Chapter XII

But sworn I have; and never must
Your banished servant trouble you;
For if I do, you may mistrust
The vow I made to love you, too.

HERRICK.

The next time Carol came to the manor-house Tim was not to be found; he had run and hidden himself in the garden when he saw him coming. Crouching among the bushes, he could hear the dearly-loved voice calling him by the familiar nickname, and his courage nearly gave out; he pressed his hands over his mouth as though he would choke back the answering cry that rose naturally to his lips.

‘Tim, Tim!’ shouted Carol, ‘where are you?’

Either there was, or Tim fancied there was, a tone of disappointment in the voice. Carol was in trouble; Carol had need of him, and he must hear him call and let him go unsatisfied away. It was his free act too; no one had compelled him to it. But it was for Carol’s own sake; and in that thought alone he was strong.

For weeks afterwards, in the silence of the night, whenever he lay awake (and he lay awake a good deal in those nights), he heard that voice calling to him, ‘Tim, Tim!’ in saddest accents of one that sought something on which he had counted, and found it not. He felt that his one chance lay in avoiding a meeting with Carol, and the constant watch and care to do so told on him fearfully, making him nervous and excitable. He dreaded to stay at home, lest his friend should come and see him, and almost more to go out, lest he should come upon him unawares. He could settle to nothing; every step on the path, every voice, every opening door, made him start and tremble, and when he could stand it no longer, and seized his hat to rush out no matter where, he would be taken with such an agony of apprehension before he had gone a hundred yards, that he had scarcely strength to get back to the house. No one will ever know what he suffered in those few days; and when his father, taking pity on his altered looks, offered to take him to the seaside till it should be time for him to return to Eton, he eagerly accepted. Not a word was spoken between them about Carol; the subject was avoided by tacit consent. William Ebbesley wondered not a little what had influenced his son to act as he had done, but he would not ask. He had long given up trying to understand the boy, who was as full of incomprehensible moods as a woman. He concluded that deference to his wishes had not had a large share in determining him, but there he did Tim injustice. Anyway his point was gained, and he could afford to be magnanimous; so the two went off to the sea together for the remaining week or ten days of Tim’s holidays.

Poor Carol failed utterly at first to understand what had happened. Tim was never to be found when he went to the manor-house, never came to the Court. Then one day the answer to his inquiry was that Mr. Ebbesley and Tim were gone away to the seaside together. Tim was ‘poorly,’ the little maid who trembled under Mrs. Quitchett told him, ‘needed change of air, the doctor had said.’

‘And had he left no message for him?’ Carol asked; ‘was she sure there was none?’

Yes; the little maid thought she was sure there was none. Mrs. Quitchett was out, but she would ask her when she came in.

Carol went away sad at heart. Tim would write, he told himself,--was sure to write. He would not yet believe that Tim could mean anything. He was not well; he had had to go away suddenly; he would be sure to write in a day or two. So he waited the day or two, but still Tim made no sign. Then Carol got the address from Mrs. Quitchett, and wrote himself, but no answer came back. He began to grow anxious after that; to imagine all sorts of possibilities; he had not known how fond he was of his friend. He determined to go again to the manor-house, and ask if the accounts of Tim were good.

‘Yes’; Mrs. Quitchett ‘thanked him; she had had a letter from him that morning, and he said he was better. He liked the sea, and thought it was doing him good.’

‘And was there any--any message or anything? in short, anything about _me_ in the letter?’ Carol asked with a little proud hesitation.

No, there was nothing; Mrs. Quitchett had noticed it and thought it strange. ‘But doubtless he means to write you a long letter himself one of these days,’ said the good-natured old woman; ‘he knew his old nurse would be anxious, God bless him! and so he wrote to her first.’

But the letter Mrs. Quitchett predicted never came. ‘If he is well enough to write to her,’ Carol thought, ‘he is surely up to sending me just a line, if only to say how he is; he might know I should be anxious.’ And he felt, not unnaturally, a little hurt. He would not write again until Tim chose to answer his first letter, which had been all a kindly affectionate heart could make it, sympathy for his ill-health, regret at his going, and no hint of blame at the manner of it, not a word about himself. He had done what he could; now he would wait.

