Miss Smithers coloured up. The conversation was getting interesting. Mr. North had lent her Rasselas, which she thought a story of thrilling interest; and she had kept his stockings and shirt buttons in order for three years. Such things had happened; and Mrs. Jabez North sounded more comfortable than Miss Smithers, at any rate.
“Perhaps,” said Sarah Anne, rather maliciously—“perhaps he’s been forgetting his situation and giving way to thoughts of marrying our young missus. She’s got a deal of money, you know, Miss Smithers, though her figure ain’t much to look at.”
Sarah Anne’s figure was plenty to look at, having a tendency to break out into luxuriance where you least expected it.
It was in vain that Sarah Anne or Miss Smithers speculated on the probable causes of the usher’s absence. Midnight struck from the Dutch clock in the kitchen, the eight-day clock on the staircase, the timepiece in the drawing-room—a liberal and complicated piece of machinery which always struck eighteen to the dozen—and eventually from every clock in Slopperton; and yet there was no sign of Jabez North.
No sign of Jabez North. A white face and a pair of glazed eyes staring up at the sky, out on a dreary heath three miles from Slopperton, exposed to the fury of a pitiless storm; a man lying alone on a wretched mattress in a miserable apartment in Blind Peter—but no Jabez North.
Through the heartless storm, dripping wet with the pelting rain, the girl they have christened Sillikens hastens back to Blind Peter. The feeble glimmer of the candle, with the drooping wick sputtering in a pool of grease, is the only light which illumes that cheerless neighbourhood. The girl’s heart beats with a terrible flutter as she approaches that light, for an agonizing doubt is in her soul about that other light which she left so feebly burning, and which may be now extinct. But she takes courage; and pushing open the door, which opposes neither bolts nor bars to any deluded votary of Mercury, she enters the dimly-lighted room. The man lies with his face turned to the wall; the old woman is seated by the hearth, on which a dull and struggling flame is burning. She has on the table among the medicine-bottles, another, which no doubt contains spirits, for she has a broken teacup in her hand, from which ever and anon she sips consolation, for it is evident she has been crying.
“Mother, how is he—how is he?” the girl asks, with a hurried notation painful to witness, since it reveals how much she dreads the answer.
“Better, deary, better—Oh, ever so much better,” the old woman answers in a crying voice, and with another application to the broken teacup.
“Better! thank Heaven!—thank Heaven!” and the girl, stealing softly to the bedside, bends down and listens to the sick man’s breathing, which is feeble, but regular.
“He seems very fast asleep, grandmother. Has he been sleeping all the time?”
“Since when, deary?”
“Since I went out. Where’s the doctor?”
“Gone, deary. Oh, my blessed boy, to think that it should come to this, and his dead mother was my only child! O dear, O dear!” And the old woman burst out crying, only choking her sobs by the aid of the teacup.
“But he’s better, grandmother; perhaps he’ll get over it now. I always said he would. Oh, I’m so glad—so glad.” The girl sat down in her wet garments, of which she never once thought, on the little stool by the side of the bed. Presently the sick man turned round and opened his eyes.
“You’ve been away a long time, lass,” he said.
Something in his voice, or in his way of speaking, she did not know which, startled her; but she wound her arm round his neck, and said—
“Jim, my own dear Jim, the danger’s past. The black gulf you’ve been looking down is closed for these many happy years to come, and maybe the sun will shine on our wedding-day yet.”
“Maybe, lass—maybe. But tell me, what’s the time?”
“Never mind the time, Jim. Very late, and a very dreadful night; but no matter for that! You’re better, Jim; and if the sun never shone upon the earth again, I don’t think I should be able to be sorry, now you are safe.”
“Are all the lights out in Blind Peter, lass?” he asked.
“All the lights out? Yes, Jim—these two hours. But why do you ask?”
“And in Slopperton did you meet many people, lass?”
“Not half-a-dozen in all the streets. Nobody would be out in such a night, Jim, that could help it.”
He turned his face to the wall again, and seemed to sleep. The old woman kept moaning and mumbling over the broken teacup—
“To think that my blessed boy should come to this—on such a night too, on such a night!”
The storm raged with unabated fury, and the rain pouring in at the dilapidated door threatened to flood the room. Presently the sick man raised his head a little way from the pillow.
“Lass,” he said, “could you get me a drop o’ wine? I think, if I could drink a drop o’ wine, it would put some strength into me somehow.”
“Grandmother,” said the girl, “can I get him any? You’ve got some money; it’s only just gone twelve; I can get in at the public-house. I will get in, if I knock them up, to get a drop o’ wine for Jim.”
The old woman fumbled among her rags and produced a sixpence, part of the money given her from the slender purse of the benevolent Jabez, and the girl hurried away to fetch the wine.
The public-house was called the Seven Stars; the seven stars being represented on a signboard in such a manner as to bear rather a striking resemblance to seven yellow hot-cross buns on a very blue background. The landlady of the Seven Stars was putting her hair in papers when the girl called Sillikens invaded the sanctity of her private life. Why she underwent the pain and grief of curling
