Title: The Vagaries of Tod and Peter
Author: Harker, L. Allen (Lizzie Allen)
Language: English
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BY L. ALLEN HARKER


  THE VAGARIES OF TOD AND PETER
  THE REALLY ROMANTIC AGE
  THE BRIDGE ACROSS
  MONTAGU WYCHERLY
  ALLEGRA
  CHILDREN OF THE DEAR COTSWOLDS
  JAN AND HER JOB
  THE FFOLLIOTS OF REDMARLEY
  MISS ESPERANCE AND MR. WYCHERLY
  MR. WYCHERLY’S WARDS
  MASTER AND MAID
  CONCERNING PAUL AND FIAMMETTA
  A ROMANCE OF THE NURSERY


CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS



  THE VAGARIES
  OF TOD AND PETER



  THE VAGARIES
  OF TOD AND PETER


  BY
  L. ALLEN HARKER


  NEW YORK
  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
  1923



  COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published September, 1923

  [Illustration]



  TO
  MARGARET GWENELIN WATSON

  WITH LOVE AND HIGH HOPES FOR
  HER FUTURE



FOREWORD


A small boy coming down to the drawing-room at half-past five for the
sacred hour of play, found a visitor absorbing his mother’s attention.
For five minutes or so he politely refrained from interrupting their
conversation, and he wandered about the room, a little disconsolate
perhaps, but in that state of being described by nurses as “not a bit
of trouble.” When, however, the five minutes lengthened into ten, he
felt that direct action of some sort was imperative. So he advanced
upon the lingering guest, laid small, imperative hands upon her knee;
and lifting an anxious face to hers, enquired in honeyed tones: “Is you
going to stay very much longer?”

That was in the forgotten, by some regretted, by many derided, nineties.

The other day I was having tea with a charming friend, wise mother of
many sons, when the youngest, aged two, came for the sacred hour. It
was pleasant in that drawing-room and I made no haste to go. Whereupon
he came to me and, with a gracious, even a gallant, gesture, held out
his hand to me with the utmost friendliness, conversing the while
perpetually and emphatically in a manner difficult for the uninitiated
to follow. Pleased and flattered, I took the kind little hand, which
pulled me to my feet. He then firmly led me to the door and out to the
top of the staircase, and was preparing to escort me downstairs and to
the front door, when his mother ran after us and fetched us back.

Whatever else is changing in the present; bewildering world, there is
one section of the community that is essentially Conservative, not to
say “Die Hard.”

Outside my window there is a long, straggling street of old cottages
which have altered very little since the fourteenth century, and in
those little old houses dwell many children who play in the street,
games that were doubtless popular “in Thebes’s streets three thousand
years ago.”

The adult attitude towards children has changed even during the last
fifty years, and largely for the better. Yet the child’s attitude
towards his playmate, and even towards the omniscient grown-up, is
fundamentally what it has been throughout the ages.

The early nineteenth century is often quoted by deprecators of the
twentieth as a time when the attitude of youth towards age was
particularly praiseworthy in its modesty and reverence. Such people,
who are perhaps a little prone to forget their own youthful viewpoint,
tell us that in those golden days children accepted without question
the opinions of those who were set in authority over them, and were
almost invariably obedient, contented and unenterprising. Yet,
researches in the literature published especially for children by
that “friend of youth,” John Newbery, at “the corner of St. Paul’s
Churchyard,” in his little “gilt books”--most of them published
between 1745 and 1802--prove that badly-behaved children were by no
means uncommon, and that over-indulgent parents were not unknown. In
the “Histories of More Children than One; or, Goodness Better than
Beauty,” Master John and Miss Mary Strictum, who, as their names imply,
are models of deportment, are unfavorably contrasted with Master Thomas
and Miss Kitty Bloomer.

Thomas insists upon his papa’s horse being brought into the parlour for
him to ride round the room. His mamma tried “to persuade him not to
want it, but he would have his own way.”

“Thomas was much pleased to have it, but Kitty was afraid of it and did
not like that it should stay. She therefore began to scream and beg it
might go out. ‘Pray take it out!’ said she. ‘It shall go out; it shan’t
stay.’

“‘It shan’t go out. It shall stay!’ said her brother.

“They made such a noise that they frightened the horse, and he began to
kick and prance,” and all manner of disasters followed. Not even the
most weak-minded modern parent could go further than this in the way of
indulgence.

Even in so didactic a work as “The First Principles of Religion and
the _Existence of a Deity Explained in a Series of Dialogues Adapted
to the Capacity of the Infant Mind_,” you will find a child as human
and engaging as any infant born since the Armistice. In this work
the particular infant selected for enlightenment is one Maria, made
after no formal pattern. Throughout the long and deadly dialogues her
nimble mind outpaces mamma’s ponderous aphorisms. As, when that lady
discourses on the awful consequences of taking God’s name in vain,
Maria demands demurely: “But would it not be politer and prettier to
say either Mr. or Mrs., and not plain God?”

Again, when her mother, as an example of the evils of slyness, relates
how “the two Misses Quick had pincushions of the same make, but Miss
Betty’s was larger than Miss Sally’s,” and Miss Sally by a subterfuge
manages to exchange her own for her sister’s, Maria says thoughtfully:
“Do you think then, Mamma, that it signifies to God which of the Miss
Quicks had the larger pincushion?”

Could the most recent Realist ask a more searching question?

At Christmas time the papers seemed full of descriptions of _blasé_
children who insisted on going to expensive shops to choose their own
presents, who scoffed at fairies or Santa Claus, and scouted the idea
of any sort of childlike party. I do not move in plutocratic circles,
so I cannot vouch for either the truth or falsehood of these dismal
revelations. But I do know that the vast majority of gently-bred
children born before and during the years that followed 1914 are
easily pleased, and are grateful for very small mercies in the way
of amusement, because nothing else is possible to the greater part
of the upper middle class for financial reasons. And no one who, in
recent years, has been to “Peter Pan” and looked round the crowded
theatre gloriously garlanded with chubby, rosy faces, and heard the
full-throated affirmative that greets the question “Do you believe in
fairies?” can doubt that children are still pretty sound on subjects of
that sort.

This being so, is it incredibly bold or superlatively simple, on my
part, to have ventured to collect into a little sheaf some fugitive
sketches of the kind of children I have known during the last
twenty-five years?

Perhaps it is, and that being so, I can only quote the lines in which
Mr. Kipling has once and for all time summed up the humble plea of the
free-lance:

  When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre,
    He’d ’eard men sing by land an’ sea;
  An’ what he thought ’e might require,
    ’E went an’ took--the same as me!

  CIRENCESTER
  1923



CONTENTS


                                         PAGE

  FOREWORD                                vii


    PART I--BOYS

  THE VAGARIES OF TOD AND PETER             1

  “TONY”                                   56

  A SQUARE PEG                             64

  A TWENTIETH-CENTURY MISOGYNIST           79


    PART II--CHILDREN OF LAST CENTURY

  A SMALL EVENT                           105

  IN DURANCE VILE                         126

  THE SURRENDER OF LADY GRIZELL           134

  A CLEAN PACK                            144

  AN IRON SEAT                            152

  LÉON                                    160

  THE OLD RELIGION                        168

  COMRADES                                177

  LITTLE SHOES                            184

  “PASSING THE LOVE OF WOMEN”             189

  A THROW BACK                            197

  THE INTERVENTION OF THE DUKE            207


    PART III--CHILDREN OF THIS

  JEAN, A PORTRAIT                        253

  THE DOLL’S-HOUSE FLAGS (1917)           264

  CONCERNING CHRIS AND EASTER (1916)      280



PART I

BOYS



THE VAGARIES OF TOD AND PETER


I

THE MURDER

By the people who live in the same terrace they are known as “those
dreadful twins.” By the more plain-spoken of the masters at the
preparatory school which they attend they are distinguished by an
adjective whose meaning is the reverse of “heavenly”; and their
schoolfellows are filled with respectful admiration for the boys, the
most resourcefully and superfluously naughty of their acquaintance,
whose genius for making the most patient of masters lose his temper is
unsurpassed.

The only person who takes them and their ways with calm philosophy is
their mother. She, with that sense of proportion and balanced wisdom so
frequently vouchsafed to mothers of large families, laughs and loves
them, and believes in their ultimate regeneration. There is some ground
for the faith that is in her; for when a woman has seen six sons fare
forth into the world to cut no such indifferent figure in it, she is
not apt to despair of the two youngest, roister they never so.

Moreover, she declares that most of their evil doings are “really Mr.
Stevenson’s fault,” and there is truth in the charge, for from the
moment that some thoughtless person, probably a godfather (I have known
godfathers, living at a distance, who would present trumpets, nay,
even concertinas! to the sons of men whom they have called by the name
of friend), gave Peter a copy of “The Merry Men” and Tod “Treasure
Island,” they have tried to fit their surroundings to the characters
they are forever enacting; with the result that the plain workaday
world, that knows not the “Master Mage” of Samoa, is always puzzled and
generally wroth.

That genial “spirit of boyhood” had never so much as to beckon to them;
he had but to hold out his friendly hands, and Tod and Peter, each
clasping one in both their own, were his, body and soul, forevermore.

They are alike as the two Dromios, these twins; and the mistakes and
complications arising from this likeness are a never-failing source
of satisfaction to them. For instance, Peter will cheerfully undergo
a caning intended for Tod that he may afterwards meekly demand of
his chastener what he has done to deserve this discipline, gleefully
watching the while the weary wonder on the master’s face grow to a
disgusted certainty that he has, as usual, “punished the wrong one.”

The fact that they are rather noticeably comely boys--they came of a
family where on both sides of the house good looks are the invariable
rule--only serves to increase the confusion. Both are tall and
straight, fair-haired, blue-eyed, ruddy, and of a uniformly cheerful
countenance. But kind Nature has bestowed on Tod an accomplishment she
has denied to Peter, to his lasting grief.

At certain seasons of the year Tod “moults” and can pull out quantities
of his thick fair hair without the slightest inconvenience to himself.
He generally chooses to perform this feat during the silent hours of
“prep.” They have done their evening work at school ever since the
night they were discovered grilling “Home Influence” and “A Mother’s
Recompense” over the study fire, when they ought to have been wrestling
with “Excerpta Facilia.” When the master in charge has walked down
to the end of the long schoolroom where Tod “keeps,” and has turned
to go back again, Tod is suddenly seized by a perfect paroxysm of
despair, clutches at his hair with frantic though absolute noiseless
gesticulations, and casts whole handfuls of fluffy curls on the floor
about him.

Naturally his companions, including Peter, get lines for disturbing the
placidity of “prep” with their unseemly giggles. And George, when he
sweeps up the schoolroom next morning, may be heard to mutter:

“Wherever all this ’air do come from passes me!”

Tod’s real name is Percy--he is called after a wealthy and aristocratic
relative--but he refuses point-blank to answer to it, for he fancies
that it savours of those “eeny peeny” children in “Home Influence,” a
work that earned their undying hatred when it was read aloud to them
by a well-intentioned but mistaken aunt while they were recovering from
measles.

On the occasion of its holocaust, before referred to, their mother,
passing the study, and struck by the unwonted stillness reigning
therein, opened the door softly and looked in. Both boys were stooping
over the fireplace and prodding a solid yet feathery mass that glowed
and gloomed in the heart of the embers.

“There goes Herbert, ‘the almost-angel boy,’ and ‘haughty Caroline,’
and ‘playful Emmiline,’” whispered Tod, poking viciously. While Peter,
quoting from “Thrawn Janet,” added in an awful voice:

“_Witch, beldame, devil! I charge you, by the power of God, begone--if
you be dead, to the grave--if you be damned, to hell._”

I regret to say that their mother’s sense of humor is stronger than her
dislike of strong language, and that she stole away to laugh, leaving
the conspirators unrebuked for the moment. But they did their “prep.”
at school henceforth.

Peter’s manner is singularly misleading in its frank sincerity, and he
will on occasion answer a sudden question in a way which is, to say the
least of it, bewildering to his interlocutor.

For instance, one day in the football-field a new master asked him the
name of a small boy some distance off who was “slacking” abominably.

“Who’s that chap with the red hair by the goal posts?” he said to
Peter, who had been somewhat officiously putting him right on several
points.

“Dumpkins, sir,” that youth replied, demurely, and strolled off to a
distant part of the playground.

“Dumpkins!” bawled the master. “Dumpkins, why aren’t you playing up?”

But Dumpkins heeded not the voice of authority and continued to loll
and gaze heavenward in easy inactivity.

“Dumpkins! Dump-kins!” again he bellowed.

But Dumpkins only took an apple out of his pocket and began to eat it.

He is a hasty-tempered young man that master, and he strode toward the
hapless Dumpkins and shook him angrily, exclaiming:

“Why don’t you answer when I call, you cheeky little beggar?”

“Please, sir, you never called me, sir,” expostulated the boy,
wriggling in the master’s grip.

“Why, I’ve been shouting ‘Dumpkins’ all over the field for the last
five minutes!”

“But, please sir, my name is Jones!”

       *       *       *       *       *

“Why did you tell me Jones’s name was Dumpkins, you, Peter?” the master
indignantly demanded of Tod some minutes later.

“I couldn’t have done that, sir,” said Tod, gravely, “for there’s
nobody called Dumpkins in the school.”

It was this young master who rechristened the twins when Peter next day
insisted that “a point has position but no gratitude.”

Strangely enough “The Merry Men” finds even greater favor with them
than “Treasure Island,” and with the enigmatical decision of childhood
their favorite of all the stories is “Markheim,” not “Will o’ the
Mill,” beloved of critics. It is doubtful if they understand much of
it, but nevertheless they read it over and over again to each other
aloud, or silently with their curly heads pressed together, till they
knew it by heart. To be sure, “Thrawn Janet” has a dreadful fascination
for them, and they acted one of the principal scenes with somewhat
direful results.

Peter made Tod “tie him by the neck” to the bed with red worsted, while
Tod, in his character of the minister, had to creep in, candle in
hand, to discover the dread spectacle; and Peter’s representation of
the fearsome Janet was so truthful and blood-curdling that Tod dropped
the candle and fled downstairs howling at the top of his voice, and
such was his haste that he fell and sprained his wrist. Meanwhile, the
candle had set fire to the valance of the bed, and altogether there was
a fine hullabaloo; there was also an end put to their dramatic efforts
for a week or two.

Nothing daunted, however, about a month later, on a Sunday evening when
the servants were all at church, and their mother writing for dear
life the long weekly letters that have to be written when a woman has
husband and four sons scattered about the globe, Tod and Peter sought
the seclusion of the kitchen and determined to “act” “Markheim.”

All went well and quietly for a long time; the firelit kitchen with
loud ticking clock answered admirably as the scene of the murder, the
dialogue between Markheim and the mysterious stranger went without
a hitch, and Tod sallied forth into a “wonderful clear night of
stars,” while Peter shut the back door softly after him. Peter, in his
character of Markheim, was bent upon making the speech with which the
story concludes, where the maidservant rings the door-bell and Markheim
opens to her with the words: “You had better go for the police; I have
killed your master!”

Poor Tod had to be the maidservant--he always had to follow where Peter
led. He shivered as he ran up the area steps; it was a cold night, he
had not troubled to provide himself with a coat, and his heart was
heavy, for, to tell the truth, he has far more imagination than Peter,
and sometimes their plays are to him one long agony of apprehension.

He positively dreaded ringing that area bell, and the sinister
announcement that would follow on the act. No longer was he Tod, but
a trembling servant lass who was forced by fate to ring a bell which
sounded a tocsin of dreadful import.

He ran down to the end of the terrace and stood under a lamp that he
might brace himself for the final effort.

Meanwhile, Peter, swollen with importance at the thought of the mighty
sensation he would make in a minute or two, stood squeezed against the
hinge of the door waiting for the fateful ring.

Then came a patter of light feet down the area steps and someone gave
the bell a modest pull. Peter drew open the door with great suddenness
upon himself, exclaiming in a deep and tragic voice, the result of long
practice in solitary attics:

“_You had better go for the police; I have killed your master!_”

The visitor gave a piercing shriek and rushed up the steps again,
calling breathlessly upon Heaven and the police. Peter, behind the
door, wagged his head, exclaiming admiratively:

“How well that kid does act; I could almost declare I heard skirts
rustling.”

Peter waited awhile for his brother to return and be congratulated, but
Tod didn’t appear, so he concluded that he had gone round to the front
door and come in that way; besides, the servants were just due from
church, and cook would be cross if she found him in her domain. He ran
upstairs and waited for his twin in the drawing-room. His mother looked
up from her letters and smiled at the little figure tip-toeing on the
hearth-rug to admire himself in the glass. Then scratch, scratch went
her pen again.

Now, Ada, the housemaid, has a dear friend in service at the other
end of the terrace, and she attends a church where the sermons are
shorter than those at the one frequented by Peter’s household. On this
particular Sunday she got out of church quite early and thought she
would see whether Ada happened to be in. Thus, while Tod with lagging
feet crept slowly down the terrace from one end, she was already
fleeing affrightedly to the other in search of the nearest policeman.

She found him at the pillar-box, and fell into his stalwart arms,
crying hysterically:

“Oh, come quick! There’s bin murder done at Number 9. Someone’s bin an’
killed the marster!”

P.C. Lee turned the light of his bull’s-eye upon Ada’s friend and found
her fair to look upon. All the same, although he still supported her
trembling frame, he shook his head slowly, saying:

“’E ain’t there for to be murdered; the Colonel’s bin in Hinjia this
las’ ten weeks; the missis tol’ me so ’erself, when she ast me to keep
a special heye to them premises.”

All the same, in spite of his incredulity, P.C. Lee was already on his
way to Number 9, half leading, half carrying Ada’s friend with him.

“But I tell you,” persisted the girl, “when I ring that there bell, the
door opened sudden-like as if someone was be’ind it, and a hawful voice
says to me, ‘You’d better go for the perlice,’ it says, ‘I’ve killed
your master,’ and I was that taken to, I did go for you, Mr. Lee, as
fast as I could lay foot to the ground. It may be as one of the young
gentlemen’s bin murdered, ’is pa bein’, so to speak, abroad. It give me
such a turn----”

And Ada’s friend was forced to stop in the middle of the road, overcome
by the horrid recollection.

“But didn’t you see no one?” asked P.C. Lee, in a judicial voice.

“No, trust me, I didn’t wait to _see_ nothing; I’d ’eard enough without
that. I’ll wait out ’ere,” she continued as they reached the scene
of the tragedy, “on the top of the steps. I couldn’t abear to see no
dead bodies;” and Ada’s friend disengaged herself from the policeman’s
protecting clasp and clung to the area railings for support,
exclaiming afresh: “I’d never get over it--never!”

“But you must come in and give evidence wot you did ’ear,” expostulated
P.C. Lee. “I don’t believe myself as anything criminal ’as occurred;
but I’ll just ring and ast.”

“I’d take my dyin’ oath them was the very words that murderer says
to me,” cried Ada’s friend, jibbing on the top step as the minion of
the law put forth a large hand to assist her down. “‘I’ve killed your
master,’ says ’e, despairin’ like, as if it was no use to try an’ ’ide
it.”

P.C. Lee proceeded to perform a solo on the bell very different to
the two timid tintinnabulations that had preceded it during the last
ten minutes; for while Ada’s friend sought the protection of the
strong arm of the law, poor little Tod had screwed his courage to
the sticking-point, gone back and rung the area bell, when, to his
unspeakable relief, he was admitted by cook, just returned from church
in so benign a humor that she forebore to scold him for being out at
such untoward hours “without so much as a ’at,” and bestowed a piece of
bread and dripping upon him “to stop ’is teeth a-chatterin’.”

Whereupon, comforted and refreshed, he departed to find Peter.

Meanwhile P.C. Lee insisted that he must see the missis, for Ada’s
friend was unshaken in her evidence, question they never so, and the
four maids at Number 9 declared that they could not sleep comfortably
in their beds unless the search-light of his bull’s-eye was thrown on
every dusky corner of the house by P.C. Lee himself before he took his
departure.

Ada’s friend was seated weeping in the front hall surrounded by the
others, when the mistress, fetched by Ada herself, and accompanied by
Tod and Peter, descended to hold parley with P.C. Lee.

“I can’t understand it, ma’am,” concluded the policeman, after a
long explanation, continually interrupted by Ada’s friend with such
interpolations as: “Oh, a hawful voice, that mournful”--“Them was the
very words,” etc.

During this recital Tod and Peter crept further and further into the
background, nudging each other in the ecstasy occasioned by such an
unexpected tribute to their histrionic powers.

But their mother knows her Stevenson--and the twins--so before the
narrative was nearly finished she turned swiftly upon them, demanding
sternly:

“Which of you was it?”

       *       *       *       *       *

“Young varmints!” said P.C. Lee to Ada’s friend, as he escorted her
home; “I might ’a’ knowed it was them. ’Tain’t the fust time I’ve come
across ’em, neither....”


II

THE SENDING

When the time came for those twins, Tod and Peter, to go to public
school, their mother seriously considered the advisability of putting
them into different “houses.” At first she thought that, perhaps,
it might make for righteousness to separate them. But on hearing the
subject mooted, they so whole-heartedly fell in with her opinion,
rapturously reviewing the possibility of “changing houses” whenever
they felt so inclined, that she instantly dismissed the idea; rightly
coming to the conclusion that if their extraordinary resemblance was a
cause of general muddle and mystification while they were together, it
would become confusion worse confounded were they separated. Moreover,
she reflected that even schoolmasters are men of like passions with
ourselves, and rightly refrained from adding to such a one’s already
heavy burden by a separate superintendence of the twins.

Tod and Peter, whose mental attitude was always that “all is for
the best in the best possible of worlds,” decided that after all
propinquity has its advantages, and rejoiced that family tradition
sent them into a house whose head was proverbially the “slackest old
slackster in the whole school.” A dreamy, mild-mannered, gentlemanly
man that master, who left the management of the “house” entirely
to an extremely energetic wife and a “young brusher” (“brusher” is
the familiar term for master in that school), whose prowess in the
playing-fields was only equalled by his extreme fussiness where rules
of his own making were concerned.

“Not a bad chap,” the twins decided after their first week; “but a
bit like the German Emperor, you know--wants things all his own way.
Still, if you humor the youth, he’s all right.”

So successfully did they humor the “young brusher” in question that
for the first month all went smoothly, and the house-master himself, a
gentle optimist, ever ready to believe the best of boy-humanity, really
thought that the “character” that had preceded them from preparatory
school was perhaps over-emphasized.

Their late headmaster, while giving them full credit for general
integrity and fair abilities, had, in mercy to his brethren of the
craft, pointed out that they were ever “ready to join in frivolity
and insubordination, when not under my own eye.” They had to work,
for they were on the Modern Side, and destined for the army, and in
that particular school, not the wiliest shirker in creation can escape
the argus eye of the “head of the Modern,” or the retribution, swift,
sharp, and sure, that follows any such line of conduct.

But, bless you! ordinary work and games, at which both were good, never
found sufficient scope for the energies of Tod and Peter, and by the
time the first month was up they began their tricks.

One Mr. Neatby, M.A., taught the twins chemistry. Not that they went
to him together. They were in different, though, as far as work went,
parallel forms, and finding that their systematic “changing” was
never so much as suspected, and therefore carried with it no spice of
danger or adventure, they gave it up, devoting their energies to the
tormenting of Mr. Neatby, who had by his severity incurred their august
displeasure.

Mr. Neatby was tall, severe, and dignified. He really liked his
subject, but felt, as a rule, little affection for his pupils.
Nevertheless, he was conscientious to the last degree in the discharge
of his duties. His way of expressing himself was what Peter called
“essayish”; he gave lines lavishly, and had but little mercy on the
reckless breaker of test-tubes. He did not rant, or stamp, or call
people by opprobrious names, as did many better loved masters. He was
always cold, cutting, and superior. But the thing about him that most
excited Peter’s animosity was his necktie.

“He wears revolting, jerry-built, Judas-like ties,” the indignant Peter
proclaimed to an admiring audience of lower boys; “ties that slip down
and show a beastly, brassy stud. His socks, too, leave much to be
desired; in fact, his extremities altogether are such as betoken a bad,
hard heart.”

“Let me see,” said Tod softly, looking up from a book he was reading;
“do you think that a _sending_ might soften the man’s hard heart?”

At this particular stage of the twins’ career, Mr. Kipling was the God
of their idolatry, and both of them had “gloated,” even in the manner
of the immortal “Stalky” himself, over the vengeance of Ram Das.

“It might be managed,” Peter answered, thoughtfully scratching his
smooth chin; “but then again, it may be close-time for kittens just at
present; don’t they generally bloom in the spring?”

“There’s always plenty of kittens, you juggins,” ejaculated a prosaic
friend. “Why, when I was down at the riding school this morning, there
was a cat with six in an empty loose-box; they’ll have to drown five of
’em, they told me. D’your people want one or what?”

“_I_ want one,” Peter rejoined excitedly; “not one, but five, to give
to a dear friend.”

“Shouldn’t think he’d be your dear friend long.”

“Oh, yes, he will. He’s an S.P.C.K., or whatever it is. He’s awfully
profane--humane, I mean.”

“Well,” said the other boy, still unconvinced; “you can ask about ’em
when you go for your lesson to-morrow morning. They weren’t half bad
little beasts, but I shouldn’t advise you to give your friend more than
one at a time, anyhow.”

Both Tod and Peter went twice a week to the riding school in the town,
as they were both destined for cavalry. Every underling about the
place knew them well, and liked them. Their father had lived in the
town during his last leave, jobbed his horses at the riding-master’s
stables, and had himself assisted at the lessons of elder brothers of
Tod and Peter.

Now there was at the school a certain Figgins, a generally handy man,
or rather boy, who worshipped the ground the twins walked upon; and
after their next lesson they and Figgins might have been seen holding
long and earnest parley in the loose-box containing the cat and kittens.

The twins laughed uproariously all the way home, and just as they
reached the house, Peter remarked: “I hate anything dead. Figgins
has promised not one of ’em shall be drowned, and when they’re fit to
be moved, he’ll tell old White he’s found good homes for the lot. And
then--and then Tod, my boy! our dear teacher shall have ’em alive,
‘alive, all alive oh! alive, all alive oh!’” and Peter burst into song
in the exuberance of his joy.

Mr. Neatby lived in lodgings within a convenient distance of the
school. He was therefore spared any intercourse with the boys after
school hours, and usually spent his evenings in correcting innumerable
marble-boarded exercise books, containing chemistry notes. He was so
engaged one evening about nine o’clock, when his landlady entered the
room and laid a square parcel at his elbow.

He finished correcting the book he had in hand, and took another, when
his attention was arrested by an indescribable sound.

Mr. Neatby lifted his head and gazed about the room. “Could it be a
mouse under the skirting-board?” he wondered. Then half unconsciously
his eyes fell on the parcel his landlady had brought into the room. It
was an oblong cardboard box, about the size of an ordinary shoe-box.
But, although tied up with string, it was not wrapped in paper, and
on looking at it more closely, Mr. Neatby discovered that the top was
riddled with small holes.

Had it been summer, he, being something of a naturalist, would have at
once concluded that someone had sent him some rare caterpillars, but
what caterpillars are to be found in November?

He drew the parcel toward him, and there arose that curious sound
again, louder and more insistent. He hastily cut the string and removed
the lid of the box, and inside, reposing on a nest of hay, lay a very
young and mewey kitten. A kitten who most evidently was homesick and
aggrieved at being reft from the maternal bosom. A sprawly, squirmy,
noisy kitten, that immediately proceeded to climb out of the box and
crawl uncertainly to Mr. Neatby’s blotting-pad, where it collapsed into
a dismal little heap, mewing louder than ever.

“There must be some mistake,” muttered Mr. Neatby, flushed and
perturbed. “No one would send _me_ a kitten; that stupid woman must
have made some muddle or other,” and he arose hastily and rang the bell.

He so rarely rang his bell after his modest supper had been cleared
away that Mrs. Vyner, his landlady, had given up expecting him to do
so, and had on this occasion “just stepped out,” as she would have put
it, to see a neighbor.

Mr. Neatby rang, and rang in vain, finally so far departing from his
decorously distant demeanor as to go to the top of the kitchen stairs
and shout. But the faint mewing of the kitten was the only answer to
his outcries, and baffled and annoyed he returned to his sitting-room
to find that the kitten had upset the red ink over Tod’s chemistry
notes, which, in company with many others, lay open on the table, and
was feebly attempting to lap it up.

“Poor little thing; it’s hungry,” he thought to himself. And being,
indeed, as Peter said, a very humane man, he lifted it from the table,
and went to his sideboard to see if he could find any milk. He did find
some in the cupboard underneath where it had no business to be, and
pouring some into a saucer, laid it on the floor beside the kitten, who
proceeded to refresh itself with commendable promptitude.

Then, as his landlady still made no appearance, Mr. Neatby bethought
him of looking at the parcel to see whether the kitten had been left at
the wrong house. But no; attached to the string was a label, clearly
addressed in a flowing, clerkly hand, “S. S. Neatby, Esq., M.A.,”
followed by his address, accurate as to number, street, and even town.