These were sad times for Carol; he was so unused to sorrow that it had all the added weight of strangeness. Violet seemed to have given him up, and now Tim--Tim, to whom he had turned in his grief with such implicit reliance,--just when most he needed the support of friendship and kindness, Tim had thrown him over too.

‘I bored him with my troubles,’ said the poor boy to himself a little bitterly; ‘it was very natural; one could not expect a child like that to feel interest in such a subject. And yet he _seemed_ so fond of me, and he never was quite like other boys of his age--older and younger at once, somehow. Well, well, who would have thought he was only a fair-weather friend after all!’

He did not know, poor fellow, all that the ‘fair-weather friend’ had borne, and was bearing, for his sake; he could not see him sitting gazing out to sea hour after hour, with eyes that saw nothing, and ears to which the long wash of the waves upon the beach kept always calling ‘Tim, Tim!’ in the never-to-be-forgotten tones that he had heard but the other day in the old manor-house garden.

But when things are at their worst they generally mend, and Carol presently found a star rising on his night that promised to comfort him not a little. It was about this time that Miss Markham Willis, finding that the _rôle_ she had assumed was anything but an easy or pleasant one, finding too that the obnoxious Tim had gone away, and seeing that Carol looked delightfully miserable as he made her a fine sarcastic bow when they occasionally met in their walks or rides, began wisely to consider that it did not make her domestic worries easier to bear to cut herself off from her principal extraneous source of enjoyment, and so determined to take pity on her lover, and show him some signs of kindness. At first these only took the form of a few gracious smiles. Then finding that these had not quite the effect she desired, she made her mother take her to call at the Court, and there, as she had hoped, was Carol.

‘Why, Lily dear,--I mean Violet!’ cried old Mrs. Darley, ‘I declare you are quite a stranger; where have you hidden yourself all these days?’

‘Oh! there has been so much to do at home, dear Mrs. Darley,’ answered Violet, all radiant with smiles, and glowing on Carol at second-hand through grandmamma. ‘You know Fräulein has gone away for a holiday, so I have all the children on my hands from morning till night. I never appreciated poor Fräulein before; but now I have had a taste of what her life is, I feel quite differently towards her; if it was only the bread-and-butter. I assure you, I rival Goethe’s Charlotte in the art of cutting bread-and-butter.’

‘Dear, dear, do young folks read the sorrows of What’s-his-name nowadays? My poor dear mother never would allow us to. She said it was a dreadful book, and that when it first came out it made all the young men commit suicide. To tell the truth, when I did read it, I didn’t think it very interesting, but perhaps I am not a good judge. You _do_ take sugar, Mrs. Wilkins, don’t you?’

‘Please yes, a little; thank you, quite enough. I _do_ hope, Mrs. Darley, I haven’t let Violet read anything improper; what you said just now about that book, you know. But Fräulein told me all young ladies read it in Germany as being a classic. I don’t read German myself, but I placed reliance on her.’

Carol meanwhile held obstinately in the background, looking black as a thunder-cloud, and strongly inclined to compare himself with the other unfortunate who was cursed with love for a woman that cut bread-and-butter. But when the visitors rose to take leave, while the elders were making their little farewell speeches, Violet took occasion to say to him in an undertone, and with a look of gentlest expostulation--

‘Are you angry with me, Carol? you haven’t been to see us for an age; won’t you come and see us again?’

Had he been dreaming? he wondered; was it all a mistake of his, this fancied coldness on her part? She spoke with such entire innocence, a little justly hurt, but ready to forgive, that he began to think it must have been his fault. His resentment was not proof against this; he pressed the little hand she held out to him, and promised to come next day.

‘I am going primrosing in the morning,’ she said, ‘in Fern Dingle, so it is no good coming then.’

And on the way home she seemed in such high spirits, that her mother stole her hand into hers and asked her what she had said to Carol. But Violet for all answer trilled out the words of an old catch--

The falling out of faithful friends, renewal is of love,

until the woods echoed to her bright clear singing; and then, putting her arm round her mother, she said, ‘Silly mamma,’ and kissed her.

Of course Carol vowed to himself that nothing should tempt him to go near Fern Dingle the next morning, and of course he went; and there, over the big half-filled basket of primroses, the lovers made up this not very terrible quarrel. Violet was half contrite, half reproachful, wholly gentle and charming.

