"Then we will wait till they appear."
On the fifth day the farmer was constrained to keep his bed.
He had now become a prey to abject terror. So sure as the hour of
sunset came, did a new visitation occur. He listened for the clock to
sound each hour of the day, and as the afternoon drew on he dreaded with
unspeakable horror the advent of the moment when again the apparition
would be seen, and a fresh chill be inflicted. He insisted that his wife
or Pete should remain in the room with him. They took it in turns to sit
by his bedside.
Through the little window the fire of the setting sun smote in and fell
across the suffering man.
It was his wife's turn to be in attendance.
All at once a gurgling sound broke from his throat. His eyes started
from his face, his hair bristled, and with his hands he worked himself
into a sitting posture, and he heaved himself on to his pillow, and
would have broken his way through the backboard of his bed, could he
have done so.
"What is it, Jacob?" asked his wife, throwing down the garment which she
was mending, and coming to his assistance. "Lie down again. There is
nothing here."
He could not speak. His teeth were chattering, and his beard shaking,
foam-bubbles formed on his lips, and great sweatdrops on his brow.
"Pete! Samuel!" she called, "come to your father."
The young men ran in, and they forcibly laid the old Boer in bed,
prostrate.
And now it was found that the right foot had turned dead, like the left.
* * * * *
On the evening of the seventeenth day after the visit to the well of
Llanelian, Mrs. Winifred Jones was sitting on the side of her bed in the
twilight. She had lighted no candle. She was musing, always on the same
engrossing topic, the wrong that had been done to her and her son, and
thirsting with a feverish thirst for vengeance on the wrongdoer.
Her confidence in the expedient to which she had resorted was beginning
to fail. What was this recourse to the well but a falling in with an old
superstition that had died out with the advance of knowledge, and under
the influence of a wholesome feeling? Was any trust to be placed in that
woman at the workhouse? Was she deceiving her for the sake of the
half-sovereign? And yet--she had seen a token that her prayer would
prove efficacious. There had risen through the crystal water a column of
black fluid.
Could it be that a widow's prayer should meet with no response? Was
wrong to prevail in the world? Were the weak and oppressed to have no
means of procuring the execution of justice on the evildoers? Was not
God righteous in all His ways? Would it be righteous in Him to suffer
the murderer of her son to thrive? If God be merciful, He is also just.
If His ear is open to the prayer for help, He must as well listen to the
cry for vengeance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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