Title: Ronald and I - or Studies from Life
Author: Pretor, Alfred
Language: English
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Transcribed from the 1899 Deighton Bell & Co. edition by David Price.



                               RONALD AND I


                            Studies from Life

                                * * * * *

                                    BY

                              ALFRED PRETOR

                                * * * * *

                                CAMBRIDGE

                           DEIGHTON BELL & CO.

                        LONDON GEORGE BELL & SONS

                                   1899

                                * * * * *

                                CAMBRIDGE
                        PRINTED BY JONATHAN PALMER
                             ALEXANDRA STREET



PREFACE


Several of the following sketches have appeared already in the _Cambridge
Review_ and the _Cantab_.  Perhaps the friends who welcomed them then may
welcome them now, on their reappearance in another and more permanent
form.

The story of “Our Rector” has been received in episcopal quarters with
polite incredulity.  It may be that episcopal supervision was less
far-reaching in those days than now.  At any rate, the things I have
narrated, and things stranger still, _did_ occur in our village, and in
all essential details, including the postprandial cigar, the story of
“Our Rector” is a literal “study from life.”

I would forget, if I could, that the “Cruel, Crawling Foam” is also a
record of fact.

                                                                     A. P.

CAMBRIDGE,

_May_, 1899.

                                * * * * *

                          _To Mrs. Thomas Hardy_
                           _who suggested and_
                         _encouraged the writing_
                             _of these tales_



CONTENTS



                                                         PAGE
RONALD AND I:
                Broadwater: a Shadow from the Past          1
                On the Race Course at Bayview              25
                On the Sands                               31
                Our Rector                                 41
                Echoes from an Organ Loft                  55
                Fighting the Cholera                       67
                Ronald’s Courtship                         79
                Judy, or Retrieved                         99
                The Professor                             117
                The Cruel, Crawling Foam                  133
                Our Queen                                 143
BINDO: a Sketch                                           155
‘DECLINED WITH THANKS’: a Postscript                      181

Ronald and I


Broadwater
A SHADOW FROM THE PAST


I


TURN your steps westward, and about four miles beyond Bayview you will
come to a rising ground where three ways meet.

One—the road to the right—trends northward, following with occasional
deviations the coast line of Dead Man’s Bay, a replica in miniature of
the Bay of Biscay, and one which claims, almost as regularly, its tithe
of life and wreckage.

The path on the left hand enters a lodge gate, and begins to fall gently
but without intermission towards the sea.  A curious impression that you
are reaching the end of all things is followed by the feeling that your
next step will be planted in the sea—and then you come to Broadwater.

The huge square-set building stands on a level plateau, guarded by a
semicircle of hills from every wind that blows, excepting the south-west.
The architecture is neither impressive in itself nor characteristic of
any particular period.  Yet, looking down upon it from the hills above,
the eye will find ample satisfaction in the colouring of the roof, for
lichens have painted the crumbling tiles with every conceivable hue of
vermilion and gold.

A stranger, journeying for the first time along the road, would complain
of the lack of trees.  And trees in the open there are none.  Nothing
less cringing than gorse and heather can show front against the
brine-laden winds of the Atlantic.  The south-west wind is jealous of its
prerogatives, and denudes a neighbourhood of isolated growth almost as
surely as does the poison-steeped atmosphere of the midlands.

Yet, if you trouble to make nearer acquaintance with Broadwater, you will
find that every ravine and gully is crowded with trees—“groves” the
villagers call them—whose tops lie level with the ground on either side,
so that a slight divergence from the recognised track might land the
unwary traveller among their foliage, almost without a change in his
plane of elevation.

The grand old house stands, as I have said, on a plateau, protected from
the north and east by the hills, down which the road winds in and out
like a white ribbon.  On the west it faces the Atlantic, and the lawn,
merging in the park, falls rapidly seawards till it meets the natural
barrier of the beach.  As a rule the barrier stands well; yet times there
are when the sea will no longer “harrow the valleys, or be bound with a
band in the furrow,” but, laughing at the puny obstruction, lays its
tribute of drift and wreckage and human life almost on the very door-step
of the house.

Whether you love the scene or not, will depend on your age and
temperament, and something, too, on the circumstances under which you
view it.  Steeped in the quiet twilight of an autumn evening, its perfect
stillness and repose appeal irresistibly to a heart that yearns for rest,
and many such have coveted it.  But let a Londoner come upon it when a
furious south-wester is raging, and the double windows are veiled with an
impermeable film of brine, and you can feel the chimneys rocking
overhead—and the chances are he will hurry from it as from the
abomination of desolation.

After our uncle’s death, Ronald, it was well known, was to reign in his
stead—supplanting myself, albeit the son of an elder brother and the
natural heir.  But my father had been unlucky enough to marry the woman
of old Heyward’s choice, and the sin of the father was to be visited upon
the son.  Our uncle (to do him justice) never made a pretence of equity
in the matter.  “I should turn in my grave,” he said, “if I thought that
son of his was to follow in my room.”  And there the matter ended.  Short
of this, he was fond of me in his own undemonstrative way.  Only lately
he had settled me at Bayview with a handsome allowance, where I was to
make acquaintance with the rudiments of the law till it was time for me
to enter at Cambridge.

Honestly I can say that I never grudged Ronald his inheritance.  He and I
were brothers rather than cousins, and I cannot remember the time when
the sturdy little Viking was not dear to my heart.  Perhaps it was I who
gave the most, and he who took it.  But that is only as it should be,
provided he who gives and he who takes are equally nothing loth.

The house was an ideal home for us, so long as we shared it in common.
When we were separated, it became unutterably dull for the one who was
left companionless.  Ghosts it must have had in plenty.  There certainly
was an “impluvium,” which in these days is rarer than a ghost.  I mean
that the whole centre of the house was open to the winds of heaven, for
the purpose of collecting the rain water which fell into a huge reservoir
at the basement.

The ghosts, if any, never showed themselves—frightened in all probability
by the antagonism of Ronald’s temperament.  But we discovered what was
next best to the real article—the equipments and paraphernalia of one.
In a disused coach-house we came one day on an old travelling carriage of
the fashion in use sixty years ago, when paterfamilias took himself and
his family for a progress round the country.  Rumble it had, and
imperial, and a chest of most unearthly pattern, accommodated to the
space under the back seat.

But the glass was broken in the frames, and the hangings were mouldy.
The very woodwork was so worm-eaten that at a touch you would expect it
to crumble into dust, like one of the Pharaohs when he is disencumbered
of his trappings.  It was painted—or rather had been painted—a sable
black, but the colour had deteriorated with time to the hue of rusty
crêpe.

Our first impression suggested that it was some time-honoured memorial of
the past—the carriage, it might be, in which a bride and bridegroom had
made their home-coming under auspices of exceptional promise.  But a
second glance through the broken semicircular skylight told rather of
intentional neglect or indifference.  The plaster of the coach-house,
where it still clung to the lath, had broken out into patches of
mouldiness, defiant of the first principles of cleanliness, while an army
of spiders, who must have worked unmolested for years, had tied the
carriage to the walls and floor with a net-work of dirt-begrimed strands.

“What on earth is it? and why is it kept here?” asked Ronald of the
groom.  “I shall get the uncle to have it broken up and burned: it’s only
filling the place with moths and insects.”

“Don’t you do nought of the kind, Master Ronald,” said the coachman,
lowering his voice to a whisper.  “That carriage has been driven up to
these very doors by old Nick himself, or one or other of his coachmen.
Aye, you may laugh.  But it’s true enough, and not so long ago neither.
They’d forgotten—had your aunt and uncle—that it was here in the stable
at all: it must have been here years before they bought the place—till
_he_ came and drove it round to the front door one night, all mouldy and
ramshackled just as you see it now.”

“Do tell us, Frampton, about it.  I’ll promise not to laugh.”

“Well, ’twas the night before we were starting for the South of France,
and I was going with them to look after the horses they were to hire in
Paris.  The house had been full of visitors for Christmas, but most of
them had gone the day before, and the rest of them were to leave along
with us.

“It was in the middle of the night, though they never noticed the true
time, when they heard, both of them, a carriage drive up to the front
door.

“They were fairly puzzled what it could mean, as they expected no
visitors, least of all at that time of night.  Your aunt got up first and
then called your uncle.  And there, full in the moonlight, stood that
identical carriage, and the coachman was a skellington—dressed in black
and weepers, for all the world like an undertaker at a funeral.  He
turned his eyes—or what should have been his eyes—full upon them both.
And then your aunt went faint, and I believe your uncle did no better.
Anyhow, when they came back to their senses, carriage and coachman were
gone.”

“And what did it mean, Frampton?”

“Well, that’s more than I can tell you, Master Ronald.  It’s fairly
puzzled all of us.  I’m sure I’ve bothered my head times over to try and
piece it together, seeing it meant no harm to them, but only to a lot of
folk they’d never seen or heard of.”

“How did that come about?”

“When we got to Paris, we put up at one of them big hotels—I forget the
name of it.  And one day he and she were going up to their rooms in the
lift.  Just as they were stepping aboard of it, they looked chanceways at
the man who managed it, and I’m blessed if it wasn’t the same coachman as
had driven that there carriage up to the door at Broadwater.  They were
that frightened that they stepped back, and the lift went up without
them.  And well it was they did so, for something or other went wrong
with the hauling gear, and every soul on board of it was killed.

“And now you know, Master Ronald, why your uncle won’t have that carriage
never touched.  He’s got it into his head, and you won’t get it out
again, that it was sent to save his life.  All I can say is that, if
that’s what it did mean, old Nick carries on his business in a queer,
roundabout kind of way.”


II


Not many days after Frampton had imparted to us his sensational story, we
were told to expect a visit from the family lawyer.  Ronald and I always
hailed his visits with delight.  He was one of those cheery individuals
whom boys can chum with.  In age he must have been nearly seventy-five,
but hale and hearty still: entering into our amusements, never minding
our noise, and tipping us when he left with a liberality that appalled
our uncle.  Ronald and I would have put him down for fifty.  But boys do
not recognise the gradations of age.  To them a man seems definitely old
at fifty, and live as long as he may after that, years will add nothing
to the mystery of his age, if only he keeps young in heart and interests.
At sixty, seventy, or even eighty, he will in their eyes be fifty still.

As a matter of course Ronald and I were told to put in an appearance on
the day of his arrival.  The unvarying order of the programme was that,
after he had had a few words with our uncle, we two should form his
escort in a progress round the park and outlying farms.

“So your uncle still cherishes the old Crofton coach,” he said, as we
passed the outhouse tenanted by the family ghost.  “I wonder he cares to
keep it,”—almost Ronald’s own words to Frampton, the coachman—from which
it was clear he had never heard of our uncle’s visitant, nor did we
venture to enlighten him.

“Do you know anything about it, Sir?” asked Ronald, in the eager tone of
one who had by no means lost hope of solving the mystery.

“My boy, I’ve _ridden in it_.”

Ronald’s face was a study.  “Ridden in it? actually _ridden_ in that
coach?  And did you, Sir, _did_ you see the devil?” he continued
anxiously.  “Frampton says he always drives it.”

“Not exactly, Ronald.  And, by the way, my lad, I wouldn’t, if I were
you, introduce his name quite so familiarly into your conversation.
Frampton must be cautioned, Fred, as to what he tells the boy.”

“Well, he didn’t exactly say that, Sir,” continued Ronald, willing to
justify his friend.  “He called him old Nick.”

“That’s a trifle better.  Anyhow, I didn’t see him, though I can’t say
honestly that my ride was a pleasant one.  I’d been staying here with old
Crofton, just before he sold the place to your uncle, and I had business
too to transact with Thorpe of Thorpe Hill.  As luck would have it, all
the carriages here were in use but this one.  It wasn’t in the state it
is now, but it was out of date and uncomfortable even then.  However, it
took me there all right.  It was on the way back that I had my adventure.

“I had barely composed myself to sleep with the consciousness of having
dined too well—Thorpe never stinted his guests—when I was roused by an
uneasy feeling that I was not the sole occupant of the carriage.  The
interior was lit up by a weird, fantastic light that came and went, rose
and fell, like the glow that throbs over a brick-kiln or a blast furnace.
After all, it may have been only the reflection of my own cigar which I
had instinctively kept alight during my short nap.  From out the
border-land which separates sleep from waking, I saw two figures on the
opposite seat.  For a time I studied them with hardly more interest than
I should the figures in a pantomime, till it was forced upon me by their
wild gesticulation that this was no pantomime enacting for my benefit,
but a veritable tragedy of life and death.  The one figure shrank
cowering in a corner of the carriage; the other stood over it with
uplifted hand.  But no voice or sound proceeded from them.  Only on the
hand of one, the figure that crouched and trembled, I recognised the
famous Thorpe emerald—as the family lawyer I knew it well—while the other
that stormed and threatened might have passed for old Crofton himself, in
so far as youth of twenty can anticipate the form and lineaments of
seventy-five.

“The details had hardly had time to shape themselves within my brain,
when the light died out.  I heard—or fancied I heard—a short, sharp gasp,
an inarticulate cry for mercy, and the carriage drew up before the gate
of Broadwater.”

That night after dinner we were subjected to a close cross-examination by
our uncle.

“The boys have told me your surprising story, Mr. Roberts.  May I ask how
it is I never heard it from you before?”

“Why, to tell you the truth, Mr. Heyward, you wouldn’t have heard it now
if my little friend Ronald hadn’t rushed me into telling it by his burst
of eagerness.  You might have said I’d been dining too well—as indeed I
had—and that isn’t exactly the thing to recommend a family lawyer.  So
you’ve got my reputation at your mercy, young gentlemen.  For, of course,
it _was_ the dinner—a nightmare of some kind, no doubt.  Though I’m bound
to say I never had a nightmare, either before or afterwards, that was
half so vivid and real.  It was quite the worst quarter of an hour I ever
passed in my life.”

“Perhaps not so much of a nightmare as you suppose,” rejoined the uncle,
and then proceeded to narrate his own experiences.  I remember thinking
how much better Frampton told the story than he did, in spite of his
rather unorthodox language.

“Phew! that alters the whole question.  Corroborative evidence with a
vengeance—evidence that one might almost take into court.  For even if
_you_ had been dining not wisely, your sister hadn’t, I know.  Anyhow, we
three staid gentlefolk could create a pretty sensation with our three
independent testimonies.  To think that a belief in ghosts should be
forced upon me at my age!  Why I shall be dragged next into believing the
village legend.”

“What is it?  I never even heard of it.”

“That Ronald’s old carriage is somehow mixed up with the quarrel between
Thorpe and Broadwater—that it stands in the way of their family union.
So you see, young gentlemen, where you’ve got to look for a wife as soon
as the carriage is gone.  But it doesn’t look like it yet.  Old Thorpe’s
dead, and the house shut up, and the only survivor of the family is on
the point, they tell me, of marrying her cousin.  Above all, you guard
the old carriage, Heyward, as if it were a priceless heirloom.  But
perhaps you are right; it isn’t your business to get rid of it.”


III


So the old carriage mouldered on in the coach-house, and its net-work of
cobwebs grew grimier each day.

How the spiders maintained themselves was a mystery, for no fly could
have run the blockade of the window, even if the inducement had been
greater.  At last Ronald and I wove a legend around them in our turn,
which terrified us more than did the carriage itself.  We decided that,
after long years of mutual slaughter, the victory had rested in the end
with two or three hoary monsters, who had ensconced themselves within the
framework of the ruined carriage, from which they looked out upon the
solitude they were creating.  Little by little the uncanny idea grew upon
us till, regardless of all probability, we fancied we could see their
eyes peering out of the darkness.

More than once we made illicit expeditions at midnight in the hope that
we might find the ghostly coachman cleaning and repairing his equipage
for another sortie.  But we could see nothing.  If either of us had gone
alone, the result might have been different; we should have seen, or
pretended to see, many matters of interest.

November was, as a rule, our month of storms at Broadwater, though
February often ran it close; and, in the year that followed upon
Frampton’s story, a gale broke upon us on the third of the month that
beat the record of our times for violence.  We had not been without
warning of its coming.  The sea had been “crying out” at intervals—sure
token that the storm had paused to gather breath, bidding the sea take
forward its message to the shore.

Not when the gale is at its height—at any rate along our coast—can you
best realise the grandeur of the sea.  Study it rather on one of these
quiet days of warning, when you can trace a wave almost from its
inception, till it curls over at your feet with a dull roar, regular as
the boom of a minute gun, and audible for miles inland.

Lashed into foam, and its voice drowned by the wind, it parts with much
of its majesty, and becomes merely a symbol of turmoil and unrest.  What
it gains in wildness, it loses in self-control, like the seething rapids
of Niagara before they compose themselves into dignity prior to the final
plunge.

Then came another and a final warning.  It was one of those rare sunsets
which leave an imprint on the memory for life.  Not a sunset in which
conflicting colours are fused into each other by soft and subtle
gradations—these we see often and soon forget—but one of war and discord;
when colours, the most antagonistic, meet without blending, and produce
effects that would be called crude and coarse upon a painter’s canvas.

On a background of unvarying crimson, black and purple clouds were
projected, clean cut in outline, and solid, to all appearance, as the
hull of an Atlantic liner that was cleaving her way across the sea
beneath them.  The sea itself borrowed its colours from the sky, but
jealously guarded them from encroaching on the beach beyond, which shone
white as silver in the unnatural glow.  Beyond it still, the valleys and
hills that rose behind Broadwater were painted a dark and luminous green,
on which a few scattered homesteads stood out in clear and startling
relief.  For the moment distance was annihilated, and a step or two, or
so it seemed, might have compassed the mile of space that separated us
from our own house door.

A sunset like this, following upon a “crying” sea, can never be misread
by the dwellers on our coast.  It warns every fisherman that he must haul
his lerret to the very summit of the ridge, and every Coastguard station
along the dreaded Bay that it behoves them to be awake and watching.  But
it was not till midnight that the storm broke upon us.

Our faith in the old house was strong.  It had outlived so many storms,
and the gale of ’24 must have been worse than this, or so we kept saying
for mutual encouragement.  But it was hard to believe it, and the comfort
was quickly followed by a disquieting thought that each year, as it
passed, left the chimneys older and less capable of resisting the
pressure.  We were disquieted, too, for others; we knew well by
experience what a night like this might bring us from the sea.  Times
upon times, in similar gales, we had been hurried to the beach by signals
of distress, and had helped the Coastguard, sometimes in saving life,
oftener in furthering that painful recall to life which is more agonizing
to witness than death itself.

