"You're right," he answered gravely; "I'm not worth my salt. Two years ago, with the child ill and not a sixpence coming in, I shouldn't have got fidgetted by a fog and a few little worries; I'm getting spoiled. It's your fault, Moll; if you coddle me this way I shall end by growing fat and sensitive and ill-tempered, like a rich old patient with nothing to do but imagine troubles."
"You'd better not, or I shall hand you over to Johnny to be suppressed. He'll find you plenty to do."
"Yes, and I've plenty to do as it is, and here I am fooling about and wasting time. It's no use the Congress people inviting me to show sections if I haven't got any ready to show. They ought all to be in Edinburgh by the 15th."
Molly still kept her arm about his neck.
"Wait just a minute. You haven't told me what the 'few little worries' are? Hospital patients?"
"Oh, partly that; and then Theo..."
"You had a letter this morning?"
Her voice was quite under control, and as she leaned above him he could not see her eyes.
"Yes, I'm anxious about him. He's writing a set of Polish dances for stringed instruments, and he says the music takes on shapes and colours and dances round his bed all night, His handwriting is unsteady, too; you know what that sort of thing always means with him."
Molly was still looking out across her brother's head, with wide, grave eyes. He sighed, and added in his patient way:
"He doesn't say who the woman is this time, but I suppose there must be one; it seems to be the inevitable condition of his doing creative work. It's a bit difficult to understand how any one's affections can jump about that way."
There was a sudden little pause; then the girl said softly:
"Still, there is this; if a rainbow is not a permanent thing, it is at least a clean and beautiful one. An artist is a kind of glorious child; his instinct protects him from sordid entanglements."
"That makes it all the worse," Jack broke in gloomily. "If he got into vulgar intrigues with society flirts, as ninety-nine per cent, of the successful musicians do..."
"He would never have written the 'Crocus Field' Symphony."
"No, that's true; his music would have got vulgar too. But at least no one would suffer. As it is — Molly, my heart aches for the women that have loved him. That little Austrian princess — the year that Johnny was born, you know; I had a long talk with her. The poor child honestly believed he would be faithful to her, and the worst of it is that he believed it himself. I've no doubt she's got over it now, and married as her father wished; but do you think she'll ever be the same creature again? He has smashed her youth in pieces, and gone off to another toy."
"Just as Johnny would do if you gave him a precious thing to play with. It is the privilege of babies and of gods and of all things defenceless and divine; they take our joys and break them, and we comfort ourselves with the broken pieces."
Her brother turned round suddenly, and took her in his arms. They were both silent for a little while.
"How you have softened, Molly, since the child came! Sometimes you remind me of Mother."
"Theo's mother?"
"Yes; or Christ's mother. She seemed to me like the Catholic idea of the Madonna: everybody's mother."
"So long as I am Johnny's mother — Jack, how could I be hard against any one now, when I have the child?"
She sat down by the fire, drawing towards her a basket of clothes to mend. Jack began to whistle over his specimens, and she to darn earnestly at a stocking; neither was in the mood for further speech.
"Mummy!" a small voice wailed from the back room; "my house has tumbled down."
Molly rose and opened the folding doors. The bricks lay scattered on the carpet, and forlorn among the ruins sat Johnny, round-eyed and on the verge of tears. His mother picked him up and carried him into the front room.
"Never mind, sonnie; well build another house to-morrow. Come and play here till your tea is ready. You mustn't shake the table, though; Jack's cutting sections."
Johnny wriggled out of her arms, and ran up to the table, his blue eyes inquisitive and shining. He had the face of a cherub and the habits of a despotic emperor.
"Uncle!" he said, stretching out a fat hand towards the microscope; "I want to see. Uncle!"
The word was a new one in his vocabulary, and he was proud of it. Susan, the maid, had just been explaining to him that little boys ought not to call their uncles: "Jack."
Jack put up his left hand suddenly, and bit it. The next instant he remembered that even the gods have some mercy, and that his childhood was over.
"I want to see!" Johnny repeated imperiously. He was not accustomed to be kept waiting.
"Don't worry Jack, darling," said the mother; "he's busy."
"He doesn't worry me; I like to have him."
He stooped down and took the child on his knee.
"What is it you want to see, old man? There's nothing much to look at to-day."
"Can't you make the animals wiggle about?"
"Animals?"
"Infusoria, he means," Molly put in. "You showed him a drop of water the other day."
"Oh, those! No, chick, I've no pond water to-day, and we don't let animals wiggle about in the water from our tap."
"Why?"
"For fear they should wiggle about in your inside and give you a bad throat. There, you can get the high chair and sit beside me, only don't jerk my elbow. Oh, confound the screw!"
He was stooping, with knitted brows, to adjust the microscope. The king of the household looked on critically.
"You're twisting him wrong," he remarked in a severe voice.
"True for you, sonnie; and that little head in my light doesn't help me to twist it right."
"I think I hear Susan coming," Molly interposed. "And I think there are hot scones for tea. We'd better hurry up and get those grubby paws washed."
She opened the door, and Johnny, radiant at the prospect of scones, trotted away to Susan. Presently little squeals of delight were heard coming from the kitchen.
"Molly," said Jack, with his head down over the screws of the microscope, "don't let the child call me 'Uncle,' there's a good soul."
The diphtheria epidemic which was spreading through the south of England had reached Cornwall. In Porthcarrick and the neighbouring moorland hamlets child after child sickened and died. It had been a wet and stormy autumn, a hard time for the fisher-folk. Many lives had been lost in the rough weather; and what little fish was dragged to market over sodden roads and howling moors brought in small return for the labour and peril it had cost. Poverty, grief, and weariness had lain heavily on the storm-beaten villages ever since the September gales; now, at Christmas-time, the sickness had come.
But for their Vicar, the Porthcarrick people would have been in evil case. Dr. Jenkins, middle-aged, overworked, handicapped by the incessant cares of a small income and a large family, did his best; but conscientious and kindly as he was, he could hot have stood against the dead-weight of general misery without the support of the stronger nature. It was the Vicar who enrolled volunteer helpers and collected subscriptions; who tramped over the soaked heather from cottage to cottage, visiting the sick and bereaved, investigating cases of distress, and finding temporary homes, away from contagion, for the brothers and sisters of the stricken children. In these black weeks he was on foot early and late; quite white-haired now and a little slower in his movements than when Jack had known him, but otherwise hardly changed; erect and uncompromising as of old.
As for Mrs. Raymond, she remained the dutiful wife that she had always been. She was too feeble, too heavy and asthmatic, to tramp the stony moors as her husband did, and for courage, she had none to help herself or others; nor could she dare to mock the gods by offering consolation to any woman who had lost a child; but what little one so poor in spirit had to give she gave submissively, without complaint. She turned her old black silk gown once more to make it last another year, and timidly slipped into the Vicar's hand the money she had saved up to buy a new one "for your coal and blanket fund, Josiah." Her mornings were spent in making soups and jellies for the sick; her afternoons in sewing or knitting for them; but it was the Vicar who had to distribute the gifts. In age as in youth, she hid behind her master and asked his approval at every step; a patient Griselda, grown old in obedience, behind whose eyes still lurked the unlaid ghost of fear.