Far-away Stories

Jeremy, with a lamentable lack of universality, thanked God on his knees for His great mercy. If Mistress Wotherspoon had not been confined to her bed she would not have allowed her niece to wander at will with a notorious scarecrow over the Bullingford meadows, and if Barbara had not been blind she could not have walked happily in his company and hung trustfully on his arm. For days she was but a wonder and a wild desire. Her beauty, her laughter, her wit, her simplicity, her bravery, bewildered him. It was enough to hear the music of her voice, to feel the fragrance of her presence, to thrill at her light touch. He, Jeremy Wendover, from whose distortion all human beings, his life long, had turned shuddering away, to have this ineffable companionship! It transcended thought. At last – it was one night, as he lay awake, remembering how they had walked that afternoon, not arm-in-arm, but hand-in-hand – the amazing, dazzling glory of a possibility enveloped him. She was blind. She could never see his deformity. Had God listened to his prayer and delivered this fair and beloved woman into his keeping? He shivered all night long in an ecstasy of happiness, rose at dawn and mounted guard at Barbara's gate. But as he waited, foodless, for the thrilling sight of her, depression came and sat heavy on his shoulders until he felt that in daring to think of her in the way of marriage he was committing an abominable crime.

When she came, fresh as the morning, bareheaded, her beautiful hair done up in a club behind, into the little field, and he tried to call to her, his tongue was dry and he could utter no sound. Accidentally he dropped his stick, which clattered down the bars of the gate. She laughed. He entered the enclosure.

"I knew I should find you there," she cried, and sped toward him.

"How did you know?" he asked.

"'By the pricking of my thumb,'" she quoted gaily; and then, as he took both her outstretched hands, she drew near him and whispered: "and by the beating of my heart."

His arms folded around her and he held her tight against him, stupefied, dazed, throbbing, vainly trying to find words. At last he said huskily:

"God has sent you to be the joy and comfort of a sorely stricken man. I accept it because it is His will. I will cherish you as no man has ever cherished woman before. My love for you, my dear, is as infinite – as infinite – oh, God!"

Speech failed him. He tore his arms away from her and fell sobbing at her feet and kissed the skirts of her gown.

The Divine Mercy, as Jeremy puts it, thought fit to remove Aunt Wotherspoon to a happier world before the week was out; and so, within a month, Jeremy led his blind bride into the little Tudor house. And then began for him a happiness so exquisite that sometimes he was afraid to breathe lest he should disturb the enchanted air. Every germ of love and tenderness that had lain undeveloped in his nature sprang into flower. Sometimes he grew afraid lest, in loving her, he was forgetting God. But he reassured himself by a pretty sophistry. "O Lord," says he, "it is Thou only that I worship – through Thine own great gift." And indeed what more could be desired by a reasonable Deity?

Barbara, responsive, gave him her love in full. From the first she would hear nothing of his maimed visage.

"My dear," she said as they wandered one golden autumn day by the riverside, "I have made a picture of you out of your voice, the plash of water, the sunset and the summer air. 'Twas thus that my heart saw you the first evening we met. And that is more than sufficing for a poor, blind creature whom a gallant gentleman married out of charity."

"Charity!" His voice rose in indignant repudiation.

She laughed and laid her head on her shoulder.

"Ah, dear, I did but jest. I know you fell in love with my pretty doll's face. And also with a little mocking spirit of my own."

"But what made you fall in love with me?"

"Faith, Mr. Wendover," she replied, "a woman with eyes in her head has but to go whither she is driven. And so much the more a blind female like me. You led me plump into the middle of the morass; and when you came and rescued me I was silly enough to be grateful."

Under Jeremy's love her rich nature expanded day by day. She set her joyous courage and her wit to work to laugh at blindness, and to make her the practical, serviceable housewife as well as the gay companion. The ancient crone was replaced by a brisk servant and a gardener, and Jeremy enjoyed creature comforts undreamed of. And the months sped happily by. Autumn darkened into winter and winter cleared into spring, and daffodils and crocuses and primroses began to show themselves in corners of the old-world garden, and tiny gossamer garments in corners of the dark old house. Then a newer, deeper happiness enfolded them.

But there came a twilight hour when, whispering of the wonder that was to come, she suddenly began to cry softly.

