Part 65 (2/2)

[Ill.u.s.tration: ”NOW I AM GOING TO FAN YOU,” SHE SAID.]

”Now I am going to fan you,” said Mrs. Cameron, as she sat beside him.

Now and then she sprinkled lavender water on his head and hands.

”Thank you,” he said; ”how nice that is! Would you sing to me? I heard you singing the other day.”

Eva softly sang a Tasmanian air which was wild and sweet.

”Will you do me a favour?” asked the young man. ”Please sing me one of the dear old psalms. I am Scotch, and at times yearn for them, you would hardly believe how much.”

She sang:

”G.o.d is our refuge and our strength, In straits a present aid: Therefore, although the earth remove, We will not be afraid.”

As she sang tears rolled down the wan cheek, but a look of perfect peace came over the pale face. She went on:

”A river is, whose streams do glad The city of our G.o.d, The holy place, wherein the Lord Most High hath His abode.”

He was asleep, the wan young cheek leaning on his hand in a child-like att.i.tude of repose. Eva sat and watched him, her heart full of pity. She did not move, but sat fanning him. Soon Mr. Cameron and Captain Wylie joined her; as they approached she put her finger on her lips to inspire silence.

She had no idea what the words of the dear old psalm had been to the young Highlander--like water to a parched soul, bringing back memories of childhood, wooded glens, heather-clad hills, rippling burns, and above all the old grey kirk where the Scotch laddie used to sit beside his mother--that dear mother in whom his whole soul was wrapped up--and join l.u.s.tily in the psalms.

The dinner-bell rang unheeded--somehow not one of the three could leave him.

”How lovely!” he said at last, opening and fixing his eyes on Eva. ”I think G.o.d sent you to me.”

”Ay, laddie,” said the old Scotchman, taking the wasted hand in his, ”but it seems to me you know the One who 'sticketh closer than a brother'? I see the 'peace of G.o.d' in your face.”

”Ah, you are from my part of the country,” said the lad joyfully, trying to raise himself, but sinking back exhausted. ”I know it in your voice, it's just music to me. How good G.o.d has been to me!”

They were all too much touched by his words to answer him, and Eva could only bend over him and smooth his brow.

”Now mother will have some one to tell her about me,” he added, turning to Mrs. Cameron, and grasping her hand. Then, as strength came back in some measure to the wasted frame, he went on in broken sentences to tell how he had been clerk in a big mercantile house in Hobart, how he had been invalided and lying in the hospital there for weeks. ”But I have saved money,” he added joyfully, ”she need not feel herself a burden on my sister any more; my sister is married to a poor Scotch minister, and she lives with them, or was to, till I came home. Now that will never be. Oh, if I could just have seen her!”

”But you will see her again, laddie,” said the old man. ”Remember our own dear poet Bonar's words:

”Where the child shall find his mother, Where the mother finds the child, Where dear families shall gather That were scattered o'er the wild; Brother, we shall meet and rest 'Mid the holy and the blest.”

”Thank you,” said the dying lad. ”I think I could sleep.” His eyes were closing, when a harsh loud voice with a foreign accent was heard near.

[Sidenote: ”I say I will!”]

”I say I will, and who shall hinder me?”

”Hush, there is a dying man here!” It was the doctor who spoke. A sick-looking, but violent man, who had been reclining in a deck chair not far off, was having a tussle with a doctor, and another man who seemed his valet.

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