‘Had she been sulky? she half feared so; but she had been dreadfully busy, and the children had been a little tiresome sometimes, and she had been rather out of sorts. Carol must forgive her if she had unwittingly hurt him; how _could_ he suppose she meant anything; he ought to have _known_ she didn’t.’

And Carol, we may be sure, was not very hard to melt. He began, on the contrary, to feel that it was he who was in the wrong for having doubted Violet’s constancy; but for this he, in his turn, received absolution, and was presently taken back into favour.

As to Tim, his name was not mentioned between them; if they thought about him at all, which is unlikely, they certainly did not waste these precious moments in talking about him. Violet’s little spurt of indignation against him was of the most transitory nature; had she recollected it, it would have been to be rather ashamed of it; besides, he was gone away, and that was enough; and Carol would certainly not have introduced a subject on which he was feeling a little sore. Violet was restored to him; the first cloud that had shadowed his young brightness had rolled away; and nothing else seemed to matter much. He went back to Cambridge in a far more peaceful frame of mind, and plunged with robust cheerfulness into all the pleasures of the May term.

One day the old Squire, meeting Mr. Ebbesley on the road, stopped his pony to ask after Tim.

‘Sorry to hear your boy was not quite strong, Ebbesley,’ he said kindly.

‘Thank you,’ said Mr. Ebbesley; ‘he is quite well again now, and gone back to school.’

‘Ah! I must tell Carol when I write; he’ll be glad to hear it; the boys are fond of one another; but most likely the young ‘un will be writing to him himself.’

‘Ah! by the way, Mr. Darley, that reminds me, if you are writing to your grandson, will you kindly say my boy hopes he will excuse his not writing to him at present? he has to read rather hard for his upper division trials, and by the doctor’s advice, I discourage his working his brain in other ways, too.’

‘Quite right, quite right. When I was a lad we didn’t write letters much. To be sure, it was before the penny post; but I can’t say I should have used it much if it had been invented. I never was a good correspondent; I don’t think I ever wrote to my poor dear father when I was a lad except when I wanted money, which I generally didn’t get. Well, good-bye. Can you come and dine with us, Tuesday?’

‘Thank you, but I am obliged to go to town again to-morrow.’

And so the two men separated; and, the Squire’s memory not being of the best, Carol never got the message.

It was quite true; Tim was trying very hard to drown in work the recollection of his troubles. It is not easy to take bodily out of one’s life a sentiment, the growth of nearly eight years, and not feel the change; and Tim’s was not a nature to which changes came easily. To take his devotion to Carol _out_ of his life, did I say? Why, it _was_ his life; it had begun when he first began to feel anything, and had grown with his growth ever since. In some fantastic way everything else in the world seemed to cluster round that central point; nothing was of interest until he had somehow brought it into relation with this ruling and pervading sentiment. And it was this that he had undertaken to cast from him and forget. He felt as some flower might which a child had plucked from its root, and then stuck back in the ground expecting it to go on growing as heretofore.

As often happens, after the very cold winter came an unusually hot summer. The air seemed to pulse and vibrate. Scarcely a leaf stirred of the lime-trees before the chapel, heavy and odorous with their wealth of blossom, and drowsy with the hum of innumerable bees. The boys grew languid and listless over their lessons, and even over their games. They fell asleep in three o’clock school, an offence with which the masters could not in their hearts but feel a secret sympathy. The dust seemed to spring eternal, almost from under the very hose of the water-cart that went ceaselessly to and fro through the highways of the old school, and the pelargoniums and fuchsias drooped in the window-boxes, because their owners had not the energy to water them. Eton is a healthy place, in spite of all its enemies say to the contrary, and the life there is for most boys the healthiest that could be devised. But Tim was not as most boys. To him, to eat, sleep, and study in one small room, to wear a high hat and a tight black cloth coat, with the thermometer at something fabulous in the shade, was very trying. The heat that made other lads drowsy and languid, roused him to unnatural and feverish alertness; so far from sleeping in school, he did not sleep at all. When we reflect that in addition to this he was fretting day and night over his hidden sorrow,--a sorrow from which he was persistently trying to find escape in extra hard work, in spite of headaches and other warning signs,--the result is not difficult to foretell. What wonder if he broke down? He never went in for those upper division trials. One day he did not come to dinner, he the soul of regularity; and when they went to look for him they found him stretched on the floor of his room, his face white and set, his eyes open, but with no consciousness in them. They put him to bed and sent for the doctor, who pronounced it a curious case.

