FullReads

Mary had just rolled gently back on the floor. I went again in despair. But I heard Bridget’s step this time. First flight, first passage; second flight, second passage. She ran in in triumph at length, with a screw-driver!

“No!” I whispered,–“no. The crooked thing you draw corks with,” and I showed her the bottle again. “Find one somewhere and don’t come back without it.” So she vanished for the second time.

“Frederic!” said Morton. I think he never called me so before. Should I risk the clothes-brush again? I opened Lycidas’s own drawers,–papers, boxes, everything in order,–not a sign of a tool.

“Frederic!” “Yes,” I said. But why did I say “Yes”? “Father of Mercy, tell me what to do.”

And my mazed eyes, dim with tears,–did you ever shed tears from excitement?–fell on an old razor-strop of those days of shaving, made by C. WHITTAKER, SHEFFIELD. The “Sheffield” stood in black letters out from the rest like a vision. They make cork screws in Sheffield too. If this Whittaker had only made a corkscrew! And what is a “Sheffield wimble?”

Hand in my pocket,–brown paper parcel.

“Where are you, Frederic?” “Yes,” said I, for the last time. Twine off! brown paper off. And I learned that the “Sheffield wimble” was one of those things whose name you never heard before, which people sell you in Thames Tunnel, where a hoof-cleaner, a gimlet, a screw-driver, and a corkscrew fold into one handle.

“Yes,” said I, again. “Pop,” said the cork “Bubble, bubble, bubble,” said the whiskey. Bottle in one hand, full tumbler in the other, I walked in. George poured half a tumblerful down Lycidas’s throat that time. Nor do I dare say how much he poured down afterwards. I found that there was need of it, from what he said of the pulse, when it was all over. I guess Mary had some, too.

This was the turning-point. He was exceedingly weak, and we sat by him in turn through the night, giving, at short intervals, stimulants and such food as he could swallow easily; for I remember Morton was very particular not to raise his head more than we could help. But there was no real danger after this.

As we turned away from the house on Christmas morning,–I to preach and he to visit his patients,–he said to me, “Did you make that whiskey?”

“No,” said I, “but poor Dod Dalton had to furnish the corkscrew.”

And I went down to the chapel to preach. The sermon had been lying ready at home on my desk,–and Polly had brought it round to me,–for there had been no time for me to go from Lycidas’s home to D Street and to return. There was the text, all as it was the day before:–

“They helped every one his neighbor, and every one said
to his brother, Be of good courage. So the carpenter
encouraged the goldsmith, and he that smootheth with
the hammer him that smote the anvil.”

And there were the pat illustrations, as I had finished them yesterday; of the comfort Mary Magdalen gave Joanna, the court lady; and the comfort the court lady gave Mary Magdalen, after the mediator of a new covenant had mediated between them; how Simon the Cyrenian, and Joseph of Arimathea, and the beggar Bartimeus comforted each other, gave each other strength, common force, com-fort, when the One Life flowed in all their veins; how on board the ship the Tent-Maker proved to be Captain, and the Centurion learned his duty from his Prisoner, and how they “All came safe to shore,” because the New Life was there. But as I preached, I caught Frye’s eye. Frye is always critical; and I said to myself, “Frye would not take his illustrations from eighteen hundred years ago.” And I saw dear old Dod Dalton trying to keep awake, and Campbell hard asleep after trying, and Jane Masury looking round to see if her mother did not come in; and Ezra Sheppard, looking, not so much at me, as at the window beside me, as if his thoughts were the other side of the world. And I said to them all, “O, if I could tell you, my friends, what every twelve hours of my life tells me,–of the way in which woman helps woman, and man helps man, when only the ice is broken,–how we are all rich so soon as we find out that we are all brothers, and how we are all in want, unless we can call at any moment for a brother’s hand,–then I could make you understand something, in the lives you lead every day, of what the New Covenant, the New Commonwealth, the New Kingdom is to be.”

But I did not dare tell Dod Dalton what Campbell had been doing for Todd, nor did I dare tell Campbell by what unconscious arts old Dod had been helping Lycidas. Perhaps the sermon would have been better had I done so.

But, when we had our tree in the evening at home, I did tell all this story to Polly and the bairns, and I gave Alice her measuring-tape,–precious with a spot of Lycidas’s blood,–and Bertha her Sheffield wimble. “Papa,” said old Clara, who is the next child, “all the people gave presents, did not they, as they did in the picture in your study?”

“Yes,” said I, “though they did not all know they were giving them.”

“Why do they not give such presents every day?” said Clara.

“O child,” I said, “it is only for thirty-six hours of the three hundred and sixty-five days, that all people remember that they are all brothers and sisters, and those are the hours that we call, therefore, Christmas eve and Christmas day.”

“And when they always remember it,” said Bertha, “it will be Christmas all the time! What fun!”

“What fun, to be sure; but Clara, what is in the picture?”

“Why, an old woman has brought eggs to the baby in the manger, and an old man has brought a sheep. I suppose they all brought what they had.”

“I suppose those who came from Sharon brought roses,” said Bertha. And Alice, who is eleven, and goes to the Lincoln School, and therefore knows everything, said, “Yes, and the Damascus people brought Damascus wimbles.”

“This is certain,” said Polly, “that nobody tried to give a straw, but the straw, if he really gave it, carried a blessing.”