"But why, why, dear?" he asked in tender astonishment.

"Only – only to think, Jeremy, that I shall never see it."

One evening in April, while Jeremy was reading and Barbara sewing in the little candle-lit parlour, almost simultaneously with a sudden downpour of rain came a knock at the front door. Jeremy, startled by this unwonted occurrence, went himself to answer the summons, and, opening the door, was confronted by a stout, youngish man dressed in black with elegant ruffles and a gold-headed cane.

"Your pardon, sir," said the new-comer, "but may I crave a moment's shelter during this shower? I am scarce equipped for the elements."

"Pray enter," said Jeremy hospitably.

"I am from London, and lodging at the 'White Hart' at Bullingford for the night," the stranger explained, shaking the raindrops from his hat. "During a stroll before supper I lost my way, and this storm has surprised me at your gate. I make a thousand apologies for deranging you."

"If you are wet the parlour fire will dry you. I beg you, sir, to follow me," said Jeremy. He led the way through the dark passage and, pausing with his hand on the door-knob, turned to the stranger and said with his grave courtesy:

"I think it right to warn you, sir, that I am afflicted with a certain personal disfigurement which not all persons can look upon with equanimity."

"Sir," replied the other, "my name is John Hattaway, surgeon at St. Thomas' Hospital in London, and I am used to regard with equanimity all forms of human affliction."

Mr. Hattaway was shown into the parlour and introduced in due form to Barbara. A chair was set for him near the fire. In the talk that followed he showed himself to be a man of parts and education. He was on his way, he said, to Oxford to perform an operation on the Warden of Merton College.

"What kind of operation?" asked Barbara.

His quick, keen eyes swept her like a searchlight.

"Madam," said he, not committing himself, "'tis but a slight one."

But when Barbara had left the room to mull some claret for her guest, Mr. Hattaway turned to Jeremy.

"'Tis a cataract," said he, "I am about to remove from the eye of the Warden of Merton by the new operation invented by my revered master, Mr. William Cheselden, my immediate predecessor at St. Thomas's. I did not tell your wife, for certain reasons; but I noticed that she is blinded by the same disease."

Jeremy rose from his chair.

"Do you mean that you will restore the Warden's sight?"

"I have every hope of doing so."

"But if his sight can be restored – then my wife's – "

"Can be restored also," said the surgeon complacently.

Jeremy sat down feeling faint and dizzy.

"Did you not know that cataract was curable?"

"I am scholar enough," answered Jeremy, "to have read that King John of Aragon was so cured by the Jew, Abiathar of Lerida, by means of a needle thrust through the eyeball – "

"Barbarous, my dear sir, barbarous!" cried the surgeon, raising a white, protesting hand. "One in a million may be so cured. There is even now a pestilential fellow of a quack, calling himself the Chevalier Taylor, who is prodding folks' eyes with a six-inch skewer. Have you never heard of him?"

"Alas, sir," said Jeremy, "I live so out of the world, and my daily converse is limited to my dear wife and the parson hard by, who is as recluse a scholar as I am myself."

"If you wish your wife to regain her sight," said Mr. Hattaway, "avoid this Chevalier Taylor like the very devil. But if you will intrust her to my care, Mr. Hattaway, surgeon of St. Thomas' Hospital, London, pupil of the great Cheselden – "

He waved his hand by way of completing the unfinished sentence.

"When?" asked Jeremy, greatly agitated.

"After her child is born."

"Shall I tell her?" Jeremy trembled.

"As you will. No – perhaps you had better wait a while."

Then Barbara entered, bearing a silver tray, with the mulled claret and glasses, proud of her blind surety of movement. Mr. Hattaway sprang to assist her and, unknown to her, took the opportunity of scrutinising her eyes. Then he nodded confidently at Jeremy.