Once more he sat down in his chair, and leant his head on his hand to
think, when he perceived, tucked into the hay at one side of the box,
a card, and drew it forth hastily; a plain glazed visiting card on
which was inscribed the words, “From a grateful friend,” in the same
excellent handwriting as the label.

Mr. Neatby blushed, and looked guiltily at the happily supping kitten.
In addition to being humane, Mr. Neatby was also charitable, and there
were many poor who had reason to be grateful to him. But as he always
gave alms through a third person, and was one of those modest people
who take care that their left hand knows not what the right hand doeth,
he felt quite upset.

Presently he heard his landlady and her niece come in, and rang again.

“Who brought this box, Mrs. Vyner?” he asked, holding it up toward her.

“I can’t say, sir, I’m sure. It was dark when I answered the door,
and a young man--leastways, I think ’e was young--simply give it into
my ’ands and ran down the steps again. I ’eld it under the gas in the
’all, sir, and read the label, as it was for you right enough, so I
brings it in and lays it down without never interruptin’ you, sir, like
you said.”

“_There was a kitten in that box_,” Mr. Neatby said solemnly, in such a
tone as might have announced some national calamity.

“Sakes alive! you don’t say so, sir,” cried Mrs. Vyner in great
excitement; “shall you keep it, sir?”

“I don’t know yet,” Mr. Neatby said gravely; “it must stay here for
to-night anyway.”

“It’s a pretty little thing, sir,” said the landlady, stooping down to
look at it where it lay basking in the heat of the fire. “’Twould be
company for you, wouldn’t it, sir?”

“Hadn’t it better go with you to the kitchen for to-night, Mrs. Vyner?”
Mr. Neatby asked persuasively, and Mrs. Vyner, with many protestations
of wonder, gathered up the kitten into her apron and departed to the
lower regions, where she informed the niece who lived with her that
their lodger “’adn’t spoken so many words to ’er never before, no, not
in a month of Sundays.”

Mr. Neatby threw the box into his capacious waste-paper basket, but he
put the card and label carefully away in one of the pigeon-holes of
his desk.

Next day, on his return from morning school, he found a white cardboard
hat-box, big enough to contain the most umbrageous matinée hat ever
worn, set right in the middle of his table, and he felt distinctly
annoyed. His landlady followed him into the sitting-room to lay lunch,
and he, pointing to the offending box, said coldly: “I must ask you not
to leave your parcels in my room, Mrs. Vyner.”

Mrs. Vyner bridled, and seizing the box, held it out toward him,
remarking aggrievedly: “If so be as you refers to this ’ere, sir, I
must ast you to look ’oo it’s addressed to. It’s put plain enough for
you, sir.”

“But I assure you,” Mr. Neatby cried, recoiling from the proffered
hat-box, “that I haven’t ordered a hat of any kind.”

“Any’ow,” said Mrs. Vyner scornfully, “I don’t suppose, sir, as you’d
order your ’ats from Madame Looeese, if you ’ad. I thought per’aps
you’d bought a present for your young lady.”

“Mrs. Vyner,” replied Mr. Neatby, in a voice glacial as liquid air
itself, “you forget yourself.”

Mrs. Vyner set down the box with an angry thump, and proceeded to lay
the cloth in injured silence.

When she had gone, Mr. Neatby approached the mysterious package
delicately, much as though it had been an infernal machine of some
sort, and regarded it searchingly on all sides. It most certainly
emanated from the millinery establishment of “Madame Louise,” but was
none the less certainly addressed in sprawly, feminine handwriting to
“S. S. Neatby, Esq., M.A.”

Just then Mrs. Vyner opened the door, saying waspishly, “’Ere’s your
kitting, sir; it keeps getting under my feet while I’m dishin’ up.”

It seemed to have gained considerable vigor during the night, for it
rushed across the room and up the curtain.

But Mr. Neatby had screwed his courage to the sticking-place, and
even the tempestuous entry of the kitten could not turn him from
his purpose. Penknife in hand, he cut the string of the bonnet-box,
and lifted the lid timidly, prepared no doubt for some tissue-paper
protected “confection” within. When, lo! even as that of the shoe-box
on the previous night was this interior; hay, dry and fragrant of
stable, met his astonished gaze, while seated in its midst was a tabby
kitten, who gathered herself together for a spring the instant the lid
was lifted, and sprang with such good-will as to turn the box over on
its side, when she immediately dashed under the table.

Mr. Neatby gazed, as if hypnotized, at the tumbled box, till the
rattling of dishes outside warned him of the near approach of his
landlady with lunch, and roused him from his trance.

He stooped hastily, thrust the scattered hay into the band-box, clapped
on the lid, and placed it under the knee-hole of his writing-table.

The door was opened rather suddenly to admit Mrs. Vyner; kitten number
one descended from the curtain, and Mr. Neatby found himself almost
praying that kitten number two would stay under the table while his
landlady was in the room. Mrs. Vyner glanced disdainfully in the
direction of the band-box, noted that the string had been cut, set the
dishes on the table with somewhat unnecessary violence, and departed
without having opened her lips, just as the two kittens frisked out
from beneath the table.

Mr. Neatby, harrassed and flushed “all over his eminent forehead,” did
not begin his lunch. He went back to the band-box again, studied the
label anew, and finally rummaged in the hay inside.

His search was rewarded by the discovery of a rather dirty piece of
paper, on which was written “A Present from Framilode,” Framilode being
a village in the neighborhood, celebrated for the manufacture of a
certain kind of mug which always bore that legend. He put it carefully
beside the other card and label in his desk, and returned to his lunch
with but small appetite, and a frown of perplexity upon his brow. The
kittens set up a perfect chorus of mewing; Mr. Neatby braced himself to
explain the new arrival to Mrs. Vyner, and rang for the pudding.

       *       *       *       *       *

“It’s my belief, sir,” said Mrs. Vyner that evening, “that somebody’s a
puttin’ a ’oaf upon you. I sent my niece to that there Madame Looeese’s
with the box lid, an’ she see madame ’erself, and _she_ says as it’s a
hold box, an’ that they certainly never sent you no box, nor wouldn’t
think of such a liberty, and you one of the school gentlemen and all.
But my niece, she said as madame did laugh when she ’eard about the
kitten, and ’er young ladies, too.”

Mr. Neatby writhed.

To a man of his reserved and sensitive temperament, the reflection
that his name could by any possibility be bandied about by a milliner
and her assistants was little short of maddening. If he could then and
there have ordered Mrs. Vyner “to take five hundred lines,” it might
have given him some relief. But in all things he was a just man, and
he knew that his landlady had at all events meant kindly in trying to
discover the perpetrator of the outrage; for the fact remained that
somebody had most assuredly “put a ’oax” on him in the shape of the
liveliest of tabby kittens.

It never occurred to him to suspect any of the boys. For how could
one of them come by either band-box or kittens? To be sure there were
some day boys, but it happened that these were nearly all “on the
Classical,” and Mr. Neatby had but little to do with them.

Of course he reckoned without the ubiquitous Figgins, who, unlike Mr.
Neatby, _had_ a young lady, who was employed by Madame Louise, and for
whom it was an easy matter both to procure a disused band-box and a new
label.

“You’re certain he got them all right?” whispered Peter to Figgins
at his next lesson, as that worthy rushed forward officiously to
settle the sack on the horse’s back. “He gave me back my notes simply
smothered in red ink, and I thought I saw a mark like a kitten’s paw,
but I couldn’t be sure.”

“Law bless you! yes, sir, _’e_ got ’em right enough. I took ’em myself,
and wot’s more, both of ’em’s there still, for I passed by this mornin’
and ’appened to look down the airey, and there they both was as peart
as print. I s’pose we’d better wait a day or so for the next ’un,
’adn’t us?”

“Yes, Figgins, wait two days till you see me again,” and Peter dug his
knees into his horse and rode at the first jump.

“It’s rather decent of him to _keep_ them,” thought Peter to himself,
who was tender-hearted where animals were concerned. “Perhaps, if he
doesn’t clap on any more lines for a bit, I’ll let him off with two.”

But, alas for good intentions. When Peter got back to the house, he
found Tod bursting with indignation. For at “Practical Chemistry,” that
very morning, Tod, who was supposed to be engaged in the manufacture of
hydrogen, used so many conflicting ingredients as to cause an explosion
and dense smoke, and a smell so appalling that it drove the whole class
into the corridor, and caused several testy masters to send indignant
messages demanding where the infernal smell came from.

Mr. Neatby, exasperated to the last degree, not only told Tod to take
five hundred lines, but bade him return the very next half-holiday and
spend the afternoon in doing similar experiments under his master’s
supervision.

Tod confided his grievance to Peter at great length, and concluded his
recital with the injunction, “Let him have all three, the _beast_! I
wish they were young gorillas.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Mr. Neatby was very busy. He was taking extra duty for a master who was
ill, and for three or four days after the arrival of the second kitten
really had not a moment to call his own, so, as Mrs. Vyner seemed to
take quite kindly to the new arrivals--only taking care to charge her
lodger an extra quart of milk daily for their maintenance--he almost
forgot their existence.

By Saturday evening he had accumulated a mass of mid-term examination
work to correct, and directly after supper set himself down to it, with
four clear hours before him, for he often worked till after midnight.

His lamp was trimmed, his fire burned brightly, and one kitten, the
first, sat purring on the hearth. That, and the scratching of Mr.
Neatby’s pen as he corrected the generally mistaken views of boys as
to the nature of an element, were the only sounds till there came a
thunderous rap outside, and the door-bell pealed loudly.

Mr. Neatby frowned, but never looked up from his corrections. He had
not been long at the school, and was not upon intimate terms with any
of the masters, so that it was hardly likely to be a caller for him.
He heard somebody open the front door, then some vehicle drive away. A
moment later there was a knock at his door, and Jemima, Mrs. Vyner’s
niece, came in, bearing a hamper.

“Please, sir, this ’ave just come by rail; there wasn’t nothing to
pay.”

“Very well,” Mr. Neatby answered without looking up; “put it down,
please; I can’t attend to it just now.”

Jemima did as she was told, and once more silence settled upon the room.

But not for long. Kitten number one got restless; it walked round and
round the hamper, and sniffed and mewed, and mewed and sniffed, with
irritating persistency. Moreover, a curious muffled echo seemed to
accompany its mewing. Mr. Neatby bore it for five minutes, then pushed
back his chair, caught the disturbing kitten by the scruff of its neck,
and bore it to the top of the kitchen stairs, calling to Jemima to take
it down. That young lady obeyed his summons, taking the kitten tenderly
into her arms with many endearments; but all the same she remarked to
her aunt, “Well, I do think as ’e might manage to look after _one_ on
’em ’isself, that I do.”

Mr. Neatby went back to his papers and corrected with more vigor than
before; but, in spite of his haste, in spite of his absorption, the
muffled mewing continued.

At last he laid down his pen and listened. “Surely,” he thought, “it
can’t sound like that from downstairs. I must have got the sound on my
nerves; it’s really most annoying.” It _was_ annoying; it grew louder
and louder till it seemed at his very side.

Mr. Neatby was endowed with great powers, both of self-control and
concentration. Having decided that the sound was in his imagination,
and not actual, he went on with the paper that he was correcting, but
as he placed it on the top of the growing pile he chanced to notice the
hamper which was placed on the hearth-rug close beside him. “Apples,
I suppose, from home,” he thought to himself; “but all the same, I’d
better see.” He lifted it on to his knee. “Too light for apples,” he
thought again. “What can they have sent?”

The lid was not very tightly fastened, and a slash or two of the
penknife at the string restraining it brought it away.

Hay, and again hay, in this case forming the cosy nest of _two_
kittens, one tortoiseshell and one black. Both lively and vociferous
beyond either of their predecessors. Mr. Neatby ejaculated just one
word, and sat perfectly still with the open hamper on his knee. The
kittens climbed out and made hay among his papers, but he took no
notice. “An angry man was he,” and when a man of his temperament is
angry, he usually sits tight. The kittens got tired of the table, and
jumped lightly to the floor, carrying a few dozen papers with them in
their flight, but still Mr. Neatby sat on staring into space.

When at last he roused himself, he once more sought some solution of
the mystery in the address label, but the yellow railway label on the
back had been torn away, and only “ton” remained. The address itself
was printed very neatly by hand.

Inside the hamper he found a little pink envelope with nicked edges
such as servants love. He opened it, and printed by the same hand, on
a piece of paper to match, was the following verse:

  The kitten’s a persistent beast,
  It comes when you expect it least,
  It comes in ones, it comes in twos--
  And when it comes it always mews.

“Ah!” Mr. Neatby said softly to himself, “some boy is at the bottom of
this.”

The clock struck twelve, and he remembered with a start that both his
landlady and Jemima would certainly be in bed.

What was to be done with the kittens?

He was far too kind-hearted to turn them out of doors on a cold
November night. They were really uncommonly pretty little beasts, and
as he watched their gambles he found himself quoting:

  Alas! regardless of their doom,
  The little victims play,

and then realized that they had no business to be playing at all at
that time of night, and that he certainly wanted to go to bed.

He really was a much tried man that night. First, he had to catch the
kittens and put them in the hamper, and as fast as he put one in, the
other jumped out. This took some time. Then he carried the hamper up to
bed with him, the kittens making frantic efforts to escape the while.
And when at last he did get to bed, he had to get up again to let them
out of the hamper, for they made such a frightful din no mortal could
sleep. They finally elected to settle down on Mr. Neatby’s bed, and
in the morning one of them ungratefully scratched his nose because he
happened to move when the kitten in question chose to walk over his
face.

When at last he arose from very broken slumbers, the black kitten upset
the shaving water and scalded its foot, and made a dreadful uproar, and
the tortoiseshell, while investigating the mantelpiece, upset and threw
into the grate a blue vase belonging to Mrs. Vyner.

In chapel on Sunday morning, Tod and Peter noted gleefully the long
scratch on “old Stinks’” nose (“Stinks” being, I regret to say, the
name by which Mr. Neatby was known among his pupils). And curiosity
as to how he was getting on with his rapidly increasing family of
cats consumed them. In the afternoon they walked up and down the road
outside his lodgings for nearly an hour, but nothing did they discover;
for Mrs. Vyner’s windows were shrouded by white curtains, no one went
in or out of the house, and all their loitering was not rewarded by so
much as hearing a distant mew.

The fact was that Mr. Neatby had gone for a long walk to try and work
off his irritation. That morning, while he was still at breakfast, Mrs.
Vyner had appeared in his sitting-room, and somewhat stormily informed
him that her “’ouse was not a ’ome for lost cats, nor never ’ad been.”
And she concluded her harangue as follows:

“I’ve ’ad gentlemen, masters at the school, for twelve year come
Michaelmas, and some ’ave bin trouble enough, the Lard knows.
With their football and ’ockey, and ’ot baths in the middle of the
afternoon, and the mud on their flannings something hawful; but a
gentleman as surrounded ’imself with cats in sech numbers I never ’ave
’ad nor never won’t again, I ’opes and prays. And although it do go
again my conscience to do it of a Sunday, I _must_ ast you, sir, to
take a week’s notice from yesterday. For start a fresh week with sech
goin’s on, and cats a comin’ by every post as it were, I can’t; no, not
if the king ’imself was to ast me on ’is bended knees.”

In vain poor Mr. Neatby pointed out that, far from “surrounding
himself” with kittens, they were thrust upon him he knew not by whom or
from whence. That he had no intention of keeping any of them if Mrs.
Vyner objected, and that it would really be extremely inconvenient for
him to have to seek new rooms in the middle of the term.

Mrs. Vyner was implacable. “I’m very upset about it, too, sir,” she
answered, more in sorrow than in anger; “for I did think as ’ow I’d got
a nice quiet gentleman, you not bein’ given to them ’orrid games as is
so dirty, nor wantin’ an over amount of cookin’. But a gentleman as
’eaven appears to rain cats on like it do on you is not for the likes
of me nor shan’t be. And though I’m truly sorry as you should be so
afflicted, I must ast you to leave my ’ouse, sir, next Saturday as ever
is, and that’s my last word.”

It wasn’t, not by a long way; for although Mr. Neatby reasoned, nay,
even almost implored Mrs. Vyner to reconsider her decision, she would
hardly let him get a word in edgeways, and remained unshaken in her
desire that he should vacate her rooms. “’Ow do I know, sir,” she asked
again and again, “wot hanimals may be sent you next? My ’eart would be
in my mouth every time the door-bell rang.”

Truly, Tod and Peter had planned a fearful vengeance had they only
known it. But they did not know it, and their unsatisfied curiosity was
their undoing. On Monday morning at the riding school they arranged
with Figgins that he was to leave the fifth kitten at Mr. Neatby’s
rooms that afternoon, just before afternoon school finished. The
despatch of the hamper had been managed by a railway man, a friend of
Figgins, whose cart started from a parcel-receiving office close to the
riding school, and he delivered the hamper on his evening round.

Directly school came out, the twins decided to rush down to Mr.
Neatby’s rooms before lock-up, to ask some frivolous question about
a paper he had set, and perhaps by great good luck be present at the
unveiling of the end of the sending. All fell out exactly as they had
arranged. Figgins took the parcel. Mrs. Vyner received it, addressed
as before to “S. S. Neatby, Esq., M.A.” (his real name was “Stuart,”
not “Stinks”), carried it grimly into his sitting-room, and laid it on
the table. She removed all her own ornaments from the chimneypiece and
sideboard, and then went downstairs and brought up all four kittens
(poor Mr. Neatby had not yet had time to arrange for their painless
destruction), and shut them up in the room to await their owner’s
return.

At ten minutes past five he hastened in, trod on one of the kittens as
he entered the room, and struck a match to light his lamp. The kitten
noisily proclaimed its injury, and the other three expressed their
sympathy in similar terms. When he caught sight of the brown-paper
parcel on the table he turned pale. The very feel of it was enough, and
even before he had torn off the cover he was sure of its contents. Yes,
in a common little bird cage was a fat, white kitten, and an uncommonly
tight fit she was.

He did not attempt to let her out, though her position was plainly one
of extreme discomfort, but stood with the cage in his hands, and the
four mewing kittens about his feet, in so universally distrustful a
frame of mind that he began to think that Mrs. Vyner herself was in the
plot to victimize him.

The door was opened, and his landlady’s voice announced: “Two young
gentlemen to see you, sir.”

Fresh colored and handsome, ruddy from their run in the cold evening
air, square-shouldered and upstanding, Tod and Peter allowed their two
pairs of candid blue eyes to travel from their master’s angry face to
his hands, from his hands holding the caged kitten to his feet, where
congregated the rest of the sending, and then exclaimed in a chorus of
genial astonishment: “Why, sir, what a lot of kittens you keep!”

Now, although he had been at the school three terms, no boy had
ever ventured to call upon Mr. Neatby before. Other masters might
occasionally ask boys to tea or permit an occasional call out of school
hours to arrange about house matches, etc. But he had ever discouraged
any familiarity whatsoever, and that Tod and Peter should dare to
intrude upon him at such a moment seemed to him, as indeed it was, a
piece of unparalleled impertinence.

“What do you want here?” he asked angrily. “It’s after lock-up.”

“Mr. Ord gave us leave to come,” Peter said eagerly. “We don’t
understand this question, sir. Could you explain? What a noise those
kittens do make, don’t they?”

Now if Tod could only have refrained from looking at Peter, Mr. Neatby
might have remained forever in the dark as to the mystery of the
kittens. But, even as Peter spoke, Tod, unaware that the light from
the master’s lamp shone full on his face, winked delightedly at his
brother, and in a flash Mr. Neatby connected their unexpected and
unnecessary visit with those equally unwelcome visitants whose advent
during the past week had entailed so much annoyance upon him.

Taking no notice of the paper Peter held out toward him, he laid the
little cage on the table, and said very quietly:

“Now that you are here, you will perhaps kindly explain what you mean
by sending all these animals to me.”

“Us, sir!” the twins exclaimed breathlessly, and as usual in
chorus--“Us!”

“Did you or did you not cause these five kittens to be sent to me?” Mr.
Neatby asked again.

Dead silence.

As Tod said afterward, “It was one of those beastly yes or no questions
that there’s no getting out of.”

“Did you or did you not?” Mr. Neatby asked again, a little louder
than before, though even the kittens had ceased mewing and seemed to
be listening. “But I know you did, and I wish to know further what
you mean by a piece of such intolerable impertinence, and such wanton
defiance of school rules.”

“There’s no rule about sending kittens, sir,” murmured Peter, with the
least suspicion of a giggle in his voice.

That giggle broke down the last barrier of Mr. Neatby’s self-control.
For full five minutes he permitted himself to thunder at those boys,
finally bidding them take all five kittens away with them there and
then.

“But we can’t, sir; we _can’t_ take them back to the house,” pleaded
Tod. “Whatever would Mrs. Ord say?”

“Well, you must take them away from here, anyway, and what’s more,
you must give up the names of your confederates, that I may take
proceedings against them for their unwarrantable interference with my
privacy. Who were they, now? At once!”

“It’s absolutely impossible for us to do that, sir,” Peter said firmly,
and Tod might have been heard to murmur something about “can’t and
won’t.”

“Then,” said Mr. Neatby, “you will both come with me to the principal
now at once.”

       *       *       *       *       *

The principal of that school is one of the youngest headmasters in
England, and he would not be the success he is did he not possess
a sense of humor. He partially pacified Mr. Neatby; he vigorously
“tanned” Tod and Peter there and then, and during the remainder of the
evening he laughed to himself more than once.

For the remainder of the term Tod and Peter found their comings and
goings so perpetually watched and suspected by the “young brusher”
aforesaid, that even the rapturous recollection of the success of their
sending was somewhat dimmed. But it was not they who suffered most;
to this day Mr. Neatby suspects of sinister intention anyone who so
much as mentions kittens in his presence, and new boys always wonder
why their schoolfellows are so anxious that they should mew in the
chemistry lectures. They only do it once.


III

THE BOY THAT DIDN’T COME

During the first part of the next, the Easter, term the twins were
so closely watched that their genius for mischief had small scope.
Whereupon the authorities, finding them apparently absorbed in games
and the general routine, relaxed their vigilance.

At the beginning of February the weather was mild and pleasant, with
just enough rain to keep the footer ground in good order. But at the
end of that fickle month there came a frost, the aggravating sort of
frost that makes a field too hard for football and yet leads to no
skating.

The never long dormant spirit of mischief in the twins awoke.

As usual, it was Peter who began it, though Tod was the innocent first
cause.

Just after first lesson, as Tod was hurrying from one classroom to
another, he met the principal in the corridor, who bade him ask his
form-master to come and speak to him at a quarter past ten. Further
down the corridor Tod met his twin, who instantly demanded what the
“Pot” wanted, and on being informed, went upon his way.

Peter might have been seen to stop more than one schoolfellow as he
went--the corridor was full of boys changing classrooms--and when he
reached his own he delivered a message to the effect that the Head
would like to see his form-master at ten-fifteen.

Peter’s form-master, familiarly known as “Pig-Face,” from a fancied
resemblance to that animal in the matter of nose, is a testy man,
much given to abusing his form and to the use of opprobrious epithets
seriously reflecting upon the veracity of boys in general; so, on
receipt of the Head’s message, he knuckled Peter’s head, called him a
“shuffling little beast,” set a complicated sum in discount for his
form to wrestle with during his absence, and hurried away, fuming
inwardly at the unreason of such a summons in the middle of morning
school. When he arrived at the principal’s room he found six other
masters also in waiting, but the principal himself was not there.

It happened that that gentleman had met Tod’s form-master three minutes
after he had seen Tod, he said what he had to say there and then in the
corridor, and dismissed the matter from his mind.

The seven masters waited in a grumpy group for ten good minutes, when,
just as they had decided upon immediate departure, the principal
himself rushed in and gazed in somewhat indignant astonishment at the
assembled multitude.

It took nearly five minutes more to explain the situation, and the only
boy whose conduct in delivering the various messages seemed not wholly
inexplicable appeared to be Peter. For the principal good-naturedly
came to the conclusion that it must have been Peter that he met, not
Tod, and that Peter had misunderstood him.

Such a charitable view of Peter’s conduct, however, could not last
long, seeing that six angry masters rushed back to their respective
forms to inflict lines upon six perfectly innocent boys, who were not
slow to protest that the message was entrusted to them by another.

During the morning three young gentlemen from the Modern and four from
the Classical received a summons “to the principal at twelve,” and of
course Tod and Peter were of the number, both looking so seraphically
innocent that the principal was perfectly sure that it was “a put-up
thing.” In this instance the innocent suffered with the guilty, for
Tod got five hundred lines as well as Peter. But they both agreed that
to have so scored off seven “brushers” at one time was well worth the
lines.

Three days afterward Tod’s nose bled toward the end of morning school
and he was dismissed to his house to clean up. As he raced along the
corridor he noticed that the door of the little room into which the
rope of the school bell descended was left open, and, peeping in, he
discovered that Hooper, the trusty porter, was not within.

In far less time than it takes to write the words, Tod had rushed in,
and the great school bell that dismisses morning school rang loud
and clear over the peaceful playing-fields surrounding the school
buildings, still humming with the busy life within.

Every boy and every master stopped short in what he was doing and
looked at the clock. Those possessed of watches consulted them, shook
them, listened to them, dubiously pressing them to unbelieving ears.
And as the clocks in that school are by no means beyond reproach, being
worked by a system of electricity that is, to say the least of it,
capricious in its conduct, all came, not unwillingly, to the conclusion
that morning work had indeed ended. Only the Head of the Modern, that
man of iron endurance, whose whole scheme of creation seemed bounded by
the exigencies of the Civil Service Commissioners, refused to believe
that his watch was wrong, and continued to discuss the “directrix and
eccentric” of a certain angle until it was really twelve o’clock;
while one of the French masters, hailing from Geneva, proclaimed the
unreliability of English clocks in general.

Meanwhile Hooper, who had gone down to the lodge to speak to his
wife, could hardly believe his ears when his own sacred bell clanged,
somewhat irresponsibly and gaily it is true, without his agency.

He rushed up the drive to discover the perpetrator of this
extraordinary outrage, only to meet a throng of masters and boys
streaming out into the playground full twenty minutes before the
appointed hour.

Tod was nearly at his house by this time, and when he did arrive,
hastened to the matron to descant upon the terrific hemorrhage that had
occurred in his nose.

But Nemesis was never very leaden-footed where the twins were concerned.

“Other chaps,” Tod remarked mournfully, “can break all sorts of rules
and do no end of mischief and never get found out, but if we do the
least little thing someone’s certain to be down on us like a hundred of
bricks, or else we’re obliged to own up to save somebody else.”

In this case it was the latter course that Tod had to pursue. The
principal was exceedingly angry at such a wanton curtailment of the
last hour of morning school, and gave it out in the afternoon that if
the amateur bellringer did not disclose himself that very day, the
whole school should stay in on the next half-holiday; and the frost had
broken and football was in full swing once more.

Of course Tod sought the principal at the earliest opportunity and
owned up.

When he appeared in the principal’s room after afternoon school
he made, it is true, a valiant effort to present himself with due
solemnity, but his round face was absurdly chubby and cheerful, and
when the principal looked up from the letter he was writing to see who
the intruder was, he sighed deeply.

“You again, Beaton!” he exclaimed wearily. “So it was _you_, was it,
who rang that bell? What on earth did you do it for?”

“My nose bled, sir....” Tod began eagerly.

“What had your nose to do with it?”

“Everything, sir. I was sent out of class....”

“Sent out of class?” the principal repeated sternly.

“Because I made such a mess,” Tod hastened to add; “and the little door
was open--and so I rang the bell.”

“Beaton, when will you cease to play these senseless and annoying
tricks? Your folly caused six hundred boys, to say nothing of the
masters, to lose twenty precious minutes. If I punished you as you
deserve, you ought to stay in for twenty minutes each day for six
hundred days....”

Tod gasped.

“But I won’t do that. Instead, you must do a thousand lines, to be
given up by the end of this week. I shall not cane you, as I have no
doubt you would infinitely prefer it.”

A good many boys assisted to write those lines, and the impost was
given up at its appointed time.

Hockey leagues were on and Peter was playing in his house team. On the
morning of the last practice before an important match, he acknowledged
so barely bowing an acquaintance with certain French idioms beloved of
the French master--for was he not their author?--that Peter was told to
stay in after morning school and learn them.

Peter did nothing of the kind; on the contrary, he went out at the
usual hour and played hockey with his accustomed vigor, with the result
that the French master sent for him that afternoon to know why he had
not done as he was told.

Peter pleaded “a very important engagement,” and, on being pressed to
disclose the nature of that same, as usual answered quite truthfully.
The French master, not unnaturally exasperated, forthwith reported him
to the Head of the Modern, with the result that Peter was hauled up and
bidden to stay in on the next half-holiday; the very half-holiday on
which his house was to play its bitterest rival.

During the remainder of that term he got into several rows with his
form-master, and Tod was equally unlucky, so that by the time the
Easter holidays arrived both boys were quite ready for them and left
school vowing vengeance on their persecutors.