Happily there came to-night no appealing cry.  Even if it had pierced its
way through wind and rain, those whom it summoned could only have watched
and waited for one of those strange freaks by which the sea now and again
elects to spare a human life.  At the height of the gale, when gust upon
gust followed each other with ever increasing fury, we were still seated
in the drawing-room under various pretences.  Ronald and I said openly
that we were afraid of venturing our lives in the upper rooms, just under
the chimneys.  Our uncle jeered at our cowardice, but stayed where he
was.  “The noise would prevent my sleeping,” he said, “but, as for
danger, I’d as lief sleep in the garrets as anywhere; only the servants’
beds ain’t as comfortable as my own.  The old house’ll last our time
yet.”

As if in answer to his boast, the gale made another defiant howl.  It was
answered by a dull crash, followed by a continuous roar of falling
materials—followed again by a dead silence that was audible above the
rush of wind and rain.  It took us only a few minutes to satisfy
ourselves that the fabric of the house was safe.  It was a chimney
stablewards that had gone, crashing through a hay loft and lumber room
right down on the top of our ghostly carriage, and clearing Broadwater of
spiders for the period of our lives.  Even the uncle himself could find
no plea for extending his protection to a mass of shivered fragments.  If
the powers of darkness had destroyed their own handiwork, or failed in
ability to protect it, there was no reason to suppose that the hand of
man would be more successful.  So the fiat went forth—not, I believe,
without great searching of heart on the part of our uncle—and carriage
and cobwebs, and even the stable itself were swept away, and, as Bunyan
says, I saw them no more.

“Well, I’m glad that it’s gone,” said a quiet, sweet voice at my elbow,
as Ronald and I were watching the departure of the last load of
materials.  And, turning, I saw before me the woman who was to be the
guiding star of Ronald’s life, yes, and my own life too.  She was little
more than a girl then—only a few years older than Ronald himself—with a
great calm truthfulness in her eyes, and the air of one who had already
known sorrow, and been refined, not hardened, by the experience.

“Yes,” she repeated, “I am glad it’s gone.  And now we can be friends.
It has been so lonely for me at Thorpe ever since my father died, and I
have so wanted to make friends with you; only that old carriage stood in
the way.  It was silly, no doubt, to be so much afraid, but then I am
Scotch—and the Scotch you know are very superstitious,” she added with a
smile.  “Besides, ever since I can remember anything, I’ve been told that
the old carriage meant mischief and trouble between Thorpe and
Broadwater.  It is true, no doubt, that an ancestor of mine did die in
it, and that all sorts of ghastly rumours were current as to how he met
his death.  But nothing ever came of them, and it was commonly assumed
that he died of heart disease; he had certainly been ailing for years
before.  Thank heaven! the very scene of the crime—if such it were—has
been swept away at last.  And it is pleasant, isn’t it? to recommence our
life’s friendship here where it was wrecked.  Though I fear we shan’t
meet often as yet, for my husband that is to be lives abroad, till I can
persuade him to give up his post and settle down with me for good in the
dear old home.  But you _will_ be my friends, won’t you, for always?”

She held out her hand in pledge of her friendship.  And we shall be
friends, I think, “for always.”  I like the old-fashioned phrase.

Besides, it was her own.



On the Racecourse at Bayview


IT was Ronald’s birthday, and the day fixed for the Races at Bayview—an
unlucky coincidence, for he always showed a keen spirit of enterprise on
that particular morning.  He was now fourteen, and looked a trifle older
owing to his splendid physique.  Even in the nursery visitors had
christened him the “Infant Hercules.”  A Viking he was in miniature, with
clear blue eyes and short, crisp hair, carrying with him an atmosphere of
suppressed fun that, dangerous as it might prove, was a certain guarantee
against dulness or want of spirit.  He had behaved himself beautifully
for an entire month.  But I distrusted him to-day.  He had never seen the
races, and had constantly signified his intention of doing so.  So when
his uncle said to him at breakfast, “You are not to go to the races; they
are destructive of morality, especially to a boy of your age,” and Ronald
winked at me across the table, I felt sure he intended to go.

“No sir,” he said respectfully—“and I suppose you won’t go either.  Of
course they can’t do you any harm at your age; but they can’t do you any
good.”

“As it happens, Ronald, I shall go—just to make sure that you don’t.
Besides, I think it a good principle that elderly people should be seen
doing things which they forbid to their youngsters.  Unquestioning
obedience is a fine thing.  It doesn’t follow that because I allow myself
a cigar to quiet my nerves, therefore you should smoke who don’t know
what a nerve means.”

“No sir: of course it doesn’t”—and he winked again.

For myself, I distinctly intended to go to the races, seeing that I was
past the age at which my uncle feared their contagion; though neither was
I old enough to plead the principle which he had so astutely paraded on
his own account.  And so I went.

Ronald had left the house soon after breakfast—for a ride (he said)—and,
as I saw nothing of him on the racecourse, I was comfortable in the
belief that for once he had obeyed orders.  When the races were nearly
over, a little stable boy came up to me and touched his cap:

“Hold your horse, sir?”

By Jove, it was Ronald.  He had borrowed Dick the groom’s livery, and had
had a fine time of it, he told me, in that unconventional attire.

Just then our uncle rode up.  “Now stand away, Fred, and don’t be seen
talking to me, and I’ll show you some rare sport.”

“Hold your horse, sir?”—this to our uncle.

“Well, I don’t mind if you do, and I’ll have a stroll with Fred here till
it’s time to go home.”

After a lounge along the course, chatting with friends and criticising
the horses, we came back to where we left Ronald.  “Thanks,” said the
uncle, as he re-mounted, “here’s a shilling for you.  A lucky dog you
are, too, for it’s got a hole in it, I see.  Good-day.”

When dinner was over that evening, the uncle waxed genial over a bottle
of ’75 Margaux.  “We’d a capital day’s racing, Ronald.  I’m almost sorry
you weren’t with us.  Next year, all well, my boy, I’ll take you myself.”

“Thanks, sir”—and he winked the third time.  “By the way, you haven’t
lost a shilling, sir, have you?  I picked up this one while you were at
the races.  You’re a lucky dog, sir, if it does belong to you, for it’s
got a hole in it?”

Verdict: _Acquitted_, _but don’t do it again_.



On the Sands


BROADWATER was fearfully dull on a Sunday, so I came over from Bayview
where I was staying, that Ronald and I might help each other in getting
through the day.

It was a blazing afternoon in August, and the park, shut in by hills,
shimmered in a haze of heat.  “I can’t stand this,” said Ronald.  “Air I
must get somehow, and, as it’s not to be got nearer than the sea, we’ll
walk to the shore in search of it.  It’s rather hard on you, to be sure,
who’ve done the walk once already.  But it’s better than lounging about
here, where it’s too hot to speak or think; and, at any rate, we shall
see the trippers.”

It happened, most unluckily, that just as we reached the pier, an open
air service had begun.  Of course they had chosen the hottest corner
possible for it; a nook sheltered by the masonry of the pier, which
carefully excluded every breath of wind that might be travelling to us
from the sea.  But, despite the heat, it was a temptation to mild
excitement that Ronald found it impossible to resist.

“Not so good as the nigger minstrels, but better than nothing,” he said.
So we joined the throng of listeners.  It was the usual audience, the
devotees (mainly women) forming the inner circle, in close proximity to
the preacher and the harmonium.  Next came the half-hearted, weaker
vessels, who separated the former as by a wall from the irreverent throng
of idlers who laughed and talked and smoked on the outside fringe.  The
preacher was a man of the ordinary type, only a little stouter, a little
more flaccid and even more illiterate than usual.  Where do they come
from, these preachers?  Are they men who think they have a call or a
gift? and are they accepted for the office on their own valuation?
Certainly they are not chosen for any capability that can approve itself
to the impartial hearer.

The present representative of the school was enlarging, when we came up,
upon the demerits of the publican.  Ronald, after a few minutes, began to
fume and fret.  But he behaved for a while excellently well, though I
could hear him muttering words in an undertone distinctly uncomplimentary
to the preacher.

“And it is publicans like these—the scum and refuse of Jerusalem—that are
represented in this town to-day by the inn-keepers, barmen, and pot-boys,
who an hour or two hence will be serving many of their fellow
creatures—many, I fear, of this audience—with drink, to the ruin of their
lives here and of their hopes of salvation hereafter.”

“Nothing of the sort,” shouted Ronald, “he wasn’t an innkeeper at all; he
was a tax-gatherer.  Every schoolboy knows that.”

The silence that followed was awful; every eye was turned upon the boy,
and it was a strain upon my loyalty to remain at his side, and not then
and there renounce his acquaintance.

“Oh, he wasn’t, wasn’t he, young man?” said the preacher.  “Well, as you
seems to know more about the Bible than I do, perhaps you’ll step up here
and take my place.  Kindly tell us, if _you_ please, out of _your_
superior knowledge, what he was, and why he was called a publican if he
was a tax-collector; and why a poor collector of rates, who only did his
duty, is held up to our scorn and reprobation; yes, our _reprobation_.”
(This word he regarded as a crushing climax.)

To my complete and indescribable confusion, Ronald, nothing loth,
accepted the challenge with delight, and the next moment was standing on
the platform addressing an appreciative audience.  What a sermon he gave
them!—lasting without a pause or break for exactly half-an-hour; every
thought reasoned out, and closing with a peroration of consummate
eloquence.  By a clever feint he had diverted the text of the preacher to
one on the Pharisee and the Publican, making a scathing attack on the
Pharisaism of the day, which went to church, and gave its alms openly and
never in secret; which paid its way and kept the conventional
commandments, and neglected (as of little count) the weightier things of
unselfishness and love.  “A day is coming when it will matter nothing
where we lived, nor in what occupations, nor amidst what circumstances,
but only how we wrought, and in what spirit we suffered.  Be the thing
you say; be unselfish, in your own poor way, to your friends and to your
home, and to the world about you; that is worth ten thousand sermons and
a hundred thousand Articles of Religion.”  A dead silence followed as he
stepped down from the platform; he had left a charm upon us that it
seemed sacrilege to break.  Then came a word or two.  “What a wonderful
boy!—a second Spurgeon; with all his eloquence and none of his
irreverence.”

“Summat worth hearin’, I calls it; how he did pitch into they bloomin’
aristocrats.  I’ll come and hear ye, young master, whensomdever you holds
forth agin.”

“Well—I never!”  It was with this ungrammatical aposiopesis that I
started, so soon as I could find breath to start at all.  “Where on
earth, Ronald, did you get it all from?”  The boy had come back to me
looking as cool as a cucumber, and highly delighted with the sensation he
had created.

“Don’t tell, Fred,” he answered, “but it was a sermon of Vaughan’s.  We
are made to analyse his sermons at school, and say them afterwards for
repetition lessons.  So when that old donkey fell foul of the publican, I
had one handy you see, on that very subject, and I thought it a pity not
to fire it off.”

Surely, I thought, he’ll be satisfied now, and I tried to draw him away
from the crowd, who were becoming a trifle too much interested in our
name and identity.  But no; not a bit of it.  The excitement was full
upon him still.  So up he went to the harmonium (they had now started a
hymn), and looking over the shoulder of the performer (she was a pretty
girl of eighteen) he began to sing as lustily as the best of them.  By
degrees his arm, I saw, began to steal about her waist, and, fuss and
fidget as she might, she was powerless to help herself.  Her hands were
occupied with the keyboard, and her feet with the blower, and with her
voice she had to lead the singing.  So he had her at his mercy, and
hugged her disgracefully, while she, poor girl, was powerless to resist.
The audience all thought she was his sister, and highly commended him, it
was clear, for the countenance and support he was giving her.

While the last line of the last verse was being sung, the temptation
became too strong for resistance, and Ronald stooped down and kissed
her—an action which touched still further the sympathetic heart of the
audience.

“A dear, good young feller that, as ever I see’d”—said an old lady in my
immediate neighbourhood.  “I only wish as how he were a son of mine; a
preachin’ that fine, for all the world like the Bishop, and a’ lookin’
arter his sister so prettily—and a nice young girl she is too.”

After this exploit he slipped across the circle and joined me, and a
minute later—with hot and blazing cheeks—I was thankful to find myself
round the corner, and well on the way home before the throng of listeners
had begun to disperse.  I felt, indeed, as must that Bishop, who, to
oblige a small girl younger in years than in experience, condescended to
ring at a street door, and was rewarded with the advice, “Run! _run_ for
yer life! they’ll knock the ’ead off yer shoulders if they catches ye.”
I wonder what he elected to do? pocket his dignity and run? or rely upon
his clerical attire to see him through?  In any case our anxiety would be
more protracted.  What if the escapade should reach our uncle’s ears?
However I was spared this climax.  The story of it got wind in the
servants’ hall, as all stories do; but the servants were far too loyal to
Master Ronald to betray him, and so it never made its way up stairs to
the drawing room.

                                * * * * *

But the career of that preacher was ended—in Bayview.



Our Rector


WE had two, if not three, celebrities in our village.  The Rector is
dead; the Clerk is dead; the Professor still lives.  But, independently
of this claim to our respect, let us give precedence to the Church.

Less than fifty years ago the services in a parish not ten miles from one
of our well-known watering places were done—or left undone—by surely the
queerest cleric of his time.

A grand old man he was in person—tall, and venerable as Bede himself,
with the most benevolent of faces and the most silver of silver hair.
Fit to be an archbishop, so far as appearances went, but most unfit to
have the charge of the hundred souls—there were no more of them—committed
to his trust.

To these he ministered, or (as I have said) failed to minister, on Sunday
mornings; for often as not the services, stipulated for at the price of
£75 per annum, were left unperformed on the shallowest of pretexts.  It
might be the weather; it might be that he was indisposed; often, I fear,
it was from sheer disinclination.

To the hamlet that clustered close round the church it was a matter of
comparative indifference.  They never believed by anticipation in the
service till the bell was actually sounding; and his henchman (clerk,
sexton, choirmaster and gravedigger in one) had strict orders to withhold
this summons till the Rector himself was actually in view.  But to our
party, who lived two miles away, the question of service or no service
was a serious one.  It meant hesitation in starting, and reluctance to
risk the chance—provocation, too, even to my long-suffering father, when
he found the church door barred, and a south-wester brewing, in the teeth
of which we had to struggle home over a barren down, unsupported by the
nutriment, mental and moral, on which we had calculated.  But the
service, when it did take place, was a queerer experience by far than the
service foregone.  The orchestra would have been the despair of
Nebuchadnezzar.  It consisted of a single flageolet, blown by the wheezy
old sexton—one Joseph Edwards by name.  We did not even boast of a
serpent—instrument immortalised by Mr. Hardy for its volume of tone in
supplementing deficiencies.  Now the flageolet is a pet aversion of mine,
and I can forgive Nebuchadnezzar many of his iniquities for having (so
far as we know) excluded it from his band.  Indeed, musicians themselves
would seem to be ashamed of it, for they have re-christened it, I am
told, by a humbler name.  But I was careful not to betray my feelings to
my friend Joseph, and listened patiently while he enlarged on the
capabilities and melodiousness of his pet instrument.  “Not but what I’m
getting a bit wheezy (he’d often say to me), and can’t make the
flourishes as onst I could.  But ’tis may be better as it is.  They
quieter tunes are belike more godly.  Anyhow the choir—poor souls—got
right puzzled among my turns and quavers, coming in here, there and no
how at the finish.”

But, praise it as he might, the flageolet is the worst instrument
possible to constitute an orchestra; especially when played as Joseph
played it.  It gave out a series of squeaks and
counter-squeaks—punctuated and accentuated by his wheezes rather than by
the requirements of the tune.  Indeed, a boy learning the bugle, or a
Punch and Judy panpipe, would have discoursed more decorous music.  To me
the panpipe and the flageolet seem nearly akin; only the flageolet is the
more powerful instrument of the two, and Punch is more exacting than we
were in the choice of an executant.

Once, as a special favour, I was invited by Joseph to attend a choir
practice.  It was before his hand or, I should say, his breath had lost
its cunning; and it took place on this wise.  An hour before service
(which on this occasion was actually realised) Joseph took his stand in
the reading desk, flageolet in hand, while a group of apple-cheeked
cottagers—fishermen mainly, and plough-boys—grouped themselves in my
father’s pew below.  In one point at any rate Joseph had anticipated the
ritual of later days; he repudiated all women from his choir.  “’Taint no
place for ’em,” he’d say; “I wonder what ’postle Paul ’d think, if he
could ha’ heard they two women at S. Matthew’s screechin’ out ‘O ’twas a
joyful sound to hear’—and none of us, let alone the choir, privileged to
put in a joyful sound along wi ’em.  If women baint allowed to preach in
Church, stands to reason that they baint allowed to sing.”

“Now boys, turn to ‘Aurelia,’ and go for to remember that we sing the
whole on’t right through this time.  Last time as ever we did it some on
you took to skipping and one sang one verse and t’other the next, whereby
I had to blow myself nigh faint to hide your discordance.  And mind ye
too, sing ’en slow, not as if you wanted to get shot on’t.”

All went well at the first rehearsal, for Joseph played the air
distinctly and without disturbing flourishes—only with an intolerable
drawl, mindful in all probability of “passon’s” injunctions; of which
more anon.

“Well sung,” says he; “you be a good choir when you be so minded; and
well instructed, too, though I says it as didn’t ought to.  Now then,
we’ll see what ye can do when I puts in the flourishes.”

This was a change for the worse, and what had been a melancholy dirge
became a haphazard scramble for notes, each boy seizing on the one that
he could detect among the enveloping flourishes, regardless whether it
was the same note that had found favour with his neighbour.  In the end
the hymn became a sacrilegious fugue, devoid of time, harmony or
sequence.  Yet Joseph was never disquieted at the result.  On the
contrary, he regarded it as a tribute to his skill, addressing his choir
at the finish as a general might address his discomfited troops: “You’ve
done your best, and none of us can’t do no more.  Better luck at
church-time, and this I do say, that ’tis few players can overlay a
melody as I can wi’ flourishes and expect them as sings it to pick out
the tune.”

But to return to our Rector.  The fun began (I write, remember, as a boy
of ten) with the First Lesson.  When the time for it approached, great
preparations were seen to be in progress.  Our benevolent Archbishop
retired into the recesses of the reading desk (a high, square pew,
scarcely to be differentiated from our own) and disposed his lunch in
orderly array upon the sill overhanging my father’s head.  And, to give
time for its consumption, a boy was summoned from the
congregation—usually it was his own son, a curly-pated lad of thirteen—to
discourse the Lesson.  Manfully he grappled with the difficulties and
hard names of the Old Testament—sticking and halting at nothing, and
making a record of false quantities and mispronunciations that I have
never heard beaten during a twenty years’ experience of the average
undergraduate.  Meanwhile his father lunched peacefully, careless what
havoc he made with the Kings of Israel and Judah.  But woe betide the boy
if ever he tried to skip a name.  A guttural rebuke issued from the
depths of the reading desk: “None of that, Jack; go back, my lad, and try
it again.”

