Wylder's Hand Part 79

'Yes--signal--stop him, can you?'

The porter only scratched his head, under his cap, and smiled sheepishly after the train. Jos. Larkin knew, the next moment, he had talked nonsense.

'I--I--yes--I have--have you an engine here:--express--I'll pay anything.'

But, no, there was 'no engine--not nearer than the junction, and she might not be spared.'

'How far is the junction?'

'Nineteen and a-half.'

'Nineteen miles! They'll never bring me there, by horse, under two hours, they are so cursed tedious. Why have not you a spare engine at a place like this? s.h.i.+llingsworth! Nice management! Are you certain? Where's the station-master?'

All this time he kept staring after the faint pulsations on the air that indicated the flight of the engine.

But it would not do. The train--the image upon earth of the irrevocable, the irretrievable--was gone, neither to be overtaken nor recalled. The telegraph was not then, as now, whispering secrets all over England, at the rate of two hundred miles a second, and five s.h.i.+llings per twenty words. Larkin would have given large money for an engine, to get up with the train that was now some five miles on its route, at treble, quadruple, the common cost of such a magical appliance; but all was vain.

He could only look and mutter after it wildly. Vain to conjecture for what station that traveller in the battered hat was bound! Idle speculation! Mere distraction!

Only that Mr. Larkin was altogether the man he was, I think he would have cursed freely.

CHAPTER LXIX.

OF A SPECTRE WHOM OLD TAMAR SAW.

Little Fairy, all this while, continued, in our Church language, 'sick and weak.' The vicar was very sorry, but not afraid. His little man was so bright and merry, that he seemed to him the very spirit of life. He could not dream of his dying. It was sad, to be sure, the little man so many days in his bed, too languid to care for toy or story, quite silent, except when, in the night time, those weird monologues began which showed that the fever had reached his brain. The tones of his pleasant little voice, in those sad flights of memory and fancy, busy with familiar scenes and occupations, sounded wild and plaintive in his ear. And when 'Wapsie' was mentioned, sometimes the vicar's eyes filled, but he smiled through this with a kind of gladness at the child's affection. 'It will soon be over, my darling! You will be walking with Wapsie in a week again.' The sun could as soon cease from s.h.i.+ning as little Fairy from living. The thought he would not allow near him.

Doctor Buddle had been six miles away that evening with a patient, and looked in at the vicar's long after the candles were lighted.

He was not satisfied with little Fairy--not at all satisfied. He put his hand under the clothes and felt his thin, slender limbs--thinner than ever now. Dry and very hot they were--and little man babbling his nonsense about little boys, and his 'Wapsie,' and toys, and birds, and the mill-stream, and the church-yard--of which, with so strange a fatality, children, not in romance only, but reality, so often prattle in their feverish wanderings.

He felt his pulse. He questioned his mamma, and cross-examined the nurse, and looked grave and very much annoyed; and then bethought him of something to be tried; and having given his directions to the maid, he went home in haste, and returned in half an hour with the something in a phial--a few drops in water, and little man sat up, leaning on his Wapsie's arm, and 'took it very good,' his nurse said, approvingly; and he looked at them all wonderingly, for two or three moments, and so tired; and they laid him down again, and then his spoken dreams began once more.

Doctor Buddle was dark and short in his answers to voluble little Mrs.

Wylder--though, of course, quite respectful--and the vicar saw him down the narrow stairs, and they turned into the study for a moment, and, said Buddle, in an under tone--

'He's very ill--I can say nothing else.'

And there was a pause.

The little colour he had receded from the vicar's face, for the looks and tones of good-natured Buddle were not to be mistaken. He was reading little Fairy's death warrant.

'I see, doctor--I see; you think he'll die,' said the vicar, staring at him. 'Oh doctor, my little Fairy!'

The doctor knew something of the poor vicar's troubles--of course in a village most things of the kind _are_ known--and often, in his brisk, rough way, he thought as, with a nod and a word, he pa.s.sed the lank cleric, under the trees or across the common, with his bright, prattling, sunny-haired little boy by the hand--or encountered them telling stories on the stile, near the castle meadow--what a gleam of suns.h.i.+ne was always dancing about his path, in that smiling, wayward, loving little fellow--and now a long Icelandic winter was coming, and his path was to know that light no more.