Their parents were in India, so they went to spend the holidays with
a jolly young bachelor uncle, who was an ardent fisherman and carried
both the boys off with him for three weeks’ peel-fishing in a remote
village in North Wales. He was also of a literary turn, that uncle,
and took with him a box of books to enliven their evenings: lots of
Kipling and Stevenson, and amongst the latter the “Life and Letters.”
He read aloud the “Thomas Libby” incident, where Stevenson and certain
kindred spirits roused a whole neighborhood to excitement by constant
inquiries as to the whereabouts of one “Thomas Libby,” who existed only
in his creator’s vivid imagination. That of the twins was immediately
fired by an ambition to go and do likewise.

The incident, or rather series of incidents, to which the
non-appearance of Mr. Libby led up, enchanted them. They chuckled over
the mysterious Thomas for a whole day, but it was not till evening, at
bedtime, that Tod whispered to Peter how, like “Sentimental Tommy,” he
had “found a way.”

Sitting on the side of his bed, he announced gleefully: “Tell you what
it is, Peter, we’ll be a parent! A parent with a delicate kid! And
we’ll write long-winded letters in scratchy, small handwriting, you
know, like the masters write....”

“But,” Peter interrupted excitedly, “how are we to get the answers? It
wouldn’t be any fun if we didn’t.”

“The answers,” Tod replied calmly, “will come to the post office here,
where we’re living, you juggins! You bet there’ll be answers. They’re
awfully keen after the oof at the good old school. Why, they scent a
new boy a mile off. He shall go into old Pig-Face’s house, just to pay
him out for all his beastliness to you, and I’ll pester the Head about
him and his delicate chest, and all that sort of rot that parents _do_
write, don’t you know.”

Peter gasped. “But how can he ‘go’ into anybody’s house if there isn’t
a him to go?”

“What an ass you are, Peter! _Was_ there a Thomas Libby? And how many
people’s houses was he going to, pray?”

“Go on,” said Peter humbly, “go on.”

“The parent’s name,” Tod announced proudly, “is Theopompus Buggins.”

“Theopompus!” Peter echoed dubiously. “It doesn’t sound very real
somehow--and is the kid to be young Theopompus?”

“No,” said Tod firmly, “_his_ name is Archibald, and Mr. Buggins is his
uncle.”

“I thought he was to be a parent,” Peter objected in a dissatisfied
voice.

“Well, an uncle is a sort of parent; probably the kid’s an orphan.”

There was silence for a minute while Peter digested this view of the
matter. But still he was not quite satisfied, for presently he said:
“Tod, would _you_ believe in anyone called ‘Theopompus Buggins’?”

“Well, no, I’m not sure that I would,” Tod admitted. “Why?”

“D’you believe the Head will?”

“I never thought of that.”

“I think,” Peter suggested beguilingly, “that we had better have a
commoner name, don’t you?”

“P’r’aps we had,” Tod sighed. “Let’s have Jones--Theopompus Jones, now.”

“Jones is all right,” Peter allowed graciously, “but I don’t fancy
Theopompus much, it’s such a peculiar name.”

“It’s a splendid name,” Tod exclaimed huffily, “but of course if you
think it’s too uncommon he can be ‘T. Jones, Esq.,’ or ‘John Jones’ if
you insist upon it. How would you like ‘Peter Jones’?”

“T. Jones will do spiffingly,” Peter answered with some haste. “_We’ll_
know his name is Theopompus right enough, and it don’t matter a hang to
them whether he’s Theobald or Theophilus or anything; but I say, Tod,
must he be an uncle?”

“Yes,” Tod replied firmly, “he jolly well must, and, what’s more,
he’s got to be going to Injia just as term begins. We’ll look out the
sailings in uncle’s paper and choose his ship. He’ll just get there in
the hot weather, but that can’t be helped.”

The twins were well acquainted with the whereabouts of “sailings” in
the papers, as most Anglo-Indian children are.

“Why, you’ve planned it all, Tod,” Peter said admiringly. “How’ll you
do about the writing?”

“I shall write as like old Stinks as possible, that niggly, scrabbly
sort of writing, _you_ know.”

“By Jove! So you can--that’ll be all right. Parents and people call
that sort of writing ‘scholarly,’ but if we did it they’d say we were
beastly illiterate or something.”

“What I like about a scholarly handwriting,” said Tod thoughtfully, “is
that no mortal can tell whether the spelling’s right or not. When I’m
once through the Shop I shall always write a scholarly hand and not
bother about spelling and that any more.”

“Boys,” a voice called from the next room, “you get to bed and don’t
keep jawing all night.”

       *       *       *       *       *

It would not be fair to disclose the exact spot in Wales from which
that anxious relative, Mr. T. Jones, indited his first letter to the
headmaster of the Public School which reckoned Tod and Peter among its
pupils.

  “There are several L’s in the place where he dwells,
            And of W’s more than one.”

but it is impossible to be more explicit than this.

The Principal of Harchester School was at breakfast in his hotel at
the seaside when a letter marked “urgent” and “if away please forward
immediately” reached him. He turned it over thoughtfully before opening
it, for he thought he recognized the handwriting of one of his masters
(familiarly referred to by Tod and Peter as “old Stinks”), a science
master, much given to drawing his attention to various details by means
of lengthy epistles.

“What in the world can Neatby want now?” he wondered, “and in the
holidays, too; it really is a little too bad!”

On opening the letter, however, he found that it was not from Mr.
Neatby, and set himself forthwith to decipher a missive in which the
margins were clear and spacious as the writing was small and obscure.
Yet it had the air, so the principal remarked to himself, of being the
letter of an educated man. Tod had played the “scholarly” game with
entire success.

The letter was as follows:

  “DEAR SIR,

  “I am desirous that my only nephew, Archibald Jones, aged thirteen
  years and six months, should be enrolled among the pupils of your
  famous seminary at the commencement of the summer session. But
  before placing him under your benignant charge there are several
  points upon which I am desirous of enlightenment. Certain friends
  have recommended to me the house of one Mr. Mannock, but from
  other sources I have gathered that he is a man of somewhat violent
  temper, sometimes almost abusive, in his intercourse with the boys.
  Is this so? Because, if it is, I shall require to seek some other
  house in which to place my nephew, an orphan of extremely sensitive
  disposition, with a weak chest. It is possible that the accounts
  I have heard of Mr. Mannock’s violence may be exaggerated, and I
  should like Archibald to enter his house unless you especially warn
  me against it. I wish my nephew to be entered upon the Classical
  side, as I am given to understand that boys are less overworked in
  that department than in that where they prepare for the Army. And
  as his delicate chest will prevent my nephew joining in the rougher
  sports of his contemporaries, I would suggest that one of the younger
  masters should be told off to take Archibald for a walk every fine
  day, as, of course, a certain amount of fresh air and exercise is
  essential. He must not be placed in too high a class, as owing to
  illness he has not been able to make such rapid progress in his
  studies as his robuster contemporaries.

  “Any information that you can afford me--and as early an answer as
  possible, for I am leaving England at the beginning of May and wish
  to see my dear nephew comfortably settled before I sail--will greatly
  oblige

                                              “Yours truly,
                                                             “T. JONES.”

Tod had written “yours turly,” but was corrected by Peter, who, if
he had less sense of style, was fairly dependable where spelling was
concerned.

Now the postmistress, their landlady, found her household duties so
much increased by the presence of her lodgers that she was fain to
depute her official cares to her daughter, Katie, a damsel who greatly
admired the good-looking twins. And when they confided to her that
if a letter came addressed to “T. Jones, Esq.” it really was for one
of them, she asked no questions, required no further information,
but, concluding that it was only a part of their mysterious charm to
receive letters in a name other than their own, promised to guard the
same should it come, without pointing out to anybody that just then no
person of the name of Jones was residing at the post office.

The letter came in two days and ran as follows:

  “DEAR SIR,

  “I enclose the entrance form to be filled up by any parent or
  guardian desirous of placing a boy at Harchester School. With regard
  to the house in which you wish your nephew to board, Mr. Mannock’s
  is, as I hope are all our houses, entirely satisfactory. But if
  your nephew is, as you imply, a delicate boy, I would suggest that
  he should be placed in one of the smaller boarding-houses, as he
  would then receive more individual attention than it is possible to
  bestow in a house where there are some fifty boys. I have asked the
  bursar to send you a prospectus, in which you will find the names
  and addresses of all the masters in the school who take boys; and
  lest the house you select should be already full, I advise you to
  communicate with the master at your earliest convenience.”

When Mr. Theopompus Jones in the dual shape of Tod and Peter received
this missive they retired to a distant bridge, whereon they sat to read
it, and they laughed so much that they nearly fell over backward into
the river. They gloated over the very envelope. But later on, when
their first glee at getting an answer at all had somewhat abated, they
expressed disappointment that the Head had omitted to answer so many of
their questions.

“You see,” Peter cried indignantly, “what a shufflin’ old hypocrite he
is. You can’t get a straight answer from him about old Pig-Face, and he
knows what an old brute he is just as well as we do.”

“Shall we send dear Archibald into one of the smaller houses?” Tod
asked thoughtfully.

“No,” Peter thundered. “He’s going to old Pig-Face, and to no one else.
Who knows but he may save some decent chap from going there? Let’s
write again to the Pot, it’s such a lark, he answers so nice and quick.
Why, there’s over a fortnight more of the holidays; we can get a whole
volume of his oily old letters by that time. I’ve always wondered how
humbugs like him manage to grease up to one’s people so, and for the
life of me I can’t see why now.”

That night the twins again engaged in literary labors, much to their
uncle’s surprise, but he was an ardent bridge player, and, having found
three like-minded anglers at the village inn, he was glad to leave his
lively nephews so peacefully employed.

“Are you chaps writing a story?” he asked that evening as he departed
to his bridge.

“Yes,” “No,” the twins answered simultaneously, then Tod answered
with some decision: “No, Uncle Frank, we’re writing letters, business
letters, that’s all.”

“Dear me,” their uncle replied, much impressed, and, having a
peace-loving and incurious disposition, he asked no further questions
and was soon contentedly playing a “no trumps” hand with conspicuous
success.

A day or two later the headmaster of Harchester sighed gently as he
found beside his plate at breakfast another bulky epistle from the
anxious-minded Mr. T. Jones. This time that gentleman did not content
himself with generalities; he made the most searching inquiries as to
the disposition of the aforesaid Mr. Mannock.

After thanking the headmaster of Harchester for his “polite letter”
(the headmaster raised his eyebrows as he reached this phrase), Mr.
Jones continued:

  “I fear that I cannot fall in with your suggestion of a private
  boarding-house for my dear nephew. In the first place it is too
  expensive, and in the second place I wish him to go into Mr.
  Mannock’s house if you can satisfy me that he is of the considerate
  and forbearing disposition that a man placed in his responsible
  position ought to be. I am pressed for time, as I sail on May 1st for
  Bombay, and an early answer will greatly oblige.

                                                “Yours truly,
                                                             “T. JONES.”

Tod and Peter had the very greatest fun in filling in the form of
application. They had long ago decided that the youthful Archibald
was to enter on the Classical side, that he was destined for the
Church, that his father was “deceased,” but as to the late gentleman’s
profession they squabbled. Peter wanted Army or Indian Civil; Tod was
in favor of Navy or Church; when Peter suddenly recollected that there
were “lists and things” in most of the recognized professions and that
an “inquisitive old buffer like the Pot would be certain to look him
up.”

Finally they decided that the deceased one had better be a “merchant.”
Peter wanted to add “prince,” but Tod, the far-seeing, pointed out that
such affluence would hardly coincide with an objection to one of the
smaller boarding-houses on the score of expense.

Finally they despatched their entrance form “to the bursar,”
elaborately filled up in the scholarly handwriting of Mr. Theopompus
Jones, the handwriting that so puzzled the Principal of Harchester by
its haunting resemblance to that of one of his masters.

Again the Pot was prompt and courteous, and by return the twins were
gloating over another letter, which, however, again disappointed them
by its brevity.

  “DEAR SIR (it ran),

  “As your time in this country is indeed getting short, I would advise
  you at once to confer personally with Mr. Mannock as to whether he
  can find room for your nephew or not; for, in the event of his having
  no vacancy, you still may be enabled to place the boy in one of the
  other houses.”

“Oh, the shuffler!” Peter shouted indignantly. “The quibbler! The
sanctimonious humbug! _He_ thinks he’s diddled Theopompus Jones, does
he? He’ll find out his mistake before very long; it’ll be Theopompus
Jones has diddled _him_. I wouldn’t trust that man with a bad
halfpenny. He can’t answer a straight question, that’s what he can’t
do--and yet to hear him talk....”

“I say,” interrupted Tod, “suppose they send in the bill, what’ll we
do?”

“You don’t propose we should pay it, do you, you young ass?” Peter
returned scornfully. “They never send ’em in till just before term,
sometimes not till after. Don’t you remember how the pater grumbled
last autumn because it _didn’t_ come, and he wanted everything settled
up before he sailed?”

“So does Mr. Jones want it all settled before he sails,” Tod remarked
gaily. “He ought to write to old Pig-Face to-night.”

This the dual Mr. Jones did, and, as before, received an answer by
return of post from Mr. Mannock, who, strange to say, had just one
vacancy, and expressed his willingness that Archibald Jones should fill
that same. And Mr. T. Jones, refraining from further researches into
the character of Mr. Mannock, wrote with his own scholarly hand, or
rather hands, a letter which announced the pending arrival of Archibald.

By this time the holidays were nearly over, and the twins began to be
somewhat anxious as to the termination of Mr. Jones’ correspondence
with the authorities at Harchester School. But their good genius did
not desert them at the last moment, for just the day before they left
Wales, when they were at their wits’ end for a satisfactory ending to
the episode, they came across the “List of Members” of their uncle’s
club; and, idly turning over the leaves, Tod found that there were no
fewer than thirteen members of the same surname as the anxious uncle of
their creation and three of them had “T” for their initial. Instantly
Tod’s resource was stimulated, and he despatched three letters in the
most scholarly of handwritings to his headmaster, to Mr. Mannock,
and to the bursar respectively, announcing his immediate departure
for London and requesting that all future communications might be
addressed to him at the club in question.

In his letter to Mr. Mannock, he informed him that Archibald would be
sent one day earlier than that given for the return of the other boys,
as he, Mr. Jones, would be so much occupied in arrangements for his
voyage that he would be unable to give the boy the careful supervision
his sensitive disposition and delicate health demanded.

“We shan’t see their pompous old letters and bills and things,” sighed
Peter, “but it will liven up the Jones fraternity at uncle’s club--it’s
a good thing he’s not going back to town just yet, or he might hear
something--and Pig-Face will simply raise Cain when that precious
Archibald mysteriously disappears. We’re sure to hear about that,
anyway; two of his chaps are in my form, jolly decent chaps they are,
too.”

“Mind you never _ask_ anything about it,” said Tod warningly. “They
might suspect something, and if we were ever found to have had any hand
in this we’d be sacked, sure as a gun. We’ve had our fun and now we
must jolly well keep it dark. By the time it’s all finished I should
say both the Head and old Pig-Face will have done their thousand lines
apiece, shouldn’t you?”

       *       *       *       *       *

“Curious thing that fellow never turning up, isn’t it?” one of the
“decent chaps” in Mr. Mannock’s house remarked to Peter, some three
days after term had begun. “Pig-Face is in an awful stew about
it--afraid the boy’s been murdered or something.”

“What boy? What d’you mean?” Peter asked innocently. “Who hasn’t come
back?”

“No one hasn’t come back; it’s a new chap hasn’t turned up at all. Both
he and his people have mysteriously disappeared, vamoosed, vanished!
Awfully funny thing. There’s no end of a fuss.”

“P’r’aps he changed his mind at the last minute,” Peter suggested.
“P’r’aps he heard something about old Pig-Face and funked it.”

“I don’t know,” said the other. “Old Pig-Face looks awfully worried.
Shouldn’t wonder if we had detectives down, and all sorts of games.”

Peter looked thoughtful for a minute, and then, to the astonishment of
his friend, who was really impressed by the enigma, doubled up with
uncontrollable laughter.

The assistance of Scotland Yard, however, was not called in; for, on
writing to the Bishop and Admiral given as references by Mr. T. Jones
(boldly lifted, address and all, from “Who’s Who,” by the ingenious
Tod), the headmaster of Harchester received an emphatic disclaimer from
each of these gentlemen of any knowledge of any such person. Moreover,
an inquiry at the post office of the Welsh village from which Mr.
Jones’ letters were dated only elicited the laconic response of “Gone
away--address not known.”

Katie had received and faithfully followed her instructions.

Every Jones of the whole thirteen in that club was approached in
vain, and inquiry at the shipping office only elicited the fact that,
plentiful as persons bearing that patronymic appeared to be, no
passenger of that name had sailed by that particular boat.

The authorities at Harchester came to the unwelcome conclusion that
they had been hoaxed; and all that remained of the incident were
certain letters, treasured, on the one hand for purposes of possible
identification, on the other for more frivolous reasons.



“TONY”


Tony sat in the gutter, wondering what would be the coolest thing to
do. The front doors of all the houses in the dull, quite respectable
street, wherein he dwelt, were close shut, as were also the
white-curtained windows, lest dust should blow in and sully these
hall-marks of houses that possess a front “best room.” The neighboring
children were all away; some at the recreation ground, some to paddle
their feet in the nearest approach to a river the town boasted--a
little muddy stream about a foot deep at the best of times; now a sort
of pea soup.

But on this August afternoon Tony felt too slack and too sticky to
seek any amusement that necessitated a walk; so, having been thrust
out of the back door by his mother, who was washing and wanted no boys
“clutterin’ round”--he strolled lanquidly to the front, quite sure that
here, at any rate, he would be left in peace, as the dwellers in Eva
Terrace never used their front doors except on Sundays.

Just then a man carrying a bag came running down the road, which was a
short cut to the station.

“Here, youngster!” he shouted, throwing the bag to Tony. “Carry this
for me, and I’ll just do it! Run after me for all you’re worth!”

Tony caught the bag dexterously and ran. He could run faster than the
man, and was soon jogging on ahead of him. At the station Tony got
sixpence for his pains, thrust it deep into his right trouser pocket,
and walked soberly away.

Infinite possibilities were opened up by this unexpected windfall, and
he had no intention of mentioning it at home. His people were poor,
but not poorer than their neighbors; his brothers and sisters were all
older than he, and in his case Benjamin’s lot was not accompanied by
the advantages with which it is generally accredited.

A lonely child was Tony, gentle and biddable enough, quick at his
books, and happiest in his school hours, when people let him alone, and
he succeeded in pleasing the clever, testy schoolmaster, whose life
was embittered by a constant struggle with an overwhelming desire to
whack the young demons who tormented him. He had been “summonsed” twice
by irate parents; so now he restrained himself at the expense of his
teaching powers and his nerves generally.

Tony stopped in the middle of the road and smacked his pocket.

“I’ll go to the baths to-morrow morning,” he said aloud, “and see them
young nobs swim; it’s only threepence before nine.”

A great excitement--unshared, unmentioned--had lately come into Tony’s
life. Every morning for the last week, about eight o’clock he had
watched for two boys who went by on bicycles with towels strapped
on to their handle-bars. One was quite a little boy, far less than
Tony himself; the other bigger, and in his eyes less interesting; and
in a few minutes after them came one for whom Tony had conceived the
extravagant, unreasoning admiration children will sometimes lavish on
somebody with whom they have never exchanged, or hope to exchange, two
words; someone unconscious of their existence as they are the richer
for that other’s.

Everybody in Tony’s locality knew the recruiting sergeant by sight:
“Sergeant” who taught drill and gymnastics to all the “young gen’lemen”
in the neighborhood. But Tony adored him, not only because he was so
tall and good looking--and Tony was strenuously certain that it is a
goodly thing to be upstanding and to have broad shoulders, instead
of the champagne-bottle variety carried by his brothers and their
like--but because he knew that the sergeant wished him well; inasmuch
as that he, even he also, was one of the hundred and fifty odd boys
in the parish schools of St. James’s. For now that the war fever was
somewhat abating, now that Sergeant himself had come back from the
front that he might send more soldiers out there, he had offered to
drill the boys in St. James’s schools twice a week for love. And it
could not be arranged.

The authorities, while granting the utility of algebra and French to
those in the seventh standard, who were presently to form the bulk and
bulwark of the nation, saw no good reason why an attempt should be made
to give them straight backs and broad chests. So Sergeant, who loved
his country, and was, in his way, something of a philanthropist, sighed
and swore, and “put the question by.”

But Tony, who had heard the subject canvassed, and listened to the
lamentations of the boys, was filled with a passion of gratitude, which
found no expression save in a constant hanging round corners to see his
idol pass.

       *       *       *       *       *

Tony sat on his bed naked, in a patch of moonlight, admiring his own
legs.

“My body be whiter nor theirn,” he said to himself, and indeed, his
limbs looked radiantly fair in the mellow light. “But my arms beant so
’ard as ’is’n for all ’e be such little chap,” he continued, pinching
the soft flesh of the upper arm in a dissatisfied way.

Tony was too excited to sleep just yet--such a great deal had happened
in the last two days. In all his ten years he had never felt as he felt
now--and yet, from an outsider’s point of view, what a little thing it
was!

The day before he had gone to the swimming bath, intending just to
watch. It was empty, save for Sergeant and the two boys who went with
him every morning. The water looked so clear, and there seemed so much
room in the big bath, that Tony undressed and went in.

He paddled shyly about in the shallow end, admiring the two boys, who
dived off the spring-board and the pulpit and swam under water, while
Sergeant roared directions at them, and flung them head over heels in
the deep end, in a fashion that filled Tony with surprise.

The big boy was practising side-stroke, when the little one, whom
Sergeant, for some reason or other, called the “swashbuckler,” swam
down the bath toward Tony, remarking cheerfully:

“You’ll get rheumatism if you paddle so. Shall I show you the first
exercise?”

He was such a little boy, but he swam like a frog. His square, freckled
face was so friendly that Tony forgot that he himself was an “oik,” and
therefore his sworn foe, and said, “Please, sir!” in the meekest of
tiny whispers.

“You must kneel on the edge further down, and let me chuck you in,” was
the next command--and Sergeant stopped in the very middle of a shout to
chuckle and whisper:

“Blest if the swashbuckler isn’t giving a swimming lesson on his own
account!”

And now Tony sat on the edge of his bed and remembered two wonderful
mornings, and pondered what it could be that made that friendly little
boy so different from all the other boys he knew. And through all his
thinking, like the refrain of a song, sounded a sentence he had once
heard at Sunday school. He could not remember the whole of it; but
five words seemed to batter at his brain as though demanding instant
comprehension and attention--“_The temple of your body._”

Tony nodded as though in answer to a spoken word. He pictured Sergeant
cleaving the water with his long arms, the muscles standing out on his
white shoulders.

“I s’pose,” said Tony softly, as if in answer to that unseen,
persistent voice, “some folks ’as temples for bodies, and some folks
’as on’y tin churches, or, so to speak, a public.... I’d like a temple
myself for ch’ice.”

He was not very sure what a temple was, but in a vague way he _was_
assured that it was something large and beautiful; and his conception
was helped out by hazy recollections of Sunday school and Solomon, and
thoughts of a building spacious and white.

“There used to be a free night,” he continued, reverting again to the
actual, “but the Corpeeration stopped it--I wonder w’y? It’s tuppence
after six, that’s a shillin’ a week--’ow can pore boys get that?--an’
I promised ’im as I’d learn the others w’en I could get a chanst, when
he’s learned me....”

Tony’s voice faltered, he was getting sleepy. He gave his smooth white
arms another stroke, slipped into his nightshirt, and got into bed.

“E’ve give oi a shillin’ to pay for four more mornin’s, till ’e do go
away,” he whispered ecstatically as he laid his head on the pillow, and
Tony fell asleep.

That evening Tony’s elder brother “Earny,” who cleaned bicycles, and
was ’prenticed to a dealer in the neighborhood, wanted his Sunday
necktie, for he purposed to “walk out with his young lady.” He ran
upstairs to the room he shared with Tony and another brother, to find
the little boy fast asleep, worn out by unusual exercise and varied
emotions.

Earny could not find his tie, and on lifting Tony’s trousers to see
if by any chance it was hidden beneath them, a shilling rolled out of
the pocket and finished spinning with a clang, just in the very centre
of the patch of moonlight where a quarter of an hour earlier Tony had
decided that he, at all events, “would ’ave a temple for ch’ice.”

“’Ullo!” thought Earny to himself, “where did that kid collar a bob?
’E bin a’ter no good, I’ll be boun’, so secret-like and sayin’ nothin’
to nobody. Serve ’im right if I buys some smokes with ’un;” and Earny
departed quietly, without having fulfilled his original intention of
waking Tony that he might look for the missing necktie.

At nine o’clock the following morning Tony still lay upon his bed,
wide-eyed, white-cheeked, with blank despair writ large upon his face.
Breakfast was over long ago, his family had all departed to their daily
work; his mother was ironing in the kitchen, he could hear the bump of
the iron as she slammed it on the table; the bedroom could wait till
one of the girls came in at dinner-time, so no one interfered with Tony.

He knew that it was his brother who must have taken the shilling--the
precious shilling that had meant so much to him. He knew that he had
no redress, no one would believe him if he told them how he came by
it, and in his utter misery he was too poor-spirited even to think of
reprisals. His whole imagination centred round the dreadful certainty
that Sergeant and the little gen’leman and the little gen’leman’s
brother would think him a fraud. For a brief space the sun had shone
out on his drab life, discovering hitherto undreamt-of colors in the
landscape, but now....

“I can never watch for ’em no more,” he said, with a hard, tearless sob.

Presently he stood out on the floor and shook his nightshirt about his
feet; he dressed quickly, and did not even wash his face as he was wont
to do.

“’Tain’t no use for the likes of me to try,” he said bitterly.

Then he went to his brother’s drawer and stole the bundle of cigarettes
he found there, and went out and smoked under the railway bridge till
his body was as sick as his heart.



A SQUARE PEG


“I told him plainly beforehand that if he did not get a scholarship
this term he must go into business. He has not won a scholarship, and,
situated as you are, any other course would be absurd.”

Uncle Henry shut his mouth with a snap, while he stared fixedly over
his sister’s head that he might not see the pleading in her eyes as she
said timidly:

“But fourteen is so young, Henry, and Rodney is so small for his
age----”

“I fail to see that his size has anything to do with it; and you,
Felicia, must learn to face things as they are, not as you would have
them. If you defer for one moment the chance of Rodney’s making his
own living, you are doing an injustice both to him and to his sisters.
Pardon my plain speaking, but he is the son of an exceedingly poor
widow and must be dealt with accordingly.”

Through the open windows came the sound of a boy’s laughter and the
ring of a smartly struck cricket ball. Uncle Henry waved his hand in
the direction of the sound, saying:

“There, you see; that’s what his education at present amounts to; he’s
a pretty bat, and doubtless looks forward to a life all flannels and
cider-cup and yells of admiration when he makes a few runs; the sooner
all that nonsense is knocked out of him the better.”

“But Rodney is not idle, Henry,” his mother pleaded; “his form-master
and the Head both speak well of him and say that he has a very good
chance next year, although he has missed this; you know the exam. came
on just after his father’s death, when the boy was dreadfully upset.”

“I have made you an offer, you may take it or leave it. You can put
him into one of my businesses; there will be no premium, and I’ll
pay for his board at a thoroughly good boarding-house I know of in
Mecklenburg Square, where he will be well looked after. In the meantime
you must try to let this house, and then you can come up and live in
the suburbs, and he can live with you and go to business every day by
train; the little girls can go to a High School. With the many claims
I have upon me, this is all that I can do, and I must serve you in the
way that seems best to me.”

Uncle Henry sat down and took up the newspaper in token that the
subject was thoroughly threshed out. He had gone into business at
fourteen, and now at little past thirty had a house in Grosvenor
Gardens and a “place down the river.” He had married at six-and-twenty,
“going where money was.” The names of his two sons were down for
Harrow, while his wife already talked of the time when she should
“present” their baby girl. He quite acknowledged that it was his
duty to help his sister now that the collapse of those Australian
banks had practically beggared her; but there was at the back of his
mind a lurking satisfaction that the way he had chosen should be one
calculated to destroy those castles of tradition her husband had been
so fond of building. It was a perpetual annoyance both to his wife and
to himself that Rodney and his sisters should be so very different
in appearance from their own children; that, clean or dirty, these
children without a sixpence should so strongly resemble the old family
portraits that his brother-in-law’s ridiculous will forbade to be sold;
that they should in speech and bearing so unmistakably be gentlefolk,
and yet be his own sister’s children seemed to him a proof of nature’s
ineptitude.

To be sure he and Felcourt had been on friendly enough terms, but he
had always--though through no fault of Felcourt’s--been conscious that
his brother-in-law and his ancestors for generations belonged to a
class which only of late, and that not altogether with enthusiasm, has
opened its doors to successful men of Uncle Henry’s stamp.

Rodney’s mother went and stood by the open window. The active white
figures flying between the wickets on the wide lawn seemed all blurred
and indistinct, and she lifted her slim hand to her throat to still its
throbbing ache; she was not a strong-minded woman. All she had asked of
life was the power to make folks happy, and to be loved; and hitherto
her desire had been generously fulfilled. Married at eighteen to a man
who, taking her out of somewhat sordid and uncongenial surroundings,
made her queen of a household where gaiety and good manners had
been vassals for generations, she readily adapted herself to the new
atmosphere, and became a sweet-voiced echo of her husband, and for
fourteen years was absurdly happy. Then Rodney Felcourt died, and six
months afterward came the collapse of the Australian banks.

