiration, and interest moved him. Every man who had money interested him more or less; but if this was a dodge on Mrs. Stone’s part, the move was one which might have filled any like minded artist with admiration. He chuckled as he invited the confidence of his visitor; yet though he thought he saw through the deceit, he respected St. Clair all the same for having money to invest, even if it were not his own, but lent to him for the occasion; it threw a halo of interest round him in old Trevor’s eyes.
“So that’s the first of them,” he said to himself, when St. Clair took his departure; “that’s number one of the pack. Women are quick about it, they don’t let the grass grow under their feet. Rushton will keep quiet, he won’t let his lad show in my sight. But the women are bold—they’re always bold. And I wonder who my lady will bring forward?” The old man laughed; he was pleased by the thought of the coming struggle. It did not give him any concern that his young daughter should be left alone in the midst of it, to be competed for by so many hungry aspirants. “I’d like to be there to see the wolves at it,” he said aloud, with a grin on his face. At the sound of the voice over his head, little Jock turned round upon his rug. Wolves were in his way; from Red Riding-hood upward, he knew a great deal about them; he had heard them in the forest pursuing the travelers, and knew what the howl meant when it occurred in a story in the midst of the black winter night. He turned right round, with the “History of the Plague” in his arms, and faced his father, looking upward from the rug. “What is it about wolves?” said Jock.
No question could have surprised old Trevor more; he looked round him first in suspicion, to see where the voice came from then looked down upon the child with a gape of wonder. “Eh! do you know anything about wolves, my lad?” he said.
“Oh, a great deal!” said Jock, calmly; “I could tell you heaps of stories about them; the worst of all is that one about the woman and her children. I told it to Lucy, and she would not let me tell it out. Would you like me to tell it to you?”
Jock spoke to his father on very much the footing of an equal. They did not, as a rule, take much notice of each other; but the curious way in which they pursued their lives together had given the old man and the little boy a sort of tacit fellowship, not at all like the usual relation between father and child. Not once in two or three months was there any conversation between them, and this gave all the more importance to their occasional intercourse. “There was once a woman,” said Jock, “traveling through a wild, wild forest, and she had her three little children with her—quite little, little things, littler than me a great deal; when all of a sudden she heard pad, pad, something coming behind her. It wasn’t quite night, but it was getting dark, darker and darker every moment; and the old white horse got awfully frightened, and the forest was miles and miles long. She knew she couldn’t come to a village, or a house, for ever so long. And she heard them coming on faster and faster, sniffing and panting, and all after her, hundreds and hundreds of them; they’re like dogs, you know,” said Jock parenthetically, looking up from the rug, where he lay on his back, with the “History of the Plague” laid open on his breast; “they bark and they howl, just like dogs when you hear them far off in the woods; but when they’re after you, they go straight before them, like the wind blowing, and never make any sound.”
“And what became of the woman and the children?” said old Trevor, partly amused, partly impressed.
“The white horse[A] galloped on and on,” said Jock, with the instinct of a story-teller; “and the wolves came after, pad, pad, all like one, though there were hundreds and hundreds of them, and the woman in the sleigh (did I tell you it was a sleigh? but I don’t know rightly myself what a sleigh is) got wild with fright, and the three little things cried, and the trees made a noise against the sky; and the wood got deeper and deeper, and the night darker and darker; and then she heard them all panting behind her, and their breath hot upon her, and every moment she thought they would jump up behind and crunch her with their teeth—”
[A] The poem of Ivan Ivanovitch had not been written in those days, and perhaps it might have been above Jock’s understanding.
“Go on, child, go on,” said old Trevor. “I think I’ve heard the story; but I don’t remember how she got out of it.”