From that evening Jeremy's martyrdom began. Hitherto he had regarded the blindness of his wife as a special dispensation of Divine Providence. She had not seen him save on that first afternoon as a shadowy mass, and had formed no conception of his disfigurement beyond the vague impression conveyed to her by loving fingers touching his face. She had made her own mental picture of him, as she had said, and whatever it was, so far from repelling her, it pleased her mightily. Her ignorance indeed was bliss – for both of them. And now, thought poor Jeremy, knowledge would come with the restored vision, and, like our too-wise first parents, they would be driven out of Eden. Sometimes the devil entered his heart and prompted cowardly concealment. Why tell Barbara of Mr. Hattaway's proposal? Why disturb a happiness already so perfect? All her other senses were eyes to her. She had grown almost unconscious of her affliction. She was happier loving him with blinded eyes than recoiling from him in horror with seeing ones. It was, in sooth, for her own dear happiness that she should remain in darkness. But then Jeremy remembered the only cry her brave soul had ever uttered, and after wrestling long in prayer he knew that the Evil One had spoken, and in the good, old-fashioned way he bade Satan get behind him. "Retro me, Satanas." The words are in his diary, printed in capital letters.

But one day, when she repeated her cry, his heart ached for her and he comforted her with the golden hope. She wept tears of joy and flung her arms around his neck and kissed him, and from that day forth filled the house with song and laughter and the mirth of unbounded happiness. But Jeremy, though he bespoke her tenderly and hopefully, felt that he had signed his death-warrant. Now and then, when her gay spirit danced through the glowing future, he was tempted to say: "When you see me as I am your love will turn to loathing and our heaven to hell." But he could not find it in his heart to dash her joy. And she never spoke of seeing him – only of seeing the child and the sun and the flowers and the buttons of his shirts, which she vowed must seem to be sewed on by a drunken cobbler.

The child was born, a boy, strong and lusty – to Jeremy the incarnation of miraculous wonder. That the thing was alive, with legs and arms and feet and hands, and could utter sounds, which it did with much vigour, made demands almost too great on his credulity.

"What is he like?" asked Barbara.

This was a poser for Jeremy. For the pink brat was like nothing on earth – save any other newborn infant.

"I think," he said hesitatingly, "I think he may be said to resemble Cupid. He has a mouth like Cupid's bow."

"And Cupid's wings?" she laughed. "Fie, Jeremy, I thought we had born to us a Christian child."

"But that he has a body," said Jeremy, "I should say he was a cherub. He has eyes of a celestial blue, and his nose – "

"Yes, yes, his nose?" came breathlessly from Barbara.

"I'm afraid, my dear, there is so little of it to judge by," said Jeremy.

"Before the summer's out I shall be able to judge for myself," said Barbara, and terror gripped the man's heart.

The days passed, and Barbara rose from her bed and again sang and laughed.

"See, I am strong enough to withstand any operation," she declared one day, holding out the babe at arm's length.

"Not yet," said Jeremy, "not yet. The child needs you."

The child was asleep. She felt with her foot for its cradle, and with marvellous certainty deposited him gently in the nest and covered him with the tiny coverlet. Then she turned to Jeremy.

"My husband, don't you wish me to have my sight restored?"

"How can you doubt it?" he cried. "I would have you undergo this operation were my life the fee."

She came close to him and put her hands about his maimed face. "Dear," she said, "do you think anything could change my love for you?"

It was the first hint that she had divined his fears; but he remained silent, every fibre of his being shrinking from the monstrous argument. For answer, he kissed her hands as she withdrew them.

At last the time came for the great adventure. Letters passed between Jeremy and Mr. Hattaway of St. Thomas' Hospital, who engaged lodgings in Cork Street, so that they should be near his own residence in Bond Street hard by. A great travelling chariot and post-horses were hired from Bullingford, two great horse-pistols, which Jeremy had never fired off in his life, were loaded and primed and put in the holsters, and one morning in early August Jeremy and Barbara and the nurse and the baby started on their perilous journey. They lay at Reading that night and arrived without misadventure at Cork Street on the following afternoon. Mr. Hattaway called in the evening with two lean and solemn young men, his apprentices – for even the great Mr. Hattaway was but a barber-surgeon practising a trade under the control of a City Guild – and made his preparations for the morrow.

In these days of anæsthetics and cocaine, sterilised instruments, trained nurses and scientific ventilation it is almost impossible to realise the conditions under which surgical operations were conducted in the first half of the eighteenth century. Yet they occasionally were successful, and patients sometimes did survive, and nobody complained, thinking, like Barbara Wendover, that all was for the best in this best of all possible worlds. For, as she lay in the close, darkened room the next day, after the operation was over, tended by a chattering beldame of a midwife, she took the burning pain in her bandaged eyes – after the dare-devil fashion of the time Mr. Hattaway had operated on both at once – as part of the cure, and thanked God she was born into so marvellous an epoch. Then Jeremy came and sat by her bed and held her hand, and she was very happy.