'With children, you know, I--I always say there's a chance--but you are right to look the thing in the face--and I'll be here the first call in the morning; and you know where to find me, in the meantime;' and the doctor shook hands very hard with the vicar at the hall-door, and made his way homeward--the vicar's eyes following him till he was out of sight.

Then William Wylder shut the hall-door, and turned about.

Little Fairy's drum was hanging from a peg on the hat-stand--the drum that was to sound no more in the garden, or up and down the hall, with the bright-haired little drummer's song. There would be no more interruption now--the vicar would write his sermons undisturbed; no more consolations claimed--no more broken toys to be mended--some of the innocent little rubbish lay in the study. It should never move from that--nor his drum--nor that little hat and cape, hanging on their peg, with the tiny boots underneath.

No more prattling at unseasonable times--no more crying--no more singing--no more laughing; all these interruptions were quiet now, and altogether gone--'Little man! little Fairy! Oh, was it possible!' But memory would call up the vicar from his half-written sermon. He would miss his troublesome little man, when the sun shone out that he used to welcome--when the birds hopped on the window-stone, to find the crumbs that little man used to strew there; and when his own little canary--'Birdie' he used to call him--would sing and twitter in his cage--and the time came to walk out on his lonely visits.

He must walk alone by the shop-doors--where the little man was so admired--and up the mill-road, and in the castle meadow and over the stile where they used to sit.

Poor Dolly! Her Willie would not tell her yet. He kneeled down in the study--'Little man's' top, and some cut paper nondescripts, were lying where he had left them, at his elbow--and he tried to pray, and then he remembered that his darling ought to know that he was going into the presence of his Maker.

Yes, he would tell poor Dolly first, and then his little man. He would repeat his hymn with him, and pray--and so he went up the nursery stairs.

Poor Dolly, very tired, had gone to lie down for a little. He would not disturb her--no, let her enjoy for an hour more her happy illusion.

When he went into the nursery little Fairy was sitting up, taking his medicine; the nurse's arm round his thin shoulders. He sat down beside him, weeping gently, his thin face turned a little away, and his hand on the coverlet.

Little man looked wonderingly from his tired eyes on Wapsie, and his thin fingers crept on his hand, and Wapsie turned about, drying his eyes, and said--

'Little man! my darling!'

'He's like himself, Sir, while he's sitting up--his little head quite right again.'

'My head's quite right, Wapsie,' the little man whispered, sadly.

'Thank G.o.d, my darling!' said the vicar. The tears were running down his cheeks while he parted little Fairy's golden hair with his fingers.

'When I am quite well again,' whispered the little man, 'won't you bring me to the castle meadow, where the wee river is, and we'll float races with daisies and b.u.t.tercups--the way you did on my birthday.'

'They say that little mannikin----' suddenly the vicar stopped. 'They say that little mannikin won't get well.'

'And am I always to be sick, here in my little bed, Wapsie?' whispered little Fairy, in his dreamy, earnest way, that was new to him.

'No, darling; not always sick: you'll be happier than ever--but not here; little man will be taken by his Saviour, that loves him best of all--and he'll be in heaven--and only have a short time to wait, and maybe his poor Wapsie will come to him, please G.o.d, and his darling mamma--and we'll all be happy together, for ever, and never be sick or sorry any more, my treasure--my little Fairy--my darling.'

And little man looked on him with his tired eyes, not quite understanding what it meant, nor why Wapsie was crying; and the nurse said--

'He'd like to be dozin', Sir, he's so tired, please.' So down the poor little fellow lay, his 'Wapsie' praying by his bedside.

When, in a little time, poor Dolly returned, her Willie took her round the waist, as on the day when she accepted him, and led her tenderly into the other room, and told her all, and they hugged and wept together.

'Oh, Dolly, Dolly!'

'Oh, Willie, darling! Oh, Willie, our precious treasure--our only one.'

And so they walked up and down that room, his arm round her waist, and in that sorrowful embrace, murmuring amid their sobs to one another, their thoughts and remembrances of 'little man.' How soon the treasure grows a retrospect!

Then Dolly bethought her of her promise to Rachel.