“This is what Lucy will never listen to,” said Jock, solemnly; “she says it can’t be true; she says there never was a woman like that. She says she’ll beat me if I go on; but it is the real end to the story all the same. Well, you know, the woman was wild; she didn’t know what she was doing. Just when they were going to crunch her with their teeth in her neck, she turned round, and she took up one of the children and flung it out into the middle of the wolves; and the little thing gave just one more cry (he was crying, you know, before), and the wolves caught him in their big teeth, and tore him, one a piece here, and another a piece there, hundreds and hundreds of them; and the old white horse galloped on and on.
“Well, but then that was only one,” said Jock, resuming after a pause; “when they had eaten that little thing all up, they were not half satisfied, and they said to each other, ‘Come on,’ and two minutes after, what should the woman hear but the whole mob of them after her again, and the sound of them panting and their breaths on her neck. And she took hold of another little child—”
“You needn’t tell me any more,” said the old man; “where did you get these dreadful stories; they turn one sick.”
“She threw them all out, the first, and the second, and the third,” cried the boy, making haste to complete his narrative, “and then she was saved herself. Lucy never gets further than the first; but you’ve heard the second. And she says it can’t be true; but it is true,” said Jock, severely; “many people have told it. I’ve read another story—”
“Hold your tongue, child,” said the old man.
Which Jock did at once. He was ready to come forward, to recount his experience, or instruct others by his large amount of miscellaneous reading whenever it was necessary, but he did not thrust his information upon unwilling ears. He turned round again promptly, and, laying his book down on the white rug, supported himself on his elbows and resumed his reading. Jock had a perfectly good conscience, and could hear any number of parables (though he was always suspicious of them) without turning a hair.
But old Trevor was not equally innocent; he trembled a little within himself at that story of remorseless self-preservation. The wolves were the image he had himself used, and when he remembered that he had looked forward to their struggle with amusement, and indeed done his utmost to draw them together, without much regard for the lamb who was to escape as she could from their clutches, a momentary tremor of conscience came over him. But it did not last long; impressions of this kind seldom do; and when he received a second visit in the evening, this time from Philip Rainy, who expressed much solicitude about his health, old Trevor had ceased to feel any compunctions about the fierce competition to which he was going to expose his child. But he was firmly determined that the first and most natural competitor, the man who was of the family, and had a sort of claim to everything that belonged to the name, should not be, so to speak, in the running at all.
“I am very well,” he said, “quite well, thank you; there is nothing the matter with me. If people say to the contrary, they’re lying, or at best they’re fools meddling in other folks’ affairs. It’s nothing to any one if I’m ill or well.”
“You must pardon me, uncle,” said Philip, “but it is something to me.”
The familiar grin came upon the old man’s face; but it was not accompanied with a chuckle of not unkindly mirth, as it had been in the case of Mrs. Stone’s nephew, in whose favor there was no such potent, argument.
“I don’t know what it should be to you,” he said, “Mr. Philip Rainy: if you had been waiting for my shoes I could have understood; but you’ve got ’em, you’ve got ’em, more fool I; and if you think there is anything more coming to you when I die, you’re mistaken, that’s all I’ve got to say. My will’s made—and there’s no legacies in it, not one. My money goes to them that have a right to it. There’s no fancy items to satisfy those that have gone out of their way, or thought they’d gone out of their way, to flatter an old man. So that it’s no good, no possible good, to take that friendly interest in me.”
Lucy, who was sitting by when this was said, started and got up from her knitting, and went once more behind her father, where she stood looking pitifully at Philip, clasping her hands together, and imploring him with her eyes not to be angry. That would have been inducement enough to bear with the old man’s brutal incivility, if there had been nothing more. He gave her a slight, almost imperceptible nod, reassuring her, and answered with a calmness which did him infinite credit, and indeed cost him a great effort.