But Jeremy then, and in the slow, torturing days that followed, went about shrunken like a man doomed to worse than death. London increased his agony. At first a natural curiosity (for he had passed through the town but twice before, once as he set out for the grand tour with Doctor Tubbs, and once on his return thence) and a countryman's craving for air took him out into the busy streets. But he found the behaviour of the populace far different from that of the inhabitants of Bullingford, who passed him by respectfully, though with averted faces. Porters and lackeys openly jeered at him, ragged children summoned their congeners and followed hooting in his train; it was a cruel age, and elegant gentlemen in flowered silk coats and lace ruffles had no compunction in holding their cambric handkerchiefs before their eyes and vowing within his hearing that, stab their vitals, such a fellow should wear a mask or be put into the Royal Society's Museum; and in St. James's Street one fine lady, stepping out of her sedan-chair almost into his arms, fell back shrieking that she had seen a monster, and pretended to faint as the obsequious staymaker ran out of his shop to her assistance.

He ceased to go abroad in daylight and only crept about the streets at night, even then nervously avoiding the glare of a chance-met linkboy's torch. Desperate thoughts came to him during these gloomy rambles. Fear of God alone, as is evident from the diary, prevented him from taking his life. And the poor wretch prayed for he knew not what.

One morning Mr. Hattaway, after his examination of the patient, entered the parlour where Jeremy was reading Tillotson's Sermons (there were the fourteen volumes of them in the room's unlively bookcase) and closed the door behind him with an air of importance.

"Sir," said he, "I bring you good news."

Jeremy closed his book.

"She sees?"

"On removing the bandages just now," replied Mr. Hattaway, "I perceived to my great regret that with the left eye my skill has been unavailing. The failure is due, I believe, to an injury to the retina which I have been unable to discover." He paused and took snuff. "But I rejoice to inform you that sight is restored to the right eye. I admitted light into the room, and though the vision is diffused, which a lens will rectify, she saw me distinctly."

"Thank God she has the blessing of sight," said Jeremy reverently.

"Amen," said the surgeon. He took another pinch. "Also, perhaps, thank your humble servant for restoring it."

"I owe you an unpayable debt," replied Jeremy.

"She is crying out for the baby," said Mr. Hattaway. "If you will kindly send it in to her I can allow her a fleeting glimpse of it before I complete the rebandaging for the day."

Jeremy rang the bell and gave the order. "And I?" he inquired bravely.

The surgeon hesitated and scratched his plump cheek.

"You know that my wife has never seen me."

"To-morrow, then," said Hattaway.

The nurse and child appeared at the doorway, and the surgeon followed them into Barbara's room.

When the surgeon had left the house Jeremy went to Barbara and found her crooning over the babe, which lay in her arms.

"I've seen him, dear, I've seen him!" she cried joyously. "He is the most wonderfully beautiful thing on the earth. His eyes are light blue, and mine are dark, so he must have yours. And his mouth is made for kisses, and his expression is that of a babe born in Paradise."

Jeremy bent over and looked at the boy, who sniggered at him in a most unparadisiacal fashion, and they talked parentwise over his perfections.

"Before we go back to Bullingford you will let me take a coach, Jeremy, and drive about the streets and show him to the town? I will hold him up and cry: 'Ladies and gentlemen, look! 'Tis the tenth wonder of the world. You only have this one chance of seeing him.'"

She rattled on in the gayest of moods, making him laugh in spite of the terror. The failure of the operation in the left eye she put aside as of no account. One eye was a necessity, but two were a mere luxury.

"And it is the little rogue that will reap the benefit," she cried, cuddling the child. "For, when he is naughty mammy will turn the blind side of her face to him."

"And will you turn the blind side of your face to me?" asked Jeremy with a quiver of the lips.

She took his hand and pressed it against her cheek.

"You have no faults, my beloved husband, for me to be blind to," she said, wilfully or not misunderstanding him.