Uncle Henry had a way of carrying through any course of action he had
determined upon, and by the beginning of October his nephew Rodney
found himself taking his exercise in the Gray’s Inn Road instead of in
the playing-fields at school. The change of life was so radical and so
sudden that the child hardly understood what had happened. Like the old
woman in the nursery rhyme, he was forever exclaiming, “This be never
I!” in melancholy astonishment. He was learning to tie up parcels,
he stuck on endless quantities of postage stamps, and occasionally
addressed a few envelopes for one of the typists. He did what he was
told as well as he could, the day seemed endlessly long, and by evening
he was so tired that he went to bed soon after the seven-o’clock
dinner. A young boy for his age, he was quite unprecocious and
unformed; hitherto his place in the universe had been clearly defined
and not difficult to fill; to do well in his form, thus pleasing the
“mater” and his form-master, to be “decent” to his little sisters at
home, and “jolly” with the chaps at school, to be good at games and get
into the “house” eleven, and to be absolutely “straight” in word, deed,
and across country--such was Rodney’s conception of the whole duty of
boy, and he had acted up to it with considerable success. Now, life was
not only complicated but unintelligible, and he was too bewildered even
to rebel against a fate that kept him tying up parcels indifferently
well when he felt that by all the ordinary standards of conduct he
ought to have been writing Latin verses.

Every Sunday he wrote neat, stilted little letters to his mother, which
informed her that he had been to church at the Foundling, was going for
a walk in the afternoon, that he was well and hoped that she was well,
and that he was her very loving son. Felicia crushed the paper against
her cheek in the vain attempt to extract from it something real and
Rodney-like. She thought of the school letters last term, how full of
life they had been, how numerous the requests they contained! Rodney
never asked for anything now, and she knew that the boy was holding
himself well in hand lest any part of the truth might hurt her.

At the end of October, Cecil Connop came back from Paris. His arrival
was announced in all the papers, for he was of some importance in
literary circles; his great ability was acknowledged on all sides, the
more freely that he was something of a failure. Though his work was
widely read and appreciated by cultivated people, he was not popular.
His appearance was quite ordinary, and he made no attempt to resemble
any historical personage. He abhorred advertisement, considering that
his published writings had no sort of connection with his private life.
His readers were quite ignorant as to whether he had a mother or not,
and his personal friends suffered under no apprehension that their
loves or their bereavements would figure, flimsily disguised, in his
next book. His rooms in Jermyn Street had never been photographed, and
only his servant knew whether he liked his bath hot or cold. The fact
was that Cecil Connop kept one face for the world and quite another
for the old friends who loved him--a proceeding so out of date among
literary people as to be almost medieval. But it has its advantages for
such as like curtains to their windows. According to his own account
he never had any money, and was, when in England, in hourly danger of
Holloway Jail; but he paid his card debts and never seemed to lack any
of the things that go toward making life pleasant.

Felicia’s letter announcing little Rodney’s apprenticeship was a great
surprise to Cecil. He had, of course, heard of her serious losses, but
he knew that her brother was a wealthy man and “people always manage
somehow”; that in this case they hadn’t “managed” came upon him with
quite an unpleasant shock.

For some reason which she would not define even to herself, Felicia had
not asked any of her friends then in town to look up Rodney. She was
absolutely certain in her own mind that he had no business there, but
circumstances were too strong for her, and she dared not offend Henry.
When she read in the paper that Cecil had returned to town she felt
distinctly relieved. Here was an understanding person who would ask no
questions and could be depended upon to give a faithful account of the
child.

Cecil wrote at once to Rodney asking him to lunch at his club on the
following Saturday, and to Felicia, to say how pleased he would be to
do what he could for him while he was in town.

Rodney sat on the edge of his bed, too tired to undress. His flannels
and “sweater” were spread on the pillow, and from time to time the
boy laid his face down on them, inhaling the clean, woolly smell. He
had of course never worn them since he came to London--Uncle Henry
had not thought it necessary to make any arrangement as to how Rodney
should spend his Saturdays--yet the sight of them comforted him. He was
beginning to employ that saddest of all philosophies, that nothing can
take from us the good times we have had. He had eaten hardly anything
all day, and the ache in his throat was well nigh intolerable. His door
opened, and the maid announced: “A gentleman to see you, sir. Said he’d
come up here.”

Cecil had come before his letter. As the open door betrayed the
listless little figure with the scattered flannels the whole situation
was revealed to him in a flash, and for the hundredth time in a not
over well-spent life he cursed the folly which had rendered him so
incapable of helping his friends in any material way. When Rodney
realized who was his visitor, he simply flung himself bodily upon him,
and Cecil Connop, who was tender-hearted and easily touched, kissed
him and had been rapturously kissed in return before he had time to
consider whether the boy would be offended or not. Then they both sat
on the bed and for the first time for six weeks Rodney chattered. One
of the boarders, a girl who did typewriting in Chancery Lane, passing
his doorway, stopped and smiled as she heard the ripple of Rodney’s
laughter; she waited for a full minute, enjoying the unwonted sound,
then passed on to her own room unaccountably cheered. People in that
house were too busy and too tired to laugh!

When Cecil Connop got back to his rooms he sat and smoked for a long
time before he wrote the following letter to Felicia Felcourt:

  “To-night I have spent an hour with Rodney, and find him apparently
  well and cheerful. I cannot faithfully report upon his appearance,
  as it was candle-light and I did not see him very distinctly. He
  talked freely enough about you all at home, about his old school,
  about myself; but, when I come to think of it, said nothing about
  his business. You will, I know, pardon me if I ask you in all
  seriousness--is this necessary? The whole time I was with him I had a
  curious sense that he was playing truant and ought to be at school;
  and there is one thing that an expression in your letter impels me
  to say at the risk of being impertinent: no amount of money in the
  world is such a possession as the breeding you and his dead father
  have given your boy. Forgive this frankness and believe me that I
  feel with you the more keenly that I am so conscious of my own gross
  impotence to help.”

On Saturdays Rodney left business at one, and on this particular
Saturday flew back to “Meck” to change into his “Etons,” when he hied
him on the top of an omnibus to lunch with Cecil Connop at his club.
When he was seated opposite to his host, that gentleman proceeded
to examine him critically. The boy was unmistakably a gentleman:
everything about him, from the long slender hands of which he was so
unconscious, to the way he looked his companion straight in the eyes,
proclaimed him to come of a race who had spent their days otherwise
than in tying up parcels. Men passing in and out looked pleasantly at
the pretty boy who was so plainly enjoying the unwonted experience;
but Cecil noted that he was very thin, that after the first flush of
greeting was past the little high-bred face was pale, and that there
were black shadows under the long-lashed grey eyes. Moreover, although
there was everything for lunch calculated to please a boy, he ate
hardly anything.

“Are they decent to you at your place of business?” asked Cecil,
carefully pouring cognac into his coffee.

“You see,” said Rodney slowly, “I don’t seem to know anybody....” Then,
with a twinkle of amusement, “They call me a fool when I make mistakes,
which is pretty often, and if I do things right nobody says anything.”

During the next week or two Cecil made a point of seeing Rodney from
time to time, and after each meeting he felt more and more convinced
that the boy’s health was failing. He did not complain, but the
sedentary life was beginning to tell upon a constitution that had never
been so tried. He began to stoop, and even with Cecil his laugh was by
no means so ready or so frequent as it had been.

Felicia, although at first much comforted by Cecil’s account of Rodney,
longed after him as only widowed woman can long for her son; but she
had promised her brother that she would not attempt to see the boy for
three months lest it should unsettle him, and it only wanted three
weeks of the stipulated time.

Rodney had not seen Cecil for a fortnight; he was out of town, but
this Rodney did not know. It was Saturday, and a smell of onion curry
pervaded the boarding-house, the Square garden looked hopelessly
uninviting, and he felt that he could endure neither the one nor the
other a moment longer. So he hied him to Pall Mall to see if he could
catch a glimpse of his friend. A conspicuously forlorn little figure,
he strolled slowly past the many clubs, when a man coming hastily down
some steps stared hard at Rodney, and, fixing his eyeglasses more
firmly on his nose, turned and walked swiftly after him.

“Felcourt! Felcourt! What are you doing here?” asked a sharp, nervous
voice, and Rodney started violently as his house-master, “Fireworks
Fenton,” caught him by the shoulder and shook him.

       *       *       *       *       *

“You young ass! Why didn’t you write and tell me all about it?” said
“Fireworks Fenton” an hour later, as he angrily thumped a tea-table in
“Stewart’s” till the cups jumped off their saucers. “We all thought
you’d gone to another school, and here have you missed a whole term,
and lost flesh and muscle, and forgotten everything you ever knew.
I’ve no patience with you; it’s preposterous, and must be put an end
to at once! Give me your uncle’s address and your mother’s----” and
“Fireworks” glared at Rodney through his eyeglasses, and Rodney sat
swallowing uncomfortable things in his throat, while his heart felt
lighter than it had been for many a long week. It was so good to be
bullied in that particular fashion once more. Now he dared to look
forward. He didn’t in the least know how it was to be managed, but his
old master had told him he was to come back to school next term, and
_he_ always got his own way even with the Head himself. “Fireworks”
was not afraid of twenty Uncle Henries--“Worthy but mistaken, worthy
but mistaken,” he had muttered more than once during his late pupil’s
explanations. Rodney went with him to Paddington to see him off, and
it was only as the train steamed out of the station that “Fireworks
Fenton” recollected that he had omitted the special business he
had come up to town to do. But he only frowned and muttered: “That
ridiculous little Felcourt put it out of my head, but I’m glad I found
him--glad I found him. What fools these dear women are! What fools!
What fools!” and whenever he turned over a sheet of newspaper (of which
he didn’t read a line), he frowned again, exclaiming: “What fools!”

The particular fool Mr. Fenton had in his mind found two letters
beside her plate on the following Tuesday morning. She knew both the
handwritings, and gave a little sigh as she opened that from Rodney’s
house-master: it would be to ask how Rodney was getting on: he had
always been fond of the boy, and she had told him nothing.

  “You will, I hope, acquit me of frivolous interference,” ran the
  letter, “in matters that do not concern me, when I tell you that I
  have seen Rodney and heard from him of the very great change it has
  been necessary to make in his life. I greatly wish that I had known
  sooner your reasons for taking him away from school, as I think one
  of the chief obstacles could have been, and still can be, easily
  removed. Dear Mrs. Felcourt, it is with considerable diffidence that
  I venture to ask you to do me a great favor, namely, to allow me
  to undertake Rodney’s education; my one stipulation being that he
  should come back to my house. You know that where there are twenty
  to thirty boys, one more or less makes but little difference, and
  in becoming responsible for the school fees, I am doing no more
  than my headmaster did for me. My mother was left a widow with five
  children and very little of this world’s gear. I am fully aware how
  much I shall be the gainer if you allow me to have Rodney, for,
  young as he is, he had a distinct influence upon that mysterious and
  fluctuating commodity, the ‘tone of the house,’ and I have not the
  slightest doubt that he will be able to make his own way by aid of
  scholarships, ultimately earning his own living nearly as soon as if
  he had remained in business.

  “Forgive me where I have expressed myself clumsily, and believe me,

                                   “Faithfully yours,
                                                      “REGINALD FENTON.”

It was a long time before Felicia took up the other letter, which was
from Cecil Connop, and of this one sentence stood out in letters of
fire to the exclusion of everything else:

“I don’t believe the boy’s health will stand it, Felicia; come and see
for yourself.”

Felicia packed her smallest box and went.

When Rodney came back from business that evening Selina, the
parlormaid, informed him that a lady was waiting in the drawing-room to
see him. Selina, usually so grim, was all “nods and becks and wreathed
smiles”; she liked Rodney, though he did “throw about his clothes
something shameful.”

He was very tired and his head ached, as it always did in the evening
lately, but something in the maid’s tone made him forget his weariness,
and he raced up the stairs certain that only one lady could have
produced such unwonted geniality on Selina’s part. But he paused on the
mat outside the door; suppose it should only be his aunt! She had never
come yet, but she might, and how was Selina to know that he did not
care particularly for his aunt?

The door opened suddenly from the inside.

“I _knew_ nobody else would come upstairs like that. What were you
waiting for, you dear goose?”--and Rodney’s mother inspected her boy
for herself.

Next day she went to see her brother at his office, and told him that
she had decided to accept Mr. Fenton’s offer. She rather surprised
Uncle Henry, she was so decided and so cool; he did not know that
Cecil Connop had got up two hours earlier than usual, in order to have
plenty of time to fortify Felicia for the interview, only leaving her
at the office door.

“Do you think he will refuse to have anything more to do with us?” she
had asked timidly.

“He couldn’t be so absurdly unjust,” answered Cecil stoutly; “but, even
if he were, you have Rodney to think of. It is a chance in a thousand;
it would be worse than madness to throw it away. He’s a square little
peg, is Rodney; you’ll never fit him into that hole.”

Uncle Henry gave in quite graciously, though he was not best pleased.
Had he but known it, he revenged himself upon Mr. Fenton for his
interference by writing him a solemn letter of thanks, in which he
spoke of his “generous, nay munificent offer.” “Fireworks Fenton,” very
red and uncomfortable, rolled the letter into a ball and dropped it
into his waste-paper basket, exclaiming:

“Pompous idiot!”

When Rodney went home his little sisters found him more delightful
than ever, but he was reticent as regarded his experiences in London,
describing it briefly as “a beastly hole.”

On his return to school “Fireworks Fenton” sent for him the very first
evening.

“A row already, Felcourt!” exclaimed his best friend in dismay.

But Rodney ran along the passage and knocked at the study door without
any fears on that score. As he closed the door behind him it was the
master who looked embarrassed, as he jerked out:

“I’m pleased to see you back, Felcourt. Remember that if you are in
any way perplexed, or get into trouble ... or ... do you want any
pocket-money, by the way?” and “Fireworks” bent anew over the letter he
was writing.

“No, sir, I have the usual pocket-money, thank you; but please I would
like to----”

“Now, Felcourt, don’t you see that I’m busy? Go away, go away!”

“But please, sir----”

“I know perfectly well all the absurd and ridiculous things you would
say, and I very much prefer that you should not say them. One thing
_I_ have to say, attend to your English prose! I have a distinct
recollection that your spelling of English is revolting--positively
revolting. Attend to it!”



A TWENTIETH-CENTURY MISOGYNIST


  What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the
  souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labors to these
  Bodleians were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state.
  I do not want to handle or profane the leaves, their winding sheets.
  I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning walking
  amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings
  is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew
  amid the happy orchard.--CHARLES LAMB.


I

Every Easter holidays the schoolmaster went back to Oxford. Head of a
flourishing preparatory school in the north, a bachelor, absorbed in
his boys, strenuous, matter-of-fact, he yet retained after some twenty
years of monotonous grind a romantic affection for the dear city of his
youthful dreams.

He always put up at the King’s Arms, that ancient hostel with the
undulating floors, where the ale is brown and strong, and the cold beef
tender and streaky. On his very first day he hied him to a solitude he
loved, paid his modest threepence, and mounted to a favorite haunt of
his--the picture-gallery of the Bodleian Library.

It was always empty; it almost always is empty. Undergraduates know
it not; artistic and intellectual residents appear to scorn its
prosaic portraits of bygone poets and college benefactors, its humble
curiosities. Visitors seldom trouble themselves to mount the few
extra steps leading to it from the world-famed library below. But
the schoolmaster loved to wander up and down the second gallery. He
loved the double archway with the traceried roof, where the statue
of William, Earl of Pembroke, stands in the centre, and the two wide
bay windows are filled with pale stained glass, and one has a deep,
comfortable seat.

As usual, the gallery seemed deserted, and the schoolmaster let
the peace of its solitude slide into his soul, till his spirit was
compassed about with a great calm. He strolled slowly through the
gallery, his hands, holding his straw hat, clasped behind him. He
always uncovered the instant he entered the little modest door in the
corner of the great quadrangle that leads to so many wonders. Presently
he reached the archway where he was wont to sit and dream.

With a start of surprise he discovered that it was already tenanted.

Under the portraits of Ben Jonson and Joseph Trapp, curled up in
a corner of the deep window-seat, his muddy boots reposing on the
sacred oak, was a boy--a small, thin boy in Norfolk jacket and
knickerbockers, apparently about twelve years old, who read absorbedly
a popular illustrated magazine. He never looked up as the schoolmaster
approached. Apparently he neither heard his footstep nor realized that
the newcomer had paused to stare at him in speechless astonishment.

Amazement, accompanied by extreme annoyance, was the schoolmaster’s
predominant emotion. There seemed to him something incongruous to the
verge of irreverence in anyone daring to read a modern magazine under
the very roof of the building that contained so much of venerable
scholarship.

It is true that the boy was perfectly quiet. Beyond the turning of
his page, he made no sound of any sort, and the schoolmaster found
himself watching this reader with a sort of dreadful fascination. He
longed that the child should reach the bottom of his page and look
up. He even gave a little cough to attract his attention. But the boy
seemed absolutely unconscious of either the stranger’s presence or his
scrutiny, and read on unmoved, smiling occasionally at what he read.

The schoolmaster fussed to the end of the gallery, pausing at every
window to look out over the roofs at the towers and spires of Oxford.
Then he fussed back again along the other side, where the view consists
of the grey-walled quadrangle, a veritable “haunt of ancient peace.”
The peace that had enveloped him on his first entry spread her wings
and fled. Irritation and curiosity had taken her place, and as he
reached the archway again he stopped and looked at the motionless
little figure in the window.

The boy was no longer reading.

The magazine lay on the window-seat beside him. His knees were drawn up
to his chin, his arms clasped about them, and he stared unblinkingly
at the portrait of Abraham Cowley on the wall that faced him.

The schoolmaster walked round the statue of William of Pembroke
till he, too, faced the boy. This time the child certainly glanced
in his direction, but the glance was of the most cursory order, and
wholly without interest. In an instant he had returned to his grave
contemplation of the poet, and the schoolmaster might himself have been
the statue of William of Pembroke for any interest he excited.

The boy was pale and thin-faced, with large, hollow eyes and a tall,
wide forehead--a scholar’s forehead, as the schoolmaster, accustomed
for years to the observation of boys, had already noted. But what
latent scholarship was displayed in the reading of that obnoxious
magazine? And what business, the schoolmaster asked himself angrily,
had a boy of that age to be boxed up indoors on a fine afternoon in the
Easter holidays?

The schoolmaster was a conscientious man in the pursuit of his
calling. From the very first he had taught himself to look upon boys
as individuals. He loved them; he whole-heartedly wished them well.
They were to him of most absorbing interest; but he liked to get away
from them sometimes, and nowhere had he been able to pass so completely
from his ordinary life of a hundred petty duties and anxieties as in
the high solitude of that deserted gallery, set in the very centre of
the scenes he held most dear, now spoilt and desecrated by this young
interloper with his horrid modern magazine. Why on earth did he choose
to come here?

The schoolmaster could bear it no longer. “Boy,” he exclaimed, “why do
you come and read here?”

Slowly the boy turned his melancholy eyes upon his questioner.
“Because,” he answered, civilly enough, but without any enthusiasm, “it
is generally perfectly quiet here.”

There was the faintest perceptible emphasis on the “generally,” not so
much impertinent as gently reproving. Having answered, he turned his
eyes again upon the chubby, smiling countenance of Abraham Cowley, and
silence fell upon them like a pall.

The schoolmaster was baffled, but more curious than ever. He was quite
conscious of the implied reproach in the “generally,” and he noted the
absence of the courteous “sir” with which any properly constituted boy
would conclude a remark made to an elder. But he could not feel that
the boy had been willfully rude. He would try again. “May I ask,” he
said pleasantly, “why you are so fond of looking at the portrait of
Abraham Cowley?”

Again the boy shifted his gaze from the smug charms of the poet to the
worn and somewhat homely features of his questioner.

“I like him cos he’s so good-tempered--in this one,” was the brief
reply.

The schoolmaster came and stood beside the boy, and looked at the
portrait. Above it was another, also by Kneller, but representing him
as thin and severe-looking.

“They’re very different, aren’t they?” the schoolmaster remarked.
“You’d hardly think they were the same man, would you?”

“I expect,” the boy said solemnly, “in the top one he’s been married.”

This startling supposition fairly took away the schoolmaster’s breath.
He racked his brains to remember all he had ever heard or read of
Abraham Cowley, and couldn’t for the life of him recollect whether he
was married or not. It is not in the nature of a true schoolmaster to
leave a youthful mind in the darkness of ignorance if he can be the
bearer of a torch whose light may pierce that gloom, so he said: “I
expect it was his political troubles that caused so marked a change in
his appearance. Do you know anything about him?”

“No, but I like him.”

“Shall I tell you about him?”

“No, thank you,” the boy answered politely, but with firm finality.

He took up his magazine again, opened it, spread it upon his knees, and
in one instant was absorbed in its pages.

The schoolmaster sat down on the window-seat and gazed alternately
at the boy and at the portraits of Ben Jonson and Joseph Trapp above
his head. Since he had been a little boy himself he had never felt
so snubbed. He was wholly unaccustomed to be a cypher in the eyes of
boys, and suddenly with devastating force there was flung upon him
the conviction that he never saw a real boy at all--that the boys
he saw were all carefully expurgated editions arranged to suit his
sensibilities.

A wild spirit of enterprise seduced the schoolmaster. He felt himself
as one who after long sailing in smooth, familiar waters suddenly
sights an unknown and precipitous shore.

He had come to Oxford to get away from the boys he thought he knew.
What if, at Oxford, he received real enlightenment with regard to a boy
he did not know? The sunshine faded and the gallery grew dark. Outside,
he heard the soft patter of a heavy April shower.

“You ought not to read in this light,” he said suddenly, “you will hurt
your eyes.”

The boy looked up surprised at this fresh interruption, but he
obediently closed his book: there is something almost irresistible in
the commands of those accustomed to exert authority.

“Do you come here often?” asked the schoolmaster.

“Yes, whenever I’ve got threepence to get in.”

“Has no one ever told you that when you are talking to an older man it
is considered polite to say ‘sir’?”

“No. I don’t know many old men, nor men at all, for the matter of that.”

“Why, Oxford is full of men.”

“That may be. I don’t know ’em. I only wish I did.”

The boy spoke bitterly and his eyes were full of gloom.

“Don’t you go to school?” this “older man” asked anxiously.

“No, I’m too delicate, so they say.”

“Who teaches you, then?”

“A guv’ness. I say, do you think we _ought_ to talk here?”

“I see no reason why not. This isn’t the library, there is no notice
enforcing silence.”

The boy looked as if he wished there was. He sat perfectly mute, with
his eyes fixed on the placid portrait over the schoolmaster’s head.

“Wouldn’t you like to come downstairs with me and see some of the
curiosities in the library?” the schoolmaster suggested beguilingly.

“No, thank you.”

Really it was most difficult to make any headway with this boy. But the
schoolmaster possessed to the full the necessary perseverance of his
craft, so he continued his catechism:

“Do your parents live in Oxford?”

“I haven’t got any parents, they’re dead.”

“Dear me, how sad! With whom do you live, then?”

“Aunts.”

Written words can in nowise express the snappiness with which the boy
ejaculated this monosyllable. The schoolmaster felt unaccountably
chilled and worsted, and silence fell upon them once more.

The black cloud had passed over the Bodleian, the rain ceased, and the
sun shone out again. The boy swung his feet off the window-seat, put on
his cap and picked up his magazine, and without a word of farewell,
strolled nonchalantly out of the gallery, leaving the schoolmaster to
exclaim when he had finally vanished, “Well, of all the curmudgeony
boys it has ever been my lot to meet, there goes the most curmudgeony!”


II

Yet he found it difficult to dismiss the ungracious youngster from his
thoughts. Next afternoon he sought the gallery again, but there was
no little figure curled up in the deep window-seat. The poet Cowley
smiled serenely, the gallery was deserted, dignified, reposeful as
of yore: with all its mellow charm of faded coloring, that even the
luminous stillness of that April afternoon could not burnish into real
brightness. But the usual sense of pleasant well-being, and ordered
peace, failed to enwrap the soul of the schoolmaster. Even as the day
before he had found the presence of the reading figure in the window
irritating and incongruous, so to-day he found its absence singularly
disturbing. He walked once round the gallery, sat a few minutes looking
at the portrait of Cowley and wondering what mysterious charm it
held for the queer child who loved it, and so into the dear familiar
irregular streets, where he scanned every boy who passed, in the hope
of coming across his small acquaintance of the day before. He went
every day to the gallery, but no boy was there. He almost gave up hope
of ever seeing him again, but he did not forget; and when, eight days
after their first meeting, he mounted to the gallery and saw the
little figure crouched in the window as before, with a gaily covered
magazine open on his knees, the schoolmaster’s heart beat a little
faster, and he hurried forward, exclaiming: “Where have you been all
these days?”

The boy started at his greeting, looked up, and a smile of recognition
changed his face so absolutely that the schoolmaster felt a queer
tightening in the muscles of his throat.

“I don’t get my pocket-money till a Friday,” the boy explained. “I
couldn’t come before.”

“Well, now you are here, let’s have a chat together,” the schoolmaster
said genially. “We both like this place, let’s tell each other the
reasons why, and see if they’re the same.”

He sat down beside the boy, just out of reach of the muddy boots. The
boy, his magazine still held open on his knees, surveyed his neighbor
with dark, mournful eyes. Now that the smile had ceased to lighten
his face, the schoolmaster was shocked at the sharpness of the thin
cheekbones, the hollows and the blue shadows under the solemn eyes.

“I can’t tell you why I like it,” said the boy, “’cept p’r’aps because
it’s so quiet, no one ever talks here, and there’s no women.”

“But women can come here if they like,” the schoolmaster objected.

“They never _do_ like, not when I’m here,” the boy exclaimed eagerly.
“I’ve been here every week for months and months and I’ve never seen
one.”

“But why do you object to women?” the schoolmaster persisted. “We
should be in a poor case without them, most of us.”

“_I_ don’t object to them,” the boy said wearily; “it’s them objects to
us, and they do talk so--talk and talk and talk about their sufferings.”

“Sufferings?” the schoolmaster repeated.

“_You_ know,” said the boy impatiently, “women’s sufferings and votes
and things, and Parliament and injustice and that.”

“Suffrage, suffrage, you mean suffrage!” cried the schoolmaster.

“It’s all the same, that’s what they talk about, and inferiority and
that. One can’t help being born a boy, can one?”

“_Help_ it!” exclaimed the schoolmaster. “Why, who’d be born anything
else if they had their choice?”

The boy’s pale cheeks flushed. “Do you really mean that?” he asked
eagerly.

“Of course I do. It’s a glorious thing to be a boy who’s going to be a
man.”

“_They_ don’t think so, they say it’s much better to be a girl; they’re
sorry I’m a boy.”

“Oh, come,” the schoolmaster said chaffingly. “You can’t expect me to
believe that. They may say so in a kind of joke, but they don’t really
mean it.”

“Do you know my aunts?”

“Well, no; but I expect they are very like other ladies, who often say
what they don’t mean.”

The boy gave one scornful glance in the direction of the schoolmaster,
lowered his eyes to the printed page, and was instantly absorbed.

The schoolmaster felt that he was dismissed. He had been weighed in
the balance, and found wanting in sympathy and insight, a mere stupid
looker-on at the outside of things. Five minutes ago the boy had
welcomed him. Now, it was as though the child had risen with the royal
prerogative, and closed the interview. The schoolmaster sighed deeply.

The boy looked up. His eyes were the color of a still pool in a
Devonshire trout stream, brown, with olive-green shadows, suggesting
depths unfathomable. The schoolmaster instantly seized upon the small
concession, exclaiming: “I came here every day in the hope of seeing
you again, and now that you are here, you sit and read. Don’t you think
it’s rather unkind?”

The boy flushed hotly, and once more the transforming smile illumined
his face as he said: “You came here on purpose to see me? Why?”

“Well, you see, I’ve known a good many boys in my time, and I thought
you seemed a bit lonely....”

The hungry eyes devoured him, and the schoolmaster stopped in the
middle of his sentence, for, like all Englishmen, he dreaded any
manifestation of feeling, and the boy looked as if he were about to
cry. His fears were groundless, however, for the child only said: “How
many boys have you known?”

“Rather over a thousand, I fancy. You see, it has been my business to
have to do with boys for over twenty years.”

“Over a thousand boys--and I don’t know one! How unfair things are, and
beastly.”

The boy looked enviously at the grizzled man who had known so many
boys; and the man looked pityingly at this boy who seemed to have been
somehow cheated of all that makes youth joyous.

“How is it you have no friends of your own age?” he said presently.
“Why don’t you beg your aunts to send you to school? You’d probably get
stronger directly you got there, with the regular games and busy life.”

“My aunts don’t like schools. They say boys learn to be tyrants and
bullies at school.”

“Oh, do they? You couldn’t have fifty tyrants in one place, or they’d
be the death of one another, like the Kilkenny cats.”

