It Never Can Happen Again. William De Morgan
good woman, but...."
"She ain't that sort of good woman ... t'other sort!"
"Well, perhaps! Anyhow, I made her wrap Lizarann up, and trotted her off to the School. Miss Fossett's got her there now, and she's in good hands...."
"You mustn't spin it out too long, Taylor." Thus the Doctor's voice, as his footsteps stop by the bed-end. He comes to the other side of the bed, and lays his finger on the near pulse. "Magnificent constitution! Everything in his favour! Splendid case—pity to spoil it! Give you seven minutes more by the clock. Look in to say good-bye as you go." He is gone, and Jim is conscious of the slight rustle of a nurse, on the watch to pounce, hard by.
"I must tell you what I came for, Coupland. Of course I wanted to find how you were, and take back word to Lizarann." Mr. Taylor has to speak quickly. "But I wanted to ask something of you."
"Give it a name, master!"
"I wanted to ask your consent to our keeping her—I should say to Miss Fossett keeping her—at the School till you are about again. She shall be well cared for. I know I am asking you to trust...." He stopped; Jim's lips were moving.
"You're the School-lady's brother, belike?"
"Not quite, but that sort of thing! Her brother and I were at College together. He is doing my work in the country, and I am doing his at St. Vulgate's at Clapham."
"That parson-gentleman—he'd be her brother. Him I heard cough?" For the brother and sister, interested in Lizarann, had visited Tallack Street, and interviewed Jim.
"Him you heard cough. That's it!"
"But he can't do no work, poor chap!—not work in the country."
"My work in the country is the same as his in London. Only not so hard. And the country air does his cough good."
"Oh, master!—ye never mean to say you're a parson!" Jim's voice rises with the poignancy of his disappointment. To him, every cleric is the Rev. Wilkinson Wilkins, the spiritual adviser of Aunt Stingy.
"I'm not a very bad one, Coupland. At least, I hope not." There is humility in the speaker's tone, and recognition of the aggressive and objectionable character of Cures of Souls, but a germ of a good-humoured laugh buried in it. The seven minutes are near their end, and the nurse, considered as a rustle, is increasing. She means action in a moment.
"I'll be your bail for that, master." But Jim cannot quite conceal his disappointment. He had formed such a high ideal of his visitor. Still, he can and does show his faith in him by spending the rest of his available speech-strength on a few words of gratitude to Lizarann's protectors, and assenting without conditions to the proposed arrangement. But when will he be "about again"? The nurse throws eight weeks, somehow, into her expression, without speech, and the forgiven parson interprets for the blind man's hearing.
"Quite a month, Coupland. But I will bring your little girl to see you the moment the doctors will allow me. Now, good-bye!"
Alas, poor Yorick! He had been so enjoying his company—company that had neither respect for his cloth, nor contempt for his cloth, nor indifference to his cloth; that, in fact, knew nothing about his cloth—and rejoicing in Jim's free speech, that would have been cramped here and crimped there had the speaker known he was addressing a parson-gentleman. It was like stepping back into the old days before he took clerk's orders; days when he was still uninsulated, still one with his kind. And yet there was never a man with a more earnest belief in his inherited mission to fight the Devil in any of the half-score of Churches that look askant at one another, and waste good powder and shot over the creeds their congregations shout in unison, knowing all the while that one or more of the chorus may be—must be—uttering a lie. Athelstan Taylor had donned the cloth he wore simply because it was the uniform of his territorial regiment in the army that, as he conceived, was being for ever enrolled in the service of Ormuzd against Ahrimanes. In his enthusiasm to fight beneath the banner of his division of the army, the Cross, he had ridden roughshod over a hundred scruples on petty details; and the consequence was that his most earnest admirers were often fain to shake their heads over his lawless expressions of opinion on sacred subjects, and to lament that Taylor, with so many fine points in his character, should be on vital points of Doctrine so painfully unsound. It was an open secret on the part of both Augustus Fossett and his sister that they prayed for Athelstan; the former with a belief as real as he was capable of that the wanderer would be guided; the latter with a practical misgiving that a very large number of thoughtful persons had not been guided, or so many samples would not be to be found outside the Communions of the English—and Roman—Churches. For too many of her brother's idols had "gone over" for it to be possible to pool the latter in the sum total of orthodox, heterodox, and cacodox dissidents. Of which last, in connection with this brother's and sister's petitions to the Almighty to guide Athelstan into their way of thinking, the one they preferred to call Socinianism was the most poisonous and insidious. A creed baited with mere veracities, to get a bite from the unwary!
As for Athelstan, every time he came to take his friend's burden off his shoulders in London he felt more clearly than before how apt he was to lose sight of even Ormuzd and Ahriman in a blind struggle against the brutalism and debauchery, and filth and disease, of a London outskirt well up to its date. Encouraged at first by the tidiness of the last-built bee-lines of bricks and mortar, he had half hoped a compromise was being found between purchasing a sense of Christianity for the rich at the cost of indefinite multiplication of the poor, and passing sentence of death on those unable to enjoy living on nothing, or to give anything in exchange for something. But as soon as he began to get behind the scenes his poorer parishioners were enacting, he saw and heard every day things that had dashed his hope; and by the time of the story had quite come to the conclusion that the small population whose souls he was supposed to be looking after were as vicious as the Court of Charles the Second, and so idle as to affirm the right of male mankind to sixteen hours out of twenty-four to eat, drink, sleep, and do nothing in—slight exceptions to the last, to nobody's credit, being allowed for. Of course it was an exaggerated feeling on Athelstan's part; one thing was that he could not reconcile himself to the ubiquitous fœtor of the beer in which, speaking broadly, his flock—who didn't acknowledge him as their shepherd at all—lived and moved and had their being. Under exasperation, he thought of them in that way ... and forgave them!
Miss Fossett interrupted a reverie to this effect, by saying to him, as he arrived, after striding five miles in an hour through the slush and drizzle: "I've had to put that child to bed."
"Hullo!—nothing bad, I hope?" What a damper! And he had looked forward so to the small anxious face, and the consolation he was going to give it. All his clients were not so nice as Lizarann.
"Dr. Ferris said he wasn't sure if it was pleurisy. It might be pneumonia."
"Doctor's been, then?"
"Oh yes!—I sent for him. She's been poulticed ever since."
"Hope it's all a fuss about nothing."
"I hope so. Here's a visitor, Lizarann. Now don't you jump up!"
CHAPTER XVI
BREAKFAST IN GROSVENOR SQUARE. STRAINED RELATIONS OF TWO SISTERS. A BATTLE INTERRUPTED. SAMARIA A GOOD-NATURED PLACE. WHO WAS TO PAY?
In a town-house of the Arkroyd order, a certain dramatic interest attaches to the morning meal that is not shared by any later one. Nobody knows who will come down to breakfast, except perhaps some confidential lady's-maid; and she won't tell, as often as not. So that the knights-harbingers of fresh toast and tea and coffee can always enjoy a little sport in the way of wagers as to who will take which, and which of the young ladies will be up—or down, which is the same thing—before ten. The pleasurable excitement which those who play cards feel, before they pick their packs up and know the worst, is akin to theirs, only less. Because the cards may be snapped up the moment it isn't a misdeal;