But his greatest delight of all was to hear Jack struggling with the
genealogy in St. Luke.  A series of chuckles issued from the corner where
the old man lay ensconced, that gathered in volume with every fresh fall;
and when the boy, hot and discomfited, retired from the fray, there was a
pause in the proceedings till the old man had recovered himself
sufficiently to resume his functions.  His luncheon meanwhile had been
progressing steadily, not without the gurgling sound of something
comforting to facilitate digestion.  It puzzled me for years to discover
the _raison d’ être_ of this extraordinary meal, knowing as I did that an
hour later he would be dining with one of his cottagers, after careful
preliminary enquiry as to which house could offer the most attractive
fare.  Only quite lately, long after the idea of luncheon had been
stereotyped upon my brain, I found out that the so-called luncheon was,
after all, no luncheon at all, but only a retarded breakfast.  Our Rector
being a late riser, and having a five-mile walk before him, could find no
opportunity of taking it in comfort till he had reached the haven of the
parish reading desk.

A cigar was the indispensable accompaniment of the second Lesson, during
which period its fumes could be seen ascending like “curling incense” to
the blackened rafters of the roof.  Indeed, the only thing that ever
really shattered my father’s equanimity was the sight of its reeking end,
projected over his head from the sill of the reading desk, where the
Rector had reluctantly placed it while he applied himself to the
requirements of the “Benedictus.”

When the flageolet sounded the key note of the first hymn, the Rector
regarded it as the signal of a temporary relaxation.  He was for a time
off duty, and the cigar was again in requisition.  But in fine and balmy
weather, he found the atmosphere of the church too close for its
enjoyment.  It “gathered sweetness from the open air.”  So, attired in
surplice, stole and bands, our Rector strolled out into the
churchyard—giving us pleasant little vista-views of his enjoyment as he
passed and re-passed the windows of the aisles.  That it might be enjoyed
in perfection and unto the end, the hymns selected were inordinately
long.  But, if fate was against him, and the wind light, and the cigar
drew slowly, he had no false shame in appearing on the chancel steps to
announce with all the dignity of a formal notice that the last two verses
of the hymn would be repeated.  After which he disappeared into the
churchyard again.

The sermon was to me, as a boy, full of the most delightful interest.  It
had an infinity of anticipation.  No one knew what was coming—least of
all the Rector himself.  We felt stimulated by the chance of any and
every possibility.  A clergyman of the strictest sect of the
Evangelicals, he always preached in a surplice.  (It was in the days,
remember, when the Geneva gown was the badge of that school, and the sign
of a high church cleric was barely appearing above the horizon).

But I sadly fear that our Rector was influenced by no question of
principle or non-principle; I cannot, I think, be wronging him if I infer
that his preference for the surplice was due to sheer indifference or
indolence.

Then came the always exciting task of moving the immense Bible from the
reading desk to the pulpit.  He regarded it, I think, almost in the light
of a fetish, and certainly, so long as I knew him, would never have
attempted a sermon with any smaller and less trustworthy guide.  He
balanced the enormous volume in his right hand, and, with his left hand
on the rails, steadied himself as he made the painful and perilous
ascent.  The hope, I fear, of us boys was that the book would one day
slip from his hand and imperil the head of the clerk beneath, who was now
no longer choirmaster, but, like a Roman flute player, had crossed over
to his proper seat and resumed his duties beneath the pulpit.  But the
hope was never realised, and I have felt ever since that my life has
lacked something in consequence.

The choice of his text was the longest part of his sermon.  The Bible was
opened haphazard, as though he intended to execute a sort of _sors
Vergiliana_.  But so casual a method was quite unsuited to the dignity of
our Rector.  The pages were turned and re-turned; whole chapters were
read and carefully studied, and, after a quarter of an hour of this
preliminary investigation, a text was given out, that for glaring
irrelevance and disconnection with everything else could never have been
surpassed if he had taken it at sight.  A name out of a genealogy—the
Christian name Mary—Tophet—the daubed wall—pillows for all armholes—are
among the subjects that I distinctly remember were selected for our
edification.  But of the treatment alas! I remember nothing—nothing then,
and certainly nothing now, when I would give £50 to trace the exact
process of his reasoning.

The last sermon I ever heard him deliver was on the text, “And there
shall be no more sea”—an unwise and disquieting subject for a
congregation, most of whom came of a race of fishermen, and gained their
living from the element which he so confidently annihilated.

“If there baint no sea, then ’tis no place for I,” I heard a man say to
his neighbour as he passed out of church; “and sakes alive, where be ’en
going to get their fish from?”

Such was our Rector.  Not reverent or discreet, you will say, in his
capacity of priest.  No, but a kindly, genial old man; devoted to his
parishioners, if not to his duties; clever too, and companionable in
society, and inexhaustible to the boys of the parish in the matter of
marbles and gingerbread.

It is with affection that I recall him, for, in spite of his
eccentricities, and perhaps because of them, I loved him well.—_R.I.P._



Echoes from an Organ Loft


    “Pale fingers moved upon the keys,
    The ghost hands of past centuries.”

From Joseph’s flageolet to one of the finest organs in England—from the
scene of “our Rector’s” ministrations to a building that could have
swallowed up his church and his school room and all the house property in
his parish—was a startling transition for a boy of fourteen.

I wonder how often, during my first experience of a cathedral service, my
thoughts travelled back to the tiny hamlet in the west, with its ruined
chancel on which the Atlantic had spent its rage, and its few cottages
straggling on and up behind an avenue of elms, to where the new church,
safe in a sheltered paradise of its own, looks down compassionately upon
the wreckage of the past.

In times to come I got to know every nook and corner of the great organ
loft at K.  It was built in those large minded days before architects had
conceived the fatal idea of economising space.  Ascending by a broad
staircase that rose with the dignity of an inclined plane, you came out
upon a plateau, roomier and more comfortable than many a London flat.
The sanctum of the organist—indeed, the huge instrument itself—were
little more than incidents of the loft.  There was a chamber for the wife
of the dean, and another chamber for the wife of the organist, together
with a library for the Church music; and still there was room in it for
blind man’s buff—when the choristers could get the chance.

The organ itself might have been a mile away—so little did you hear of
it.  In this respect the loft resembled the deck of a battleship, where
the men who work the guns hear least of the explosion.  Only a few
muttered growls from the big pipes that lined the walls on either side,
or burrowed in the caverns underneath, suggested the proximity of sound.
The crash of the full organ was delivered at a point far above your head,
somewhere among the shadowy outlines of the roof.

The space allotted to the dean’s wife on the other side of the organ was
less comfortable than ours, but far more interesting.  The floor outside
her enclosure was broken by yawning chasms to give the great pipes
breathing room; and though they were of wood, and spoke, as wooden pipes
should speak, in hollow muffled tones, they must, I fancy, have confused
her devotions and raised a small hurricane about the nape of her neck.

Linking the present to the past were the names of by-gone choristers,
carved in schoolboy fashion upon the old oak panels, who had sung their
last note a hundred years ago—it might be in this very gallery.  It was
easy to picture them passing and re-passing still through the trap door
which opened at our feet—a white robed procession of the voiceless dead.

An organ loft is a delightfully irresponsible place from which to take
part in a service, especially when the instrument is a large one, well
removed from the congregation on the top of a screen—above all, when you
do not happen to be the organist.

I would not for an instant be understood to imply that the sense of
aloofness necessarily engenders irreverence.  On the contrary, many of
the most solemn hours of my life were passed within the recesses of the
great organ at K., and my friend the organist might have been a pattern
to the congregation in true devotional spirit.  But the necessities
imposed by a choral service afforded him little opportunity for a
devotional attitude, while he would have been more, or less, than human
if he had not utilised our isolation to impart to me pleasant little
details regarding the progress of the service.  These would be
interrupted at intervals by parenthetical instructions whenever he wanted
help in the management of his stops.

A reminiscence of an organ-loft monologue would read something as
follows: “_Draw the Gamba_, _please_.  How flat that boy Robinson’s
singing; and oh! those _h_’s of his!  _Principal_, _please_, _and now the
mixtures_.  Green’s getting shaky in his top notes; he only looked at
that upper G.  _Take care_; _you put in that coupler before I had
finished the bar_.  What a nuisance it is!  I shall never get a boy like
him . . .  The finest hymn written, don’t you think?  (They were singing
Stainer’s ‘Saints of God’) . . . and ‘Aurelia’ is the second best.  (Well
done! Joseph, I thought; you’re in it after all.)  Get me Wely’s
Offertoire in G, will you?  It’s poor stuff, but the people will have it.
_The Oboe_, _please_, _for the air_ . . .  And now for the scramble . . .
_Turn over in good time_; _I can see ahead of me_, _but I can’t see
through the page_.”  And he dashed into the finale at the hurricane pace
that alone makes the thing endurable.  Even he couldn’t talk till it was
done.

Sometimes we were interested in events that were proceeding in the world
beneath us.  “What on earth’s the man reading the fifteenth for? it’s the
sixteenth that’s the lesson for the day.”  “Oh, it’s Henderson,” would be
my reply.  “He always chooses a fine chapter to show off his voice and
elocution.  If he’s hauled up for it, he’ll say he did it by mistake.”

On one occasion we were favoured by a reader, fresh from the study of
Aristophanes, with the startling announcement that the First Lesson for
the day was taken from the Book of _Ecclesiazusae_.

One day I heard voices in the choir beneath.  I knew, before I saw the
speakers reflected from the mirror in front of me, that they were two
limp figures in blue serge and coal-scuttle bonnets.  The strident tones
were unmistakeable, the product, in so far as the human throat can
compass it, of a long and careful assimilation of the clash of the
cymbals.

“A rare fine buildin’, this,” said one, “and what a hinstrument!  I only
wish we ’ad it in our place; draw a sight better than drums and cymbals,
wouldn’t it?  And a deal noisier.”

“You’re right,” answered the other, “but, for all that, I wouldn’t
exchange with that lot to get it.  They deans and chapters and canons,
and heaven knows what they calls theirselves, aye, and the bisshup
hisself, is that sunk in ignorance and self-conceit that they can’t see
the right way; no, nor never will.”

Occasionally, but very rarely, matters went wrong in our own department.
The water that fed the hydraulic gear failed, or was cut off at the main,
and the organ “went out” in the middle of an anthem.  One afternoon in
November it clouded over so suddenly that we could hardly see our faces
in the organ loft.  Worse luck still, the matches were damp, and till I
could be back with some more, Dr. H. had to guess at the anthem as best
he could.  I am not musician enough to know how he surmounted the
difficulty, but I suspect that the choir that day must have been treated
to an amount of improvisation to which they were wholly unaccustomed from
an organist who, as a rule, played what he had to play, and rarely
indulged in vagaries.

But our worst disaster was of earlier date.  Bildad the Shuhite blew the
organ.  He had received that name because he cleaned shoes in a corner of
the Close.  It was in prehistoric days before hydraulic gear was dreamed
of in connexion with the organ.  As luck would have it, Bildad fell sick,
and had to supply a deputy at the last moment.  Dr. H. studied the man
carefully, mistrusting, I think, his intelligence.  But his answers were
satisfactory, though I thought with the Doctor that he protested too
much.  Anyhow, the service was due, and we had no time to waste on our
fears.  The singing began, but the organ was irresponsive, and, hurrying
to the back of the loft, I found our deputy-blower contemplating with
blank stolidity the mechanism at his command, and pleading with an
injured air, “Sir, I am a’ waitin’ for you to begin!”

One day I was laboriously extracting discords from the great instrument
with Dr. H. at my elbow, when a gentle voice at our side asked for
permission to try the instrument.  What a delight it was, after the
horrors I had been perpetrating, to see the long fingers charm out the
melody, till they drifted at last into the chords of Chopin’s great
march.  Surely, I thought, the composer must hear and welcome such a
perfect realisation of his wondrous dream.

“Charrlie, me boy, thry the pey-dals,” came a voice from below, with the
raciest and most captivating of brogues.  It was my first introduction to
Ireland’s great musician—Sir Robert Stewart—and his still greater pupil,
composer in prospective of the _Requiem_ and _Revenge_.

At our next interview the Professor of the future gave me a friendly
lecture on Wagner, emphasising his teaching the while by illustrative
passages, which he played, I remember, in thick woollen gloves, of which
he hadn’t troubled to divest himself, being pressed for time and the
organ loft none too warm.  The mechanism of the organ, I am bound to add,
was old and antiquated—not as it is in these days, when the notes speak
if a fly sits upon them, or you venture to sneeze in their neighbourhood.

I have made acquaintance with strange scenes in an organ loft—an organist
of surpassing ability playing through a service when he was drunk, but
certainly not incapable.  Yet a deputy sat by him, ready to take his
place in case he should prove unequal to retaining his seat at the
instrument.  I have seen a fight between two choristers who had been sent
to fetch music for the choir.  It began on this wise.  “I can lick you
’ead over ’eels in ’oly ’oly ’oly,” said one.  The taunt was not to be
endured by a chorister of spirit, so “Come on!” said the other; and they
had fought it out to the bitter end at the back of the organ before ever
Dr. H. was aware that the battle was in progress.  I have seen courtship
too—ending, as all courtship should do, in matrimony—while the organist
played unsuspiciously a soft and dreamy accompaniment.  And I have seen
heroism too—grand as any displayed upon a field of battle—when my friend
came from his sick bed and played through a service magnificently while
the death dew gathered on his face.  And I coveted, as I never coveted
before or since, the divine gift of music, which would have enabled me to
spare him his long and patient hour of martyrdom.

And, at the end, he played the Dead March, never knowing that it was for
himself he played it, while a furious thunder-storm raged over head, and
the roll of the thirty-two-foot pipes was drowned by reverberating peals.
As the final chords came crashing from his hands, he said to me, “Handel
must have written it, I think, to an accompaniment like this.  And yet
the modern school of organists would have us leave out the drums!  I
shall never care to play it again.”

And three weeks afterwards he was dead.



Fighting the Cholera


WAS it an escapade, I wonder? or was it something greater and grander?
There are, I suppose, escapades good and bad; heroic and unheroic.

One evening I was tidying up Ronald’s room at Cambridge.  We were both of
us in residence now: I as an M.A., while he had just entered as an
undergraduate.  He was as studiously untidy as I was the reverse, and,
but for me, his room, artistic as it was, would always have looked like a
boudoir that had been used over-night for a tap-room.  Pipes, tobacco,
and matches met the eye everywhere, scattered among vases of flowers and
ferns; no two sheets of the _Times_ were together in one place; “Esmond”
lay cheek by jowl with “Tom Jones” (the former, I was glad to see, the
better worn), while there was more than a suspicion that his surplice was
in use as a bed for a litter of kittens.

Ronald himself lay at his ease upon the sofa, watching—I cannot say with
interest, but at any rate without prejudice—my improvements for the
worse.  But I roused him at last.  In replacing a small box of Italian
olive wood I knocked off the lid, and an aggregation of articles
unimaginable were scattered on the floor.

“Hullo! stop that, old man,” he said.  “You’ll be losing or breaking some
of my most cherished possessions.”

“What on earth are they, Ronald?  Here’s a small crucifix and a missal
(you haven’t turned Roman Catholic, have you?) and any amount of
rings—most of them brass—and, by Jove, a lock of hair!  Is the last a
love token?  It looks uncommonly like the relic of another escapade.  Did
it belong to the girl who played the harmonium on the beach at Bayview?
I didn’t know you’d got so far as that.  Besides, her hair was light, if
I remember.  Out with it, old man, and clear your conscience by
confession.”

“Have done with your jokes, Fred; you’re the last fellow to chaff like
that if you knew the rights of it.  And, if I must tell you, I must.  But
I didn’t want you to know of the matter; it looks too much like boasting.
However, you find out everything I do; so I may as well tell you all
about this, before you hunt it up for yourself in some underhand way, or
make a tale out of it that isn’t the true one.  You know Richards, Fred;
the man my uncle made me travel with last autumn—to see the world, as he
called it.  I never liked the fellow, and always thought him a cad; but I
didn’t know till then that he was a coward as well as a cad.”

“I always thought him both,” was my reply.

“Taormina in Sicily was one of the places we stopped at: the loveliest
spot that you could dream of, if you dreamed your hardest.  You’ve never
been there, have you?  Well: the town itself is a fair day’s walk up hill
from the sea, and Mola’s another day’s walk above that; by which time
you’ve nearly reached the clouds—only, as it happens, Sicily doesn’t
boast of any.  But you needn’t go higher than Taormina for the loveliest
view on earth.  They may talk of seeing Madrid, Seville, Naples, and a
hundred other places, and then dying contented—why, there’s none of them
that’s a patch on Taormina.  Sit down in the proscenium of the old
theatre, facing Etna, with the Straits of Messina and the foot of Italy
laid out like a map on your left: and you can do without another view for
the rest of your natural life.  The only objection we found to it was
that in September of last year it was most awfully hot, and Taormina is
pestiferous enough to be a Turkish settlement.  It is worse, I think,
than the old town of Granada, which is perhaps the filthiest place that I
know in Europe.  The cholera, too, was about last year, especially in
Italy; and, if it _did_ cross the Straits, Taormina was ripe and handy
for it.

“After we’d been there for a week or so it _did_ come with a vengeance.
First a suspicious case or two, then a case that was not suspicious at
all, and then it fell like a thunderbolt on the town.  Richards was off
directly, and with him everyone in the place who could afford to go; so
the poorer people, with their old priest, who stuck to his work like a
man, had it all to themselves.

“Now it looks like boasting, but I didn’t like to run.  Besides, I had
come there for a fortnight, and I was fond of the place and the view and
the old theatre—so why go?  Anyhow I didn’t budge, and did what I could
to help the old man in his difficulty—it was little enough.  However, I
had heaps of money, and they wanted that more than anything.  And he
taught me something about medicine—what little he knew of it; though,
after all, nothing but stimulants at one stage and opium at another
seemed to do them the slightest good.

“What a time it was!  I pray that I may never stand face to face with
cholera again.  Overhead, a sky like brass, and, veiling the town, a
dusky, steel-blue haze, almost as palpable as gauze: the distinctive
colour (I’ve been told) of a cholera atmosphere.  They died like flies,
crowded in their close, evil-smelling dwellings, though we lighted fires
in the streets to clear the air; an idea I borrowed, I believe, from ‘Old
St. Paul’s.’