“My aunts say,” the boy continued, “that I’m to be a result. I won’t
be a result. It’s beastly to be a result. I’ll be a policeman when I’m
grown up. Just you wait. I’ll stand outside Parliament, and if a woman
comes near I’ll carry her to jail. You see if I don’t.”

The boy spoke with such vindictive bitterness that the schoolmaster was
shocked.

“I have no doubt,” he said soothingly, “that your aunts have good
reasons for many of their views. You cannot possibly judge of such
questions for many years to come.”

“You’d judge if you heard it all day long like I do,” the boy retorted.
“It’s only here I get away from it. Here in this nice quiet with that
fat, contented chap smiling at me; and now you’ve been and made me
talk about it, so even _he_ will know. You’ve gone and spoilt my
place--it’s too bad.”

The boy looked as if he was really going to cry this time, and the
schoolmaster felt dreadfully guilty.

“Tell me about your parents,” he said hastily. “Do you remember them?”

“My father died before I was born, and my mother just after--she always
was very unwise.”

“My dear boy, you ought not to speak about your mother like that. You
shock me.”

“Well, _they_ say so.”

“If anyone was to say to me that my mother was unwise, I’d--I’d knock
him down!” the schoolmaster exclaimed.

“P’r’aps you knew her?”

“Thank God, yes!”

“Ah, I didn’t, you see--and I don’t think I could knock Aunt Amabel
down--she’s very strong.”

“Of course not, of course not,” the schoolmaster said hastily. “I never
suggested such a thing for a moment. I expect you misunderstand your
aunts, and it is possible that they don’t quite understand you.”

The boy said nothing. He no longer stared at Cowley’s portrait. He
stared at the schoolmaster, and in his melancholy gaze was concentrated
all the bitterness and disappointment of his twelve short years.

“Let us come out and walk by the Cher,” said the schoolmaster.

The boy followed him obediently, and as they turned into Catharine
Street, slipped his hand into that of his new acquaintance.

“Twelve years old,” thought that worthy, “and he takes a fellow’s hand.
Poor little chap!” Aloud he said: “Boys generally take each other by
the arm, you know.”

Instantly his companion seized him by his, and arm in arm they sought
the sheltered walk loved well by Joseph Addison.


III

After that they met every day in the quadrangle of the Bodleian by
appointment, and together mounted to their favorite seat in the
picture-gallery. The boy no longer read a magazine; instead, he asked
questions--endless, anxious, exhaustive questions--as to the usual
doings and habits of boys who lived with each other and were brought up
by men. All his ideas on the subject were gathered from school stories,
and in consequence were crude and chimerical in the extreme. It was
undoubtedly a shock to him when this kindly friend of his frankly
admitted that he had frequently caned boys, and that he was supposed
to have “rather a heavy hand.” And the schoolmaster was still more
shocked at the bitterness of soul he discovered in this queer, quiet
boy. He gathered that the aunts--generally spoken of as “they”--were
ladies wholly absorbed in politics and every kind of movement for the
emancipation of women, and the schoolmaster pictured them as members
of the shrieking sisterhood, ill-favored and ill-dressed, oblivious of
the fact that feminine political opinions do not necessarily march in
elastic-sided boots. When the boy did condescend to mention one of his
aunts by name it was always of “Aunt Amabel” he spoke. She appeared
to be the guiding spirit of the trio, busy, strong, and energetic,
spending what time she could spare from politics in the pursuit of
all those games from which the unfortunate boy was debarred by lack
of comrades, and the schoolmaster found himself thinking with quite
unusual enthusiasm of the sister who kept house for him. At times he
had regretted her exclusively domestic talents. Now he even began to
share her serene conviction that women were, on the whole, so much
superior to men that only the very foolish could wish to resemble them.

In the course of their long talks the schoolmaster had enlightened
his companion as to what constituted, in his simple creed, the whole
duty of boy; and so far as his ideals related to honor and courage and
truthfulness, he found the child singularly receptive and responsive;
but when he touched on the chivalry that should be shown to women, when
he tried to arouse the protective instinct that is generally so deeply
rooted and spontaneous in even the most rough and tumble average boy,
he was met by blank incomprehension, or a veiled hostility that puzzled
and depressed him. “If this,” thought he to himself, “is the result
of the feminist movement on the rising generation of men, God help the
next generation of women!”

The men had come up, and the schoolmaster’s holiday was nearly ended.
In two days more he would need to return to his duties in the North,
to look after the cricket pitches in the playing-fields, and to see
that all was shipshape for the boys’ next term. For the last time he
met his sad-faced little friend in Catharine Street. This time they did
not go up to the picture-gallery. It was a sunny day in late April,
when Oxford seems to burgeon and blossom in a riotous ecstasy of youth
and gladness. River and playing-fields were gay with lithe, flannelled
figures, and everywhere the air was sweet with the scent of opening
lilacs.

“We’ll go on the river this afternoon,” cried the schoolmaster when he
spied the little figure waiting for him; “it’s far too fine to be boxed
up indoors. I’ll take you in a Canadian canoe. You must sit very still,
you know. You don’t think your aunts would mind, do you?”

“They’re in London. Aunt Amabel comes back to-night, but she’ll be off
again in a day or two; she’s always going to meetings. I’m jolly glad
she’s been away this week; she might have wanted to interfere----”

“I don’t think she would mind your coming out with me, or I wouldn’t
take you. You must tell her all about it this evening. I’ll give you my
card to show her, and you can explain how we met.”

The boy’s dark eyes were mutinous as he took the proffered card and
put it in his pocket, but he said nothing. On the river in the bright
sunshine the schoolmaster noticed how very ill he looked, and a great
desire possessed this kindly soul to make things easier for the boy.
The sight of the black shadows encircling the sombre eyes that should
have been so bright with youth and hope decided the schoolmaster to do
what he most hated doing--to interfere in another’s affairs, where he
had no possible excuse or even reason for so doing.

He walked back with the boy to his home, one of the large, ugly,
comfortable houses “standing in its own grounds,” that have sprung
up on the outskirts of beautiful old Oxford: a house that looked
excessively well-to-do and trim and neat. “Nothing of Mrs. Jellyby
here,” thought the schoolmaster.

“Shan’t I see you again?” asked the boy in a husky whisper, as they
reached his gate. “It’ll be awful when you’re gone.”

“We’ll see, we’ll see,” the schoolmaster said hastily. “I can’t make an
arrangement now. Good-bye, my boy. God bless you!”

The boy’s wistful eyes were more than he could bear. The man turned
hastily and walked away, nor once looked back at the watching figure by
the gate.

Next morning he called upon Aunt Amabel about ten o’clock. The less
conventional the hour, the more possible did he feel it might be
to explain his errand. She was at home and would see him. The boy
had evidently done his bidding. As he followed the maid from the
drawing-room to the study, he prayed that some Pentecostal gift of
tongues might be vouchsafed to him.

Aunt Amabel was seated at a large knee-hole table covered with
papers. She rose as he came into the room and held out her hand.
The business-like table, the litter of papers, was exactly what the
schoolmaster had expected, but the lady was wholly unlike the lady of
his dreams. Tall, well-dressed, good-looking, and by no means old, she
made things harder for him by her welcome. “You are the gentleman who
has been so good to Reginald? It is kind of you to call. I am most
pleased to meet you. He is a somewhat unusual boy, is he not? We rather
pride ourselves on his taste for old buildings, and things that do not
generally appeal to boys.”

The schoolmaster mumbled some vague politeness and seated himself upon
a chair which faced the knee-hole table. Aunt Amabel’s eyes were dark,
like the boy’s, but they were bright and lively, and she turned them
now upon her visitor with full inquiring gaze.

“I came,” the schoolmaster said bluntly, “to see you about your nephew.
He is not well, and I think his state of health arises largely from the
fact that he has no companions of his own age, nor suitable interests.
Why don’t you send him to school?”

As he spoke he was perfectly conscious that this self-possessed
young woman was misjudging him, and the knowledge made him even less
diplomatic than usual.

“We have never considered him strong enough for school life. He is an
unusual child of difficult temperament. He would be extremely unhappy
at school.”

There was a superior finality in the lady’s tone that roused all the
fighting element in the schoolmaster. “He could hardly be more unhappy
than he is at present,” he said sharply. “I know that this must appear,
as indeed it is, a piece of unwarrantable interference on my part, but,
having become really interested in the boy, I could not reconcile it to
my conscience to leave Oxford without warning you that if you persist
in keeping your nephew away from the natural companionship, amusements,
and employments of his age, he will wither away as surely as a plant
withers when light and air are withheld from it. That boy will die.”

He shook a thick forefinger at her, and the scorn died out of her eyes.
The men who most countenance the woman’s movement are seldom masterful.
Aunt Amabel began to like this dictatorial man. It was a new, and not
altogether disagreeable, experience to be rated.

“You have a school, haven’t you?” she asked, sweetly.

The schoolmaster’s dun-colored face crimsoned. “My dear young lady,”
he answered hotly, “if you imagine that I came to see you because I
was touting for another pupil, pray dismiss the idea from your mind.”
This time it was Aunt Amabel who blushed. “I came because, knowing a
good deal of boys, I feel sure that your nephew is delicate because
he is lonely and unoccupied; he is a very boyish boy, a boy who needs
the companionship of his own kind. You have an excellent preparatory
school quite near here. Try for a term--see what it does for Reginald.”

“To be quite candid,” said Aunt Amabel, “we do not care for the
training, mental or moral, that boys receive at the average preparatory
school.”

“Try one that’s not average,” he interrupted. “There are plenty of
them, all fads and flannel shirts and girls thrown in. He won’t learn
anything, but what does that matter? It’s health and youth and gladness
that you want for him, and a normal point of view; at present that
child’s a perfect misogynist.”

The lady started at the word, and at this critical moment her nephew
came into the room. At first he did not see his friend of the Bodleian;
when he did he stopped short, looking from his aunt to her visitor with
puzzled, timid eyes.

“Reginald,” said Aunt Amabel, “this gentleman says you are lonely and
unhappy, and that you would really like to go to school. Is this so?”

“Yes.”

The timid look faded from the boy’s eyes to be replaced by one that was
almost stern, so earnest was it.

“Why have you never said anything to me about it? You have never
complained.”

“What was the use?”

“But how could we know you were not happy if you never said anything?”

“He knew, without my never saying anything.” The boy pointed at the
schoolmaster, who sat with downcast eyes.

“So it appears,” the lady said somewhat tartly, “although you seem to
me to have said a good deal. That will do, Reginald; you may go.”

But Reginald did not go. He looked at the schoolmaster, and he looked
at his aunt. He took a step forward, exclaiming earnestly: “If you will
let me be like other boys, Aunt Amabel, I won’t be a policeman when I’m
grown up; I’ll give it up; I’ll truly be something else.” The boy spoke
as one who promises to part with some long-cherished and imperishable
ideal.

“Oh, child!” exclaimed poor, puzzled Aunt Amabel, “I can’t imagine what
you are talking about. _Do_ run away.”

“You see,” said the boy sadly to the schoolmaster, “she never _can_
understand,” and he hastened from the room.

The schoolmaster rose. “Believe me,” he said gently, “I do not want
your nephew for a pupil. I’d far rather keep him as a friend--I don’t
mean to say that a master can’t be a friend to his boys, but the
relationship must necessarily be a little different, and it has been a
pleasant experience to come across a boy under quite new circumstances.
I wouldn’t spoil it for the world.”

Aunt Amabel looked down, and the schoolmaster noticed that her
eyelashes were long and very black. “I am sure you mean kindly,” she
said gently, “and you may be sure I shall give every consideration to
what you have said.”

When her strange visitor had gone she sat for a long time quite still
in front of her table, staring with unseeing eyes at the many papers
scattered upon it. She knitted her black eyebrows and thought and
thought, but apparently to no purpose, for presently she said to
herself: “What _could_ he mean by calling that little boy a misogynist,
and what on earth could the child mean about not being a policeman?”

The boy was waiting for the schoolmaster at the gate as he went out.
“Well, was it any use?” he cried eagerly.

“My dear chap,” said that gentleman, “you are a little noodle. That’s
what you are.”

And the boy, as he trotted by the schoolmaster’s side, found something
vaguely comforting in this cryptic speech.



PART II

CHILDREN OF LAST CENTURY



A SMALL EVENT


  All service ranks the same with God:
  If now, as formerly He trod
  Paradise, His presence fills
  Our earth, each only as God wills
  Can work--God’s puppets, best and worst,
  Are we; there is no last nor first.

  Say not “a small event”! Why “small”?
  Costs it more pain than this, ye call
  A “great event” should come to pass,
  Than that? Untwine me from the mass
  Of deeds which make up life, one deed
  Power shall fall short in or exceed!

                           _Pippa Passes._

Every night the Alfresco Entertainers gave their performance on a
little platform set right under the shadow of the great cliff; while
in front of them, not a dozen yards away, the rhythmic wash of the sea
on a rocky shore seemed a sort of accompaniment to their songs, much
softer and more tuneful than that of the poor, jingly, rheumatic piano,
which had nothing between it and every sort of weather save an ancient
mackintosh cover.

The village itself was but a shelf of shore with one long, straggling,
lop-sided street: cottage and shop and great hotel set down haphazard,
cheek by jowl, all apparently somewhat inept excrescences on the side
of the green-clad cliffs rising behind them straight and steep, a sheer
five hundred feet, and just across the narrow line of red road lies the
Bristol Channel, with, on a clear day, the Welsh coast plainly in view.

At ten years old, people are generally found more interesting than
scenery, and Basil took a great interest in the variety entertainers.
They looked so smart and debonair, he thought, in their blue reefers,
white duck trousers, and gold-laced yachting caps--though they none
of them ever put out to sea. There were five of them altogether, two
ladies and three men. Basil did not care so much about the ladies, in
spite of the rows of Chinese lanterns that outlined the little stage
and shone so pink in the darkness; there seemed no glamor or mystery
about them. They were not transcendently beautiful like the gauzy good
fairy of pantomime, or the peerless, fearless circus lady in pink and
spangles: neither did they possess the mirth-provoking qualities of the
dauntless three clad in yatching garb. One always sang sentimentally of
“daddies,” or “aunties,” or “chords,” that had somehow gone amissing;
and the other--Basil almost disliked that other--sang about things he
could in nowise understand, in a hoarse voice, and danced in between
the verses, and she didn’t dance at all prettily, for she had thick
ankles and high shoulders.

But the three “naval gentlemen,” as Basil respectfully called them,
sang funny songs, and acted and knocked each other about in such
fashion as caused him almost to roll off his chair in fits of ecstatic
mirth. Nearly every fine night after dinner, if nobody wanted him,
Harnet, the tall man-servant, would take Basil, and they sat on two
chairs in the front row and listened to the entertainment. Sometimes
grandfather himself would come, but he generally went to sleep in his
chair at home; for when a man goes peel-fishing all day, walking half
a dozen miles up the rocky bank of a Devonshire trout stream to his
favorite pool, he is disinclined to move again, once he has changed and
dined.

The bulk of the audience attending the Alfresco Entertainment sat on
the wall separating shore from road, or on the curbstone, but there
were always a few chairs placed directly facing the stage, which were
charged for at sixpence each. Harnet was far too grand and dignified to
sit on either wall or curbstone, and as grandfather always gave Basil a
shilling to put in the cardboard plate, Harnet preferred to spend it in
this wise.

Now all that company had high-sounding, aristocratic names, except
one, who was called, as Basil said, “just simply Mr. Smith.” There
was Mr. Montmorency, the manager, whose cheeks were almost as blue
as his reefer, and his wife, the lady who danced in the evening, but
in the daytime affected flowing tea-gowney garments and large flat
hats; there was Mr. Neville Beauchamp, who sang coster songs, to whom
the particular accent required for this sort of ditty really seemed
no effort, as all his songs were given in similarly pronounced and
singular fashion. The lady of the melancholy ballads was called De
Vere; she looked thin and young and generally cold, as well she might,
for she played everyone’s accompaniments, and never wore a coat,
however cold the night. But it was for Mr. Smith that Basil felt most
enthusiasm. In the first place, his speaking voice was as the voices of
“grandfather’s friends.” In the second, he was, to Basil’s thinking, an
admirable actor--changing face and voice, even his very body, to suit
the part he happened to be playing; and thirdly, he was funny--funny in
a way that Basil understood. Even grandfather laughed at Mr. Smith and
applauded him, and when the cardboard plate went round, he sent Basil
with the first bit of gold they had had that season.

“Clever chap that,” he said as they strolled homeward under the quiet
stars. “Reminds me of someone somehow--looks like a broken-down
gentleman; got nice voice, and nice hands--wonder what he’s doing with
that lot?”

Basil, however, was quite content to admire Mr. Smith without
concerning himself as to his antecedents. He forthwith christened him
“the jokey man,” and it rather puzzled him that, except at night, the
jokey man was hardly ever with the others, but went wandering about by
himself in an aimless and somewhat dismal fashion. Could it be that
Mr. Montmorency and Mr. Neville Beauchamp were proud, Basil wondered,
because they had such fine names.

Basil’s face was as round as a full moon, and fresh and fair as a
monthly rose. Tall and well set up, he was good at games, and keen
on every kind of sport. Long days did he spend up the river with his
grandfather fishing for trout--he was to have a license for peel
next summer, but had to be content with trout during this. He went
sea-fishing, too, in charge of a nice fisherman called Oxenham, and
caught big pollock outside the bay, and every morning Oxenham rowed
Basil and Harnet out from the shore that they might have their morning
swim, for the coast is so rocky and dangerous that bathing from the
land is no fun at all--though the rocks are very nice to potter about
on at low tide, when energetic persons can find prawns in the pools.

One day as Basil was busily engaged in this pursuit, who should come
up behind him but the jokey man, looking as melancholy as though there
was no sunshine, or blue water, or pleasant pools full of strange sea
beasts. Indeed, although he was by profession such an amusing man, he
had by no means a cheerful face. Tired lines were written all round his
eyes, his shoulders were bent, and his long slim hands hung loose and
listless at his sides, yet it was plain that he was by no means old.
Moreover, he had changed his smart yachting suit for an old tweed coat
and knickerbockers, and a grey billycock dragged over his eyes bereft
his appearance of all traces of the jokey man. So that for a minute or
two Basil did not know him, even although he sat down on a rock close
by and lit his pipe.

Basil was standing bare-legged and knee-deep in water in pursuit of a
particularly active and artful shrimp, so that it was only when he at
last lifted his head with an emphatic “bother,” that he noticed the
stranger; then he beamed, for chance had tossed plump into his lap the
opportunity he had long been seeking.

“How do you do?” the little boy inquired politely, taking off his
muffin cap with one wet hand while he grasped his net with the other.
“I am so pleased to have met you; I’ve wanted to for ever so long.”

“That’s very nice of you,” said the man, and when he smiled he looked
quite young. “I am sure the pleasure is mutual.”

“I’ve something most pertickler to ask you,” continued Basil eagerly,
scrambling out of the pool to sit on the rock beside him, “and it
seemed as if I was never to get a chance. It’s not for myself either,
it’s for Viola--you know Viola by sight, I daresay?”

Now it happened that the jokey man, like most other people in that
village, knew Viola by sight very well indeed. In fact, Viola, and the
General, and Basil, were as speedily pointed out to every stranger who
arrived as though they had been bits of scenery. For they came every
summer and the village was proud of them.

“Is she your sister?” asked the jokey man, suddenly taking his pipe out
of his mouth.

“Yes, and she’s two year older than me, but she doesn’t go to
school--I’ve been for a year--she has a ma’mselle. I daresay you’ve
seen us with her. It’s been such a bore having her here, but she’s
going to-morrow, and then we shall do just what we like, for there
will be only Harnet and Polly, and we like them. Grannie had to go off
quite suddenly to nurse Aunt Alice, and won’t be back for a week, so
there’ll be nobody but grandfather and us; it’ll be simply ripping,”
and Basil paused breathless, beaming at the pleasant picture he had
conjured up.

The jokey man put his pipe back into his mouth and waited; but it had
gone out, so he just laid it on the rocks beside him, saying:

“What was it you wanted to ask me?”

“It’s rather difficult to explain,” Basil began, turning very red and
rumpling his hair. “It’s Viola, you know; she wants so dreadfully to
come to your entertainment. I’ve told her about it, you know, but
grandfather says----” Here Basil paused, and turned even redder than
before: “One has to be so particular over one’s girls, you know,” he
interpolated apologetically, “and she’s the only girl in our family.
Grandfather never had any sisters or any daughters, so he thinks no end
of Viola, and father and mother are in India, and he says----”

“That some of the songs are vulgar,” said the jokey man shortly. “So
they are; he’s perfectly right.”

The jokey man looked at Basil, and Basil looked at the jokey man for a
full minute. Then the little boy said very earnestly:

“Do you think that you could persuade them--those other gentlemen, I
mean--to leave out one or two songs one evening? There’s that one about
the ‘giddy little girl in the big black hat’ that Mr. Montmorency
sings. Grandfather doesn’t like that one, and it’s not very amusing, is
it? And Viola _does_ want to come so dreadfully.”

The jokey man made no reply, but stared straight out to sea with a
very grave face. Perhaps he was thinking of all those other Violas who
listened night after night to the songs the General objected to, and
were perhaps, unlike his Viola, not “cared about, kept out of harm, and
schemed for, safe in love as with a charm.”

Basil waited politely for some minutes, then, as the jokey man didn’t
speak, he continued earnestly:

“You see she can just hear that there is music and singing when the
windows are open, and it’s so tantalizing, and you see it would be rude
to walk away when we’d heard you, and come back next time you sang,
wouldn’t it? It doesn’t matter for boys----”

“I’m not at all sure of that,” said Mr. Smith hastily; “it matters very
much for boys, too, I think--especially if they don’t happen to have
wise grandfathers with good taste. I’ll see what can be done, and let
you know.”

“Oh, thank you so much!” cried Basil; “that is kind of you. Viola will
be so pleased; she’s up the village now with Polly, or I’d fetch her to
thank you herself.”

Now while Basil was talking he noticed that the jokey man’s coat had
got leather on the shoulders, and that the leather looked as worn as
the coat, so he rightly deduced that at some time or another his new
friend must have been something of a sportsman, and asked:

“D’you fish at all?”

“Not here,” said the jokey man, “but I’ve done some fishing in my time.
Have you had good sport?”

Then immediately ensued a long discussion on the relative merits of
flies, and Basil gave forth his opinion, an opinion backed up by the
experience of numerous natives, that the “Coachman” was the fly for
that neighborhood, but that there were occasions, especially early in
July, when exceedingly good results might be obtained by using red
ants. They told each other fishing stories. Basil confided to the
jokey man that he had just got a beautiful new split cane rod from
“Hardy Brothers,” promised to show it to him at the earliest possible
opportunity, and they speedily became the best of friends. For it is
a curious fact that although the actual sport itself is a somewhat
taciturn pursuit, there are no more conversational sportsmen in the
world than ardent followers of the gentle craft.

Another thing--they are always courteous listeners, and generally full
of good stories themselves, yet have the most delicate appreciation
of other people’s anecdotes. You can nearly always tell a member of a
fishing family by this rare and pleasing trait.

Next morning the jokey man called at the hotel and asked for Basil
at the door. He wouldn’t come in, and when Basil, greatly excited,
appeared, only waited to say hastily: “If you like to bring your
sister to-night, I think I can promise you that it will be all right.”
Then fled before Basil could thank him, and was soon pounding up the
steep hill that ends abruptly at the hotel door, as though he were
training for a mountaineering race.

Basil tore back into their sitting-room to lay the case before his
grandfather, who, for once, was lunching in the hotel.

“He promised, you know,” he concluded jubilantly, “so she _can_ come,
can’t she?”

Grandfather pulled his moustache and laughed. Then Viola came and laid
her fresh soft cheek against his, murmuring pleadingly: “Darling,
it would be so lovely,” till he pinched Viola’s cheek and made
stipulations about heavy cloaks, and the children knew the day was won.

And the end of it all was that, at half-past eight that evening,
grandfather, Basil and Viola were seated on three chairs in the very
middle of the road that ran past the Alfresco Entertainers’ stage;
but as the road ends abruptly in a precipitous rock some thirty yards
further along, there is no fear of being run over by traffic.

What an evening of delight that was! How Basil and Viola laughed, and
how pleased was grandfather! Another thing is quite certain--that the
Alfresco Entertainers in no way lost by the alterations they had made
in their programme; the rest of the audience seemed as pleased as Basil
and Viola, and no one appeared to miss the “giddy little girl in the
big black hat” the least little bit in the world.

“Really, it’s vastly civil of Mr. Thingummy,” said grandfather on their
way home.

       *       *       *       *       *

Grandfather and Harnet had gone fishing for the whole day. Mademoiselle
had departed, only Polly was left in charge, and she had so bad a
headache--she put it down to the close, cloudy weather--that she was
fain to go and lie down directly she had waited upon Basil and Viola
at their lunch, having given the children permission to go for a walk
along the beach.

It was a grey day, humid and still, and, being low tide, there seemed
no fresh wind blowing in from the sea as usual. The children scrambled
over the rocks, very happy and important at being, for once, left to
their own devices, and they decided to make an expedition to a little
sandy bay that can be reached from the shore at low tide, and to come
back by a steep winding path up the cliffs which terminates in the
coach road just above the village. They had not considered it necessary
to confide their intention to Polly, who would certainly have objected.
They reached the bay all right, paddled for a little time on the hard,
smooth sand, and then set out to climb the path which winds in and out
of the side of the cliff for all the world like a spiral staircase up
to some nine hundred feet above the sea. This path is so narrow that
travelers can only walk in Indian file. On the one side is the steep
face of the heather-clad rock, on the other a sheer drop on to the
rocks below.

When the children had climbed about a third of the way they found
themselves enveloped in white mist--a mist so thick, and fine, and
clinging, that you cannot see your own hand held before your face. It
was no use to go down again; the tide had turned, and soon the sea
would be lapping gently at the foot of the pathway. There was nothing
for it but to go on slowly, carefully, step by step, feeling all the
time for the rocks on the inner side; by and by the path would widen.

“Don’t be frightened, Viola,” said Basil cheerfully. “It’ll take us a
goodish while, but a bit higher up we can walk together.”

“I’m not exactly frightened,” said Viola in a tremulous voice, “but I
rather wish we hadn’t come.”

“So do I,” Basil answered fervently. “If I hadn’t been such a juggins
I’d have looked up and seen the mist on those cliffs long ago. Probably
you can’t see that there _are_ any cliffs in the village now.”

On they toiled, slowly and painfully. It is really a most unpleasant
mode of progression, walking sideways up a hill with your back against
a very nubbly sort of wall.

“Hark!” cried Basil presently. “Didn’t you hear a call?”

The children paused, leant against the cliff, and listened
breathlessly. Sure enough someone was calling. It sounded very muffled
and far off; but it was plainly a man’s voice, and he was calling for
help.

“Do you think it’s above or below?” Basil asked anxiously. “I can’t
seem to tell in this fog.”

“It must be above, or we should have heard it before. Call out that
we’re coming.”

Basil shouted with all the force of his young lungs, and again the
faint, muffled voice answered with a cry for help.

“Come on,” exclaimed Basil in great excitement; “we’ll find him!” and
sure enough in another bend of the path Basil nearly fell over the
prostrate figure of a man lying right across it, for here it suddenly
grew wider. The man raised himself on his elbow, exclaiming:

“I say, do you think that when you get to the village you could send
help? I’m very much afraid that I’ve broken my leg. I can’t stand, and
moving at all hurts it no end.”

“Why, it’s the jokey man!” Basil cried out in dismay. “However did you
do it?”

“Oh, dear! oh, dear!” added Viola. “This is sad.”

None of them could see the other, but nevertheless, the jokey man knew
in a minute who had come to his rescue, and forgot his injuries in his
surprise, exclaiming:

“Whatever are you two doing here? Is the General with you?”

“Oh, dear, no,” said Viola proudly; “we’re _quite_ alone, or we
shouldn’t be here, but isn’t it a good thing we _are_ here? How did you
fall?”

“I was mooning along, not thinking where I was going, when down came
the mist. I made a false step and went bang over the edge, but only
fell on to the path below, not right over, as I might have done....
Perhaps it would have been better if I had,” he added to himself.

“You’d better go and get help, Basil,” said Viola decidedly, “and I’ll
stay and take care of Mr. Smith till they come.”

But Mr. Smith wouldn’t hear of this. The children helped him to crawl
as near the inner side as possible, and when they left him he nearly
fainted with the pain of moving. It began to rain, the cold, soft,
wetting rain of a Devonshire summer, and Mr. Smith groaned and shivered.

“I am so sorry for you,” said a soft voice close beside him. “Is there
nothing I could do? Wouldn’t you be more comfortable if you were to
rest your head in my lap? It would be a sort of pillow. Daddie used to
go to sleep like that sometimes out on the moors last summer, when they
were home.”

“Oh, Viola, Viola!” exclaimed the jokey man, with far more distress
than he had yet shown, “why did you stay? You will get cold. It’s
raining already, and they will be ages.”