Such rapture had the sight of the child given her that she insisted on its lying with her that night, a truckle-bed being placed in the room for the child's nurse. When Jeremy took leave of her before going to his own room he bent over her and whispered:

"To-morrow."

Her sweet lips – pathetically sweet below the bandage – parted in a smile – and they never seemed sweeter to the anguished man – and she also whispered, "To-morrow!" and kissed him.

He went away, and as he closed the door he felt that it was the gate of Paradise shut against him for ever.

He did not sleep that night, but spent it as a brave man spends the night before his execution. For, after all, Jeremy Wendover was a gallant gentlemen.

In the morning he went into Barbara's room before breakfast, as his custom was, and found her still gay and bubbling over with the joy of life. And when he was leaving her she stretched out her hands and clasped his maimed face, as she had done once before, and said the same reassuring words. Nothing could shake her immense, her steadfast love. But Jeremy, entering the parlour and catching sight of himself in the Queen Anne mirror over the mantle-piece, shuddered to the inmost roots of his being. She had no conception of what she vowed.

He was scarce through breakfast when Mr. Hattaway entered, a full hour before his usual time.

"I am in a prodigious hurry," said he, "for I must go post-haste into Norfolk, to operate on my Lord Winteringham for the stone. I have not a moment to lose, so I pray you to accompany me to your wife's bedchamber."

The awful moment had come. Jeremy courteously opened doors for the surgeon to pass through, and followed with death in his heart. When they entered the room he noticed that Barbara had caused the nurse's truckle-bed to be removed and that she was lying, demure as a nun, in a newly made bed. The surgeon flung the black curtains from the window and let the summer light filter through the linen blinds.

"We will have a longer exposure this morning," said he, "and to-morrow a little longer still, and so on until we can face the daylight altogether. Now, madam, if you please."

He busied himself with the bandages. Jeremy, on the other side of the bed, stood clasping Barbara's hand: stood stock-still, with thumping heart, holding his breath, setting his teeth, nerving himself for the sharp, instinctive gasp, the reflex recoil, that he knew would be the death sentence of their love. And at that supreme moment he cursed himself bitterly for a fool for not having told her of his terror, for not having sufficiently prepared her for the devastating revelation. But now it was too late.

The bandages were removed. The surgeon bent down and peered into the eyes. He started back in dismay. Before her right eye he rapidly waved his finger.

"Do you see that?"

"No," said Barbara.

"My God, madam!" cried he, with a stricken look on his plump face, "what in the devil's name have you been doing with yourself?"

Great drops of sweat stood on Jeremy's brow.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"She can't see. The eye is injured. Yesterday, save for the crystalline lens which I extracted, it was as sound as mine or yours."

"I was afraid something had happened," said Barbara in a matter-of-fact tone. "Baby was restive in the night and pushed his little fist into my eye."

"Good heavens, madam!" exclaimed the angry surgeon, "you don't mean to say that you took a young baby to sleep with you in your condition?"

Barbara nodded, as if found out in a trifling peccadillo. "I suppose I'm blind for ever?" she asked casually.

He examined the eye again. There was a moment's dead silence. Jeremy, white-lipped and haggard, hung on the verdict. Then Hattaway rose, extended his arms and let them drop helplessly against his sides.

"Yes," said he. "The sight is gone."

Jeremy put his hands to his head, staggered, and, overcome by the reaction from the terror and the shock of the unlooked-for calamity, fell in a faint on the floor.

After he had recovered and the surgeon had gone, promising to send his apprentice the next day to dress the eyes, which, for fear of inflammation, still needed tending, Jeremy sat by his wife's bedside with an aching heart.

"'Tis the will of God," said he gloomily. "We must not rebel against His decrees."

"But, you dear, foolish husband," she cried, half laughing, "who wants to rebel against them? Not I, of a certainty. I am the happiest woman in the world."

"'Tis but to comfort me that you say it," said Jeremy.

"'Tis the truth. Listen." She sought for his hand and continued with sweet seriousness: "I was selfish to want to regain my sight; but my soul hungered to see my babe. And now that I have seen him I care not. Just that one little peep into the heaven of his face was all I wanted. And 'twas the darling wretch himself who settled that I should not have more." After a little she said, "Come nearer to me," and she drew his ear to her lips and whispered: