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.
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 church-yard—of
which, with so strange a fatality, children, not in
romance only, but reality, so often prattle in their
feverish wanderings.