“There’s no use worrying about that,” said Viola, edging herself
nearer. “We couldn’t leave you here all alone and hurt, and Basil
wouldn’t let me go on to the village ’cause of the fog, so of course I
stayed. I hope you won’t mind very much; I won’t talk if you’d rather
not, but I think I’d like to hold your hand if you don’t mind. It would
be comforting.”

The kind little hand was curiously comforting to the jokey man: he
insisted on taking off his coat and wrapping Viola in it, in spite
of all her protests. Presently the white pall of mist lifted a little
and they could see one another, and it certainly was a great pleasure
to the man lying against the cliff to watch the little high-bred face
with the kind blue eyes turned in such friendly wise toward him.
Viola was so like Basil, and yet so entirely individual. Basil’s
face was round, hers was oval; Basil’s nose was broad and indefinite
as yet, Viola’s nose was small and straight and decided, with the
dearest little band of freckles across the bridge. Basil’s manner was
extremely friendly, Viola’s was tender and protecting, and it was such
a long time since anyone had taken care of the jokey man, that he
almost crooned to himself in the delight of being so tended. She was
very tender in her inquiries after his aches and pains, expressed a
pious hope that he always wore “something woolly next him,” and being
reassured on that head, proceeded to suggest that he should smoke if he
found it comforting. Then she told him a great deal in very admirative
terms about daddy, and grandfather, and Basil, for Viola was of that
old-fashioned portion of femininity that looks upon her own mankind
as beings of stupendous strength and wisdom. The man lay watching her
very intently, but it is not certain that he heard half of what she
was saying. He had the look of one who was trying to make a difficult
decision. The voices of habit and tradition called very loudly to him
just then--dared he listen?

Presently Viola’s voice ceased. She was evidently waiting for an
answer, and none came.

“Have you any sisters, Mr. Smith?” she repeated.

Mr. Smith shook his head, then he raised himself on his elbow, saying
earnestly:

“Look here, Viola! I want you to tell me exactly what you think
about something. Suppose Basil--of course it’s utterly impossible,
but still--suppose that when he was grown up he did something that
annoyed you all very much, something disappointing and entirely
against his father’s wishes”--he paused, for Viola looked very grave
and pained--“and then,” he continued, “if he went right out of sight,
and you, none of you, heard anything more about him for nearly a
year--supposing _then_ he was sorry, said he was sorry----”

“We should never lose sight of Basil,” said Viola decidedly, her eyes
dark and tragic at the mere thought. “At least, I’m sure I shouldn’t;
whatever he did I should love him just the same. You don’t love people
for their goodness--you love them because they’re _they_.”

“Are you sure?” asked the jokey man earnestly.

Viola looked hard at him, turned very red, and said shyly:

“Do you think you could tell me just what you did? I know it’s you.”

The man leant back against the wall again.

“It’s not an interesting story,” he said wearily, “but it may pass
the time. I was at the ’varsity, Cambridge. I was always very fond of
acting, and I was extravagant and lazy, too. The very term I went in
for my degree I was acting in the A.D.C., and--I was plucked. My father
was furious. Then came a whole sheaf of debts. He said I must go back
to a small college, live on next to nothing, work, and take my degree.
Instead of taking my punishment like a man, I quarreled with everybody,
vowed I’d go on to the stage, and came to this. I have kept body and
soul together, and I don’t think I’ve done anything to be ashamed of
since, but I’m sick and sorry at the whole business. Yet now that
I’m all smashed up and useless, it seems somehow mean to go back. My
father’s a parson, you know, not over well off, and there are a good
many of us.”

All the pauses in his story, and there were a good many, had been
punctuated by Viola with reassuring little pats, and now that the pause
was so long that he seemed to have finished his story, she turned a
beaming face toward him.

“How _glad_ they will be!” she exclaimed. “You must write to-night
directly you get back. How _glad_ your mother will be!”

A spasm of pain crossed his face. “My mother died just before I left
school,” he said.

Viola’s eyes filled with tears, and she had just exclaimed, “And
you have no sisters either, you poor dear?” when the rescue party,
accompanied by Basil and the nearly frantic Polly, appeared just
below them. They carried the jokey man to the foot of the cliff and
took him back to the village in a boat, and as his ankle proved to be
very badly broken he elected to go into the cottage hospital on the
hill. The long wait in the wet, that had not in the least hurt Viola,
proved altogether too much for the jokey man. That night he became
feverish and delirious, and when the children and the General went to
ask for him next day, they were told that he was very ill indeed, and
that the broken ankle was quite a small matter in comparison with the
pneumonia. That evening the doctor called on the General, and directly
the performance was over, the General went to see the Alfresco Players
at their lodgings.

“Do you happen to know who his people are?” the General asked Mrs.
Montmorency.

“He never let on that he’d got any folks, poor fellah,” she answered
with a sob. She had a kind heart if her ankles were thick. “He was
never one to talk about himself, and he’s never had so much as a
postcard by post since he’s been here, that I do know. His real name’s
not Smith at all; all his linen--beautiful and fine his shirts are
too--is all marked ‘Selsley.’”

“Have you no idea what part of the country he came from?” the General
asked. “Then we could look in a directory. It would be a horrible thing
if----”

“He joined us in London,” Mrs. Montmorency gasped between her sobs,
while her tears made little pathways on her painted cheeks. “He hadn’t
any references, but I persuaded my husband to take him. He carried his
references in his face, I said, and so I’m sure we’ve found it, for a
nicer, more obliging, gentlemanly----”

“Do you think, sir,” Mr. Montmorency interrupted, “that he told the
little lady anything about himself when they were up on the cliff
together?”

“God bless my soul!” exclaimed the General in great excitement. “Of
course he did; I have it. Who has got a clergy list?”

Naturally none of the Alfresco Players possessed such a work, and it
was already too late to knock up the vicar of the parish. But next
morning the General called on the vicar very early, and then despatched
an exceedingly long telegram to the post office and several bottles of
champagne to the cottage hospital, where Polly, Basil and Viola hung
about the doors all the morning hoping for better news. The Alfresco
Players got out a green leaflet to the effect that there would be that
night a benefit performance for that talented artist, Mr. Smith, who
had been suddenly stricken down by serious illness. The General seemed
to send and receive a great many telegrams, and did not go fishing all
that day. At sundown there was no better news at the hospital, and it
seemed exceedingly probable that the jokey man would joke no more. The
General met the last train, and drove away from the station accompanied
by an elderly, severe-looking clergyman. They stopped at the hospital
and the clergyman went in.

       *       *       *       *       *

The jokey man was so noisy and talked so continuously that the hospital
authorities had him moved from the men’s surgical ward into a little
room by himself. As the matron showed the strange clergyman into this
room, a nurse rose from the chair at the bedside. The jokey man’s
voice was no longer loud, but he kept saying the same thing over and
over again.

“All day long he keeps repeating it,” she whispered. “I’m so thankful
you’ve come, for he can’t possibly last if this restlessness continues.”

“I’m sure he’ll come if you send,” the weak, irritable voice went on.
“Why don’t you send? I want my father--‘father, I have sinned’--that’s
it--‘father, I have sinned’--but I know he’ll come if you send. I want
my father, I tell you--why won’t you send? I want my father.”

The whispering voice persisted in its plaint, the hot hands plucked at
the sheet when other hands closed over them, holding them firmly, and
the voice he was waiting for said quietly:

“My dear son, I am here.”

As the sick man raised his tired eyes to the grave grey face bent
over him, his troubled mind was flooded with an immense content, his
poignant restlessness was calmed.

“Good old father!” he said softly, and lay quite still.

The jokey man thought better of it, and didn’t die after all. In
another week Basil and Viola were allowed to go and see him. They stood
very hushed and solemn on either side of his bed, for he looked very
thin and white, and was still lying right on his back, which made him
seem more ill somehow. For quite a minute nobody said anything at all,
till Basil, who held a large folded bracken leaf in his hand, laid it
down on the jokey man’s chest and spread it out. A fish speckled with
brown reposed in solemn glory in the midst.

“It’s for your dinner,” whispered Basil. “It’s only four ounces off the
pound. I caught it myself two hours ago. Viola saw me do it. I think a
‘Coachman’s’ the best fly after all.”



IN DURANCE VILE


Gabrielle always remembered the day that the ringmaster of the circus
came to see her pony jump. She was proud of her pony, who was dapple
grey and Welsh, and could jump nine inches higher than himself.

Gabrielle was five, and had ridden without a leading rein for two
years, but her father never let her jump Roland, the pony. So the pony
jumped by himself, greatly to the edification of the ringmaster who had
been bidden to see the feat.

While all this was going on, Nana called her to nursery tea, and as she
trotted down the long yard, past the stables, and towards the drive,
the ringmaster turned to Jack Ainslie, Gabrielle’s father, and said:
“Has the little Missie hurt her foot? She’s a thought lame.”

Jack Ainslie looked hastily after the idolized little figure, and noted
that the ringmaster was right. She _was_ a thought lame.

Hastily excusing himself, he ran after the child. “Have you hurt your
foot, darling?” he asked anxiously. “You’re limping a little. Did you
twist your ankle?”

“Oh, no, Daddy dear, I’m not hurt. I’m going to tea.” Gabrielle put
up her face for the ever-expected kiss and ran after her nurse. Jack
Ainslie dismissed the subject from his mind and showed the ringmaster
the rest of the horses.

From that day, however, things changed for Gabrielle. Other people
noticed the little limp, and her parents, terrified and distressed,
sent for the family doctor. He discovered that in some way, probably
at birth, her hip had been dislocated, and had formed a new socket for
itself, and that henceforth she would limp--unless--and here all the
mischief began--something could be done. Her father was frantic. Of
course something must be done. That his Gabrielle, his dainty little
lady with her pretty face, her quick intelligence, and her gracious
ways, should be lame--oh, it was intolerable! He was broken-hearted
and rebellious, and even his wife’s steadfast patience and unchanging
tenderness could not make him resigned. Then began for Gabrielle a
series of visits to London. She was taken from one great doctor to
another till she grew quite used to marching about on thick piled
carpets, clad in nothing but her sunny hair, while they discussed her
interesting “case.”

“Doctors are chilly men,” said Gabrielle; “their hands are always cold
to my body.”

An operation was arranged, but at the last moment Jack Ainslie drew
back, for the surgeons would not guarantee success, and the family
doctor said grave things about Gabrielle’s constitutional delicacy.
So it was decided that more gradual means must be tried to bring
about the desired result. The “gradual means” assumed the shape of
an instrument, hideous to behold and painful to wear. It broke Jack
Ainslie’s heart to see his little lady cabined and confined in such a
cruel cage, and for the little lady herself it blotted out the sunshine
and made life very grey and terrible. One thing was quite plain to
Gabrielle, and that was that evidently Nature was very much to blame
in having provided a new “socket” for the poor little dislocated bone.
This impertinence must be interfered with at all costs--the doctors
seemed to agree upon that. And Gabrielle wondered why it was so wrong
to have no pain, to be perfectly unconscious of her “affliction,” as
her nurse called it, and so interesting (to the doctors) and right,
to be uncomfortable and to wear a hideous high-soled boot and an iron
cage, with crutches under the arms that pushed her shoulders up to her
ears.

As for the instrument, it was designed and ordered by three famous
surgeons, and it cost the price of many ponies. Gabrielle tried to be
brave. She was curiously conscious that the pain her parents suffered
was far greater than her own. The instrument was adjusted in London,
and on the way home in the train her mother asked her many times, “Does
it hurt you, my darling?” And Gabrielle always answered bravely, “I can
bear it, mother dear; I can bear it!”

When she got home that night, the poor little leg was black from the
cruel pressure, and Mary Ainslie broke down and cried till she could
cry no longer. Gabrielle tried to walk bravely in her cramping irons,
and to smile at her parents when she met their troubled eyes. At
first she broke the thing continually, for she was an active child,
much given to jumping off chairs and playing at circus on the big old
sofa. But by and by all desire to jump and run left her. She grew
high-shouldered, and would sit very still for hours, while her daddy
told her stories or drove her behind Roland in a little basket-carriage
he had bought for her. Truly the iron entered into her soul, the cruel
iron that cramped the child’s soft body; and Gabrielle’s eyes grew
larger and larger, and her chin more pointed, while the once plump
little hands were white as the petals of the pear-blossom outside the
nursery window.

“I wish people wouldn’t ask me about it; they are kind, but I wish they
wouldn’t,” Gabrielle would say. “I’m tired of telling them about the
socket, and I’m not ‘a poor little soul’--I’m daddy’s little lady!”

There came to Jack Ainslie a very old college friend, a doctor,
Gabrielle’s godfather, and devoted to her, and he was supremely
dissatisfied with her treatment and implored them to take her to see a
young surgeon, a friend of his own, who was making a great name, and
doing wonders for everyone who came under his care. Jack Ainslie and
his wife needed but small persuasion, and it was decided that Gabrielle
should go to London as soon as possible.

What hastened the visit was this: Gabrielle was devoted to fairy lore,
and a favorite play of hers was to be the beautiful princess who is
freed from giants and dragons and lions by the gallant “Boots” of the
Norse tales. Her father always enacted the part of that redoubtable
third son, and was wont to kneel before her, making extravagant
protestations of his devotion, which she accepted with gracious
condescension. On this particular afternoon, just after tea, her father
proposed to play the favorite game, but Gabrielle would have none
of it. “I can’t be a princess any more, Daddy; I’m sure no princess
ever wore an instrument!” she said. “I don’t feel like a princess any
more at all.” Her father caught her up in his arms, with a great hard
sob, which frightened her, and she stroked his face, saying tenderly:
“Don’t be sorry, dear, dear Dad! I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’ll be a
princess, I will, indeed! I _will_ feel like a princess really!” The
next day Jack Ainslie and his wife took Gabrielle up to town. They did
not even take the faithful Nana, for Gabrielle’s mother could hardly
bear to let any hands but hers touch her darling, ever since the day
that the ringmaster had made his sad discovery.

Mary Ainslie took Gabrielle to the new doctor the following morning,
while Jack sat in the smoking-room of the hotel, lighting innumerable
cigars which he did not smoke, and turning over illustrated papers
which he did not see. Then he turned out of the hotel and walked down
Piccadilly, blundering into the passers-by, and when he crossed the
road, was nearly ridden over by an omnibus, so blind and stupid was
he in his heavy sorrow. Poor Jack! his honest heart was very full of
grief, for he loved his little lady dearly, and he felt that unless
something were done quickly, he would soon have nothing but a tender
memory to love.

Gabrielle and her mother were shown into the new doctor’s
consulting-room at once. He was a tall young man, with red hair
and keen green eyes. Her mother undressed Gabrielle, all but the
“instrument,” which clasped the tender little body, and seemed so
cruelly unnecessary. The young doctor frowned when he saw it, then he
took it off himself, and Gabrielle noticed that his touch was as gentle
as her mother’s, and that his hands were warm. She gave a happy little
shake when she was free of it, a little wriggle and jump of relief.
Then the doctor made her walk, and felt her all over, after which he
rolled her up in a big fur rug, to sit in front of the fire, while he
went into the next room with her mother. They were not long away, and
on their return Gabrielle looked up at the doctor with bright, curious
eyes.

“Does the instrument hurt you?” he asked. Gabrielle looked at it, as it
leaned feebly against a chair, and said: “It does, rather; but it does
its best not to. I think...!”

“Well, any way, you’re not going to wear it any more. Are you glad?”

“But what will the socket do?”

“Bless me, child; they’ve talked about you far too much. The socket
will do beautifully--much better without it than with it!”

“May I wear shoes like other little girls?”

“Certainly; the prettiest shoes that can be got!”

“Not compensatum shoes?”

“No; ordinary shoes, exactly alike!”

By this time Gabrielle had been arrayed in some clothes. She noticed
that her mother’s hands trembled, but that her eyes were glad. The
child looked up at the tall young doctor, who was watching her with his
keen green eyes, and said: “My Daddy will be so glad. He will look at
me, and not look so sorry, and there will be no hard things to stick
into him when he cuddles me! He will be so glad!”

The doctor made a queer little sound in his throat; then he lifted
Gabrielle in his arms and carried her to the window.

“Do you see the end of this street,” he asked, “where the roar and the
rumbling sound comes from? That’s Oxford Street. Well, in that street
is a beautiful shop full of shoes--shoes for little girls--and you are
going there directly, to get the prettiest pair that mother can find
for you!”

“May they have silver buckles?” Gabrielle asked eagerly.

“I think it extremely advisable they should have big silver buckles.
You will walk both fast and far in buckles shoes, and you must learn to
dance the _tarantella_, and all the dolls will sit in a row to watch
you!”

Gabrielle gave a delighted laugh. “Will the leg that wore the irons get
fat again, like the other?”

“Oh, dear, yes! You mustn’t think about that leg any more, but you must
do all the exercises mother is going to show you, and when you can
hang on a trapeze for twenty minutes, without falling off, you must
write and tell me.”

Then Gabrielle’s mother finished dressing her, all but her boots. The
boot with the “compensatum” sole lay near the instrument. Gabrielle
looked at it with great aversion. “It’s a very dry day,” said she. “May
I go to the cab in my stockings, and not put on no shoes till I have my
new ones?”

The doctor pushed the little boot out of sight, under the chair, with
his foot, and said: “I’ll carry you to the cab, and mother or the
cabman will carry you to the shop across the pavement, and you shall
never see that iron horror or that boot again!”

As the doctor carried her across the hall, Gabrielle put her arms round
his neck, and kissed him on both his eyes.

“Your eyes taste very salt!” she said, “But you are the best doctor in
the world!”



THE SURRENDER OF LADY GRIZELL


Geordie had found the world a rather draughty place since that March
morning when his mother went out hunting and was brought back in a
strange secret fashion, and he saw her face no more.

“Your poor Ma’s met with a haccident, Master Geordie--poor lady she’ve
broke her back and now she’s gone to ’Eaven.”

So Nana explained things to him. New black clothes came from the
tailor’s, and Geordie went with Nana to lay flowers upon his mother’s
grave.

At five years old discomfort is felt, rather than defined; Geordie
was conscious of a difference, an uncomfortable difference in his
surroundings, but by no means directly traced its cause to the loss of
his mother. Nor was he actively miserable. It is true that he sometimes
wondered why Nana so often omitted his bath in the morning, and why he
was never dressed to go down in the evening; but in some respects he
had quite a dissipated time. So many people asked him out to tea, and
amusement of which Nana distinctly approved, for she went too.

Geordie regarded his father with immense admiration, he was so tall,
and handsome, and jolly. But since that day when everything was
altered, the Hon. Donald Cochran found less time than ever to devote to
Geordie. It is true he did not go out hunting any more, but he seemed
always to be shut up in that hitherto almost unused room--called the
“study,” sorting papers and interviewing stout gentlemen, who wore
aggressive watch-chains, and whose footsteps were much lighter than
those of the hunting friends who used to come about the house.

After a month of vague loneliness and discomfort there came a change in
Geordie’s fortunes. His aunt, Lady Grizell Fane, who had been abroad at
the time of Mrs. Cochran’s death, appeared upon the scene.

A tall woman, with keen grey eyes, a woman who observed much and said
little--Lady Grizell after three days realized the exact position of
affairs. On the fourth day she went back to the Towers, taking Geordie
with her.

Lady Grizell was one of those women, so often childless, in whom the
maternal instinct is passionately alive. The love of children was a
religion with her, and all the love she would have lavished on her own
child had the fates bestowed one on her, she lavished upon Geordie.

The world suddenly became a sunny, sheltered place for the lonely
little boy. Baths were plentiful and nursery tableclothes were clean,
as meals were regular. Above all, somebody wanted him, somebody took
an interest in his doings, and a great warm human love “enwheeled
him round.” A new experience this for Geordie--no one had ever been
actively unkind to him, his mother had looked after his creature
comforts thoroughly. He was always well dressed and well tended, but
she had never found his society particularly interesting, nor did she
manifest any desire to see him often during the day. Though a fine
strong child, he was too like the Cochrans to be pretty. Big nose,
grey eyes, thin face, high cheekbones, and dogged mouth, may be well
enough in a man, but in a child are apt to be all indefinite and out
of proportion. No, Geordie was not a pretty child. Neither was he very
clever; but he was honest and kind-hearted, and he worshipped those who
were kind to him, Aunt Grizell most of all.

Uncle Fane was a philanthropist, absorbed in blue books and statistics.
When Parliament was sitting he went to London, while Aunt Grizell not
infrequently preferred to remain with Geordie at the Towers.

Geordie learned to ride with his aunt (his father had never been
able to afford a pony for him, it takes such a lot of money to keep
hunters), he did gardening with her, and with her he learned to read
indifferently well. But he learned many things more important than
these.

He learned to be immensely proud of “the family,” to hold the reigning
house in due respect certainly, but with reservations in favor of one
Charles Edward, and his descendants, for whose sake “the family” had
greatly dared and suffered. He learned that he must be courteous and
deferent in his manners, true and just in all his dealings, and that he
must control his temper, which, like that of the rest of the family,
was inclined to be hasty. Moreover, he quickly discovered that his aunt
_was_ herself all she would have him be. To know that a thing grieved
her was enough with Geordie to prevent its happening again, so they
were very happy.

His father came from time to time to spend a few days at the Towers,
praised his improved appearance, and his seat in the saddle, took him
out shooting on occasions, and was always profuse in his thanks to his
sister for her care of the boy.

But this happy and peaceful state of things was not to last. A cloud
came over the horizon. Lady Grizell went about with red eyes and a
harrassed look, and Geordie found Uncle Fane regarding him with an
expression, kindlier than of yore certainly, but in which he discovered
so large a proportion of pity that he resented it, without knowing why.

Then Lord Lochmaben, his father’s eldest brother, came to the Towers.
During his visit, the child was always hearing scraps of conversation
in which the words “madness,” “that woman,” and “social suicide”
occurred with bewildering frequency. He felt that in some mysterious
way these irrelevant remarks had some bearing on his own fortunes. Lord
Lochmaben also regarded him with that strange pitying expression, and
during his lordship’s visit, Aunt Grizell’s eyes were redder, and her
manner more perturbed than ever.

At last, one morning at the end of May--Geordie will always hate the
scent of the lilacs--Lady Grizell called him from his play to come to
her in the morning room.

He came, running through the open French window, and when he reached
his aunt’s chair she put her arm round him, saying huskily: “Geordie
dear! your father wants you at home, until September--and then you are
to go to school!”

Lady Grizell made the announcement abruptly. To her surprise it was
received in absolute silence. Geordie was, as his aunt herself would
have said, “utterly dumbfoundered.” To go to school some day was
natural and proper--but to go home.... “Why does father want me now?”
asked Geordie in a shaky voice. The Hon. Donald never betrayed any
distress at parting from him when he left the Towers--what could it
mean?

The child was very like “the family,” he was not at all demonstrative,
and he “thought shame” to cry.

He flung his arms round his aunt, holding her so tight that the buttons
of his Norfolk jacket made deep dents on her cheek, and Lady Grizell
could hear how painfully the little heart was thumping.

There was silence for a minute between these two who understood each
other so well; then Geordie asked: “When am I to go, Aunt Grizy?”

“In a week--oh, what shall I do without you, my bonnie man?”

“But I shall come to see you often, shan’t I? Papa won’t want me all
the time, and you will ask him to let me come often, won’t you, Aunty?”

Lady Grizell stroked his hair tenderly, but she could not deceive even
a child, and she shook her head.

“I’ll ask him, my dear, you may be sure. But I fear he may not be able
to grant my request. Unfortunately, there is a subject upon which your
father and I cannot agree, and he is vexed with me, and naturally wants
his son for himself.”

“Is it that ‘suicide woman’ that is the subject?” asked Geordie
breathlessly.

Lady Grizell gazed at him in thunderstruck amazement. “What _do_ you
mean, child?”

“Well, whenever I was out walking with Uncle Lochmaben and Uncle Fane,
I kept hearing little bits about ‘that woman’ and ‘suicide’ and papa,
so I thought it might be that. I didn’t listen, truly--I couldn’t help
hearing, and I didn’t understand.”

Lady Grizell put back the hair from the boy’s square forehead and
looked into his honest grey eyes, then she spoke:

“Geordie dear, there are always things in life that we cannot
understand, and things we cannot help; what we must do is to be as
brave and honest as we can, and leave the rest to God. Your dear father
is very lonely and he has recently married a lady who will be your new
mamma. You must try to be as good and courteous and obedient to her as
you are to me--and Geordie, son! don’t forget me!”

Here Lady Grizell broke down, and Geordie thought it no shame to cry
too.

That week was terribly short. At the end of it Geordie went out into
the draughty world again, while Lady Grizell went about saying like
her more famous namesake: “Oh, werena my heart lecht I wad dee!”

Geordie could never be induced to speak much about the three months
that followed. During those three months Lady Grizell grew thin and
pale.

One morning she received a letter from the Hon. Donald in which he
informed her that he and his wife had made arrangements for Geordie to
go in September to an excellent school in the Forest of Dean where boys
received board and education for the modest sum of twenty guineas a
year.

Lady Grizell gave a little cry, and stared at the letter in her hand as
though it had been some horrible phantom. Then she flew downstairs and
into her husband’s study, where he sat writing a report for the Society
of Agriculture.

“Augustus, read this! I am going to see Donald to-day, and tell him
that I will receive his wife--I can’t let my pride stand in the way of
that child any longer--read this!” and she thrust the letter under her
husband’s aristocratic nose.

Mr. Fane put on his glasses, read the letter, took them off, folded
them up and put them in the case--a methodical, deliberate man, Mr.
Fane--then he said slowly:

“Have you considered what people will say? Have you forgotten that
everybody knows her most unpleasant story?”

“I cannot help it. People must say what they please. I will not have
Geordie go to such a school, even if I have to receive half the fallen
women in London to prevent it. If Lochmaben never marries, Geordie
will be head of our house.”

Lady Grizell spoke with passionate excitement. Mr. Fane felt that he
hardly knew his wife, always so gentle and dignified, in this woman
with the pale face and blazing eyes. He expostulated forcibly and at
his usual length. If he was somewhat less conscious of the dignity
of the House of Cochran than was Lady Grizell, he was keenly alive
to the dignity of the House of Fane. But all his exhortation, all
his arguments were of no avail. He could not shake Lady Grizell’s
determination; and the afternoon saw her speeding in the express toward
the interview with her brother.

The journey was not long, but the August day was hot. Lady Grizell felt
faint and shaken when the omnibus (she had been too excited to wire for
a cab) deposited her at her brother’s door.

The parlormaid looked curiously at the tall lady who asked so pointedly
for _Mr._ Cochran, and showed her into the study. No ladies ever
called, and here was an undoubted lady--“my lady” to boot--as the sharp
girl discovered on reading the card.

She carried the card to her master in the garden, where he was sitting
with his wife. He flushed as he read it, and tossed it to the woman
beside him, exclaiming: “Grizie, by Jove!--can she be coming round?”

The woman caught the card, reading the name aloud in an eager, excited
voice, then said, a little bitterly: “She only asks for _you_.”

“She wouldn’t come here to insult you. I know Grizie. It’s something
about the boy, and she wants to be friends. You wait here till I send
for you.”

He strode across the lawn, and entered the study by the open French
window.

“Now this is really good of you, Grizie; Geordie will be in
raptures--it’s kind and friendly!”

Lady Grizell was pale, and the cheek she turned to his kiss was very
cold. She clasped her hands to stay their trembling and began in a low
voice:

“Donald! you said that if I would receive Mrs. Cochran----”

“Nelly, you mean!” interrupted the Hon. Donald.

“If I would receive your wife--you would let me keep Geordie. If I
promise to ask you both to the Towers--twice every year--will you let
me have him, instead of sending him to that horrible school--will you,
Donald? I’ll educate him, he shall cost you nothing--I have a little
money, you know, and Augustus is very generous to me--will you let him
come to me?”

Donald looked rather shamefaced as he muttered: “Isn’t it rather like
selling the little chap?”

“But it’s selling him into happiness, Donald: he is such a dear lad,
and he loves me, and ... it isn’t very easy for me!”

There was silence for two minutes. Lady Grizell’s heart thumped in her
ears.

Overhead there was a sudden patter of little feet, and Lady Grizell
sank upon her knees, sobbing: “Oh, give him to me, Donald, for God’s
sake, give him to me! I cannot bear it!”

Donald’s eyes were red as he raised his sister and gently put her in an
easy chair. He patted her shoulder soothingly, and his voice trembled
as he said: “Look here, Grizie! you shall have the boy. There shall
be no bargain between us; I never meant to send him to that beastly
school. I tried it on to fetch you--as it has--but I can’t play the
game so low down as that--I don’t set up for a model parent. I know
you’ll bring him up better than we should. You can leave this house
without meeting my wife if you prefer it, and I’ll send Geordie to you
to-morrow. But, if you like to do a kind and generous thing to a woman
who has known little but unkindness, and shame, and sorrow all her
life, and who is a good and loyal wife to me, then I say, God bless
you, Grizell Cochran, for you are a good woman!”

Donald was not given to the making of long speeches. His voice broke
many times in the course of this, and the tears were running down Lady
Grizell’s pale cheeks. She held out her hands to him, saying simply,
“Take me to her!” and the two tall figures went out across the grass
together.