“Late one evening I hurried from a sick room to get a breath of air in
the theatre below.  My friend, the old priest, was there before me.  This
was an unusual coincidence, as he scarcely ever gave himself a moment’s
rest.  Yet he might have done so now, for in ten days’ time the disease
abated as rapidly as it had begun.  And besides, he had organised a band
of fairly efficient helpers.

“‘Good evening, signor,’ he said.  ‘You see me in my church; for I find
in it the same relief that my brethren in the cities find within the
walls of a cathedral.  To me it would seem a poor exchange—for what
cathedral built by man could match this view?’  As he spoke he pointed
through the ruined arches to where Etna towered in the distance.  Surely
the noblest drop-scene ever fashioned by the hand of nature, and not
unworthily framed by the artist who had designed the theatre.  Between
the ruined columns on the left a steamer, environed by a little group of
feluccas, made a series of dissolving views as it overtook and passed
them on the sea below.  But I saw he had some trouble on his mind over
and above his care for his patients.

“‘Take courage, padre mio.  The worst is over.  That shroud of steel-blue
mist is lifting day by day.  I should like to know what causes it.  I
believe if we had had the power of gauging it, its changes would have
made no bad register of the death-rate in the town.’

“‘You are right, my son; the worst _is_ past; and, thanks mainly to you,
I have been enabled to do my duty while it lasted.  Without you I could
have done little.  Take an old man’s thanks, signor, on behalf of those
who are left and those who are gone.  Neither the one nor the other will
ever forget you, here or in the world that holds them now.  Yet I could
almost wish that you had never come.’

“‘Why so?’ I asked.

“‘I wish, at any rate’ (speaking with more vehemence than his wont),
‘that you had not brought with you that false-hearted friend of yours.’

“‘You mean Richards.  Yes, he is a coward to run away like that.’

“‘Worse, far worse.  You know little Ninetta well, who lives at your
lodgings up the hill—the prettiest girl in Taormina they call her, and I
fancy they are right.  She is down with the cholera—didn’t you know it?
Taken this morning, and, unless I am wrong in my judgment, it is one of
the worst cases we have had—hopeless, I should say, from the very first.’

“‘Poor little Ninetta!  It does seem hard; taken, too, just when the
disease was dying out.  But what has Richards to do with it?’

“‘The confessional is sacred, my friend.  But it may be that, in this one
case, the cholera has struck in kindliness.  Though I am sorry he should
be away when he might have made her end more peaceful.  Even when I left
her to come and find you, she was perpetually calling for him.  Put her
off with excuses; it won’t be for long.  Don’t let her think him a coward
as well as a villain.  If you weren’t a heretic, I would absolve you
beforehand for any necessary evasion.’

“‘You may be sure I’ll do my best.  The evasions won’t lie heavy upon my
conscience.  Goodnight.’

“There was no hope for her, as he had said.  During the early stage of
her illness she was always asking for him—wondering why he stayed
away—for I obeyed the priest’s injunctions, and never told her he’d been
coward enough to run.  As she got worse, she began to wander, and, from
having seen us so often together, she would confuse him with me; and, at
the last, was perfectly happy so long as I was with her; calling me by
his name, and thanking him, as she imagined, for all his care and
kindness to her.  The lock of hair that puzzled you is hers.  She gave it
to me just before she died (she had nothing else to give, poor girl) in
the belief she was giving it to Richards.  And then, quite quietly, still
in the belief that he was with her, and that it was his hand and not mine
that she was holding, she died.

“There you have the story, Fred, such as it is.  All the other things
were given me by the villagers—the few of them, that is, who lived—all
except the missal, which came from my old friend the priest.  It was his
most cherished possession; given, I believe, in the hope of converting
me.  Well, if conversion would make me another such as he was, I wouldn’t
say no to it.

“Shall I ever see him again, I wonder?  Some day, Fred, you and I will go
and hunt him up.”



Ronald’s Courtship


I


I HAVE been looking through all my old letters to-night.  It is a strange
sensation in these days, when the shuttle spins so fast, to re-read the
letters between childhood and manhood.  All details seem softened, viewed
through the haze of time.  Human nature was (or so it seems to one) so
much kindlier then than now.  What pleasant ghosts are raised by these
old letters; what touches that one missed in them in the hurried,
feverish days when they were written!  In so very many cases, too, the
hands that penned them are still.  I have come upon one from Ronald,
written when he was just twenty-five.  It is singularly devoid of
romance, compared with many of the others, and has “brisked me up”
considerably, when I was verging on melancholia.

    “DEAR FRED (it runs),

    “I shall want you for a wedding a month hence.  Guess the name of the
    happy lady.  No more escapades from—Yours respectably,

                                                                 “RONALD.”

Who was she? and how had he managed it? were the questions I asked myself
at the time.  Somehow or other, I couldn’t imagine Ronald proposing to
his lady-love in a conventional, Christianlike way.  True, time had
sobered him considerably.  He was now a handsome young fellow, living
quietly and sedately with his uncle at Broadwater; not easy to recognise
as the lad who had discomfited an itinerant preacher, and played the
stable-boy on the race-course at Bayview.  But the spirit of Bohemianism
dies hard, and I was possessed with the idea that, even in the act of
“placing himself” for life, Ronald would make opportunity for a final
fling.  He was having a really bad time of it with his uncle, and, in
spite of occasional outbursts, when the Viking blood got the better of
him, had been fairly amenable to discipline.  The old man, I know, must
have been a constant thorn in his flesh; very selfish, and very dogmatic
on all points, especially politics.  If he could have reasoned logically
himself, or have listened to reason in others, he would have been less
objectionable.  But he formed his opinions on grounds as strictly
illogical as does the average woman, and, to do him justice, never
abandoned them.  For example:

“What a grand speech that was of Gladstone’s yesterday, Ronald!”

“Do you think so, sir?  It seemed a trifle commonplace to me in
comparison with Dizzy’s reply.”

“Pshaw!  Dizzy’s no speaker at all compared with him.”

“Did you ever hear him, sir?”

“Never—and don’t want to.”

“Then you have read his speeches, sir?”

“Never—and I hope I never may.”

This was his recognised line of argument (Heaven save the mark!) on all
topics.  Yet to differ from any of his conclusions was a most serious
offence, which Ronald in time learned how to avoid.  His own part in a
conversation became limited to a series of characterless phrases—“Yes,
sir,” “No, sir,” “Of course, sir”—which passed muster as entirely
satisfactory.  Occasionally, it is true, they were flavoured with a salt
of sarcasm, but as this only rebounded harmlessly, without piercing his
uncle’s pachydermatous hide, the peace was seldom broken between them.
Outsiders were less merciful.

“Growing a trifle dogmatical is Heyward, isn’t he?”—one club member would
say to another—when a theory, accepted obediently by my uncle’s
household, had been thrust a little prematurely down a stranger’s throat.
“But there: he’s getting on in years—sixty, I should say, if he’s a
day—and we shall all of us like our own way then.  Indeed, youngsters
like it too, as a Master of Trinity found with his junior Fellows.  ‘Not
one of us is infallible,’ he said to them, ‘not even the youngest.’”

It was a gentlemanly face, was old Heyward’s, though, if you happened to
be a judge of faces, you would probably have added “a weak one.”  Yes,
and—No.  Not strong, certainly, in intellect or knowledge, though the
features are scored with deep-cut lines, that might be mistaken by the
casual observer for traces of reflective thought.  But lines traced by
the hand of intellect ennoble and brighten the face, even in the act of
carving it; these had only soured and embittered it.  Such strength as
they show is the strength of a dogged persistency, which clings to an
opinion, right or wrong, because it admits no counter argument, and
always carries its point by a process of blank obstructiveness.  But each
victory thus gained is of the nature of a defeat, narrowing and confining
the soul still more within its self-imposed limits, deafening it to the
interests of an outer world, and to the joys and sorrows of humanity at
large.

His sister was a tall, angular woman, with thin, compressed lips and a
cold, grey eye, betokening a far more active and aggressive will.  But
probably no two people were ever more entirely in harmony, till Ronald
sowed dissension between them.  Even dissimilarities, in their case,
became points of agreement.  For instance, the uncle read much and forgot
all that he read, while she read nothing and had consequently nothing to
forget.  Then again, they were united in their devotion to comfort, for
which each required the other.  Wider forms of attachment they ignored
and dispensed with, as unprofitable for the furtherance of the main
issue.  Friends, servants, animals, who were found detrimental, simply
disappeared without comment, as unobtrusively as did the obnoxious
teachers in Madame Beck’s famous _pensionnat_ in the Rue Fossette.

In the art of “nagging” our uncle was supreme, bearing out Sarah Grand’s
theory that women are nowhere in this province, which has been reckoned
peculiarly their own.  Curling himself up gracefully in his favourite
armchair, and lighting a cigar, he would prepare himself to enjoy it.
Sometimes the attack would be sudden and wanting in delicacy.

“Ronald, I wish you could manage to be down in time for dinner.”  Ronald,
be it observed, had been five minutes late, but yet five minutes prior to
its announcement by the butler.

“My tie was so infern—intolerably hard to fasten, sir.  I must get a
_Jemima_.”

“A _Jemima_!” shouted the uncle—scandalised at the idea of Ronald
contemplating the introduction of some rustic handmaid—“What on earth do
you mean?”

“A hand-made tie, sir.”  (The pun is yours, old man, not mine.  Besides,
the uncle wouldn’t have seen it, even if he’d given me the chance.—R.)

A mollified pause of ten minutes.  The next time he would preface his
thrust with a feint, to throw Ronald off his guard.

“What a wonderfully nice young fellow Carter is.  Gets himself up as if
he were living in town.  I _do_ like to see a fellow wear a tall hat on
Sunday; it’s far and away more respectable than a round one.”

Ronald was incorrigible in this respect, and became as the deaf adder.

Five minutes’ grace.

“How that fellow Stanton did talk at dinner; one couldn’t get a word in
edgeways.  By-the-by, I think _you_ talk a little too freely, Ronald, to
men older and wiser than yourself.”

“_Semper ego auditor tantum_?” muttered Ronald.

“What is it you are saying, Ronald?  I do wish you would speak up.”

“I said I would only listen in future, sir.  _Nunquamne reponam_?” (the
latter _sotto voce_).

“There you are—muttering again.”

“I was only saying I wished I could write a book, sir.”

Miss Heyward couldn’t hold a candle to her brother in this particular
department.  She lacked altogether the delicacy of “finesse” which is
essential to its development, and, strange to say, possessed in a high
degree by people of feeble intelligence.  But she seconded him bravely in
cases where temper and determination would serve its purpose.  Here it
was to advocate stronger measures, and hers was the master mind.  She was
not without a suspicion that time and reiteration had blunted the edge of
her brother’s innuendo.  When therefore she was called in for
consultation, Ronald knew that it betokened a definite and concerted
campaign.  He would be sent to Coventry, or fed on roast pork, and
specialities that his soul abhorred, or (but for his age) have been
whipped.  Finally, and in the last resort, his pocket money would be
docked—a punishment that was known to be effective.  Spending little upon
himself, he had always a band of pensioners who were dependent on him for
assistance.  So it was through them that he could most surely be reached.
“Seething the kid in the mother’s milk,” as we are told in ‘Kenilworth,’
is an occupation that offers a wide field to the ingenuity of the
inventive.

“Two’s company and three’s none,” muttered Ronald, when, on entering a
room suddenly, he found an animated conversation drop suddenly into
silence, while an echo of his own escapades and iniquities lingered in
the air.


II


A strange and melancholy life it was for a lad of Ronald’s temperament; a
strange and incongruous fellowship:

    “For East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”

Yet it had in it one redeeming feature.  Only a mile from Broadwater, in
the white house that nestles in the heart of the valley, just visible to
us over a depression in the lulls, lived a young widow of
twenty-eight—Ronald’s dearest friend, and his comforter and consoler
whenever the monotony of existence seemed almost intolerable to the lad
just entering on manhood.

The coalition between Ronald and Mrs. Thorpe was regarded with extreme
disfavour by the uncle.  “Making a milksop of the lad,” he called it
sneeringly.  But the villagers, one and all of them, were emphatic in
their praise.  “A nice couple they’d make,” said old widow Denvers.  “I
only hope it may come off, and that I may be alive to see it.  And love
each other they do already, unless my old eyes deceive me.  See how he
follers her about and well nigh wusshups the ground she treads on.  Why
he’d be at Thorpe Hill all day, if only that old aunt of his didn’t watch
him like a cat.  Drat her!”

A feeling of companionship had steadily grown up between them.  The
almost daily meetings and constant interchange of ideas had produced
their natural result, and the companionship that had at first been a
pleasure had long become a necessity.  Yet, strange to say, neither had
recognised the fact.  Ronald himself would have scouted the idea.
Possessed of not a penny in his own rights, and dependent only on what
his uncle allowed him, he would have ridiculed the notion of asking the
richest woman in the county to become his wife.  Indeed it was the
deterrent influence of their relative positions that had excluded the
possibility from finding a place among the contingencies of his life.
Yet she it was, however unwittingly, who was the cause of Ronald’s last
escapade.

The idea had frequently occurred to him that she had inspired his uncle
with the nearest approximation to love of which his nature was capable.
Not according to the accepted traditions of lovemaking, nor exhibited in
a manner that would be patent to the world at large.  But he showed her
attentions that he withheld from all other women.  He would enquire
solicitously after her health, and the health of her dogs, in huge
Grandisonian phrases; above all, he would vacate for her his favourite
armchair, and waive her into it with a bow of old-world politeness.  (To
his sister, who ruled his household, the chair in question was rigorously
debarred).  Then again, she was a Liberal in politics.  Not that this
counted for much, because he maintained that women should be allowed no
politics at all, beyond presenting a feeble reflex of the man who was
nearest or dearest to them.  Much as he hated Conservatism, he would
sooner have seen the wife of his friend Jacobs pose as the rankest of
Tories, than at variance with her husband in a way so subversive of the
relation of the sexes.

“What a blessing it is to get across here for a change of air,” said
Ronald, flinging himself down on a chair in Mrs. Thorpe’s drawing-room,
where she was arranging her flowers for the day.

“Well, what’s the matter now?  Is it the aunt or the uncle who has
ruffled you this morning?”

“Not so much the people as the atmosphere.  The air seems laden with
small trivialities.  I feel like the man in ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ who
lived in a cloud of dust that he was constantly raising.  Whereas life
ought to be lived on a breezy upland, with your face to the sea.”

“I think I understand what you mean, though your reminiscences of Bunyan
are a trifle mixed.  And perhaps the dust is better for you.”

“Not a bit of it, when it’s of one’s own making.  Now _you_ haven’t a
scrap of dust in your house.”

“I’m not so sure.  Look at that piano.  Anyhow, you didn’t come all this
way so early in the morning to treat me to a revised version of Bunyan’s
allegory.  What’s the matter, Ronald?”

“I believe the old man’s jealous of me.  He says I’m over here too
often—that people are beginning to talk, and all manner of rot.  I’m
almost sure he wants to marry you himself.”

“My dear boy, you’re dreaming.  Do you think that I would abandon my
independence, and all my advanced theories on women, to adopt your
uncle’s musty, antediluvian ideas?  Not a bit of it.  Why I’d sooner
marry _you_, if the worst came to the worst, though even that wouldn’t
suit me either.”

“It would suit _me_,” muttered Ronald, “just down to the ground.”

The uncle’s sight had of late been failing him, owing to some weakness or
lesion of the nerve that no spectacles could remedy.  Under these
circumstances, his favourite amanuensis was Ronald; for, though I regret
to say it, his sister’s spelling was occasionally defective, and his
uncle was particular above all things that his correspondence should be
strictly orthographic.  Not that this characteristic could be imputed to
Miss Heyward as a fault, especially in these days, when even Peeresses (I
am told) have adopted phonetic spelling, and orthography has been
relegated to our village schools as the symbol of a lower and less
intellectual class.  But the uncle was conservative in everything but
politics, and regarded the innovation as a forecast of the nation’s
decadence.

One morning he called Ronald into his study, with a thoughtful,
pre-occupied air that betokened business of more than average importance.

“Ronald, I’m thinking of marrying—and who do you suppose is my choice?  A
great friend of yours by the way, Mrs. Thorpe.  I like her amazingly; a
most well-bred woman, who will look famously at the head of my table.
Then again, she’s got money, though it’s true I don’t want it.  And her
property marches with mine; and we’ll enclose it all in a ring fence, and
have the finest estate in the county.  She’s got a few crotchets, I know,
but they’ll soon be ousted when she’s found a sensible man to advise her.
I grant I’m a trifle old for her, but people think nothing of that in
these days when the fault is on the right side.  What do you say to it? a
good idea, isn’t it?”

“Very good indeed, sir,” said Ronald—demurely, but doubtingly.

“You ain’t very hearty about it, Ronald.  I expected you to jump at the
suggestion.  Indeed, I thought you were a little gone on her yourself,
and would have welcomed her warmly for your aunt.  You’re across at her
house pretty well every day.”

“Yes, sir, I am; and I do like her very much.  Indeed, I wouldn’t have
minded marrying her myself.”

“Good Lord! if that doesn’t beat everything!  A mere boy like you,
without a penny in the world except what you get from me—and I’m not dead
yet by a long way, Ronald—_you_ to be in love with the richest woman in
the county!  God bless me!  What are the boys coming to?  But there—it’s
nonsense.  Put it out of your head, my lad, and sit down and write what I
tell you.”

The letter, when it was forwarded, ran thus:

    “DEAR MRS. THORPE,

    “I write on a subject that touches very nearly the happiness of my
    future life (‘it touches mine, R.’)  You must have seen, I imagine,
    how much I have admired and loved you (‘my sentiments exactly R.’);
    nor can you be blind to the fact that no other woman occupies the
    place in my esteem which has been wholly given to you (‘couldn’t have
    expressed myself better, R.’)  I now offer you my hand and heart
    (‘savours of the complete letter writer, but true notwithstanding,
    R.’), together with all my worldly possessions (‘£50, all included,
    R.’)  You know, I fancy, my ways and habits as no other woman can
    know them (‘too well by half, R.’)  My temper is equable, and I am, I
    think, companionable (‘query? R.’)  My nephew Ronald will continue to
    live with us; you know him well (‘I should just think so, R.’)  He is
    a really good-hearted, well-meaning lad (‘thanks, old man, R.’), but
    a little uppish at times, and thinks he knows everything, like all
    the boys of the present day (‘I retract my thanks, R.’)  But I fancy
    that you and he will get on together (‘admirably, R.’)

    “I shall await your answer with impatience, and anxiously hope it may
    be favourable (‘to me, R.’)

    “I remain,

                            “Your sincere admirer,

                                                             “A. HEYWARD.”
                                                (‘Your loving friend, R.’)