‘It is no doubt partly the heat,’ he said, ‘and he has been working too hard; but he must have been in a wretched state of health to begin with; neither the weather nor his work is enough to account for it.’

‘He has never been very strong,’ answered his tutor, ‘and lately I have noticed that he has been working very hard, harder than was necessary even. I have had once or twice to put on the drag, a thing I am very seldom forced to do,’

‘He must have perfect rest and quiet, and must not write or read even the lightest books for a long time to come; when he is able to bear the move, he had better be taken home.’

So the tutor went and wrote a kind sympathetic letter to Mr. Ebbesley, telling him his son was ill. How ill he thought him he took care not to say, but he did say enough to carry an awful dread to the father’s heart. A chill foreboding seized upon him, and would not be shaken off,--a presentiment that he was to lose his child, that child so zealously longed for, so little appreciated, and yet in a way so deeply loved.

William Ebbesley was in no sense of the word religious; the rough struggle with the world that had filled his early years had not tended to bring him into the devotional attitude, nor had he ever been visited by one of those overwhelming joys that sweep the soul, whatever the nature of its beliefs, with an imperious necessity for giving thanks. And great and terrible as had been some of his sorrows, they had been such as harden and embitter rather than the reverse. But now he felt in some dim way a kind of wonder if this were intended as a punishment to him for the little regard he had paid to the one blessing of his life, which, in that it did not bless him in strict accord with his own notions of what he desired, he had flung from him so carelessly, the priceless gem of his child’s love. How that child could love, he had seen; and till now the thought that the love was not for him but another, had chafed and angered him. Now he was humbled by it. Who could say but that had he tried, he might have turned at least some streamlet of those freshening waters into his own parched and rugged field?

There was an old woman once to whom certain kind friends of mine used to send her dinner. She was quite past work, and absolutely destitute, except for what was bestowed upon her in charity, but if the victuals were not to her taste she would send them back. Was it that by so doing she got better ones? On the contrary, the alternative was to fast, and indeed to risk offending the givers, and so cutting herself off from the alms for ever. The proverb that half a loaf is better than no bread, is one to which we all give assent with our lips, but few people, if any, are found willing to make it a rule of conduct. They will have a whole loaf, new and soft, of the finest wheaten flour, and baked just as they choose, or they will eat no bread, though they starve for it. These are perhaps somewhat homely illustrations for the state of mind of a father half wild with grief and self-reproach over a dying son. For something told him, as I have said, that the gift which he had so recklessly cast aside, would never be his now. His boy would die, and would never know how much he really loved him. If he could only win him back to life, only make him think a little more kindly of his father, he felt that nothing else mattered.

He went and fetched Tim home himself, and when he saw how ill and fragile the lad looked, his heart died within him; he longed to fall on his knees by him and tell him how he loved him, and implore him not to leave him. But the doctor had cautioned him to betray no emotion, and to conceal as far as possible any shock he might experience at his son’s appearance.

At first for a few days Tim suffered from a raging pain in the head; he could bear no light and no sound, and they feared that he would have brain fever. Then suddenly the pain left him, but left him so exhausted that he hardly seemed alive. Still, weak as he was, the doctor thought he had better be taken away from school, and his father carried him back to the old manor-house where his childhood had past. As though to mock William Ebbesley’s grief by violent contrast to the pale and feeble Tim, it was the time of year when the earth is most instinct with buoyant and vibrating life,--July, when the last crowning touch has been put to the long work of spring, while no foreshadowing of the yet distant autumn has fallen on any leaf. The lilies were in their tallest, whitest majesty, the roses blushed and glowed in the old garden, where, a few weeks before, Tim had hidden himself from the voice of his friend.

‘I never see such a year, sir,’ said the gardener; ‘everything is a-doing better than I’ve ever known it since I’ve lived here.’