A CLEAN PACK


Basil sat alone in the schoolroom, although it was past bedtime. Nurse,
like everybody else, had apparently forgotten him, but Basil, absorbed
in his own thoughts, sat on by the dying fire. There were always fires
in his grandfather’s house whenever it was in the least cold, and that
August it was very cold, so cold that grandfather, getting wet through
out shooting, somehow got a chill, was ill only three days, and now
was lying dead in the big bedroom over Basil’s head. So Basil had a
good deal to think about. It was not that death was new to him--from
his earliest infancy it had been impressed upon him that his father
was dead--but that he could not by any stretch of fancy imagine what
life would be without grandfather--grandfather who was lying with his
beautiful hands crossed on his breast in that long, light-colored
wooden box upstairs.

Basil resented the fact that grandfather’s coffin should be made of
light wood. It seemed incongruous and impertinent, somehow, that
anything used by grandfather should be otherwise than old--old and
rich-colored and seemly; and the child found himself wondering whether
grandfather was annoyed. There were many things in that bedroom
calculated to annoy him, Basil reflected. In the first place, when
mother took him in that afternoon that he might lay the asters gathered
in his own garden at his grandfather’s feet, he remarked that all
the blinds were down, and grandfather would have hated that, and the
windows were shut, and there was a heavy scent of hot-house flowers.
“I fear he’s very uncomfortable,” whispered Basil to himself. “He’ll
be glad to get to heaven out of that stuffy room.” For grandfather had
loved air as much as he liked fires.

The horizon of Basil’s experience was somewhat limited. It consisted
of mother and grandfather, and of “other grandfather,” who lived at
Altringham in Cheshire, and was mother’s father.

Every year Basil and mother went to Altringham for six weeks, and life
there was so utterly different from what it was with grandfather that
Basil never ceased to puzzle over it and to wonder why mother always
cried when she came away, and why “other grandfather” always said: “You
moost bear with the old heathen, Sophia; he’s been generous enough as
regards mooney, and, remember, you can be _in_ the world but not of it.”

There were aunts, too, at Altringham, who made a great fuss of Basil
for about three days, and then seemed to find him greatly in the way;
while “other grandfather” had a most embarrassing way of suddenly
demanding: “Well, yoong mon, and how’s the ciphering?”

Basil loved his mother very dearly, but he could have wished that she
took life a little less sadly. A gentle melancholy characterized her
every thought, and the child felt rather than understood that her
mental attitude toward her father-in-law was that of a deprecating
disapproval. Grandfather felt it too, for only a week before Basil had
heard him say to one of the gentlemen who were tramping the stubble
with him: “We shall never understand each other, my poor little
daughter and I, though we’ve lived together seven years. She’s as good
as gold, and I don’t think I’m particularly _difficile_, but there it
is--we can never get the same focus for anything.” Basil was walking
just behind with the keeper, who blushed up to the roots of his hair as
he called out: “I’m here, you know, grandfather.”

Grandfather pulled up short and turned to look at Basil. Then he gave
a queer little laugh. “There’s not much Manchester about the boy,” he
said, and tramped on.

They all went to London from November till the end of March, and there
grandfather generally dined at his club and played whist afterward,
while Basil’s mother had supper with him or had friends of her own to
dinner, just as she liked. Grandfather could not get on without his
rubber. Even in the country, three times a week three broughams drove
solemnly up the drive, and three old gentlemen descended therefrom to
dine with grandfather and play whist afterwards.

In London on fine nights he walked to his club, and Basil used to watch
him go from the nursery window just as he was going to bed; and at the
lamp grandfather always stopped and looked up at the curly head pressed
against the pane, then he would lift his hat with a grand sweep and
walk on, while Basil hugged himself with the delighted conviction that
_his_ grandfather was the very handsomest old gentleman in the whole
world. And sometimes grandfather would crush his hat over his eyes,
while a spasm of pain crossed his clean-shaven, stately old face, and
he’d whisper to himself: “My God! how like he is to my poor boy.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Among the very first things that Basil ever learned were the different
“suits” in cards. Grandfather taught him and gave him a shilling for
every suit as he knew them and the values of the cards, as in whist.
Then he taught Basil whist, playing double-dummy, and explaining as
they went along: “I wish you, Basil, to play whist as a gentleman
should, carefully and with due consideration, with the intelligence and
respect that the game deserves, not like a counter jumper for penny
points.”

It must be confessed that Basil took to this instruction much more
kindly than to that included under the heading of “ciphering,” or even
of reading and spelling. At six he could play a “fair hand,” at which
he was somewhat puffed up, the only drawback being that mother did
not seem to take any interest in his achievements. She never played
herself, though grandfather impressed upon her that she was preparing
for herself an unhappy old age; in fact, she did not seem to like cards
at all.

One very wet Sunday grandfather had arranged four “hands” on the
library table, and was proceeding to play a game out of “Cavendish”
for Basil’s instruction, when his mother suddenly came into the room.
She gave one quick glance at the table with the cards, and came forward
and stood beside it, saying very quietly: “I do not wish Basil to play
cards on Sunday.”

Grandfather had risen to his feet as Basil’s mother entered the
room. It would never have occurred to him to sit down while his
daughter-in-law was standing; he swept the cards into a little heap
with one swift movement of his beautiful white old hands, and said,
with a grave little bow:

“I apologize, my dear. I had for the moment forgotten
your--er--convictions on this question. What _may_ we play at?--for
I’ve made a bet with myself to keep Basil amused till teatime, and I
don’t want to lose it.” Then, turning to Basil--who, conscious of the
thunder in the air, felt very unhappy indeed: “It’s not your fault, my
boy. You’ve not been naughty. It’s I who was forgetful.”

Basil’s mother looked from one to the other a little piteously. She
had no weapons wherewith to meet her father-in-law’s smiling courtesy.
She might have liked him better had he sometimes been rude. “Other
grandfather” was not uniformly courteous.

On Sunday mornings they all three went to church together, and
grandfather sat under the big carved tablet which set forth how Basil’s
father had died at Ulundi, “aged twenty-nine.” Grandfather always
carried his daughter-in-law’s prayer book for her up to the house,
discussed the sermon with her, and was, as he himself would have put
it, “vastly agreeable.”

       *       *       *       *       *

A piece of coal fell out on the hearth and startled Basil out of his
reverie. He had evidently come to some decision, for he nodded his head
emphatically, muttering: “I’d better do it. I’m sure he’ll be bored if
I don’t, and I mayn’t get another chance.”

The room was quite dark but for the flickering firelight, which had
brightened since that big piece of coal fell apart. Basil went to
his own special cupboard and took from it a pack of cards, which his
grandfather had given him only last week. Grandfather never used the
same pack on two consecutive evenings, and gave one to Basil nearly
every week with the instruction: “Never use dirty cards, even to build
castles with.” The child had never played with the ones he held in his
hands, and his big grey eyes filled with tears as he wrapped them up in
a leaf torn out of his copy-book. Then, laboriously, for Basil was no
scribe, he wrote on the packet, a proceeding which took a considerable
time. He gave a sob as he kissed his message, but there was no time to
be lost. Slipping off his shoes, he opened the door very softly, raced
across the hall and up the stairs. The staircase was quite dark, for
Chapman had forgotten to light the lamps.

When he reached his grandfather’s bedroom door he paused with his hand
on the handle. His heart was pounding in his ears, and for a full
minute he could not hear whether all was quiet in the room or not.
Opening the door very softly, and as softly shutting it after him, he
ran across the room and pulled up the blind of the big window that
faced the bed. The moon came out from behind a bank of cloud, as if to
aid him in his task, and shone full on that strange last couch at the
foot of the bed in which grandfather lay so still under his coverlet
of flowers. Basil pushed at the heavy window, but it was fastened far
out of his reach, and he could not let in the fresh night air that
grandfather loved. As his eyes grew accustomed to the lighter room, he
came and stood by that light-colored box that he hated so, lifted the
white cloth covering his grandfather’s face, and looked at him long and
earnestly.

Basil had very vague notions as to what heaven was like; but, on
reviewing all that he had heard of it, he came to the conclusion that
if there was no whist there grandfather would be dull, and he had
often heard him say: “There’s only one thing that I dread, and that’s
boredom.” So Basil had decided that at all costs such a contingency
must be avoided, and grandfather must teach the angels to play whist.
“They can p’obably make more cards when they’ve seen them,” said Basil
to himself, and pushed his little packet underneath the folded hands,
kissed them, and turned to go as softly as he had come.

But the door opened at that moment, and his mother, candle in hand,
stood on the threshold gazing at the little figure standing full in the
strand of moonlight thrown across the carpet.

“What are you doing here, Basil?” she asked breathlessly.

“I came to give something to grandfather. Oh, don’t take it away from
him!”

The passionate distress in the child’s voice moved her.

“I will take nothing away from him that you wish to give him. But what
is it? Is it flowers?”

“No, mother, it is not flowers.”

She came into the room, closing the door after her.

“I must see what it is,” she said very gently.

Basil stood where he was as though turned to stone. Would she take it
away--or would she put it back? He could not see her, for he stood with
his back to her, and seemed incapable of turning round. His mother,
noting the disarrangement of the flowers, drew out the little packet,
and, holding her candle close, read the inscription in the large
uncertain writing:

  “DEAR GRANDFATHER,

  “I’m sory it’s not a cleane pak, but I don’t know where they are.

                                             “Your loving boy,
                                                                “BASIL.”



AN IRON SEAT


He sat at one end of the seat, she at the other, and the seat was on
the cliffs overlooking the sea at Wolsuth on the Suffolk coast. They
say that if your eyes were strong enough you could see the coast of
Holland; but even with telescopes no one has yet succeeded in doing
that.

At first he hardly noticed her--she was so small and still and read her
book so assiduously; but she could have passed a searching examination
as to his appearance, for she had studied it carefully. She would
have told you that he was tall, and thin, and dark, and “rather old”;
that his beard was grey, though his hair was black and decidedly thin
on the top; that his spectacles had gold rims and the eyes behind
them were very kind; that his manner struck you as extremely grave
and decorous: what impressed her most, however, was that big, dull,
paper-covered book he was always reading. She was sure it was dull, for
_she_ couldn’t read a word of it; it was in German--she knew that much,
and she had tried to pronounce the title to herself in bed at night,
but never came near it at all, for it looked like this: “Mendelejeef
Chemie,” and it would take a very sharp little girl of ten to make much
out of that.

No one ever came to sit between them on that iron seat; it was far from
the esplanade, and overlooked a lonely part of the beach where there
were no “entertainments.” When they had sat there for several days,
the man who read “Mendelejeef Chemie” looked up suddenly to find that
his companion at the other end of the seat was wiping her eyes with
the absurdest little red-bordered handkerchief. She held her book in
one hand--a somewhat large and heavy book for such a little hand--and
wiped her eyes with the other, and yet the man was sure that she was
not unhappy, for her thin brown cheeks were flushed, and though her
mouth was tremulous it wore a proud and happy smile. He was devoured by
curiosity. What book could it be that had the power to move a little
girl in so complex a fashion?

He shifted down the seat toward her; but she was so absorbed in what
she was reading that she never looked his way, and he found that the
book she held in her hand was “From London to Ladysmith via Pretoria.”

Suddenly she looked round and saw him. Quite simply and naturally she
offered him a share of her book, saying enthusiastically:

“Isn’t it splendid? And my daddie was there through it all.”

“Are you ready?” she said presently.

The man nodded, and she turned the page. Then, with tears still shining
on her cheeks, she began to read aloud:

  “It was a procession of lions. And presently, when the two battalions
  of Devons met--both full of honors--and old friends breaking from the
  ranks gripped each other’s hands and shouted, everyone was carried
  away, and I waved my feathered hat and cheered and cheered until I
  could cheer no longer for joy that I had lived to see the day....”

Here she stopped, and, turning her radiant face to the man beside her,
cried:

“Aren’t you glad you weren’t born in any other century? Isn’t it a good
thing to be in the world when there are such splendid things happening?”

The man smiled down at her, saying heartily: “It is, indeed!” And
straightway they were friends.

Ever afterward they sat in the middle of the seat quite close together,
and although Winny--that was her name--continued to read “From London
to Ladysmith,” she read it aloud, and “Mendelejeef” lay neglected on
the far end of the seat.

They talked a great deal about the war, and the man found that this
little girl knew all about it, from the battle of Glencoe to the relief
of Ladybrand, the name and whereabouts of every regiment, the result of
every single engagement big or little.

He learned that last year her father had been home on long leave
and had brought them all to Wolsuth, “and oh! we did have a lovely
time!” but that this year mother couldn’t afford it, “War risks are so
expensive, you know,” that she--Winny--had been silly enough to get
influenza in July, and an aunt had consented to let her come with her
own family.

“Mother and the boys--there’s three boys younger than me: I’m the
eldest--have got to stay at home this year. I’m so sorry, though I’d
far rather be with them, only I’ve _got_ to get strong. Daddie said so
in his last letter.”

The man gathered that her aunt and cousins were not altogether
_simpatica_, though Winny never said so; still, every day she came
and sat on the iron seat after her bath and talked of her book, for
which she had unbounded admiration, and of her own small affairs.
Being an excellent listener, the man found himself well amused, for
he was one of those people who keep the best part of themselves for
old friends and little children, and are always quite misunderstood
and unappreciated by casual acquaintances, which lack of appreciation
doesn’t trouble them in the least.

He learned that one of the “boys” was going into the Royal Engineers,
“because there you can live on your pay from the first if you’re
careful,” another into the Artillery, “and we may spare one for the
Navy.”

“And what are you going to be?” he asked one day, after they had
exhaustively discussed the futures of the three boys.

“Oh, I’m going to be a mother,” she replied, with immense decision.
“You see, you have such a lot of people to take care of you and love
you, if you’re a mother.”

“But you have to take care of them first, haven’t you?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, just at first--but afterwards---- You should just see the
care we take of mother, daddie and all.”

The man looked out to sea and tried to picture the eager little figure
at his side as a large comfortable mother of many children. He tried so
hard that he forgot to answer her last remark, and she asked anxiously:

“Don’t you think it’s a good thing to be?”

“Excellent!” he answered heartily. “It is one of the oldest and most
honorable professions; mothers are people we can in nowise ever do
without.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Winny, in a satisfied voice, “and that’s
what I’m going to be; I made up my mind years ago.”

       *       *       *       *       *

One day as he arrived at their trysting place he discovered that Winny
was crying in right down earnest, and not for joy that Ladysmith had
been relieved. The little red-bordered handkerchief was screwed up
into a tight, wet ball, and the small figure in blue serge looked very
woebegone indeed. She had taken off her fisherman’s cowl, and cast
it on the ground beside her; and when she saw her friend, instead of
waving him a gay welcome as he came up, she shook her curly brown hair
round her cheeks to hide her face.

All this was so unlike Winny that the man immediately reflected with
dismay that he had not read the morning paper at all carefully. It was
possible that some disaster had happened to her father. In those days
we were apt to trace all sorrows to South Africa.

“No bad news, I hope?” he said in rather a hesitating way as he came up.

Winny shook her head till her face was entirely hidden by her hair; but
she did not answer otherwise.

“You may as well tell me what’s the matter,” said the man; “it may not
be past mending.”

Now there was something about this man that inspired confidence;
moreover, he offered Winny his own handkerchief, which was large and
clean and comforting. So she accepted it, mopped her wet face, shook
back her hair, and began: “I don’t bathe with the others, you know.”
Here she paused so long that the man said, “Well?” though it was
against his principles to interrupt anybody’s narrative.

“I bathe at Herrington’s machines,” she continued, “where we always
bathed last year--daddie too--right far away at the end of the beach.
My aunt and cousins bathe where the niggers are, and the concert, and
such crowds of people you have to wait ever so long for a machine. So I
asked if I might bathe with Herrington like last year, for he’s such a
nice man, and he takes such care of me, and daddie liked him awfully.
There’s been Herringtons in Wolsuth since 1400!”

Winny paused after this announcement, evidently expecting comment of
some sort.

“That’s a long record,” said the man, rising to the occasion. “And what
was Mr. Herrington before he took to keeping bathing-machines?”

“He was mate on a schooner, and one of his sons is a captain of a
merchantman; he’s raised himself tremendously. Then there’s two
sons who help Herrington, and are fishermen in winter; and Mrs.
Herrington does washing. Oh, they’re such a nice family!” she exclaimed
ecstatically.

The man looked out to sea, wondering what on earth all this had to do
with her tears. But he was a patient person; so he waited.

“I go home to-morrow,” she continued, “and I’ve had one of Herrington’s
bathing-machines ever since I came--going on for three weeks now--and
he’s taken me out in the boat and let me dive and swim, and been so
kind and jolly, and to-day, when I asked my aunt for the money to pay
him--it’s fourpence each time--she wouldn’t give it me, and laughed and
said that it wouldn’t hurt him to take me for nothing this year, he
made such a lot out of us last. Think of it!” she exclaimed, clasping
and unclasping her hands. “It’s his living! It’s like taking a leg of
mutton from a butcher for nothing. I told auntie that mother would send
it to her if she’d let me have it, but she only laughed and said it was
nonsense. Of course mother will send it to _him_, but that’s not the
same. He’ll have to think me shabby and ungrateful for nearly three
days, for I can’t go and say good-bye to him when I’ve nothing to give
him. I’ve only sixpence. Isn’t it dreadful?”

The man reflected that there were people who had no objection to
accepting legs of mutton from their butchers, who rather resented the
fact that these same butchers ventured on occasion to send in a bill;
but evidently the soldier who had been shut up in Ladysmith brought up
his children with a different view of their obligations. He was very
sorry for Winny, but he didn’t dare to offer her the money. There are
people to whom one cannot offer money.

“Can’t you tell Herrington how you are placed?” he feebly suggested.

“Of course not,” the child answered scornfully. “He’d say I was ‘more’n
welcome’ to my baths, and that it didn’t matter a pin. It’s just
because I know he’d gladly give me my baths that it hurts so. It’s his
_living_,” she repeated. As she spoke she stood up and stuffed the
little wet handkerchief into her pocket.

The man was sitting with his hands thrust deep into his own, as men
will when perplexed or troubled. Winny stood with her back to him,
gazing sorrowfully at Herrington’s bathing-machines on the distant
beach.

The little pocket gaped, and the man succumbed to temptation. Very
gingerly he dropped a crown piece into the opening which displayed the
drenched handkerchief. Then he stood up. “I’m going by the afternoon
train,” he said, “so I fear I must say good-bye. But I hope we shall
meet again some day.”

“I hope so,” sighed Winny, as she held up her face to be kissed, and
wondered why he seemed in such a hurry and never even asked her to walk
back with him.



LÉON

  I would have our children taught, so far as teaching can go, to love
  and admire France, that glorious nation which has done so much and
  suffered so much for humanity.--WILLIAM ARCHER, 1898.


We did not believe it possible that a boy of nine could wear
high-buttoned boots, a pale blue sash, and long hair like a girl’s,
and yet possess a character unaffected by these deplorable externals.
That, in addition to this, he should be French, speaking that
“_nimini pimini_” language with perfect ease; and, in further proof
of his mental slipperiness, speak English almost equally well--but
for a curious roll and rumble of the letter “r” in the back of the
throat--was another serious stumbling-block in the way of our liking.
It was not natural. Had he been puny, or sallow, or in any way
physically “Frenchy” as we supposed it, we should have found him less
bewildering. But he was sturdy, ruddy, and fair-haired; tall for his
age, and of a frank cheerfulness that was rather engaging. Absolutely
unashamed of his inferior nationality, unconscious, seemingly, of those
elongated buttoned boots, he would shake back his tawny hair and look
you squarely in the face with big blue eyes that smiled. He didn’t
look a “Molly,” somehow, in spite of his hair; but we children were
convinced that he “must be one, really,” and that what the twins called
his “false French smile” was a sort of cloak for the innate cowardice
of his disposition.

What induced Aunt Alice to marry a French officer, we could not
think! That she and her husband were what mother called “devoted to
one another” seemed to us an insufficient explanation. Not only did
she marry this foreigner and desert her native land, but she became a
Roman Catholic--nurse minded this most and called her a Papist--and
she seemed perfectly happy in her exile. She was supposed to be a very
beautiful person, but what most impressed us during her rare and brief
visits was the quality and quantity of the sweets she brought us;
sweets in gorgeous boxes which bore the mystic device _Gouache_. France
was, we were convinced, a poor sort of place, but exception must be
made in favor of her sweets.

In reflecting upon our general attitude toward France and the French at
this time, I am reminded of the man who scornfully held up to ridicule
a country so far left to itself as to speak of bread as “Pain.”

“But,” suggested a more tolerant friend, “we call it bread.”

“Ah! it _is_ bread, you see.”

But to return to Léon. His father’s regiment had been ordered to some
place in Africa, where they could not take Léon, and as Aunt Alice was
going with her husband for at least six months, Léon was sent to us.

Eric and I decided that it was a bore. Jennie, who is queer and
contradictory at times, said nothing. She adores Aunt Alice. The twins,
who had just been doing the Battle of Waterloo in history, and were
rampantly patriotic, expressed grave doubts as to whether it was quite
loyal to Queen Victoria to receive Léon at all.

“No one likes to go about all day with a mountebank!” grumbled Eric.

“If only he’d had fewer clothes!” I sighed.

But even the most sanguine destroyer of garments could hardly hope that
Léon would wear out the quantity of which he was possessed in less than
six months.

The twins and Léon came toward us from the tennis lawn; the twins red
and triumphant, Léon red and evidently perturbed. Jennie followed,
lingering in the rear; she is lame, not a cripple, you know, but
noticeably lame.

“England won!” shouted the twins. They always seemed to speak in a sort
of chorus.

Léon sat down on the bank beside us and shook his hair back from his
face. He evidently intended to appeal to Eric about something; but just
as he opened his mouth to speak, he noticed Jennie.

“Come, my cousin,” he called, patting the bank beside him; “we shall
have good fortune another time!”

“England won!” chanted the twins again. “We always do!”

“That is not so!” cried Léon angrily. “Why do you speak to despise
my country? If you were in France, my guest, we speak not forever of
Hastings?”

“Oh, that was ages ago,” said Eric judicially; “but you were not fairly
matched.”

“Léon had me, you see,” put in Jennie.

“Not so, my cousin, your play was beautiful,” said Léon, and he took
her hand and patted it. He had queer affectionate ways, and never
seemed to mind showing that he liked people. “We beat them next time.”

“I wonder what makes Léon so chummy with Jennie?” I asked Eric half
an hour later, as we rested after a hot “single.” “Do you think it’s
because she’s the only one of us that couldn’t lick him?”

Eric raised himself on his elbows and stared at me.

“Well, of all the chuckle-headed ideas I ever heard! Really, for
downright wrong-headedness, give me the average girl. Can’t you see,
you silly, that it’s because she’s lame, and the little beggar’s sorry
for her? He’s a good-hearted kid if he is Frenchy, and as to licking,
just you wait----”

I felt very much snubbed and rather aggrieved, for only that afternoon
Eric had grumbled about Léon’s clothes and called him a “mountebank.”
Boys seem to keep things separate somehow, in a curious way.

One day Jennie and Léon had been sent to the Home Farm to fetch eggs.
It was really the twins’ turn, but they hid so that they shouldn’t
have to go, for it was a very hot afternoon. Eric and I went for a
stroll through the fields in the same direction to look at a nest of
young yellow-hammers in the big paddock. There’s a sort of hill in the
big paddock, and we saw Jennie and Léon coming down the cart road from
the farm; they went by the road because Jennie hates climbing gates--it
hurts her. Léon was carrying the eggs and they came very slowly,
because Jennie was tired. Toward them came one, Fred Oram, a village
boy, not a nice boy at all. He hates us because the head groom gave him
a thrashing when he caught him throwing stones at the thoroughbreds.

Fred Oram began to limp like Jennie, and called out:

“’Ullo, Frenchy! Shall I plait your ’air for ya?”

Eric, who happened to be at home because two-thirds of his school got
measles and mother was nervous, began to run, and I ran after him;
but we were a good way from the gate, and the hedge is too thick to
get through. We ran alongside of it, and heard Léon say in his funny,
stilted English:

“Please hold the eggs, my cousin!” Then, evidently to Fred: “How dare
you to mock at my cousin and insult me?”

As we reached the gate Eric pulled me back.

“Let the kid alone!” he whispered. “He’s not afraid.”

It reminded me of old King Edward, and “Let the boy win his spurs.”

None of the three saw us. Jennie was standing on the grass at the side,
looking very red and excited; Fred Oram was pulling Léon’s hair and
dancing round him, making derisive remarks. Léon wrenched his head
away, and with a bound stood in the middle of the road, facing his
enemy. In spite of his buttony boots--in spite of his blue sash and his
long hair--Fred seemed rather afraid of him, for Léon looked, and was,
furious.

For about half a minute they stood looking at each other. Léon shouted,
“Lâche! Lâche!”--he forgot to speak English, he was so excited--then,
“En garde!”--and there seemed a thousand _r_s in that _garde_--and he
sprang on Fred, who went down like a ninepin.

Eric vaulted the gate, yelling excitedly, “By Jove! the kid can box.”

Jennie laid down the eggs on the grass, and hid her face in her hands.
But she looked through her fingers. I saw her.

In another minute Fred was upon his feet. He was bigger than any of
us--even Eric. Léon went at him again, calling out what we supposed to
be battle-cries in French, and I do believe that the French alarmed
Fred as much as the pommelling. Anyway, down he went again, with Léon
on the top of him.

“Time!” shouted Eric, picking upon Léon and wiping his face, which was
hard to see, for his nose was bleeding and one eye was swollen.

But Fred got up and began to walk away, remarking with surly dignity:

“I don’t care for to fight with no French tiger-cats.”

Léon broke away from Eric, and ran after his late foe. Fred stopped and
took up a defensive attitude, but Léon went up with his grubby right
hand held out.

“Shake!” he cried. “We have foughten; it is over. Shake with me?” And
Fred shook. “That was quite English?” asked Léon anxiously, as he came
back to be cleaned.

Eric looked at him very kindly. “It was all right,” he said; and Léon
squared his shoulders with modest pride.

“I never saw such a nose to bleed!” exclaimed Eric, ten minutes later,
as the last available handkerchief had been reduced to a crimson, pulpy
ball. “There’s one sash done for, anyway. I suppose the suit’ll wash,
which is a pity.”

On the way home Eric carried the eggs, and Jennie walked hand in hand
with Léon. They rather lagged behind, and presently I heard Jennie
whisper--I have very sharp ears:

“Léon, am I so very lame?”

“My little cousin, I do not see you lame at all, except when you are
fatigued; and we all of us walk badly when we are fatigued;” and he
stopped and kissed Jennie on both cheeks.

I had often heard that the French say what is pleasant at the expense
of what is true; but just then I wondered if it was always such a bad
thing, for when I turned and looked at my little sister her face was
perfectly radiant, and she was hardly limping at all.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” said Eric, when Léon had been carried off
by the authorities to have keys put down his back, his eye bathed, and
to be generally cleaned up; and we were all five sitting in solemn
conclave on the largest wheelbarrow--the twins had joined us, much
excited by recent events--“I’ll tell you what it is: you kids must drop
that Waterloo business, and we must none of us mind his queer clothes
any more. He’s a ripping good sort, and, after all, he can’t help being
French!”

“And he wouldn’t help it if he could!” cried Jennie. “France is a great
country.”

For a wonder nobody contradicted her. We were all busy readjusting
preconceived ideas.



THE OLD RELIGION

  God is above the sphere of our esteem,
  And is the best known, not defining Him.

                               ROBERT HERRICK.


It’s a far cry from a busy street in Leith to a village in the
loveliest part of wooded Gloucestershire; but, at eight years old,
vicissitude is borne with a calm philosophy seemingly unattainable in
later years, and Maggie McClachlan expressed no great wonder at her new
environment, rather to the disappointment of her worthy aunt, who was
fully aware of her own extreme good nature and condescension in “taking
the lassie for the whole summer, and paying her fare _both_ ways.”

Measles followed by an obstinate “hoast,” was the commonplace cause
that transported Maggie to this strange new country. The long, roaring,
whirring, bewildering journey--in which she was passed by a kindly
official into the varied guardianship of such passengers as were going
her way--left her dazed and puzzled, but not unhappy. Her childless
uncle and aunt were kind, and there were the woods.

The first thing that struck Maggie about these woods was the singular
absence of bits of paper; neither did she come upon any broken bottles
in the course of her wanderings. This lack seemed even more wonderful
to her than the presence of innumerable foxgloves. She had spent an
occasional afternoon in the woods at Aberdour, but always in a crowd.
Here the spaciousness and peace attracted her, even as it filled her
little soul with an awe that was a thing apart from fear. If in after
years Maggie should read what Mr. Henry James has written of “a great,
good Place,” she will understand it better than most people.

For the first week she met with no adventures. Her aunt, a bustling,
busy, thrifty Scotswoman, worked a great deal up at the big house; her
uncle assisted in the manufacture of the “superfine broadcloth” for
which the little village used to be famous, and Maggie was left to do
much as she pleased. Her cough left her, and the color came into her
pale cheeks, and the sun set his mark upon the bridge of her nose in
the shape of a band of the dearest little brown freckles.