The answer came next day, and was a crushing blow to my uncle’s hopes.
She thanked him gratefully for the offer, and regretted the
disappointment her answer would cause him.  But her affections, she said,
had long been bestowed on his nephew, and she had lately had _reason to
believe_ (italics at Ronald’s request) that the feeling was reciprocated.
She was in a position, she added, to disregard monetary considerations in
the choice of a husband.

                                 * * * *

There was strife within the gates of Broadwater on the announcement of
Ronald’s engagement.  The uncle was furious at being supplanted this
second time, and, to make matters worse, the offender in this case was
the nephew of his choice.  So wroth was he that he nearly made me his
heir out of spite, and, for two or three days, my price rose considerably
on the matrimonial market.  But, on giving tongue to his wrath, he found
himself without a supporter.  “A servile war had broken out” (to quote
from ‘Cometh up,’—sweetest of all love stories, but, Great _Dionysius_!
what Greek!) and his sister was in a state of open rebellion.  It was she
who headed the rising, and with her went all the servants, which left our
uncle in a minority of one.  She was, naturally enough, well pleased at
the progress of events, and anticipated with satisfaction the continuance
of her reign.

Ronald, so soon as his month’s probation was ended, was thankful to be
received out of the fray into the sanctuary of Thorpe.  Not that he was
at peace, even there.  His conscience gave him twinges, and I had a word
to say to him on the subject, and his wife had a word or two more.  But
it was all for his good, and he had brought it upon himself by treating
matrimony (of all estates in the world) in a spirit of graceless levity.

                                * * * * *

And what of myself?  Well, reader, I had lost my chance, or, perhaps,
willingly foregone it.  All Ronald’s pet schemes had been safe in my
hands, and I was little likely to oppose the present one, when, almost
from the first, I had pictured its realisation, and seen how necessary it
was to the happiness and stability of his life.  My unselfishness—call it
passivity if you will—carried with it its own reward, for neither of the
two was happy without me, and Thorpe Hill practically became my home.



Judy, or Retrieved


RONALD became her ‘fidus Achates’ and Lord High Almoner in all her acts
of charity.  Occasionally, it is true, he misunderstood or exceeded his
instructions, as, for instance, when he went round with a parcel of
physic to a sick cottager.

“How be I to take ’m? did she tell ’e?”

“No: she didn’t, but she meant all, I suppose, unless it’s written
inside.”

This was a large order, as the parcel contained castor oil, a black
draught, and six blue pills.

“And which be I to take fust?  She must ha’ told ’e that.”

Again Ronald was at fault.

“Much, I allow, as the gentry do their vittles—solids fust, and drinks
atterwards.”

The prescriptions, whatever the order observed in their administration,
answered to perfection, and Ronald’s fame was greatly magnified by the
result.  His drugs were in high request everywhere, and were reported to
be “powerfully fine.”

One day his wife said to him, “Ronald, would you like to hear a project I
have in hand for reclaiming a pet drunkard?”

“Very much: what is it?”

“I shall give him a dog.”

“Good Lord! how will that help him?  It reminds one of a story in the
‘Arabian Nights,’ where somebody with a crack-jaw name gives to somebody
else—a porter, I think it was—a lump of lead, promising it will make his
fortune.  But he wisely declined to specify by what particular method the
charm would work.  I think the man weighted a fish-line with it, and
caught a salmon with a diamond in its mouth.  But you can hardly expect
your scheme to work like that.”

“Wait and see, Ronald.  I read in a German story book the other day how a
dog had turned a man into an early riser (I shall give you one, Ronald),
and made him charitable, and religious, and all the rest of it.  Surely I
can trust my dog to reclaim a man from one single failing.”

“I should like to see how he’s going to do it,” said Ronald
incredulously.  “The chances are your _protégé_ will take his dog the
first day to the nearest public-house.  And, if he gets biscuits there,
as a nice dog is sure to do, he’ll want no coaxing to take his master
there every day.  And the last state of that man will be worse than the
first.”

“I am afraid there is no worse possible in this case.  At any rate I have
faith in my dog.”

The next day a ragged little hound, called “Judy,” was selected from the
kennels at Thorpe Hill, and despatched to the _protégé_ in question.
Pure white she was, and so small, that, at a shift, you could hold her in
the hollow of your hand.  A veritable little mongrel, of course, if ever
there was one.  Indeed, nothing but a mongrel would have had the capacity
for so delicate a mission.  For, as we all know, it is to the mongrel
that we look for intelligence and originality.  The consciousness of
inherited merit is fatal to intellectual progress in an animal of
pedigree.  Partiality—but only the most prejudiced—might have called Judy
a rough Irish terrier.  Only her ears didn’t lop, but were carried erect
like a donkey’s, and her legs were too long, and her tail had an ugly
“kinck” in it.

Having abused her sufficiently for her personal appearance, let me add
that she had the sweetest and most winning of faces—chiefly composed of
eyes, which were so large in comparison with the rest of her features
that they seemed to swallow them up, giving to the face, as a whole, the
thin, troubled look of premature age, which is so pathetic in any sick
animal.  But Judy was far from being delicate, and enjoyed to the full
the zest and sparkle of life.  With her head on one side, and her ears
pricked up, and attention bestowed on the curl of her tail, a matter in
which she was often negligent, she would have matched the best of them as
a study of arrested life.

The two—the dog and the young reprobate she was expected to reform—took
to each other with all their hearts, and soon became inseparable.  But at
first Ronald’s pessimistic prophecy seemed likely to be realised.  True
to his natural instinct, her master took Judy at once to the nearest
public-house, and, as the biscuits due to an intelligent dog were always
forthcoming, Judy fell in entirely with her master’s view as to the
direction their daily walk should take.  Ronald triumphed maliciously but
prematurely.  For Judy was to be recalled to her duty by a stern
dispensation.

It happened one day, that, as she and her master were starting, a troop
of bicyclists came scorching down the hill, and Judy, caught off her
guard and losing her head, was run over, and taken up for dead.  After
long days of anxious nursing she was called slowly back to life, at least
to a measure of life.  But the little dog’s nerve was gone.  From that
day forward no persuasion could tempt her to follow her master along the
public road.  Warned by experience, she dreaded bicyclists at every
turning.  Just so far as the garden gate, and no further, she would
follow him, and, with a thin little feeble whine, plead almost in words
for a change of route.  But the master’s heart was steeled.  It was to be
a conflict of will between them.  And which was to conquer? the dog or
the man?  For days and weeks the result trembled in the scale.  But the
walk grew dreary apart from his companion, and, going and returning, he
was haunted by the piteous whine.  Then at last he succumbed.  The day’s
walk along the high road was exchanged for a run in the nearest field or
common, and Judy’s heart rejoiced, and her spirit came again to her, and
she became—almost, but never quite—her natural self again.

Thenceforth the sympathy between these two was complete.  When Judy was
ill again, almost to death, she was restful nowhere but in her master’s
presence.  When he left the room, her eyes would languidly follow him;
when he came back, they kindled to life again, breathed into by a new
spirit; and when he took her in his arms, all pain and disquiet ceased,
and she lay neither shivering nor moaning—lost to all feeling but the
satisfied assurance of his love.

“Well, Ronald, and how about my experiment?”

“You’ve beaten me,” was the reply.  “What a wonderful woman you are!”


II


    “In quo tam similem videbis Issam
    Ut sit tam similis sibi nec ipsa.”

                                                                  MARTIAL.

She was a very little dog with a very large soul, and all her soul looked
out of her eyes.  No one whom she loved could doubt her love, when once
her eyes had assumed their final expression.  “I am your friend for
life,” they said, “and for death—and perhaps beyond it.”

In the frivolous days of her youth she had snapped at the knickerbockers
of a chubby errand boy, and been promptly handed over for punishment.
But she broke from the executioner under the indignity of the first
stroke, and fled for refuge to her master’s bedroom, from which no
efforts could dislodge her.  So, making the best of a bad business, he
took to his bed too for company’s sake.  Judy was deeply touched by this
practical sympathy, and it formed, I believe, the historic ground-work of
their life-long friendship.

Her pedigree was mixed.  Her father was a white English terrier of
unimpeachable breed, who lived a sober, self-contained existence, with no
friend but the postman, whom he followed conscientiously on all his
rounds of delivery.  Her mother was the daughter of a “King Charles,” who
had been woo’d and won by a fox.  Fair and frail, she was careless of the
duties of life, and passed her time in eating and sleeping, sleeping and
eating—she is sleeping and eating still, the latter with an ever
increasing appetite as the time at her disposal grows less.

Judy repudiated _in toto_ her maternal parentage, and reproduced all the
best characteristics of her father, combined with a brilliant
intelligence, and a far wider appreciation of the sympathies of life.
Her minor peculiarities were borrowed from those of a cat.  She sat like
a cat, pounced like a cat, and washed her face like a cat, using either
or both of her paws with a truly feline indifference.  She could climb
bushes, too, hanging on by her teeth, to the detriment of any unwary
fledgling who presumed over confidently upon the limitation of natural
gifts.

Judy often came on a visit to Thorpe Hill, where she regularly spent an
hour after dinner in digging at the root of a favourite beech tree, with
the energy of a dog that is close on a prize.  From which I inferred that
she was a truffle-terrier in disguise, who would make all our fortunes,
and set Matthew to dig in her place till he blasphemed against Judy and
the truffles and me.  But Matthew didn’t put his heart into his work, or
realise the fact that Judy’s credit was at stake.  And I always believed
in her more than I did in him.  Later on she justified my confidence—not,
I admit, by a discovery of truffles, but (better still) of a full-grown
Roman or Anglo-Saxon, crouching among his household divinities.  Judy was
complacently proud of him as a very superior find, in spite of Matthew’s
sneer, “Tweren’t triffles, _I_ knowed,” and forthwith transferred her
attentions to a neighbouring tree, under which, for all I know, others of
his family may still be reposing.

It is humbling to admit that she was wholly devoid of tricks, properly so
called: partly because no one had troubled to teach her any, and partly,
I think, because she accounted it a waste of time to try and acquire
them.  No one who studied her thoughtful little face could doubt that she
held higher and more recondite theories of the responsibilities of life.

It was probably the same reason that led her to pass her days in silence.
Few objects she thought were worth the trouble involved of setting in
motion the harsh and cumbrous method by which alone a dog
converses—certainly not meat and drink, and therefore she declined to ask
for them.  The prospect of a walk, or the sight of a blackbird deriding
her from a twig, formed the only exceptions and proved the rule.
Otherwise Judy would have been a canine Trappist.  And her reticence was
the more remarkable, seeing that her mother passed her time in futile and
vociferous talking.  Probable Judy regarded her as an object lesson and a
warning.  She was certainly disdainful of her noise.

But she had two natural gifts: you may call them tricks if you will.  She
took her meals like a Christian, seated, or rather kneeling, at table
beside her master, with her paws doubled under her knees.  From this post
of vantage she would watch the whole proceedings of dinner with the
curiosity of an epicure.  But dining on her own account offered little
attraction.  The position of her paws, it is true, suggested an attitude
of devotion and gained for her the reputation of saying grace before
meat.  But her own diet was strictly limited to morsels of bread and
biscuit, which she received with indifference, and apparently without
gratitude.  It may be that she dined in the night-time, as Amina did with
the ghoul.  If so, I hope she selected more desirable company.

She had one other peculiarity.  I cannot call it an accomplishment,
though it found her a number of admirers.  After studying you intently
with eyes that looked you through and through, as though she were
appraising carefully your capacity for friendship, she would raise a
delicate fur-capped paw, and lay it gently upon your nose—never anywhere
else.  It was a favour accorded to no stranger, never indeed till she had
known you for months.  For it was an oath of allegiance, emblematic as
the solemn transfusion of blood, and renewable on occasion, if you cared
to elicit it by staring her well out of countenance.  Yet it was trying
to be reminded of the fact when you were kneeling at prayers in full view
of the servants, simply because Judy regarded your attitude and
surroundings as a ceremonial specially designed for the re-enactment of
her vow.

Being a good friend, Judy was, by consequence, an equally good nurse.
The attributes of the two are indeed strangely akin, if the latter be not
a natural development of the former.  For in sickness, as in sorrow,
there are times when a sympathetic silence is a better restorative than
more obtrusive remedies.  Her master found it so when Judy nursed him for
four months at a stretch, sacrificing without a whine the most brilliant
summer on record.  Cleverer than many a nurse or doctor, she inferred his
condition from certain changes of face and expression, unappreciable by
their less intuitive faculties.  Satisfied by a careful inspection that
he was for the moment improving, she would fall back on the pillow with a
sigh of satisfaction, till he was restless again, or till the time
came—she knew it as well as did the nurse—when he had to be roused for
his medicine.

Judy was sorry, I fancy, on her own account when the days of her nursing
were ended by her master’s recovery.  For she never disguised her real
sentiments, whether creditable or the reverse, differing therein from the
race of men, at whose feelings and motives one can only hazard a
bewildered guess.

Judy taught her master many things: among them how to win the love of her
community.  Jealousy, it seems, is the family failing.  It is idle, she
told him, to imagine that a few scraps of half-hearted affection can
claim the devotion of a life.  Careless, casual attentions may gratify an
unexacting dog; they can never win his heart’s love.  It is not for
pity’s sake, as some will tell you, that the mongrel of the streets is
attracted by preference to the vagabond and outcast, who is as lonely as
himself; rather, because he feels that here at any rate is a field
unoccupied, a mine of sympathy that will royally repay for working.

But let the master of his affection form other and more engrossing ties,
and the love that he has given he will infallibly withdraw—not hastily,
capriciously, or for the moment, but slowly, deliberately, and for
ever—at what cost to himself is happily not ours to fathom.


III


    “They sin who tell as love can die.”

                                                                  SOUTHEY.

Retrieved by Judy from a life of shame, her master had become a
respectable character, and the year afterwards found work as a carpenter
in an adjoining town, which compelled him to migrate from our village.

How to dispose of his dog was the question.  His lodgings were situated
in a crowded street, through which a continuous stream of the vehicles
most dreaded by Judy, bicycles included, was passing literally by night
and day.  Garden he had none—only a small paved court-yard, tenanted in
the main by children and cats, Judy’s natural enemies, while the nearest
field was two miles off.  It was clearly impossible to transfer her to
such surroundings.  Her future was settled thus.  She was left in his old
rooms under special charge of the landlady, and every evening when his
day’s work was done, wet or fine, winter or summer, her master walked out
to console her for the long hours of his absence.

Such affection might have satisfied a reasonable dog.  But Judy was
distinctly unreasonable.  She remembered—none better—how in former times
she was with him all the day, and sometimes, when she willed to have it
so, all the night as well.  _Now_ she was left to her own devices, and
only caught a hurried glimpse of him in the evening when she was too
sleepy to enjoy it.  Besides, when he left her at the garden gate, she
was strictly enjoined not to follow him—a prohibition which, while it
whetted her curiosity, was also regarded as a direct insult, viewed in
the light of former days, and the unrestricted licence that had been
accorded to her then.

So Judy put on her considering cap.  “He can’t go far,” she said, “else
he could never leave me so late and get home in time for bed.  And I’m
sure he doesn’t drive or travel by train, else his boots would never be
so muddy when he comes here at seven.  So it’s clear that he walks.  And,
in that case, a dog of the feeblest intelligence can follow in his
track.”

Accordingly, on a wet and windy evening, when bicyclists were not likely
to be abroad, a little wistful-eyed face peered out into the road,
growing bolder and bolder as her master receded from view, but ever and
again hurriedly withdrawn whenever he turned upon her with a threatening
hand.  Then he vanished behind a hill, and Judy felt that her opportunity
was come.  But a mob of children ran by with sticks in their hands, and
Judy slunk back in alarm.  As soon as these had passed, she made another
attempt.  But horror of horrors! a bicyclist scorched by, and back she
shrank again into the friendly shade.  At last the road was empty and
silent.  The most careful inspection to the right hand and to the left
could find no sign of life, and the keenest ears with which ever dog was
gifted failed to detect a sound.

“Now or never,” said Judy, and with tail erect, and her tiny snub nose
well to ground on the scent, she rushed out into the night.

                                * * * * *

An hour later a man was sitting down to his supper in the adjoining town,
cursing the noise of the street in which he lived, with its wrangling
women and screaming children, and cabs and drays coming home for the
night, when a little dog whined and scraped at his door, and Judy rushed
in, mud-stained and panting and panic-stricken with fear.

It was probably the fright that killed her; it may have been some injury.
Her master never knew.

Only a brief friendship, measured by the standard of time.  But perhaps
what Southey says is true, and “love is indestructible”—even the love
that bound these two.



Our Professor


NO: he was no Professor in the recognised sense of the term; not a bit of
it.  Neither can I tell you how he acquired the title, unless it were in
recognition of his original wit.  He was simply my factotum or Man
Friday, ready for shooting, fishing, game-keeping, or gardening, as the
emergency of the moment required.  He could neither read nor write.  But
what are trifling details like these in comparison with ’cuteness.
Institute a Tripos for originality and native wit, and Matthew would even
now, at the age of seventy, pass with high honours.  But the examination
must be strictly _viva voce_, and not allowed to wander into the region
of conventional knowledge.

“Matthew,” I said, “this isn’t work,” as I bestowed a kick upon an object
that lay prone upon the lawn, when it ought to have been digging at our
garden border.

“No, sir; but it’s _preparin_’ for it,” was the prompt reply.  For
myself, I was knocked out of time, though I felt I was clearly within my
rights.  Fancy a man, roused from a peaceful siesta, being ready with a
retort of such preternatural smartness!

Unhappily Matthew had two failings, by which his career was handicapped.
He was always lazy, and sometimes inebriate.  Of the former he never
repented so long as I knew him; the latter he was always repenting of and
always repeating.  And the stage of repentance was the more acute and the
more grievous, at any rate to his neighbours.  After a bout of drinking
he would wander through the house with his hands on the pit of his
stomach—as if the seat of his iniquity lay there—moaning in a dreary,
exasperating way, “The Lord forgie I; I’ll never be drunk agin.”  “How
can you _expect_ him to?” said his wife, in a tone of the bitterest
sarcasm.

Every time he repented he took the pledge anew.  The consequence was, his
bosom was garnished with blue ribbons—his “decorations” he called
them—for he never cast off one when he assumed another, but regarded them
as an old soldier does his medals, traces of many a scar and many a
conflict, in which, unhappily, he always fell.

“Decorations!” said his wife, “fine decorations!  Call ’em rather
sign-posts along the road to perdition.  If you stick to ’em all when
you’re buried, they’ll have no trouble in fixing _your_ whereabouts.”