Yes. Everything. Everything but that one blossom for which he would gladly have bartered all the wealth of sunny fruit and folded petals, and on which a frosty hand had been laid in the midst of all the warmth of summer. For Mrs. Quitchett’s old friend the doctor, who had known Tim from a baby, did not dare conceal from the poor father his belief that the lad would die. How soon he could not say; he might even be wrong, and Tim might take a turn and begin to gain strength; but he was afraid to hope it. The little stock of life in him seemed to be ebbing away. He might go on for a year, or it might be much sooner; it was impossible to say.

‘And could nothing be done?’ asked the father. ‘Were there no new remedies he could try, no learned men to consult, no places or climates in which the flickering young life would have a better chance to reassert itself?’

The old doctor’s voice trembled as he answered. He was almost as fond of the child himself, and he grasped Mr. Ebbesley’s hand and spoke very gently. ‘I should only be deceiving you if I said “yes”; of course consult any one you will, if it will be any comfort to you; but they will only say the same thing. There is no organic disease; he is dying of sheer weakness, and to drag him about the world will only use up the little stock of strength he has left. If, as God grant, he takes a turn and lives till the winter, then I don’t say but it would be well to try a better climate. But at present he is as well off here as anywhere.’

So, then, there was no help for it; nothing to do but to watch his child fade slowly from him, to see him grow whiter, thinner, more easily tired day by day.

The Darleys were all away, and Violet was with them. The Court was shut up, and Tim might have wandered up there without any fear of meeting Carol. But he found, when he tried it, that even this walk, short as it was, was beyond his powers, and this, coming upon him with a vague surprise, was the first intimation to him of how ill he really was. He thought of the old childish days when he had skimmed across the fields for miles round his home, and the Court woods had been but the beginning of his rambles.

Mrs. Quitchett thought of those days too, and wept when she compared the child, small and frail, it is true, but lithe and active as a young squirrel, with the figure of the slim lad of sixteen that moved so slowly round the garden paths. ‘Who would ha’ thought, who would ha’ thought that see’d us two,’ sobbed the poor old woman, ‘that he was the one the Lord would take first to Himself!’ But to Tim she showed a smiling front, watching every sign, indefatigable in her zeal to miss no attention that might do good, and never admitting for a moment that he was not getting better.

As the Ethiopian cannot change his skin, so was it not given to William Ebbesley in an instant to alter his whole nature; such changes do not happen in real life; and even now he caught himself sometimes speaking half-sharply to Tim, when the struggle within him was almost more than he could bear. But the boy did not feel afraid of him any longer; it seemed as though he had some intuition of all that his father was suffering and had suffered on his account; he was beginning to understand him, and in the place of his old fear there welled up in his heart an infinite pity.

One day, when Mr. Ebbesley had brought out cushions with which to make the garden seat easy and soft for him, and was turning to go, as he usually did after shyly proffering some such little act of tenderness, Tim laid one of his thin white hands on his, saying, ‘You are very good to me, father.’

‘Oh! my boy, my little son,’ burst out the poor man, ‘I have been a very hard father to you. I see it all now; I thought, I meant to do what was right, but I have been very cruel. Oh! if I could only atone! but you will never forgive me, never love me now.’

The cry that had been stifling him was uttered at last, the proud man had humbled himself, the thin partition that for eight years had kept these two apart had crumbled and let them find one another.

Tim for all answer put up his other arm and drew his father’s head down upon his breast, and so for a little space they sat quite silent. After a time Tim said very simply, ‘Do you remember the talk we had about my grandmother? You said all her family died young; I think _I_ shall die this summer.’

His father could not speak: he could not contradict him, he could only fold him more closely in his arms; and it was Tim who spoke again.

‘You mustn’t fret for me, father; I am surprised myself to find how little I mind the thought; I think I am rather glad. But there is something I have wanted to say. I am afraid I have not been all you wished; I have disappointed and vexed you. Do you forgive me?’

Still his father could not trust himself to answer save by that convulsive hold; the words meant to ask pardon set themselves in array against him like accusing angels. What words could he find strong enough to express all he was feeling? But Tim smiled and was satisfied. He seemed as though he understood.