Neighbours on the Green; My Faithful Johnny

‘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.

THE END