Sometimes, when he was particularly exasperating, she would take the law
in her own hands.  “My head’s swimmin’ like a tee-total,” Matthew would
say pathetically.  “The very last thing it ought to swim like,” retorted
his wife, a woman with a ready wit, “but I’ll soon make it do so.”  And
with that she would take him in her strong arms and give him a twist, as
boys do when they give its first impetus to a top, after which she would
wait patiently for the result.  The result was, of course, collapse as
soon as the primary impulse had run down; whereupon she would catch him
up when he was on the point of falling, and bear him off to repentance
and bed.

Matthew’s dialect was unique.  I question whether a specialist could have
reproduced it in its integrity, if only because it never reached
finality, but was always in process of development.  For myself, I had
studied it for years, and could never get any nearer towards the
discovery of its principles.  Every day he was startling you with some
new combination, as a rule strictly ungrammatical, but often a reversion
to some lost or more accurate phraseology.  For example: “Let I go,”
“Would you like I to do it”?—the latter a reproduction, as near as may
be, of the Latin formula _visne ego faciam_?  A still more perplexing
characteristic in his speech was that he used many of his words in a
variety of senses.

“Cuss they nigglin’ weeds,” he’d say, and “Cuss my nigglin’
toothache”—phrases in which the adjective (or participle) carried an
appreciable meaning, even when he didn’t add the word “darn’d” as an
explanatory gloss.  But when he transferred the phrase a minute
afterwards to a splendid crop of potatoes, in which my inexperienced eye
could detect no possible fault, I was all at sea again, and had to ask
him to explain himself.

“I means they’m small,” he answered, with a contemptuous sniff at my
ignorance.

“But, Matthew, you told me just now that ‘nigglin’’ meant ‘darn’d.’”

“And so it do—darn’d small;” looking at me as if he thought the epithet
suited me as much as the potatoes.

When Matthew had pneumonia and lay _in extremis_, his friends came round
to console him with the assurance that he would die at the turn of the
tide.

“What time, Matthew, do ’en begin to turn?” they said.

“At seven o’clock, ezzactly,” whispered the inveterate old humorist.  And
it was not till the next morning they discovered that he had defrauded
them of one whole hour of pleasant anticipation.

In his sober moments Matthew was a brilliant story-teller (in both
senses, I fear); though his brilliancy now is limited to occasional
flashes of wit.  The following is one of his best reminiscences.  I have
selected it out of many because I have since discovered that it was
founded on fact.  Not only was it authenticated by a clergyman in whose
neighbourhood it was enacted, but it was told and re-told by one of the
actors in the tragedy, though he had passed to a land from which no
testimony is available long before I heard the story at second-hand from
Matthew.

“’Twas in December, 1824, that it happened.  So Joseph told I.”  (This,
at any rate, was Matthew’s recognised formula.)  “’Tis true he were a
great liar, and I didn’t take no count o’ the main o’ his tales; for he’d
tell you most anything, he would; ’specially if he see’d the price of a
glass of fourpenny for tellin’ it.  But, in proof ’tis true, they’d tell
it to the childer at night time, when they was obstrepulous and wouldn’t
go to bed—just for a joke like, to fright ’em to sleep.

“’Twas in December, 1824; and not likely he were to forget it.  For ’twas
the year of the great gale (the ‘Outrage’ they calls it hereabouts), when
the sea broke clean over Rudge and washed away th’ old church, all but
the chancel.  Joseph never took kindly-like to the new church they built
for ’en higher up i’ the valley, out o’ reach o’ the sea.  ’Twas too
spick and span, he said, to suit he—all white and glitterin’ like
chalk—though ’twere built of the best Portland stone, and a sight
prettier to my thinkin’ than the tumble down old barn that’s all that’s
left o’ th’ old un.  But the visitors and gentry, they takes after
Joseph, and for one what goes to see the new church there’s hundreds ’ll
bring their vittles and sit and peant th’ old ’un—studyin’ all the
tombstones, and what’s writ on ’em—mostly shipwrecks it be, for I doubt
if there’s half-a-dozen stones in th’ old grave-yard but what tells of
someone or t’other who was drownded at sea.  In that one gale of ’24
’twas thousands that perished, and all that was found on ’em Joseph
buried there, when the sea gived back her dead, and he could get at his
grave-yard.  Though, to be sure, nought was left but the chancel, so you
could scarce say as how, poor souls, they got a decent buryin’.

“Anyhow ’twas in that very month, just arter the ‘Outrage,’ that one
Price—a farmer he called hisself—was livin’ high up yonder among they
hills that you can see faint-like in the distance, nigh agin they ricks.
A bleak and dreary place it were at the best o’ times, and a job to get
at it at all when a strong so’wester were blowin’.  And most every
November it _do_ blow cruel strong along they high downs, wi’ no cover to
speak on’t ’cept scraps of fuz and heather, and a small thorn tree, may
be, now and agin, wi’ ’is branches all leanin’ to the nor’-east, as
though ’twas an old man a holdin’ out his arms for shelter.  And the road
to Price’s farm were no better nor a sheep run.  A godless man Price
were, as you’d expect wi’ a man who lived so far from all we decent
folks.  And he never com’d nigh no church.  Passon, he said, didn’t suit
he, and he weren’t a goin’ to trapeze over hill and dale—not he—when
chance ’twas he’d find no passon and no service at t’other end.  And if
passon went to he—as he did now and agin—he’d find the door shut in his
face.  And for vittles—not a bite nor a sup of anything did he offer ’en,
though passon was a rare ’un at that kind of work.  Sunday after Sunday
he’d look in reg’lar nigh about dinner time, and savour by his nose, he
would, where there was a chance for ’en of summat enticin’.  Not but what
’twere bad for the childer where he _did_ settle hisself, for ’twas
little of the pudden was left for they when he’d a’ had his turn on’t.

“Howsomever, ’twas there Price lived, wi’ hisself for his company.  So no
wonder strange tales got abroad about ’m.  ’Twas said, though Joseph
never gived no heed to ’t, that three wives had entered his doors, and
never one of ’em had come out agin—no, not for buryin’.  And Joseph must
have known on’t if so be they had, seein’ he were clerk and sexton and
grave-digger, let alone the head o’ the choir.  ’Twas thought that he’d
buried ’em in another parish, more nigher to the house he lived in, and
wi’ a better road ’long which to carry ’em.  But, Lord save us! tweren’t
nothin’ of the kind.

“One morning, early in December, ’twas nine o’ the clock, may be, or
thereabouts—for Joseph had just been out to pen the sheep in the
church-yard—a tall fine old genelman called at the door, and he knowed by
his dress ’twere the Bishop.  Not that he’d cast eyes on ’en before, for
our youngsters are confirmed a way off; there baint enough of them to
claim a Bishop for theirselves.  But he knowed ’twere the Bishop, what
wi’ his gaiters, fittin’ as though they’d grow’d to his legs, and his
broad hat as shiny as if you’d smoothed it wi’ a flat iron.

“‘Good morning to you,’ says he, as pleasant as anyone could say it.
‘You be clerk of the parish, baint you?’  ‘True, your wusshup,’ he
replied.  ‘And sexton too’ says he.  ‘Right you be; and grave-digger and
choir leader as well,’ for he thought it no sin to make the most to ’m of
his preferments.  ‘Well,’ says he, ‘I want you for a buryin’—this night
at eight o’clock.’  ‘A buryin’, your wusshup,’ says he, ‘and at night?’
‘Yes, and three on ’em,’ says he, ‘all in one grave.’  ‘Well, it _do_
sound mortial strange, your wusshup, but ’tis you that says it, and not
I.’  ‘You’d better go at once,’ he says, ‘and begin the grave, for you
won’t have none too much time to spare on’t, ’specially as I want it done
on the quiet, so to speak, and you mustn’t take no hand to help you, and
meet me punctually as ever is at eight o’clock at Farmer Price’s, up
along the hill, and bring a lantern and the parish hand-bier ’long wi’
’e.’

“He hadn’t much time to ponder on it, as you may suppose, with that grave
to dig, and no one to gi’ ’m a helpin’ hand.  And mortial hard work he
found it, too, for the frost set in early that year, and the ground that
hard that, young and lusty as he were, he found it a job to get the
pick-axe into ’en.

“Howsomever he did get ’en done, and at eight o’clock he was at Farmer
Price’s door, and ’twas opened to ’en by the Bishop hisself.  And so,
hand in hand as you may say, he and the Bishop, they went into the
kitchen.  And there right facin’ ’em—packed up agin the wall like so many
old grandfeyther clocks—stood three coffins, with a piece of glass let in
’em to show the face, and a dead woman in each!

“Close handy they were to ’m when he took his meals, or smoked his pipe;
and when he felt a bit lonesome (so he told Joseph) he’d go up to ’em and
ask ’em how they did, and if they felt comferable.  And fresh as peant
they were, too: only a bit shrivelled, like as ’twere an apple in April.
Perhaps ’twas the heat of the kitchen, or may be some stuff he’d put in
along wi’ ’em; anyhow you could see their faces right enough and tell
they was women.

“‘Take ’em down,’ says the Bishop; ‘Farmer Price’ll lend ’e a helpin’
hand: and we’ve none too much time to get ’em back to the churchyard and
bury ’em.’  Joseph hisself could scarce do nought but stare at ’em.  To
think that that godless man had kep’ ’em there—one on ’em for nigh on ten
years—never thinkin’, not he, that he was keepin’ ’em tied hand and foot
to this world, with never no chance of a resurrection till he took it
into his wicked head to let ’em go.  And there they’d a’ been for ten
years longer—for just so long he lived—if Bishop hisself hadn’t got wind
on’t and come down right away to bury ’em.

“Anyhow they _did_ get decent burial—the three on ’em—at last.  For they
had Bishop, and Joseph and Farmer Price; though I don’t take no count o’
he, ’cept that he helped to lower ’em and fill in the grave.

“But Joseph were right glad, he were—and so he told I—to see the rare tug
he had in draggin’ they three dead women up hill and down hill ’cross to
the church-yard.  For Joseph never gived ’en no helpin’ hand—you may take
your oath on’t—though he did make a show of pushin’ at the bier
whensomever the Bishop looked his way.

“Didn’t no one never hear on’t?  Yes, they did.  But they didn’t take no
count on’t.  Our people baint over wise about religion, and things were
done in those days that’d make a rare potheration now.  Besides, you see,
Bishop were there, and he made a sight o’ difference.  ’Twas a rare fine
buryin’, people thought, wi’ a Bishop to put you unnerground; though ’tis
true he hadn’t his fine gran’ toggery on, and his girt white sleeves.”

                                * * * * *

The actors in our humble drama are dead and gone.  The Bishop and Price
and Joseph have, each in his turn, been followed to the grave, only with
less eccentric rites.  But the story of the farmer’s “Happy Family” still
lingers in the village, and is told and re-told round many a cottage
hearth under the quaint but significant title of “Price’s Menagerie.”

                                * * * * *

P.S.  The “Professor” himself came round to-day—“for a pipe of baccy,
Sir, if you have such a thing about you”—so I have utilised him to
correct his own proof sheets.  “There baint nothin’ wrong in ’em,
_Master_ Fred (this to a man of sixty!), so fur as I sees.  Only you says
‘gived’ where I says ‘gi’ed.’  But taint no odds.  Like enough they’ll
guess what you means whatsomever you writes down.”  Thanks, Matthew, for
your tribute to my clearness of expression.



The Cruel Crawling Foam


IT was a touch of the old wilfulness in Ronald, which cost him dear, and
saddened all his future life.

A windy storm-swept sky, though the wind was only playing with the sea as
yet.  Still, it met us, as we went down to the shore, with a drift of
sand that stung the face like pin-pricks—trying, one might easily fancy,
to warn us back from our foolhardy enterprise.

A painter would have needed only his blends of grey to paint the scene,
till we came upon it, and added, I suppose, a patch of colour.  Wiser
people than ourselves kept quietly indoors; and the sand, the sea, the
gulls, and the hurrying scud could all have been rendered in varying
shades of grey.  It is, to me, the most fascinating hue that the
changeful sea can wear.  One great artist, whose sketches are the glory
of Girton College, knew it well.  With an unerring eye for this sad unity
of tone, she admits no faintest touch of colour into her cold grey wastes
of sea and sky.

It was a risky and foolhardy attempt on the part of Ronald, and one that
he has bitterly repented of, to launch a boat that afternoon.  I can
never quite forgive him for the sorrow it was to bring on us.  But his
wife would have it so.  It was her greatest enjoyment to put out to sea
on such a day.  A calm aimless drift, in life or on the sea, was out of
harmony with her bright and nerve-wrought soul.

Where Ronald was still more at fault was in the choice of our third hand.
True, we had a fair amount of experience between us.  But, with a strong
south-wester to fight against, weight and strength are the two things
needed, and will often win through a gale when experience is powerless.
Ronald, however, was in one of his obstinate moods.  He would take Oswald
or no one, and his wife said ditto.  Now Oswald was a lad of eighteen: a
good seaman, I grant, but quite unequal to the work we had in view.
However, he was the son of Ronald’s favourite gardener, and had been his
wife’s pet scholar at her Sunday school, since which time he had been her
devoted slave, making himself useful about the house, and looking after
her specialities in the garden and conservatory.

“Isn’t that boat too big for us, Oswald?  Remember, there are only two of
us to handle it, for Ronald’s ill, and can’t be reckoned on for much.
Unless I’m mistaken, it intends to blow harder than this before it’s
done.”

“Yes, sir.  You’re right in a way.  But we’ve got the winch to lower and
haul her up with.  And once at sea she’ll be a deal safer and stauncher
than that one,” pointing to a lean, wall-sided thing that was our only
alternative.  “Besides, we’ll set very little canvas; indeed, to all
appearance we shan’t want much.”

What a sail we had that afternoon!  I think that I, who had countenanced
it least, enjoyed it most.  For Ronald was only just recovering from
influenza, and certainly not up to a rough and tumble experience of this
sort.  And Oswald, too, for a lad of his spirits, was strangely
depressed.  “Never felt like it before,” he said, “and I shall be
thankful when we’re safe on shore again.  Our old people at home would
say that I was walking over my grave, or some folly of the kind.  But
that can’t be out here,” he added, with a poor attempt to laugh it off.

First of all we took her along under the lee of the shore, where we were
able to carry a fair amount of sail, and when we had worked her well
round the bay we put her head straight for the south-east, and, with the
wind on our beam, raced out into the open sea.

It was a longer and heavier business to work her back again, with the
wind right in our teeth, and freshening steadily as the evening wore on.
Fortunately for us it had only blown fitfully, and without much weight in
it till now.  It was still “making up its mind,” as sailors say, whether
it would blow or not.  But as we were beaching her in a deep sandy cove
it had finished apparently with indecision, and began to blow in earnest.

Just as we had landed, and Oswald was preparing to follow us, a terrific
squall burst full upon the boat, which lay beam on to it.  Relieved of
her last weight, as Oswald stepped on shore, she yielded to the pressure,
and, heeling over on her side, pinned him to the ground.  In a moment the
horror of it broke upon us.  What could we do, the two of us, even if
Ronald hadn’t been shorn of half his strength?  It would have taken ten
men to pull her over in the face of the gale that was blowing.  And the
tide was rising rapidly.  It was idle to look for help.  We had beached
her in a quiet sequestered cove, used only by ourselves.  But it was
closer to Thorpe Hill than the regular landing stage, and, after a hard
day’s work, saved us a tedious beat along the coast when the wind was
blowing from its present quarter.  The high land above us was private
property, with no right of way, and on a day like this, for it was
beginning to rain, would be lonely as a desert.

Our first thought was of the winch.  We had had one fitted up under the
cliff in order to save labour in launching and beaching the boat.  But,
even if it were possible, we had no time nor knowledge how to alter the
gear so as to utilise the leverage for righting her.  No doubt the
incoming tide would help us later on, but its help, when it did come,
would come too late.  Yet to do anything was better than to do nothing.
So we took the balers out of the boat, and, kneeling down beside Oswald,
attempted the hopeless task of freeing him by scooping out the sand on
either side, till he begged us to desist, as the boat only fell over more
heavily, and imprisoned him still deeper in the yielding sand.

And all the time that we were working, Kingsley’s “cruel, crawling foam”
beat persistently upon my brain, maddening me with its ghastly congruity.
And yet “cruel and crawling” it was not.  Quicker it could scarcely have
been, and its quickest was (I saw) its kindliest.  Already it was playing
with the lad’s hair, though his mistress, careless of the risk she ran,
knelt down beside him and supported his head in her arms.

“Pray for me,” he said.

She whispered the words in his ear, though if she had shouted them with
all her strength they would not have reached us on the other side of the
boat, where, with a hope that was hopeless now, we were straining
ourselves to no purpose in the attempt to right her.

But Oswald was satisfied.  A look of repose and even comfort settled upon
his face before the last words came.

“Thank you,” he said, “you have made death easy for me.  And you have
done so at the risk of your own life.  Tell them at home I was not
afraid.”

She bent down and kissed his forehead.

“And now—cover my face.”



Our Queen


    “And the stars—they shall fall, and the Angels go weeping,
    Ere I cease to love her, my Queen, my Queen.”



I


“OUR Queen” she was to me and Ronald, ever since we first met her at
Broadwater, and Ronald had dared to love her.  And now that she is gone
from us there is little fear that her title will ever be questioned.
Neither he nor I need any coarser picture of her than that engraved by
memory.  But for others—for those who knew her little, or less well—let
me try to call her back in clearer and less shadowy outline.

A woman this, to whom you gave your confidence with your first greeting,
and never afterwards withdrew it.

Not the face to tempt an artist by its regularity of feature or beauty of
colouring.  Madonna-like some would call it, and so it was in sweet and
loving trustfulness, but far too mobile and human, too full of interest
and human sympathy to suggest the reposeful placidity of conventional
art.  Instinct, rather, with the life and animation that inspires the
best work of Gainsborough and Reynolds, and frank with a simplicity that
is careless of its surroundings, and therefore conquers them.  The centre
of her interest was home; thence it radiated outwards.  From her family
to her friends, from friends to neighbours, her influence passed in ever
widening circles like a ripple that, stirred in the centre of some pool,
travels to the extremest edge.

Nature creates not many such.  Happy the man who has known and honoured
one.

Over and over again I have tried to unravel the secret of her
inexplicable charm.  Seating myself in some sequestered nook, where
Ronald himself would find it hard to discover me, it has been my
pleasure, through a long evening’s entertainment, to watch her in every
graceful word and greeting that she exchanged with her friends.  It was a
satisfaction even to see her walk across the room—a lost art (they tell
us) in these hurried and inartistic days.  I tried to learn the mystery
from her conversation.  The words told nothing, but the tone was less
secretive; and, after all, how much more the tone always does tell of the
spirit of the speaker than the conventional coinage we have devised in
words.