“I am sorry you think so badly of me,” he said, “but I will not defend myself, I am waiting for no old shoes, heaven knows. I should like to be of use to my relations—to you or to Lucy. But if you will not let me, I must put up with it. And I will not stay longer now, since you have so poor an opinion of me. Good-night, I am going away; but I shall not cease to think about you, though I do not see you. You have been very kind to me, substantially kind,” said Philip, rising slowly with a lingering look at the father and daughter, “I owe all that I am, and something of what I may be, to you, and I want no more, Mr. Trevor, no legacies, nothing but a way of showing my gratitude. If I am not to be allowed to do this, why, I must submit. Good-night.”
There was a quaver of real feeling in the young man’s voice. It was true enough, and if there was something more that was likewise true, the suppressio veri is in some cases a very venial fault. As for Lucy, what with sympathy, and indignation and shame for her father’s conduct, she was more tenderly inclined toward Philip than she had ever been in her life. Thus opposition usually works. She cast an indignant look at her father, and a strenuous protest in the shape of an exclamation, “Papa!” which spoke volumes; and then in spite of his call to her to remain she followed Philip as he went down-stairs, appealing to him also, in a different way, with the tears in her eyes.
“You will not mind, Philip; but please don’t stop coming or quarrel because he is cross. He is ill, that is the reason, he is not himself; but I am sure you are too sensible to mind.”
Philip shook his head with a smile. “I fear I am not so sensible,” he said. “I do mind; but Lucy, if you will always speak to me as kindly I shall not mind what any one else may say,” he added, with fervor. He had never gone so far, or felt inclined to go so far before.
Lucy was surprised by this new tone, and looked at him, not with alarm, but with a mild astonishment. However, as it did not occur to her that there could be any special meaning in it, she gave him her hand kindly as usual, nay, a little more kindly, in that her father had used him so badly.
“It does not matter very much about me,” she said, “but I am very, very sorry papa has been so—strange. It is only because he is ill, very ill still. They all think he is better, but I don’t think so; his hand is so hot and trembling, and there is such a wild sort of brightness in his eyes. I am not easy about him, but very unhappy. I wish to-night was over,” she said, the tears falling in a little shower from her eyes.
“Lucy! let me stay; will you let me stay? He need not know that I am here, but I could sit up down-stairs and be ready to run for the doctor, or to do anything.”
“It is very good of you, Philip; but how would you be fit for your work if you sat up all night? No, no, I can not let you do that. And perhaps it will not be so bad; perhaps I am—silly,” said Lucy, with a dolorous attempt at a smile.
“What does the doctor say?” Philip asked.
He was very sorry for her in all truth and sincerity, besides having a sense that it would be very good for him to be thus identified with her, and show himself as her chief comforter and support at this serious moment of her life.
Mrs. Ford came out from her parlor as she heard the conversation outside. She was Philip’s relation too, and she had decided that nothing could be more suitable, if— But like so many other good women, she could not let well alone, and to Philip’s great vexation here came out, adding her portly presence to the scene.
“The doctor is quite satisfied,” said Mrs. Ford, “quite satisfied. He is going on as nicely as possible; you must help me to persuade Lucy, Philip, that she must not sit up as she is talking of doing. Why should she sit up? I shall be there to do whatever is wanted, and to call her if it should be necessary. At her age it is a killing thing to sit up all night.”
“I have been begging her to let me stay and watch instead,” said Philip; “a chair in your parlor would be all I should want, and I should be ready to run for the doctor.”
“Oh, no, no,” Lucy said.
Mrs. Ford wavered for a moment, thinking that a young man was much more fit for this duty than her respectable husband, but finally decided that it was not to be thought of, remembering Mr. Trevor’s dislike to Philip; and then the bell was heard to ring, and Lucy ran upstairs anxiously. Mrs. Ford’s parting words, however, were very encouraging.
“Don’t you take any notice,” she said, “but come and see her, whether you see him or not. He will go some day or other, that’s certain, in one of these fits.”
“Poor little Lucy!” Philip said.
“Yes, it is true, it will be sad for her,” said Mrs. Ford, not half sure of what she was saying; “but yet Lucy will have a great deal to be thankful for, whatever happens,” she added, as she again bade him good-night.