In making this change in his position, slight as it was, the gentleman in the superfluous clothing reminded Mr. Jos. Larkin very sharply for an instant of — somebody. There was the rub; who could it be?
The figure was once more a mere mountain of rug. What was the peculiarity in that slight movement — something in the knee? something in the elbow? something in the general character?
Why had he not spoken to him? The opportunity, for the present, was past. But he was now sure that his fellow-traveller was an acquaintance, who had probably recognised him. Larkin — except when making a mysterious trip at election times, or in an emergency, in a critical case — was a frank, and as he believed could be a fascinating compagnon de voyage, such and so great was his urbanity on a journey. He rather liked talking with people; he sometimes heard things not wholly valueless, and once or twice had gathered hints in this way, which saved him trouble, or money, which is much the same thing. Therefore upon principle he was not averse from that direst of bores, railway conversation.
And now they slackened speed, with a long, piercing whistle, and came to a standstill at ‘East Haddon’ (with a jerk upon the last syllable), ‘East Haddon, East Haddon,’ as the herald of the station declared, and Lawyer Larkin sat straight up, very alert, with a budding smile, ready to blow out into a charming radiance the moment his fellow-traveller rose perpendicular, as was to be expected, and peeped from his window.
But he seemed to know intuitively that Larkin intended telling him, apropos of the station, that story of the Haddon property, and Sir James Wotton’s will, which as told by the good attorney and jumbled by the clatter, was perhaps a little dreary. At all events he did not stir, and carefully abstained from wakening, and in a few seconds more they were again in motion.
They were now approaching Shillingsworth, where the attorney was to get out, and put up for the night, having a deed with him to be executed in that town, and so sweetening his journey with this small incident of profit.
Now, therefore, looking at his watch, and consulting his time table, he got his slim valise from under on top of the seat before him, together with his hat-case, despatch-box, stick, and umbrella, and brushed off with his handkerchief some of the gritty railway dust that lay drifted in exterior folds and hollows of his coat, rebuttoned that garment with precision, arranged his shirt-collar, stuffed his muffler into his coatpocket, and made generally that rude sacrifice to the graces with which natty men precede their exit from the dust and ashes of this sort of sepulture.
At this moment he had just eight minutes more to go, and the glitter of the pair of eyes, staring between the muffler and the rim of the hat, met his view once more.
Mr. Larkin’s cigar-case was open in his hand in a moment, and with such a smile as a genteel perfumer offers his wares with, he presented it toward the gentleman who was built up in the stack of garments.
He merely shook his head with the slightest imaginable nod and a wave of a pudgy hand in a soiled dogskin glove, which emerged for a second from under a cape, in token that he gratefully declined the favour.
Mr. Larkin smiled and shrugged regretfully, and replaced the case in his coat pocket. Hardly five minutes remained now. Larkin glanced round for a topic.
‘My journey is over for the present, Sir, and perhaps you would find these little things entertaining.’
And he tendered with the same smile ‘Punch,’ the ‘Penny Gleaner,’ and ‘Gray’s Magazine,’ a religious serial. They were, however, similarly declined in pantomime.
‘He’s not particularly polite, whoever he is,’ thought Mr. Larkin, with a sniff. However, he tried the effect of a direct observation. So getting one seat nearer, he said: —
‘Wonderful place Shillingsworth, Sir; one does not really, until one has visited it two or three times over, at all comprehend its wealth and importance; and how justly high it deserves to hold its head amongst the provincial emporia of our productive industry.’
The shapeless traveller in the corner touched his ear with his pudgy dogskin fingers, and shook his hand and head a little, in token either that he was deaf, or the noise such as to prevent his hearing, and in the next moment the glittering eyes closed, and the pantomimist appeared to be asleep.
And now, again, the train subsided to a standstill, and Shillingsworth resounded through the night air, and Larkin scrambled forward to the window, by which sat the enveloped gentleman, and called the porter, and, with many unheeded apologies, pulled out his various properties, close by the knees of the tranquil traveller. So, Mr. Larkin was on the platform, and his belongings stowed away against the wall of the station-house.
He made an enquiry of the guard, with whom he was acquainted, about his companion; but the guard knew nothing of the ‘party,’ neither did the porter, to whom the guard put a similar question.
So, as Larkin walked down the platform, the whistle sounded and the train glided forward, and as it passed him, the gentleman in the cloak and queer hat was looking out. A lamp shone full on him. Mr. Larkin’s heart stood still for a moment, and then bounded up as if it would choke him.
‘It’s him, by —— !’ and Mr. Larkin, forgetting syntax, and propriety, and religion, all together, and making a frantic race to keep up with the train, shouted —
‘Stop it, stop it — hollo! — stop — stop — ho, stop!’
But he pleaded with the winds; and before he had reached the end of the platform, the carriage windows were flying by him with the speed of wheel-spokes, and the end of the coupé, with its red lantern, sailed away through the cutting.
‘Forgot summat, Sir,’ said the porter, touching his hat.
‘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? Shillingsworth! 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 shillings 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 shining 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 churchyard — 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 goodnatured 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 passed 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 sunshine 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 shopdoors — 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 God, 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 buttercups — 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 God, 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.
‘She made me promise to send for her if he was worse — she loved him so — everyone loved him — they could not help — oh, Willie! our bright darling.’
‘I think, Dolly, we could not live here. I’d like to go on some mission, and maybe come back in a great many years — maybe, Dolly, when we are old. I’d like to see the place again — and — and the walks — but not, I think, for a long time. He was such a darling.’
Perhaps the vicar was thinking of the churchyard, and how he would like, when his time came, to lie beside the golden-haired little comrade of his walks. So Dolly despatched the messenger with a lantern, and thus it was there came a knocking at the door of Redman’s Farm at
that unseasonable hour. For some time old Tamar heard the clatter in her sleep; disturbing and mingling with her dreams. But in a while she wakened quite, and heard the double knocks one after another in quick succession; and huddling on her clothes, and muttering to herself all the way, she got into the hall, and standing a couple of yards away from the door, answered in shrill and querulous tones, and questioning the messenger in the same breath.
How could she tell what it might or might not portend? Her alarms quickly subsided, however, for she knew the voice well.
So the story was soon told. Poor little Fairy; it was doubtful if he was to see another morning; and the maid being wanted at home, old Tamar undertook the message to Brandon Hall, where her young mistress was, and sallied forth in her cloak and bonnet, under the haunted trees of Redman’s Dell.
Tamar had passed the age of ghostly terrors. There are a certain sober literality and materialism in old age which abate the illusions of the supernatural as effectually as those of love; and Tamar, though not without awe, for darkness and solitude, even were there no associations of a fearful kind in the locality, are suggestive and dismal to the last.
Her route lay, as by this time my reader is well aware, by that narrow defile reached from Redman’s Farm by a pathway which scales a flight of rude steps, the same which Stanley Lake and his sister had mounted on the night of Mark Wylder’s disappearance.
Tamar knew the path very well. It was on the upper level of it that she had held that conference with Stanley Lake, which obviously referred to that young gentleman’s treatment of the vanished Mark. As she came to this platform, round which the trees receded a little so as to admit the moonlight, the old woman was tired.
She would have gladly chosen another spot to rest in, but fatigue was imperious; and she sat down under the gray stone which stood perpendicularly there, on what had once been the step of a stile, leaning against the rude column behind her.
Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated) Page 208