"We are loth to lose you; and besides, while you can be kept here, it is a sign that you ought to be here."
"So Grace tells me. Yes, I will be patient, and wait till He has done His work. I am more patient now; am I not, Grace?" And she fondled Grace"s hand, and looked up in her face.
"Yes," said Grace, who was standing near, with downcast face, trying to avoid Tom"s eye. "Yes, you are very good; but you must not talk:"
but the girl went on, with kindling eye,--
"Ah--I was very fretful at first, because I could not go to heaven at once: but Grace showed me how it was good to be here, as well as there, as long as He thought that I might be made perfect by sufferings. And since then, my pain has become quite pleasant to me, and I am ready to wait and bear--wait and bear."
"You must not talk,--see, you are beginning to cough," said Tom, who wished somehow to stop a form of thought which so utterly puzzled him.
Not that he had not heard it before; commonplace enough indeed it is, thank G.o.d: but that day the words came home to him with spirit and power, all the more solemnly from their contrast with the scene around--without, all sunshine, joy, and glory: all which could tempt a human being to linger here: and within, that young girl longing to leave it all, and yet content to stay and suffer. What mysteries there were in the human spirit--mysteries to which that knowledge of mankind on which he prided himself gave him no key!
"What if I were laid on my back to-morrow for life, by a fall, a blow, as I have seen many a better man than me;--should I not wish to have one to talk to me, as she was talking to that child?" And for a moment a yearning after Grace came over him, as it had done before, and swept from his mind the dark cloud of suspicion.
"Now I must talk with your mother," said he; "for you have better company than mine; and I hear her just coming in."
He settled little matters for his patient"s comfort with the farmer"s wife. When he returned to bid her good-bye Grace was gone.
"I hope I have not driven her away."
"Oh no; she had been here an hour, and she must go back now, to get her mother"s supper."
"That is a good girl," said Tom, looking after her as she went down the field.
"She"s an angel from heaven, sir. Not a three days go over without her walking up here all this way after her work, to comfort my poor maid--and all of us as well. It"s like the dew of heaven upon us.
Pity, sir, you didn"t see her home."
"I should have liked it well enough; but folks might talk, if two young people were seen walking together Sunday evening."
"Oh, sir, they know her too well by now, for miles round: and you too, sir, I"ll make bold to say."
"Well, at least I"ll go after her."
So Tom went, and kept Grace in sight, till she had crossed the little moor, and disappeared in the wood below.
He had gone about a hundred yards into the wood, when he heard voices and laughter--then a loud shriek. He hurried forward. In another minute, Grace rushed up to him, her eyes wide with terror and indignation.
"What is it?" cried he, trying to stop her: but, not seeming to see him, she dashed past him, and ran on. Another moment, and a man appeared in full pursuit.
It was Trebooze of Trebooze, an evil laugh upon his face.
Tom planted himself across the narrow path in an att.i.tude which there was no mistaking.
Not a word pa.s.sed between them. Silently and instinctively, like two fierce dogs, the two men flew upon each other; Tom full of righteous wrath, and Trebooze of half-drunken pa.s.sion, turned to fury by the interruption.
He was a far taller and heavier man than Thurnall, and, as the bully of the neighbourhood, counted on an easy victory. But he was mistaken.
After the first rush was over, he found it impossible to close with his foe, and saw in the doctor"s face, now grown cool and business-like as usual, the wily smile of superior science and expected triumph.
"Brandy-and-water in the morning ought not to improve the wind," said Tom to himself, as his left hand countered provokingly, while his right rattled again and again upon Trebooze"s watch-chain. "Justice will overtake you in the offending part, which I take to be the epigastric region."
In a few minutes more the scuffle ended shamefully enough for the sottish squireen.
Tom stood over him for a minute, as he sat grovelling and groaning among the long gra.s.s. "I may as well see that I have not killed him.
No, he will do as well as ever--which is not saying much.... Now, sir! Go home quietly, and ask Mrs. Trebooze for a little rhubarb and salvolatile. I"ll call up in the course of to-morrow to see how you are."
"I"ll kill you, if I catch you!"
"As a man, I am open of course to be killed by any fair means; but as a doctor, I am still bound to see after my patient"s health." And Tom bowed civilly, and walked back up the path to find Grace, after washing face and hands in the brook.
He found her up at Tolchard"s farm, trembling and thankful.
"I cannot do less than see Miss Harvey safe home."
Grace hesitated.
"Mrs. Tolchard, I am sure, will walk with us; it would be safer, in case you felt faint again."
But Mrs. Tolchard would not come to save Grace"s notions of propriety; so Tom pa.s.sed Grace"s arm through his own. She offered to withdraw it.