“And how’s that sweet little bairn of yours, Mrs. Macpherson?”  (She was
half Scotch by birth, and now and again her descent betrayed itself in a
pretty mannerism of word and accent.)  “I lost my heart to her, I did,
when I met her yesterday on the Parade with her nurse.”  A greeting old
as time can make it, but new, entirely new, in the sympathy she threw
into it right from the depths of her heart.  No one could hear her and
not believe; and Mrs. Macpherson was won.  Sometimes, almost awestruck, I
asked myself, Is there, _can_ there be a human nature so nearly
approximating to the divine as to possess the verity of universal
sympathy?  And, knowing this woman so nearly and so closely as I knew
her, it was impossible, I found, to answer the question with a negative.

“If you are in doubt, play trumps” used to be the rule in whist, and “If
you are in doubt, wear black” would be my advice to a lady in difficulty
about her dress.  And Ronald’s wife suggested it.

To-night she was looking her best—in black, and silver and diamonds.  She
and Ronald were giving their largest ball of the season, due regularly at
this period of the year, and every family of standing for miles round had
sent its representative.  For a wonder I hadn’t been watching her that
evening, and was surprised to feel her gentle touch on my arm.

“Come with me, Fred,” she said, “I want you for a few minutes upstairs.
Poor old nurse is dying.  We’ve been expecting it, you know, at any
moment for some weeks past.  But I wish it hadn’t come to-night.  It
looks so heartless to have all these people about us; and yet I know she
wouldn’t have had the ball put off.  She was the last person ever to
think of self.  Still it _does_ look unfeeling to go to her straight from
all this light and merriment.  Yet I feel it less than most would.  Life
and death seem to me so closely mixed, that wherever one is there you may
expect the other.”

“Of course I’ll come.  But oughtn’t Ronald to be there too?”

“Yes; but, you see, we cannot both be spared.  He must be here to make
excuses for me if I am missed.  I don’t want to spoil the pleasure of all
these young things during their one great evening of the year.”

“But you’ll change your dress?” I said aghast.

“No, I think not.  If death is always so very near to us, it hardly seems
worth while to change one’s dress to meet him.  Besides, I have a special
reason in this case.  All her life long dear old nurse has liked to see
me in my ball-room dress, and I’m sure she will to-night.  She said it
gave her an idea of what the angels were like better than did her Bible.
And if it could give her one comforting thought to help her, I’d have
dressed on purpose as I am.”

There was little need for Ronald to make excuses for our absence.  The
old woman was dying when they called us.  But her eyes opened and
brightened as she saw her mistress.

“What! an angel?” she cried.  “No, but my own dear mistress, the best
angel of them all, and dressed as I would have her—not yet in her robe of
white—not yet.”  And, with her mistress’ face pressed close to hers, and
the diamonds and silver rippling and shimmering about her pillow, our old
nurse died as she would have chosen.  Half-an-hour later “Our Queen” was
back in the ball-room: bright, and, to all appearance, cheerful as the
rest.  None that saw her would have guessed the scene from which she had
come back to them.  “Heartless” they would have said, and will say so
still.  But Ronald and I knew better.  Her heart was in the nursery up
stairs.

She wears her white robe now.  But, in reverence be it written, I would
fain see her come to welcome me, clothed, as she was clothed that night,
in black and silver and diamonds.


II


When her own time came, as it did soon after, she met death with the same
fearless, friendly courage.  Her thoughts were wholly for those who were
to stay, and she was even playful in urging upon me never to leave Ronald
and the children, but learn to “take her place.”  I own I was troubled at
times by what seemed almost levity in the face of death, till I began by
degrees to realise her point of view.

“I think it will be a very short distance,” she said, “perhaps into
another room, perhaps not even so far as that; and the time (to me, at
any rate) will certainly seem short—no longer than the night of sleep
which separates us from our loved ones till the morning.”  And of the
future she had no fear.  “Nothing,” she said, “could persuade me that the
light which has been fanned and quickened here will be extinguished for
ever by the incident we call death.  The jest would be too horribly,
inconceivably malicious.  Yet our choice lies between this and the
crowning impossibility of a self-created world.”

Not thoughtlessly, but in the hope of finding a standing ground for
myself, I would ask her sometimes if she had no misgivings regarding the
re-existence of the body, and mutual recognition, and the endless
difficulties that centre round the subject.

“None,” she answered, “none.  Why should I?  Look at the natural world.
I know that space must be either limited or limitless; but can I form a
conception of either alternative?  Yet the problem may be simplicity
itself to some larger mind than ours.  So why trouble myself about
difficulties which may be easier of solution still to those who hold the
key?  And you think it hard, I know—you have often said so—that many
should die, as we know they must, without a friend on earth to whom they
can look forward for a welcome when they reach the further shore.  To me,
I confess, it seems quite the contrary.  Surely the burst of welcome will
be greater in their ears than in ours, who have lived surrounded by
friends, and never known the dearth of sympathy.”

And every difficulty, as I raised it, she met with the same calm,
unquestioning certainty.

She died, as she had lived, in ministering to others.  Oswald’s death was
the first blow.  From the exposure and the physical effects she soon
recovered—sooner than we expected, considering her frail and uncertain
hold on life.  But the horror of it was always with her, especially the
feeling that it was she who had suggested the fatal experiment.  Ever and
again, as the subject was referred to, I could see her shuddering at the
reminiscence, blaming herself with what was surely the only reproach that
can have harassed her bright and blameless conscience.  And the
remembrance was still upon her when her two children sickened with the
scarlet fever.  Considering her weak state, and consequent liability to
infection, the doctor had strictly forbidden her to enter their room.  “I
can make no promises,” she said; “if they want me I must go.  Till then I
will obey your orders.  We are told to give up father and mother, and
perhaps oneself for one’s husband, but our children, I think, have a
prior claim to all.”  And so she watched and waited at their door,
stealing along the corridor in her robe of white at all hours of the
night, listening and listening to hear if a summons came.

One night, unhappily, it came—a summons she was powerless to resist.  The
elder child was delirious, and she heard it moaning piteously, “Mother,
mother, why don’t you come to me?”  Without a moment’s hesitation she had
entered the room, signing her own death-warrant in the act.

She did not linger long in dying; lingering was little in her way.  On a
grey morning in October, just ten days after she was taken ill, the gun
which welcomes sunrise from the signal-station on the pier echoed like a
call.  She opened her eyes to greet us, and with the diamonds flickering
again about her head—only they were sunbeams now—she passed to that
“larger life” of which she, if anyone, held the key.

                            “Lest we forget.”

                                * * * * *



Bindo A Sketch


I


THE last notes of “Jerusalem, Jerusalem!”—sung as no other boy on earth
could sing it—had just died away in a storm of applause.  Now and again
the surge of voices reached the green-room in a muffled roar, where Eric
was protesting to the Manager that nothing would induce him to sing
another note that night.  “They’ve had four songs,” he said, “what on
earth do they want more?  As it is, I shall break my voice some day in
that confounded hall.  It was never meant for a boy to sing in—all wood
and iron and glass—with nothing to help you or carry the voice.  No!  I
_won’t_ sing, that’s flat; tell them I’m ill, or my mother’s come for me,
or anything you like.  Sing again, I _won’t_.”  “Yes, I’ll tell them your
mother’s come for you,” said the Manager with a laugh, “but, remember,
they’ll be clamouring for ‘A boy’s best friend is his mother’ if I do.”

As if to confirm Eric in his determination there came a knock at the
door, and a boyish face peeped _in_.  “Sorry, Hudson, if I’ve interrupted
business, but they told me the show was over, and I want Eric for supper.
By the way, you can come too, if you like.  Andrews and Thorne are there
already, and have finished supper by this time, I expect.  But there’ll
be some champagne and lobster-salad left for us.”

“Thanks, Lord Eastonville, I’ll come with pleasure, but I must first go
and quiet these lunatics.  They’re roaring for Eric like a lioness robbed
of her cub.”

Ten minutes later the three were entering a room in Hope Square, so rich
in its decorations of china, tapestries, and antique bronzes that it
might have been transported by a slave of the lamp direct from Aladdin’s
palace, or have done duty for a catalogue of Roman luxury: “The
merchandise of gold and silver and precious stones and of pearls and fine
linen and silk and scarlet and all manner of vessels of most precious
wood and of brass and iron and marble and frankincense, and souls of
men.”

By the fire (for it was early in May) stood an oval table, covered with
old glass and silver in pleasant confusion.  The fruit—a distinctive
feature—piled artistically in a ribbed basket of the Queen Anne period,
not disposed at the rate of four apples here, flanked by four oranges
there, after the fashion dear to the soul of the British householder when
he calls his neighbours to a feast.

The three new comers were greeted with a round of applause as hearty in
spirit as the cheer which had followed them from the hall.

“Why, Bindo, you’ve the very boy we’ve been longing for.  We’ve finished
supper and used up our talk, and it’s too late for a theatre and too
early for bed.  Singing will just fill the interval before cards.”

“Not a note from me, Thorne, till I’ve had some supper.  I must clear my
throat from the dust of the hall with champagne first.  Why you’re as bad
as the audience, who think that songs can be pumped out of one as easily
as you can get squeaks out of a gutta-percha doll.”

While Eric is better employed we can introduce the party.

Lord Eastonville, who owns the rooms, is a thorough gentleman of the
well-bred English type, with brains enough to carry him safely through
life—good-looking, generous, easy-going to a fault, and twenty-five.  Too
fond, it may be, of taking his ease, as all well-to-do Englishmen are
now-a-days, but a man who could fight for his country, as in the old
Crimean times, when war galvanised our lethargy into life.  War is no
unmixed evil; it carries with it a blessing in disguise.  It is the scare
and shadow of war that is the curse without the blessing.

Thorne, as a minute in his company would prove to you, is a hard-headed
journalist; witty, and an excellent talker; facile, of course, with his
pen, and ready to turn out a new theology as easily as he could write an
article on the last discovered butterfly or grub.

Andrews is a graduate of London University, spending with Eastonville the
remnant of a holiday.  Fairly humorous and incorrigibly deaf—never more
so (his friends say) than when a subject bores him—he is himself a trifle
of a bore to-night.  In his latest translation of Vergil “ploughed with a
team” has become in the hands of the printers “ploughed with steam,” an
anachronism that pleases him mightily.

He is also sorely exercised over the term “Prolegomena,” used in
connexion with our classical editions.  “Either the word’s bad Greek,” he
says, “or else it’s rank nonsense.  ‘Things that are being said before’
means just nothing at all.  What they want is a Perfect, ‘things that
have been said beforehand,’ which is not only more grammatical, but also
(he adds with a chuckle) much more descriptive of prefaces in general.”

“Well, I don’t understand Greek and Latin,” said Thorne, “so suppose we
talk English.  I have been studying you carefully, Bindo, and have come
to the conclusion that you look highly picturesque among all that fruit
and flowers.  I wonder what made you so good looking; was your father
particularly lovely?”

“Neither my father nor my mother, Thorne, though she _has_ contrived to
marry again; and the consequence is I’m not so well looked after as I
ought to have been, else I shouldn’t be here to-night.  Fate, I think,
must have made a judicious blend of the best points in his face with the
best features of hers.  And the result is me.”

“First class grammar, Bindo.  She must have sent you to a good school at
any rate.”

“Anything else to ask, old man?  You seem to be in an inquisitive mood
to-night.”

“Yes; who taught you to sing?”

“Le bon Dieu, I suppose, as Patti said.  I had only the training of a
country choir boy.  By the by, my master’s name was Thorne, a matter full
of interest to you.  I believe I sang by intuition.”

“A Hamiltonian philosopher,” muttered Andrews, “only he has developed
theory into practice.”

“Anyhow, when your voice goes I shall put on mourning,” said Eastonville,
“not black, for I don’t believe in it.  Purple’s the farthest I can go.”

“You may put on white or canary yellow, like a heathen Chinee, for all I
care.”

“Don’t lose your temper, Bindo.”

And Eric, _alias_ Bindo, how shall I describe him?  A fair boy, delicate
looking, but with lungs that can fill the biggest concert room in London,
with wavy golden hair flung back on his forehead, and the long dreamy
eyes so dear to the soul of Raphael.  In fact, it was Raphael’s picture
of Bindo Altoviti (long supposed to be a portrait of the painter) that
had won him his name.  Framed in the cabin window of a Bournemouth
steamer (excursion boats in these days do not condescend to port holes),
his arms resting on the sill, the resemblance had struck me irresistibly.
From that day he became “Bindo” to all of us, and would scarcely have
recognised an appeal to him as “Eric,” if we had lighted on the name by
accident.  His hair perhaps was one of his most telling points.  It
reflected under strong lights brilliant flakes of gold, isolated like the
motes that are suspended in certain liqueurs.

But after all it was his manner that took so much with all his friends.
He had the timid deprecating caress of a half-tamed animal, like
Hawthorne’s Donatello before he had won himself a soul.  Alas! poor Bindo
was hardly allowed time to win it.

“And what was the show like to-night, Bindo?” asked Eastonville.

“Oh, the same old game.  Nothing would suit them out of sixty songs but
‘Jerusalem,’ ‘Rags and Tatters,’ and ‘Home, sweet Home.’  They don’t mind
‘A boy’s best friend’ for an encore when they are in a strictly domestic
mood.  But anything really worth singing they won’t look at.”

“Well, we’ll follow their better mood and have ‘Jerusalem.’  You’ve got
back your voice by now, old chap, and we’ve been waiting for you
patiently this last half-hour or more.”

Once again that night the glorious voice rang out into the thin air,
startling the silent square.  Windows were hastily flung up, and the word
“Bindo” was passed from sill to sill.  Even a drowsy canary was
stimulated to try a note or two in emulation of a method more attractive
than its own.  And through the open window came, for an accompaniment,
the voice of London, soft as the murmur of a far-off sea.

With the end of the song a sharp rattle of applause ran round the square,
marked by distinctive intervals, like the volley at a soldier’s funeral.

“Bravo, Bindo,” said Eastonville, “it would pay you to send the hat round
to-night.  Here’s a fiver, young ’un, to open the bank with, though why I
should give it you passes my comprehension.  A boy who can earn ten
pounds a night at sixteen is a sight better off than I am.  If you lose
it, you’ll have to try the others.  I’m pretty well cleared out.  After
all you’re detestable, Bindo.  Just when we want you most, your voice
will be gone, and you’ll have spoiled us for all other singing, precisely
as the great Sarah has spoiled us for any acting but her own.  If we
could only forget and start fresh with each week, how nice and pleasant
everything would be.  I believe Nelly is right in ‘Cometh up,’ when she
says that memory is often a cruel gift.  No one would choose to remember
a feeble show, or to spoil his enjoyment of average singing by a
recollection of the best.  Why are ‘Jack Sheppard’ and ‘Geneviève de
Brabant’ practically withdrawn from the London stage?  Because elderly
playgoers cannot forget the days when Mrs. Keeley played ‘Jack,’ or when
Emily Soldene and the Dolaro drew all Mayfair to Islington by the
witchery of a serenade.  But now for ‘A boy’s best friend’—we’re all in a
domestic mood to-night—and then cards.”



II


Bindo was very docile as a rule, especially in the hands of those who
loved and cared for him.  But on some points he was obdurate as steel.
For instance, I could never persuade him, try what I would, to invest his
salary, nor could anything induce him to learn a profession against the
day when his voice should fail him.  Singing, he said, had come naturally
to him; a good voice, a good ear, and a little training had done the
trick; and he thought, or pretended to think, that the evil day, when it
did come, would bring with it its own resource.  “Sufficient unto the day
is the _good_ thereof” was Bindo’s motto throughout.

And it was impossible to teach him the value of money.  He spent it
royally on others, lavishly on himself.  “Where have you been, Bindo?” I
said to him one Monday, when he hadn’t turned up as usual on the previous
afternoon.  “Oh, I took Harry out of town.  He’s been seedy, you know,
and wanted change.  So we went to Brighton.”  “And you travelled
first-class, and put up at the Bedford, and lost money to him at cards in
the evening?”  “You have hit it _exactly_, old man,” was the reply.

I believe that most of his money went on Quixotic kindnesses of this
sort.  One night when I was with him at the Queen’s Hall (he liked to run
round to me between his “turns” and criticise the show from the front)
his salary for two nights went before it was earned to the first violin,
a blind little snuff-powdered man, but Bindo’s very particular friend,
because he had stumbled in getting down from the stage and damaged his
instrument.

When the end did come, it came suddenly.  His voice cracked on an upper
G—sudden and short like the string of a violin—in the very hall he had so
emphatically abused for its acoustic deficiencies.  Of course he came to
me, if it can be said that he came to me, when he had always been with me
for most of his time.  But the life bored him.  I had my own work to do
in the evenings, and couldn’t go with him to restaurants, theatres, and
concerts, the excitement of which had become a second nature to Bindo.
And so we drifted, little by little, but still very surely, farther and
farther apart.

It was about this time that his friend Harry, the same whom he had
entertained so royally at Brighton, fell ill.  Bindo had been anxious
about him for a long while, and never passed a day without seeing him.
But it was only quite lately that the doctors had begun to suspect a
rapid form of consumption.  Bindo was full of trouble.  I think he liked
Harry best of all his friends, perhaps excepting me.

One day he burst into my room, with something more akin to tears in his
eyes than I had ever seen in them before.  “What _is_ to be done,
Charlie?  They’ve given Harry the sack at his office because he’s too ill
to do his work properly.  They won’t even keep it open for him for a week
or two on the chance.  What brutes they are!  And, poor old chap, he’s
got nothing.  If it were only this time last year, and I had my voice
again, we could do famously.  I wish I’d taken your advice, old man, and
saved my pile while I had the chance.  By the way: happy thought!  I have
a heap of rings and pins and watches at home that the swells gave me last
year for singing at their matinees and concerts—enough of them to stock a
pawnshop.  By Jove! they _shall_ help to stock Attenborough’s; and we’ll
live on the proceeds, at any rate till things look more rosy.”  He was
off then and there, and for the next six months, till Harry died, I
scarcely saw him.  One excitement in his case had cast out the others,
and while Harry lived he hardly cared to be outside his room.  Brother
and nurse in one he was to him—with him night and day—and, whatever money
or love could do, Bindo did for him.

