There & Back by MacDonald, George, 1824-1905

CHAPTER XLVIII.

_DEATH THE DELIVERER_.

The spring advanced; the days grew a little warmer; and at length, partly from economic considerations, it was determined they should go home. When they reached London, they found a great difference in the weather: it cannot be said she owes her salubrity to her climate. Fog and drizzle, frost and fog, were the embodiment of its unvarying mutability. At once Richard was worse, and dared not think, for his mother's sake, and the labour she had spent upon him, of going to the next popular concert, if indeed those delights had not ceased for the season. But he ought to try, for he could do that in the middle of the day, at least to get news of Arthur Manson. He dreaded hearing that he was no more in this world. The cold wintry weather, and the return to poor and spare nourishment caused by Richard's illness, must have been hard upon him! It was a continual sorrow to Richard that he had not been able to get him his new clothes before he was taken ill. So the first morning he felt it possible, he took his way to the city. There he learned that the company had dispensed with Arthur's services, because his attendance had become so irregular.

"You see, sir," said the porter, "the gov'nors they don't think no more of a man than they do of a horse: so long as he can hold the shafts up an' lean agin the collar, he's money; when he can't no longer, he's dirt!"

Sad at heart, Richard set out for Clerkenwell. He was ill able for the journey, but Arthur was dying! He would brave the mother for the sake of the son! He got into an omnibus which took him a good part of the way, and walked the rest. When at length he looked up at the dreary house, he saw the blinds of the windows drawn down. A pang of fear went through his heart, and an infilial murmur awoke in his brain:--why was he, on whom those poor lives almost depended, made feeble as themselves, and incapable of helping them? After all his hoping and trusting, _could_ there be a God in the earth and things go like that? The look of things seemed the truth of things; the seen denied the unseen. Cold and hunger and desertion; ugly, mocking failure; heartless comfort, and hopeless misery, made up the law of life! Moody and wretched he went up the stair to the darkened floor.

When he knocked at the front room, that in which Alice slept with her mother, it was opened by Alice, looking more small and forlorn than he had yet seen her, with hollower cheeks and larger eyes, and a smile to make an angel weep.

"Richard!" she cried, with a voice in which the very gladness sounded like pain. A pink flush rose in her poor wasted cheeks, and she lay still in his arms as if she had gone to live there.

He could not, for pity, speak one word.