Neighbours on the Green; My Faithful Johnny

‘I do not believe it,’ I cried. ‘There is no need that it should end so, even now; if—if you are unchanged still.’

‘I—changed?’ He laughed at this once more, but not so tragically, with sham ridicule of the foolishness of the doubt. And then all of a sudden he began to sing—oh, it was not a beautiful performance! he had no voice, and not much ear; but never has the loveliest of music moved me more—‘I will come again, my sweet and bonnie: I will come–’ Here he broke down as Ellen had done, and said, with a hysterical sob, ‘I’m ill; I think I’m dying. How am I, a broken man, without a penny, to come again?’

Chatty and I walked with him to his room through the soft darkness of the Italian night. I found he had fever—the wasting, exhausting ague fever—which haunts the most beautiful coasts in the world. I did my best to reassure him, telling him that it was not deadly, and that at home he would soon be well; but I cannot say that I felt so cheerfully as I spoke, and all that John did was to shake his head. As we turned home again through all the groups of cheerful people, Chatty with her arm clasped in mine, we talked, it is needless to say, of nothing else. But not even to my child did I say what I meant to do. I am not rich, but still I can afford myself a luxury now and then. When the children were in bed I wrote a short letter, and put a cheque in it for twenty pounds. This was what I said. I was too much excited to write just in the ordinary way:—

‘Ellen, I have found John, ill, heart-broken, but as faithful and unchanged as I always knew he was. If you have the heart of a mouse in you come out instantly—don’t lose a day—and save him. It may be time yet. If he can be got home to English air and to happiness it will still be time.

‘I have written to your mother. She will not oppose you, or I am much mistaken. Take my word for all the details. I will expect you by the earliest possibility. Don’t write, but come.’

In less than a week after I went to Genoa, and met in the steamboat from Marseilles, which was the quickest way of travelling then, a trembling, large-eyed, worn-out creature, not knowing if she were dead or alive, confused with the strangeness of everything, and the wonderful change in her own life. It was one of John’s bad days, and nobody who was not acquainted with the disease would have believed him other than dying. He was lying in a kind of half-conscious state when I took Ellen into his room. She stood behind me clinging to me, undistinguishable in the darkened place. The flush of the fever was going off; the paleness as of death and utter exhaustion stealing over him. His feeble fingers were moving faintly upon the white covering of his bed; his eyelids half shut, with the veins showing blue in them and under his eyes. But there was a faint smile on his face. Wherever he was wandering in those confused fever dreams, he was not unhappy. Ellen held by my arm to keep herself from falling. ‘Hope! you said there was hope,’ she moaned in my ear, with a reproach that was heart-rending. Then he began to murmur with his almost colourless yet smiling lips, ‘I will come again, my sweet and bonnie; I will come—again.’ And then the fingers faintly beating time were still.

But no, no! Do not take up a mistaken idea. He was not dead; and he did not die. We got him home after a while. In Switzerland, on our way to England, I had them married safe and fast under my own eye. I would allow no more shilly-shally. And, indeed, it appeared that Mrs. Harwood, frightened by all the results of her totally unconscious domestic despotism, was eager in hurrying Ellen off, and anxious that John should come home. He never quite regained his former health, but he got sufficiently well to take another situation, his former employers anxiously aiding him to recover his lost ground. And they took Montpellier Villa after all, to be near Pleasant Place, where Ellen goes every day, and is, Mrs. Harwood allows, far better company for her father, and a greater relief to the tedium of his life, than when she was more constantly his nurse and attendant. I am obliged to say however that the mother has had a price to pay for the emancipation of the daughter. There is nothing to be got for nought in this life. And sometimes Ellen has a compunction, and sometimes there is an unspoken reproach in the poor old lady’s tired eyes. I hope for my own part that when that ‘eldest little girl’ is a little older Mrs. Harwood’s life will be greatly sweetened and brightened. But yet it is she that has to pay the price; for no argument, not even the last severe winter, and many renewed ‘attacks,’ will persuade that old tyrant, invisible in his upper chamber, to die.

A song needs no story perhaps; but a story is always the better for a song: so that after all I need not perhaps apologize to Beethoven and his interpreters as I meant to do for taking their lovely music as a suggestion of the still greater harmonies of life.