Afterwards he came back to me, looking a trifle older, a trifle more
depressed; but improved, or so it seemed to me, by the experience he had
undergone.  I forgot that there are natures receptive of vigorous and
even intense impressions, but absolutely incapable of retaining them.  So
soon as one predominant idea has passed from the brain, its place must be
occupied by another, for good or else for evil.  Which of the two it may
be, seems almost a matter of indifference; it is the law, so to speak, of
their being that it _should_ be indifferent.

I almost wished in those days that I could fall ill myself.  Five or six
months of nursing under Bindo’s hand would have been a lazy delight to
me, and (selfish as it may seem) better far for him than the life he was
leading.  Unhappily I never felt fitter, much too fit and too
self-occupied to be interesting to Bindo, and so he left me for others,
more at liberty and likely to be more amusing.

All this time he was (to quote his own words) “looking about for
something”—the Micawber-like expression that does duty for an idle life.
Whatever Bindo’s interpretation may have been, I know it made him very
late in coming home of an evening.  Yet he never asked me for money.  His
resources seemed boundless, and the stock of rings and watches
inexhaustible.  But, portable and useful property as they are, you must
have a good supply of them in hand to live upon it for a year in the
style Bindo was doing.  Besides, it occurred to me as strange that I had
never had a sight of them; in old days I had always had the first view of
any present that was made him.  On another point, too, he was inflexible
as ever.  Advice and help towards securing permanent employment he
absolutely and positively refused.  “Better that, old boy,” he said,
“than do what most people do—bother their friends all round for an
opinion when they’ve decided all along to follow their own.”

Your practical and steady-going individual—the one, for example, who can
“see nothing” in _Alice in Wonderland_—never admits into his reckoning
the influence of excitement.  It disturbs and disarranges his equilibrium
of life.  Yet, disparage it as you may, it is one of the most important
factors in shaping life and character, and perhaps the very strongest
lever that operates for the development of vice.  Fortunately, a fair
number of mankind can do with a small and weak modicum of this dangerous
stimulant.  Individuals like Bindo, who ask for more, are classed among
the eccentricities of nature, for whom it is impossible to prescribe.
Yet, think what it means for a boy of sixteen, without discipline or
experience to steady him, to drop, literally in a moment, from notoriety
to neglect, activity to stagnation; almost from life to death.

No wonder Bindo pined and drooped.  I knew the alternative that lay
before him: life and death—not in metaphor this time, but in sober
earnest.  Yet I let him go, for he had taught me himself, if I had wanted
the knowledge, that no man can cage a human will.  So from the very
moment I had become more hopeful about him, the gulf widened between us.
But only in companionship; never in spirit—

    “For, till the thunder in the trumpet be,
    Soul may divide from body, but not we,
    One from the other.”

Meanwhile he had retained all his old friends—no one who had known Bindo
was in a hurry to part company with him—but he had made other and less
reputable ones.  The strange and (to me) disquieting element in the
situation was that he never, even now, seemed to be in want of money.
Yet Harry’s illness alone must have cost him a fortune.  All his old
luxuries were resumed.  Dinners to his friends, at which Bindo was always
paymaster, with periodical trips to Brighton and Bournemouth for change,
succeeded one another with the same regularity as when the boy was
earning £10 a night.  “Where _does_ the money come from?” I asked myself
again and again.  Alas! the knowledge was to come soon.

Late one evening, as I was finishing an article for the editor who
employed me, Thorne and Eastonville called at my rooms.  That they had
come on no pleasant errand was written on their faces.  “Charlie,” said
Thorne, “we are here on a disagreeable business.  I hope it may prove
less disagreeable than it looks.  The fact is we’ve been losing a lot of
things for some time past; at least we’ve tried our level best to _think_
we’ve lost them.  But it won’t do.  The thing is far too systematic to be
accidental.  Sometimes it has been money—a sovereign or two at a time;
then it was a diamond ring of Eastonville’s that went, and then some
valuable scarf-pins of mine.  So the thing must be stopped.  But who has
done it?  I may as well out with it at once, though it burns my throat to
tell it.  We can’t help fancying it’s Bindo.  No one but he has had
access to our rooms at all hours, and you know how suspicious he has made
us all by the pile of money he’s been spending.”

“Yes: it _is_ Bindo, Thorne.”

What was the good of attempting to deny it, when it flashed across me in
a moment where all his jewellery had come from?  No, not all perhaps.
Probably—for I never asked him—he had started with articles that were
legitimately his own, and then, when these had failed him, had been
tempted to supplement them less creditably in the time of Harry’s need.

Of course we found the things, as I anticipated, at Attenborough’s; all
of them, that is, but one.  Bindo was not the boy to try and hide his
work, as an expert would have done, by distributing the articles at
different shops, or even by signing under an assumed name.  On the
contrary, there was a contemptuous candour in his method of dealing that
actually surprised and puzzled us for a moment at starting.

I would allow no one but myself to liquidate on behalf of Bindo.  But I
as steadily refused to be the bearer to him of the discovery we had made.
None of the others volunteered for the office, or showed the faintest
ambition to be the one selected for the murder of a friendship.  So we
cast lots for the office, whose it should be, in true melodramatic style,
and the lot fell upon me.

“Cheer up, old fellow,” said Eastonville.  “Bindo’s a deal fonder of you
than he is of the rest of us, and won’t take it so hardly if it comes
through you.  The fact is we’ve spoiled him; all of us, that is, but you.
And he knew it too, and I believe he liked the preaching you gave him
better than all my five-pound notes; not that he showed any objection to
the notes, I’m bound to say.  Now, don’t look so savage, old man.  I’m
bound to try and laugh over it, because, if I didn’t, I feel sure I
should do the other thing.  And after all this business may be the making
of Bindo.”

But he didn’t know Bindo as I did.  The boy came to me with outstretched
hand, and with the old frank look in his eyes.  But I could not trust
myself to return it.  What I did, must, I felt, be done quickly.  If I
waited for words in which to break the news to him; above all, if I gave
him the chance of speaking first, I knew it was all up with me.  So I
just put the things on the table in front of him—how I hated the sight of
them!—and said, “These things have come into my hands, no matter by what
means.”  He looked at them, and the faintest flush imaginable crept over
his face.  “Before you leave me to-night we will do them up for the post,
and you will address them to the respective owners and leave them in my
hands.”  I did not dare to look at him, but turned away to another table,
making up the parcels one by one and handing them to him where he stood
behind my back.  He addressed each parcel as he received it, never
betraying by a word or sign what I knew the effort must have cost him.

“And now, Eric, you and I part company.”  I saw him wince at the name;
almost as if he had received a blow.  No doubt it implied to him, far
more plainly than I had intended, that the Bindo of the past was lost
beyond recall.  It was not said in heedlessness, still less in
heartlessness; it was simply loss of self-control.  The old familiar name
_could_ not be forced past my lips.  In a moment I saw what I had done,
and would have given worlds to repair it.  “Bindo,” I cried impulsively,
“come back.”  But it was too late; the mischief was done.  I had lost my
last chance by that one word.

“Good-bye,” he answered, and was gone.



III


The characters we meet with in this world are composite, all of them—not
saint or sinner; not this or else that, but something betwixt and
between; the good in them not permanent, the bad in them not hopeless;
and Bindo’s short life had exemplified the fact with startling clearness.

From that day forward my influence over him was gone.  He must have kept
studiously out of my path—an easy thing for him to do, as he knew all my
habits and places of resort.  I used to try and persuade myself that I
was guiltless of the result, whatever it might be; that “unstable as
water” his character was past all guidance, and would in any case have
drifted to the end that seemed to be in view.  Yet it was hard to feel
all the while that a strong, kind word from me that night might have
nerved him to fresh energy.

“And what about Bindo?” I asked of Eastonville one day.

“Going to the dogs, and pretty rapidly, too, I’m afraid.  The last time I
saw him, he was with Hutchinson and all that crew.  You know what comes
of mixing with loafers like that.  He wouldn’t look at me, though I tried
hard to get a talk with him.  He’d had more to drink, too, than a boy of
seventeen can carry.  The pity of it all.  What a voice he had, and what
a good fellow, too, at heart!  How he nursed poor Harry!  Few Samaritans
of the present day would have given up six months of their time to spend
them in a sick room.  But I’m afraid it’s all up with him.”

“Can’t Thorne do anything?”

“No; Bindo fights shy of us all, and no wonder either.  I am sure I
should do the same in his place.  If _you_ could only have got hold of
him, and made him feel that we were rather glad than otherwise that our
useless belongings had gone towards nursing Harry, he’d have got back his
self-respect and been less shy of us.  But our last hope went when _you_
failed.  What the plague made you call him Eric instead of Bindo?”

“Heaven only knows,” I answered, “or its Antipodes.”

I told Thorne one day of Eastonville’s report, and asked him what he
thought of it.

“Just nothing at all,” he said.  “He knows no more of what Bindo’s doing
than all the rest of us.  For myself, I believe he’s got work of some
kind.  I grant he’s seen sometimes at shady music halls with shady
companions; and that’s what Eastonville means.  But, after all, a fellow
must have some one to speak to in the evening, especially if he’s at work
all day; and if he’s lost his old friends he must fill up their places
with the best he can.  Besides, it’s quite possible that Bindo has grown
wise enough by this time to make sure they do him no harm.”

A few months later Thorne dropped in again.  “Now you’ll be happy, I
suppose; at least I am.  Bindo starts to-morrow for Brazil in the
_Magdalena_.  We came across him to-day.  He’s had work on hand all the
year, though he kept it quietly to himself; and now he’ll be quit of all
his old associations and be able to make another, and, I hope, a better
start.”

I made up my mind, of course, that I must see him before he sailed.  But
how to do it?  Fortunately I knew the name of the boat he was to travel
by, unless he had wilfully put Thorne off the scent.  But it was too late
to get a train that night, and, as the boat I knew sailed at two o’clock,
it gave me none too much time to hunt him up at Southampton.

When a letter came to me next morning by the early post, requiring an
article at once for the afternoon papers, it was only what I expected.
Fate had come between me and Bindo every time I had wished to help him,
and she was at her old games again.  So I sat down and wrote off my
article—doggedly rather than savagely—in the spirit of one who gives up
the game against chance, yet knowing, all the time I was writing, that I
was losing my train, and that it was doubtful whether the next one would
catch the _Magdalena_ at all.  The official at the Dock entrance told me
that she was already throwing off from the quay wall, and it would be
quite impossible to get on board.  “Far and away your best chance,” he
added, “is to run round this way to the Dock gates.  You’ll be there
before she is, for it takes a lot of time to back and turn her.  Then if
you want to say good-bye to anyone _very_ particularly (and he smiled),
you’ll get a word with her perhaps.  For the vessel’s loaded deep, and
her portholes won’t stand very high above the quay wall.  Besides, she’ll
only creep through the gates, but you’ve no time to lose.”

I hardly stopped to thank him _then_.  On my way back he got, not only
thanks, but, to his great astonishment, a five-shilling piece.  “Well; he
must have wanted to see her badly,” I heard him whisper to his mate.

The preliminaries of throwing off, backing, warping, were all over by the
time I reached the gates, and the big vessel was beginning to make a move
under her own steam.  I looked eagerly for Bindo among the passengers.
Fate had been kind to me, and given me yet another chance.  What if I
missed it like the last?  But she favoured me this time.  He was leaning
over the deck-rail, watching the leave-takings as the great vessel swept
slowly past the wall.  His cap was thrown back and his hair blown off his
forehead.  What a boy he looked to be starting a new life in a new world,
without a friend and with worse than failure for the past!

Just then he caught sight of me.  For a moment he hesitated—I could _see_
him hesitate; then he left the deck and re-appeared at a port-hole in the
aft part of the ship, framed once more (and it was my last picture of
him) as the very Bindo of old.  “Good-bye,” he said, “old man; it was
good of you to come, after the way I’ve treated you.  Thanks again, most
faithful of friends, and good-bye.  Forgive and forget.  This time,
believe me, I’ll go straight.  By the way,” he added, “just give this
parcel for me to Fred—naming one of his chums—I had intended it for the
pilot, but it will be safer in your hands.”

A wave of the hand, as the ship headed for the open water, was the last I
saw of Bindo.  But a load was off my mind as I walked back to the
station.  I could look forward hopefully now and patiently to our next
meeting.

Glancing at the parcel he had given me, I found it was addressed to
myself.  It contained a small diamond ring without word or comment.  At
the time when we found the jewellery at Attenborough’s, this ring had
been missing, and, as it belonged to me, I had said nothing to the others
about it.  I might easily have lost it, and at any rate I gladly gave
Bindo the benefit of the doubt.  He had pledged it apparently at a
different shop; perhaps because it was mine, and he did not wish it to be
discovered with the rest; perhaps to remind him more vividly of the task
he had set himself during the year to come.  Till this ring could be
redeemed, he must wait and work in London, and though all his hopes were
centred in life abroad, it must not be thought of till this one act of
reparation had been done.  I never saw or heard from him directly again.

Two years later he died of yellow fever in hospital at Rio; and his last
act, while he still had strength to hold a pen, was to write me a loving
letter of farewell, enclosing a cheque that covered the sums I had
expended on his account.  The letter was forwarded to me by the nurse who
attended him.

                 “Is it well with the lad?  It is well.”

                                * * * * *



‘Declined with Thanks’
A Postscript


“READ and rejected” would be a more satisfying formula.  But the Oracle
is discreetly vague, and condescends not to particulars.  Editorial
reticence is surely a queer anomaly in these days when a reason is
required for everything.  When my own effusions have come back to me with
the trite ascription, I could have welcomed enthusiastically the
scantiest information, the liveliest abuse, in exchange for that
exasperating commonplace.

Sometimes even this amount of formal recognition was deferred.  At first
I augured hopefully from the delay, till experience taught me otherwise.
Once, when an editor had kept my MS kicking about in this way, I actually
wrote him my mind in free and unorthodox language.  “Unwise, most
unwise,” you will say.  “Yes, but oh! _so_ satisfactory.”  Add to which,
my letter effected its purpose.  He made up his mind then and there on
the merits of my article and “declined it _with thanks_.”  (The italics
are his own.)

But the mystery remains a mystery.  He did not reveal it to me, in spite
of his gratitude for my contribution, and I still hold to my opinion that
such delay is discourteous to a male contributor, and ungallant to a
lady.  Besides, what is the reason?  Is it that the editor waits to see
what space he has got left at the finish, and then accepts an article,
not for its merits, but for its length, on much the same principle as a
lady will ask you at breakfast for _just_ the amount of bread that will
suit a remnant of butter, or _vice versa_?  If so, Aristophanes had
anticipated the process, or one very nearly resembling it—“Man, man,” he
says, “they are weighing my tragedy as if it were a pound of beef!”

By the way, why shouldn’t the editorial chair be thrown open to
competition?  It is thus we elect our Professors, or some of them, at
Cambridge.  Let a candidate for the office be required to compose an
“Exercise”—say a complete story for the magazine he aspires to conduct.
So should we respect an editor more, or (possibly) fear him less.  At any
rate, no order of men, least of all one which examines others, should be
debarred now-a-days from the privilege of being examined in its turn.

The fear is that, if my suggestion were acted upon, it would empty the
Universities of their Professors.  Who could resist the attraction of a
post which limits the bulk of its correspondence to one conventional
formula?  Besides, to a tired Tripos examiner, the duty of looking over a
few hundred magazine articles per month would be a frolic—a light and
airy holiday task.  But he’d think the rules of the competition a trifle
rough on the candidates, and might be tempted to violate decorum by an
occasional word of encouragement and help.

Apart from the suspense they inflicted upon me, due no doubt to the care
they bestowed on the investigation, I think the editors were not far out
in their judgment of my work.  It always looked so heavy, even to a
partial critic like myself, on the morning after I had written it.  Once,
in despair, I showed an article to a great novelist, who is happily also
a great friend.  “What _is_ the reason,” I asked him, “that it always
looks so lumpy and devoid of wit and smartness?”

I wonder he had patience to read it through.  Perhaps it was my presence
that inspired him.  Then he said, “Not so bad in sense, but, as you say,
terribly cumbrous in form.  Let’s see what’s the matter with it.  Why,
it’s description, description, description, instead of action, action,
action, as Demosthenes recommended in a kindred art.  It’s an essay—good
enough so far as the matter goes—but wearisome and heavy almost beyond
_my_ endurance.”

“Well, what’s to be done with it?”

“Break it up,” was the reply, “and make them talk.  See, here’s a man
called Fred.  Make him talk to the first woman he meets—Susan, I see,
you’ve called her—let him ask her how she is, and where she’s going, and
whether it’s a fine day.  Do this with every proper name you can find,
and you’ll soon see the mass disintegrate and look promising for the
printer’s hands.”

I followed his advice, and (triumph of triumphs) the article was
accepted.  But I felt unhappy and disquieted even in my hour of success.
The fact is, the plot of my story was a dream.  Yes; it came straight to
me at midnight from the god Oneiros himself, complete to the very
smallest detail, and where was I to look for another?  I very seldom
dream at all, and never, before or afterwards, a complete story; and, as
I can never originate a plot, my chances for the future are the reverse
of promising.  Yet I labour on with a persistency beyond all praise, and
always during the night—a detrimental practice, involving great
expenditure of candles and tissue.  By daylight my ideas entirely
evaporate, and I have abandoned the attempt as hopeless.  The sight, too,
of a fair blank sheet of paper makes my thoughts take wing on the
instant.  They can only be arrested on scraps of waste paper or (best of
all) on the pages of a novel.

It is said that the criticisms on Corelli are literally “given to the
dogs.”  But my revenge upon a dull novel is, I flatter myself, more
recondite still.  I punish a poor story by using it as the palimpsest for
a poorer one.  Hence the highest tribute I can pay to my heroes in
literature is an unspoken (I mean an unwritten) one.  I leave their pages
immaculate.  My mind might be teeming at midnight with the noblest of
thoughts, yet I could not bring myself to record them, even in thought,
upon the pages of “Quentin Durward,” “Esmond,” “Silas Marner,” the
“Return of the Native,” or “Wuthering Heights.”

Judging it for power alone—power that never flags from the first page to
the last—I know of nothing that approaches “Wuthering Heights,” except
the preface Charlotte Bronte wrote for it.  Yet I never read the book
without compassionating the authoress.  The creation of a character like
Heathcliff must have been one long struggle against herself, to be faced
without flinching, as one of the penalties of genius.  What her own
choice would have been is shown by the relief with which she flings
behind her the nightmare of the past to picture the hope and happiness of
Earnshaw’s love.  Her second book, if she had lived to write it, would
certainly have been more genial; it could scarcely have been so great.

                                * * * * *

                                 THE END

                                * * * * *

                                CAMBRIDGE
                        PRINTED BY JONATHAN PALMER
                             ALEXANDRA STREET





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