"No; you will require it. You do not know yet how much you have gone through. My fear is, that you will feel it all the more painfully when the excitement is past. I shall send you up a cordial; and you must promise me to take it. You owe me a little debt you know, to-day; you must pay it by taking my medicines."
Grace looked up at him sidelong; for there was a playful tenderness in his voice which was new to her, and which thrilled her through and through.
"I will indeed, I promise you. But I am so much better now. Really, I can walk alone!" And she withdrew her arm from his, but not hastily.
After that they walked on awhile in silence. Grace kept her veil down, for her eyes were full of tears. She loved that man intensely, utterly. She did not seek to deny it to herself. G.o.d had given him to her, and hers he was. The very sea, the devourer whom she hated, who hungered to swallow up all young fair life, the very sea had yielded him up to her, alive from the dead. And yet that man, she knew, suspected her of a base and hateful crime. It was too dreadful! She could not exculpate herself, save by blank denial--and what would that avail? The large hot drops ran down her cheeks. She had need of all her strength to prevent sobbing.
She looked round. In the bright summer evening, all things were full of joy and love. The hedge-banks were gay as flower gardens; the swifts chased each other, screaming harsh delight; the ring-dove murmured in the wood beneath his world-old song, which she had taught the children a hundred times--
"Curuckity coo, curuck coo; You love me, and I love you!"
The woods slept golden in the evening sunlight; and over head brooded, like one great smile of G.o.d, the everlasting blue.
"He will right me!" she said. ""Hold thee still in the Lord, and abide patiently, and He will make thy righteousness clear as the light, and thy just dealing as the noon-day!"" And after that thought she wept no more.
Was it as a reward for her faith that Tom began to talk to her? He had paced on by her side, serious, but not sad. True, he had suspected her; he suspected her still. But that scene with the dying child had been no sham. There, at least, there was nothing to suspect, nothing to sneer at. The calm purity, self-sacrifice, hope, which was contained in it, had softened his world-hardened spirit, and woke up in him feelings which were always pleasant, feelings which the sight of his father, or the writing to his father, could only awaken.
Quaintly enough, the thought of Grace and of his father seemed intertwined, inextricable. If the old man had but such a nurse as she!
And for a moment he felt a glow of tenderness toward her, because he thought she would be tender to his father. She had stolen his money, certainly; or if not, she knew where it was, and would not tell him.
Well, what matter just then? He did not want the money at that minute.
How much pleasanter and wiser to take things as they came, and enjoy himself while he could; and fancy that she was always what he had seen her that day. After all, it was much more pleasant to trust people than to suspect them: "Handsome is who handsome does! And besides, she did me the kindness of saving my life; so it would but be civil to talk to her a little."
He began to talk to her about the lovely scene around; and found, to his surprise, that she saw as much of it as he, and saw a great deal more in it than he. Her answers were short, modest, faltering; but each one of them suggestive; and Tom soon found that he had met with a mind which contained all the elements of poetry, and needed only education to develop them.
"What a blue stocking, pre-Raphaelite seventh-heavenarian she would have been, if she had had the misfortune to be born in that station of life!" But where a clever man is talking to a beautiful woman, talk he will, and must, for the mere sake of showing off, though she be but a village schoolmistress; and Tom soon found himself, with a secret sneer at his own vanity, displaying before her all the much finer things that he had seen in his travels; and as he talked, she answered, with quiet expressions of wonder, sympathy, regret at her own narrow sphere of experience, till, as if the truth was not enough, he found himself running to the very edge of exaggeration, and a little over it, in the enjoyment of calling out her pa.s.sion for the marvellous, especially when called out in honour of himself.
And she, simple creature, drank it all in as sparkling wine, and only dreaded lest the stream should cease. Adventures with n.o.ble savages in palm-fringed coral-islands, with greedy robbers amid the fragrant hills of Greece, with fierce Indians beneath the snow-peaks of the Far West, with coward Mexicans among tunals of cactus and agave, beneath the burning tropic sun--What a man he was! Where had he not been? and what had he not seen? And how he had been preserved--for her? And his image seemed to her utterly beautiful and glorious, clothed as it was in the beauty and glory of all that he had seen, and done, and suffered. Oh Love, Love, Love, the same in peasant and in peer! The more honour to you, then, old Love, to be the same thing in this world which is common to peasant and to peer. They say that you are blind; a dreamer, an exaggerator--a liar, in short. They know just nothing about you, then. You will not see people as they seem, and as they have become, no doubt: but why? because you see them as they ought to be, and are, in some deep way, eternally, in the sight of Him who conceived and created them.
At last she started, as if waking from a pleasant dream, and spoke, half to herself--