Hitherto she had not gone far into the woods, but with returning health
came a spirit of adventure. One afternoon she wandered on and on,
singing softly to herself a ditty relating that “Kitty Bairdie had a
coo,” going on to describe minutely, and at length, the various animals
owned by this worthy lady, and concluding each verse with the cheerful
injunction, “Dance, Kitty Bairdie!”

Everything seemed to want to sing that afternoon, and did sing, too,
lustily and long. Unconsciously Maggie raised her voice till the
final “Dance, Kitty Bairdie!” had quite a rollicking sound, and she
found herself doing a sort of double shuffle among the ground ivy and
foxgloves.

It is not easy to dance in and out of ground ivy and brambles, and
Maggie paused for breath, only to catch it again in a perfect agony
of fear, as, not five yards from her, she beheld a big white figure,
apparently just risen out of the ground.

Paralyzed with terror, she stood staring at the vision. A tall man it
was--she was sure it was a man, and no ghost--clad in curious flowing
robes of soft whitey flannel, falling to his feet in innumerable folds,
while in his hand he held what Maggie took to be some instrument of
torture. It was a butterfly net; but Maggie did not know this, for
people did not catch many butterflies in Commercial Street, Leith.

The whole dreadful truth flashed upon her. This was one of the monks!
Had she not read in a guide to the neighborhood that “The Dominican
Priory of the Annunciation is a large and handsome building; here
candidates for the priesthood pursue a course of study in divinity and
philosophy. It is under the government of a Prior.” This, then, must
be one of the priests, and having been very well brought up in the
strictest sect of the Free Kirk, she was sure that if only he succeeded
in “catching her,” she would be put to unspeakable tortures, or forced
to recant her faith.

Had she not with her own eyes seen her mother hastily slam the door of
their flat in the face of a woman wearing a queer head-dress and long
cloak, who had come to beg for money?

“I’ll ha’e none o’ they Papishes here!” her mother exclaimed angrily,
and then--for it was just before Maggie came south--“and you, Maggie,
if you see ony o’ them when you’re wi’ your aunty, just turn and flee.
I’m told there’s a whole clamjamfray o’ them there, an’ ye can never
tell what they Jesuits will be at.”

So, having found her breath sufficiently to give a wild cry, Maggie
turned and fled.

The queer white man, who, as she afterward remembered, looked
astonished, called something after her. But Maggie’s heart was thumping
in her ears to the exclusion of every other sound, and she ran blindly
on till one treacherous little foot, more used to pavements than rough
forest ground, gave under her with a horrid wrench, and she fell
forward in a terrified little heap just as she reached a footpath
leading she knew not whither.

There she lay shivering with pain and fear, with her eyes shut, for she
heard the soft swish of long garments through the undergrowth. Then a
shadow fell upon her, and she was lifted up into a pair of strong arms,
while a voice that even her excited imagination could not construe as
unkindly exclaimed:

“I do believe I frightened you, and I’m awfully sorry. I don’t suppose
you ever saw such a funny frock before!”

There was something human and disarming about the “awfully” and “funny
frock”; moreover, the owner of the voice did not hold her as though she
were a captive. He sat down at the foot of the big tree whose gnarled
roots had tripped Maggie up, and set her on his knee. Besides, the
voluminous flannel garment had a most reassuring and workaday smell of
soap. But she could not bring herself to open her eyes just yet. She
screwed them and her courage up very tight, and whispered:

“I’ll no recant! Ye may burn me, but I’ll no recant!”

The big, queer man threw back his head and laughed, and his laugh was
even more inspiring of confidence than his speaking voice. But he
pulled himself up short in the very middle of his laugh to ask:

“I say, though, did you hurt yourself when you fell?”

Maggie opened her eyes the tiniest little bit, and for the first time
saw this queer man’s face. It was a kind face, a handsome face, with
large merry brown eyes and an exceedingly straight nose. His mouth was
well cut and firm, and when he smiled as he did then, he showed two
rows of admirably white and even teeth. And the good smell of soap was
in no way deceptive, for there was about this queer man’s appearance a
radiant cleanliness that was by no means merely physical. All this did
Maggie gravely take in through half-shut eyes, and though the pain in
her ankle was horrible, and her heart still danced a sort of breakdown
against her ribs, she was no longer afraid--only very, very curious.

The queer tall man, looking down at the face resting against his arm,
noticed that it was small and white, with long-lashed closed eyes set
rather far apart, and that the little freckles looked pathetically
prominent across the thin small nose; and even as Maggie was comforted
by the good smell of clean flannel, so he recognized approvingly that
he held in his arms a very clean little girl, even though her pinafore
was patched and her shoes worn at the toes.

“Are you hurt, you poor mite?” he asked again.

For answer Maggie stuck out the painful foot, and behold! there was a
big lump on the ankle, and it looked twice as big as the other one.

“Here’s a pretty kettle of fish!” cried the queer man. “You’ve sprained
your ankle.”

As he spoke he set Maggie on the ground beside him very gently, and
diving into the folds of his habit produced a large handkerchief, which
he proceeded to tear into strips. Then, very gently and deftly, he
bandaged up the poor swollen foot. By this time Maggie’s blue eyes were
wide open, and as he stooped over her foot she found time to wonder why
he wore such “a wee, wee roond cappie” on the back of his head. The
pain was bad, but she tried hard not to flinch, and when it was all
done and the bandage fastened with a little pebble brooch that she had
worn at her neck, he said gaily:

“And now to carry you home, for that foot must have hot fomentations as
soon as possible.”

Here, however, Maggie demurred. “I can walk fine,” she announced with
great dignity, and tried; but it was no use--she couldn’t even stand,
the pain was so bad.

So the “papist man” picked her up in his arms and set off toward the
village.

Now, Maggie was just a little anxious at this, for she had wandered a
good way into the park, and the path he took seemed quite unfamiliar.

With unprecedented courage she took hold of his chin with her hand and
turned his face that she could see it.

“You’re sure you’re no takin’ me to your convent?” she asked gravely,
as one who begs to know the worst at once. She still had fleeting
visions of a dungeon followed by stake and faggots if she proved leal
to the faith of her fathers.

“My dear child, they wouldn’t have you there. We don’t allow any women
to come in--not even little girls--where I live.”

Maggie was silent for a minute; then, because every Scotsman, woman, or
child loves an argument, and a theological argument best of all, she
said slowly:

“But you worship a woman--images of a woman.”

“Ah, that’s rather different. I don’t think we’ll discuss that,
because, you see, we look at everything from rather different points of
view. How’s that poor foot of yours? You’re a regular Spartan to bear
pain. Am I carrying you comfortably?”

Here was another facer for Maggie; he did not want “to discuss that.”

“I thought,” she said, “that you liked to burn everybody wha’ didna
’gree wi’ you--when ye got the chance,” she added.

“Oh, we’re not quite so black as we’re painted, and the world is big
enough for us all nowadays, even though there are so many more people
in it. Isn’t that a good thing?”

Maggie’s honest little heart yearned over this mistaken man, who
carried little girls so tenderly, who seemed so kind and gay.

“I wish that you were no a papish,” she said softly, “for I’m sorely
afraid that ye’ll no win Heaven if you worship graven images.”

The papist in question stopped short in the middle of the woodland
path. The sunlight shining through the leaves painted fantastic
patterns on his white draperies, and his eyes were very kind as he said
gently:

“Don’t you think there will be even more room in Heaven than there is
here for all sorts of people, provided they are kind, and brave, and
honest, and do their best?”

And Maggie agreed that it might be possible, and was something
comforted. By and by he asked her what the nice song was that she had
been singing when he first met her, and she sang it again for him all
through, till he, too, learned the tune; then she taught him the words,
and although his Scotch left much to be desired, they made a very
considerable noise between them, and the woods resounded to the strains
of “Dance, Kitty Bairdie.”

       *       *       *       *       *

“They monks seem different to the ordinary sort,” said Maggie that
night, when, after much fomentation of the injured ankle, her aunt
tucked her into bed.

“They’re just harmless haverals,” said her aunt indulgently; but
Maggie “added a wee thing” onto her prayers, and whispered under the
bed-clothes:

“Please make room for yon clean man at--any--rate.”



COMRADES


He was called Bunchy because, when a very little boy, his clothes
_would_ bunch; the tiny petticoats were short for their width, and
everything stuck out all round him like a frill.

Now that he was five, and wore breeches with four little buttons at the
knee, the name still stuck to him, though it was no longer appropriate.

Bunchy was lonely.

If Pussy had been there it would have been very different; but she had
been sent for quite suddenly to go and nurse dad, who had incontinently
fallen ill with influenza just three days after mother (Bunchy always
called her Pussy), Nana, and he had settled down for a fortnight’s
holiday in a Cotteswold village.

It was a delightful village! It had a green with noisy geese upon it,
a stream that gurgled and splashed and told fairy tales on sleepy
September afternoons, and real woods surrounded it.

The cottage where Pussy had taken rooms was ever so pretty, and had a
garden full of currant-bushes and celery.

For three days they had a lovely time. They sought giants in the
woods, finding squirrels instead--which were prettier and only less
exciting; they paddled their feet in the stream and caught minnows in
a bottle; they pretended that the geese on the green were “Trolls,” and
routed them with great slaughter; and they had found mushrooms before
breakfast in a neighboring field.

Then Pussy had to go away, and for Bunchy the face of Nature was
changed and clouded. Only Nana was left, and, although very kind, she
was not an exciting companion. She knew nothing of giants, and seemed
to care very little about Trolls. Moreover, on this particular morning
she sat indoors making a cotton dress, and told Bunchy to “run and play
in the garden like a good little boy, and not worry.” How can people,
he thought, sit in a room and sew when all the beautiful out-of-doors
seems clamoring for them to come and admire it?

However, he played in the garden for a while; but it was rather a small
garden, and he grew tired of being a “third son” all by himself, with
no one to admire him, so he came in again and climbed the steep little
staircase. Finding the door of his mother’s room open, he went in. The
dressing-table faced the door, and the first thing he saw was a pair
of Pussy’s slippers standing in front of it. They had tall curly heels
and buckles, such as she loved, and he remembered how, even with the
tall heels, she did not reach to daddy’s shoulder. Somehow the sight of
those slippers made him want her so dreadfully that he couldn’t stay
in the room or in the garden. He went out into the road to walk and
walk until he should come to Yorkshire, where daddy was laid up in the
house of a bachelor friend with whom he had gone to shoot.

It was a very straight road, with a trim path by the side. By and by
he came to some big gates. There was a little house inside them, all
covered with purple clematis. The gate stood open, and as Bunchy was
rather tired of the neat, straight road, he turned in, and went down a
very broad gravel path. A little way inside the gate stood two little
churches, one on each side of the path; beyond them, as far as Bunchy
could see, it was all garden. There were flowering shrubs, and trees,
and lots of grass, but it was unlike any garden he had ever seen
before, for it was full of little mounds, and there were crosses, and
slabs of stone, and marble angels dotted about among the mounds.

He turned down a side-path to investigate further in this strange
garden. Nobody was in sight, and he wandered on by himself till,
turning a corner suddenly, he came upon a man.

The man was dressed in black, and was sitting on a big stone slab--a
very grew old slab; but close at his feet there was one of those
curious mounds that puzzled Bunchy, and although this one had no grass
upon it, you could hardly see the brown earth, for it was almost
covered with scattered flowers--all of one kind.

Bunchy knew the flower by sight, for Pussy always wore a bit in her
tam-o’-shanter when she came back from Scotland. The man did not move
as Bunchy came up to him. The little boy regarded him with grave brown
eyes, and something in his expression made Bunchy sure that the man
was sorry.

Now, in Bunchy’s house, when people are sorry, Pussy talks about
something else, and she does it so beautifully that they straightway
forget their sorrow in the interest of her remarks. Bunchy felt that he
ought to talk about something else to this man who looked so sorry; but
how can you change a subject when no subject has been broached?

So the child went up to the sorry man and lifted his tam-o’-shanter,
saying politely:

“Can you, please, tell me whose garden this is?”

Now it is an easy thing to take off a tam-o’-shanter, but when you try
to put it on again it has a shabby way of curling up and sitting on
the top of your head so insecurely that it topples off again directly.
Pussy generally put Bunchy’s on again for him, and as she wasn’t there
he left the matter alone and held it in his hand. The man started a
little as Bunchy spoke, then he said slowly:

“I think it is God’s garden.”

Bunchy was not surprised. He felt that he knew God very well indeed.
When you say prayers morning and evening, and know that there is a
benevolent Somebody somewhere, who gives you your home, and your
parents, and your little white bed, who likes you to be truthful and
courteous, and to have clean hands at meals, it is quite natural to
hear that this benevolent Person has a garden. All nice people ought to
have gardens, so Bunchy said:

“Why does God have so many little rockeries in His garden? Why are
there all these stones, and figures, and little mounds?”

“When people die they are buried in this garden, and their friends put
up the crosses and stones----”

“And angels?” interrupted Bunchy admiringly; and as he looked up in the
man’s face he noticed that his eyes were very kind, but that there were
big black shadows round them, and their lids looked red and heavy.

“They put up the crosses, and stones, and angels to show where their
friends are sleeping,” continued the tall man.

“Then it’s a funeral,” said Bunchy solemnly, and there was silence.

The man looked sorrier than ever, and Bunchy felt that now was the time
to talk of something else, so he said:

“Can you tell me the nearest way to Yorkshire?”

The man seemed to give himself a shake, as though he were trying to
wake up. He held out his hand to Bunchy, who placed his own in it
confidingly; then he drew the child toward him and set him on his knee,
asking:

“Why do you want to go to Yorkshire, old chap?”

“Because Pussy is there and I am so lonely,” Bunchy’s voice broke.
“I went into her room, and I saw her shoes--the ones with the curly
heels--and they made me want her so bad. They’re such tall heels.”

“She had such little feet,” murmured the man.

And Bunchy saw that he had gone to sleep again, so he sat very still
for a minute or two, then he said mournfully:

“I’m so lonely!”

“So am I,” said the man. “My Pussy has gone to sleep. She is not coming
back any more. She is sleeping under the heather here.”

Bunchy felt the man’s shoulder heave as he leant against him, but he
said nothing. He felt that this was not a time to talk of something
else; this sorryness was something beyond him; so he stroked the man’s
face with a soft, sticky little hand, and the corners of his mouth
drooped, but he did not feel quite so lonely.

The man seemed to like the feel of the little hand, for he bent his
head, and, laying his cheek against Bunchy’s, said in a queer broken
voice:

“How is it that you understand, you quaint little boy?”

“Sorry people always understand, and I feel to love you! Will you come
to Yorkshire too? We should be such nice company.”

The man seemed to consider; then he said:

“It’s a long way. I’m afraid we shouldn’t get there by candle-light.
You’d be very tired, and your shoes would be quite worn out.”

“Couldn’t you carry me a bit sometimes? Daddy does when I’m very tired.”

“Well, I might do that; but even then we shouldn’t get there to-day.
How is it you are here all alone?”

The man seemed waking up, and waited quite anxiously for Bunchy’s
answer.

“Well, you see, Nana was busy sewing, and I was lonely wivout Pussy, so
I thought I’d walk to Yorkshire just to see her.”

“Suppose you come to lunch with me instead. It’s not so far as
Yorkshire; still, it’s a good way, and we’ll go and tell Nana you’re
coming, then she won’t be anxious. I don’t think Pussy would like you
to walk all that way to-day. She’ll come back as soon as she can, you
may be quite sure. Will you come? We’d be nice company, as you say.”

Bunchy looked up into the man’s eyes; then he slid off his knee, saying:

“I’ll come, thank you.”

The man got up off the big flat stone and held out his hand to Bunchy;
but the little boy had knelt down by the mound all covered with
heather. He stooped his curly head and kissed the flowers, saying in
his sweet child’s voice:

“Good-bye, man’s Pussy! I hope you are happy in God’s garden.”

Then he took the man’s hand and they walked away together.

But the man had gone to sleep again, for he said:

“Nay! And though all men, seeing, had pity on me, she would not see.”



LITTLE SHOES


The Vicarage stands at the bottom of the market place, inside high
walls and entered by wooden gates which generally stand open. Thus the
passer-by can, for a moment, feast his eyes upon the perfect garden
within.

The Vicaress was dead-heading her roses. She does this carefully every
summer afternoon just after lunch. She had reached the bush of cabbage
roses close to the gate, and her long lath basket lay on the drive
beside her.

The market place was empty and still; nobody was shopping, for all the
world rested preparatory to attending the Earl’s garden-party later
on. Road and houses alike glared white in the hot June sunshine, while
in contrast the Vicarage garden seemed doubly cool and shady. The yew
hedge just inside the gates threw long green shadows on drive and lawn.
Such a lawn it was! Plantains or dandelions were a thing unknown. Other
lawns might get brown or worn in a drought, but the Vicarage lawn was
watered every night by a specially constructed hose, that the beauty
of its velvet turf might never vary. The Vicar was wont to excuse his
exceeding pride in his lawn by quoting: “The green hath two pleasures:
the one, because nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass
finely shorn; the other, because it will give you a fair alley in the
midst.” It was a sunken lawn surrounded by smoothly shaven banks and
reached by broad stone steps.

The Vicar and like-minded clerics occasionally played bowls upon it;
but to think of lawn tennis or croquet in connection with such grass
were little short of sacrilege.

Presently the Vicaress became aware that a woman stood in the doorway,
a woman carrying a baby, while a little girl of some three years clung
to her skirts.

They stood gazing wistfully into the garden. As both mother and child
wore red kerchiefs instead of hats, the Vicaress looked for the
inevitable organ, but could not see it.

As she strongly disapproved of indiscriminate charity she shook her
head at them, saying: “We never give at the door!”

Wearily shifting the baby to her other arm, the woman answered, with a
touch of gentle dignity: “I have not ask the senora for money, but if
she permit that we rest on the seat in the shade; we do no harm.”

Her voice was soft, and her English refined by its foreign accent. The
Vicaress pointed to a rustic seat under the yews, saying: “You may
certainly come in and rest.” Then she continued to deadhead the cabbage
rose--it was an untidy bush that cabbage rose.

As the child toddled past her to climb into the seat the Vicaress
noticed that the little feet made red marks on the gravel. The woman
pointed to them with an apologetic shrug: “The little Zita she wear out
her shoes, her feet bleed. The senora has a pair of old shoes of her
children? Yes?”

The Vicaress shook her head, and a spasm of pain crossed her face.
There were no children at the Vicarage now. But shoes? Yes! there were
shoes. She bent down to look at the ragged little feet, and very gently
took off Zita’s shoes. “Her feet must be washed,” she announced. “Will
she come with me?”

Zita shook her curls out of her eyes, but on further inspection of the
senora declined to budge. “Then I must bring the water here,” said the
Vicaress, marching away to fetch it.

She was a tall, thin woman, with keen grey eyes and a lined, hard face,
framed in hair that Nature had intended to break into fluffy rings of
sunlight round her brow. But the Vicaress coerced her hair with some
abomination that kept it flat and close to her head. It was only when a
shaft of sunlight struck the tight braid at the back that one realized
it was of the true Titian color. She went up the wide oak staircase
into her cool, sweet-scented bedroom, where the _Gloire de Dijon_
roses nodded into the windows. Stopping in front of a big Chippendale
wardrobe, she pulled out one of the deep drawers.

“I can’t bear to do it!” she murmured, “but I never give money, and her
little feet were cut and bleeding.”

In that drawer lay many pairs of half-worn little shoes--shoes that had
pattered gaily down the Vicarage stairs and danced across the sacred
lawn. Her eyes were very soft as she chose out a pair of little strap
shoes and some woollen socks. Had the Murillo cherub, chattering in
her sweet jargon of Pyrenean Spanish under the shade of the yew trees,
seen the face of the Vicaress just then, she would not have refused
to go with her. But the Vicaress kept what Mr. Barrie tenderly calls
her “soft face” for solitary places. The best that people could say
of her was, that if her manner was hard her deeds were often kindly.
She filled a basin with warm water and went through the silent house
into the garden again. Zita laughed and showed her white teeth as
she dabbled her feet in the water, becoming quite friendly; then the
Vicaress dried her brown legs and arrayed her in the new shoes and
socks. On the party being regaled with Vicarage cake and milk, the
mother informed her hostess that they purposed to go on to Gloucester
that day--a fifteen-mile walk.

“Have you no money to go by train?” asked the Vicaress.

“Oh, no, senora! My ’usban’ sell ze ice cream there, he cannot send me
large money.”

“But you can’t get there to-night; where will you sleep?”

The woman shrugged her shoulders, turning her unoccupied hand outward
with an expressive gesture. “In the hedge, senora, it is cool and dry.”

“But the children?”

“Oh, zay sleep--and Zita, she walk well till her foots come to ze
ground.” Then turning to the child she said something rapidly in
Spanish, adding: “She sing for you, senora, you so kind for her.”

“_A la puerta del cielos, venden zapatos_,” crooned Zita in her funny
little nasal chant, and sang the lullaby right through.

“What is it all about?” demanded her hostess with a queer little catch
in her voice.

“Senora! it is that zay sell shoes at ze doorway of heaven, to ze
ragged little angels who have none!”

The woman rose, and shouldering the brown baby, prepared to depart. But
the baby, who approved of Vicarage cake, choked alarmingly, and delayed
matters for a while.

The baby’s equanimity restored, they bade their hostess farewell. They
had not gone very far, however, when hearing hasty footsteps behind
them, they turned. It was the Vicaress. She thrust something into
little Zita’s hand, exclaiming breathlessly: “I wish you to go by
train; it is not safe for such babies to be out all night!” Then she
turned and fairly ran home.

An hour later, as she stood in front of her looking-glass, smoothing
her hair till it looked like a yellow skull-cap, she said to herself:
“To pay for a person’s railway journey is not indiscriminate charity!”
and her eyes grew tender as she thought of the little shoes.



“PASSING THE LOVE OF WOMEN”


“You sent for me, mother?”

“Yes, child; I sent for you to say good-bye. I am going away for some
time.” The woman spoke deliberately in the monotonous voice of one
giving a piece of information tedious to give.

Angus did not express any surprise, or regret. The nine years he had
spent with his mother had not helped him to know her. Without in the
least understanding wherein lay her strange aloofness, he was conscious
that he was supremely uninteresting to her. He wondered why it should
be so, and his honest boyish soul was sometimes troubled. But children
submit readily to the inevitable, and Angus had his compensations.

Vera Warden looked at her son with more interest than was usual with
her. He was certainly a handsome lad, tall and well built, with blue
eyes that were both kind and honest. She had been long in making her
decision. Now that it was made she did not regret: she only wondered
if, somehow, she had missed something that more commonplace women find
easily.

“Angus, dear, you must take care of father. You and your father are so
much alike--understand each other so well--that it will be easy for
you. You must be especially good to him, now.”

There was a curious little catch in Vera’s voice as she said the “now.”

“Why are you going, mother?” questioned Angus, feeling that here was
something even more puzzling than usual in his mother’s manner. “When
are you coming back? Father will miss you.”

“Will he?” asked Vera wistfully. “And you, Angus, will you miss me at
all?”

Angus was profoundly astonished. He would like to have kissed his
mother just as he kissed dad, but he did not dare. He only grew red,
and fidgeted awkwardly, as he answered: “Of course I shall miss you,
mother--at meals.”

It was not greed that prompted the child’s definition, but the fact
that he seldom saw his mother, except at breakfast and lunch.

Vera Warden did not care for children, and said so--frequently.

The carriage came to the door, good-bye being said without much emotion
on either side. As she was driven out of the big stone gates, Vera gave
herself a little shake, saying: “And now for life!”

       *       *       *       *       *

An hour later Thomas Warden returned from a fishing expedition on the
other side of the Dale. The oak trees in the avenue had burst into
gold-green leaf. The big chestnut on the lawn--the only chestnut on the
estate--was covered with cones of pinky blossom. The May sunset touched
the grim grey house with rosy light, and Thomas Warden felt a welcome
in it all.

Laying down his rods and fishing-baskets in the hall, he went straight
to his study. There on his blotting-book lay the letter he had both
dreaded and expected.

His sunburnt face looked grey as he took it up. He sat down heavily;
then, with shaking hands, opened the letter and read:

  “I have burnt my boats; there is no going back. I warned you that
  it would come to this: that I would bear the monotony no longer. I
  have given you ten years of my life--the ten best years. Now I owe it
  to myself to live--it may be ten years more--but anyway, to _live_.
  Marriage and maternity have, for me, proved uninteresting; but I have
  endured them for your sake, and for the sake of the boy--while he was
  quite young. Had he been in any way an unusual boy I might have found
  life more tolerable. To develop his mind would have been an interest
  for me; he might have shared, in some degree, my aspirations after
  a fuller intellectual life. But he is a healthy, handsome, quite
  commonplace boy, who will grow into what you would call ‘an honest,
  God-fearing man’ without my help. He has an excellent governess, and
  your good mother will doubtless come frequently to worship you both.
  I wish I could free you of me altogether, and that you could marry
  again and be happy. But you are not the sort of man to bear with
  equanimity any sort of scandal or publicity, and you have my promise
  that the life I lead shall be such as can give you no cause for
  offence other than the fact that I lead it away from you. For your
  never-failing courtesy and kindness I thank you. Believe me, I shall
  always have the sincerest affection and respect for you. The fact
  remains, however, that I cannot lead your life, and you can lead no
  other. Let us then separate, and go our different ways in peace.

  “In every conventional and actual sense, I am and will be your
  faithful wife,

                                                          “VERA WARDEN.”

There was nothing in the letter that she had not said to him, many
times, during the last six months.

Now, she had actually carried out her so often announced intention, and
was gone; and the realization stunned him. He felt cold and numbed. The
roar of the beck, in which he had stood all morning, was in his ears,
and he gazed out into the gathering twilight, seeing nothing--only
conscious that it was dark and chill everywhere.

There was a knock at the door, and a servant came in, saying: “Please,
sir, Master Angus is ready, and would like you to come to him, if you
are not too tired.”

Dragging himself out of his chair, he passed his hand across his
dazed, strained eyes. Then he went out of the room and up the wide old
staircase to his dressing-room, where Angus slept.

“I’ve got a new nightsuit, dad, just like yours. Look--pocket and
trowsies, and all!” exclaimed the child, displaying the latter garments
with great pride. “Miss Taylor had them made for me in York. Aren’t
they nice?”

“Yes, my boy, yes--very!” but the voice was absent, and Angus felt that
there was a something lacking, something that he generally found there.

The child felt frightened. Was dad, too, going to hold himself “aloof”?
Would he, too, take to looking over people’s heads, and answering in a
far-away voice? The thought was one full of omen.

Angus gazed into his father’s face, as he sat wearily on the edge of
the little bed. The child, if commonplace, was quick to understand
those who loved him. In a moment he acquitted his father, and came and
knelt beside him, rubbing his curly head against his knees. He said his
prayer with devoutly folded hands, as Grannie had taught him. Then,
climbing into Warden’s arms, put his own round his neck.

“Shall I sing my psalm, dad? Or are you too tired?”

His father held him very close. “Sing it, laddie. Sing Grannie’s psalm.”

Grannie was Scotch. When she came she taught Angus the psalms in metre.
She taught him other things that he learned more easily than the
psalms; chief among them a great love and trust in her, and through
her, for everything Scotch.

Shortbread was Scotch, and it was good. Scones were Scotch, and they
were good, especially with currants. Edinburgh rock was excellent;
therefore the psalms, too, were probably superior in the Scotch
version. Angus learned all Grannie’s favorites, the first of which was
the twenty-third:

  My table thou hast furnished,
  In presence of my foes.

The child always pictured a long table, covered with a fair white
cloth, and plentifully plenished with plates piled high with scones and
shortbread. He wondered what “foes” were, for he hadn’t any; he thought
they must be the servants who handed round the plates.

“Goodness and mercy all my life shall surely follow me.” The sad,
patient tune Grannie had taught him sounded almost triumphant, as the
child’s strong treble voice rang out. When he had finished, his father
leant his head against the little rounded shoulder, and there was
silence save for the man’s quick breathing.

“Good-night, dad!” said Angus at last, turning himself to see his
father’s face.

Thomas Warden rose hastily; he laid the boy in his little white bed,
kissed him, and blessed him, and went down and sat in the study again.
But a man cannot dine in his fishing boots; so he went upstairs, had a
bath, and while he dressed, Angus discoursed cheerfully to him through
the half-open door.

       *       *       *       *       *

The silence was unbearable; it was so lonely. Thomas Warden could not
sleep. He got up and walked about his room. Only one o’clock! The night
had hardly begun.

The moon shone brilliantly, but the wind blew shrewdly through the open
casement. May nights are cold in the North country.

He went into the dressing-room and looked at Angus. “If she had only
loved the boy--if she had only loved the boy.” He could have forgiven
her all the rest. A just and tolerant man, he knew his own limitations.
He granted to the full his wife’s intellectual superiority; but she
might have loved the boy.

“Goodness and mercy all my life shall surely follow me.” Why did those
lines ring in his head? and then, there always followed the sentence in
his wife’s letter: “I cannot live your life, and you can live no other.”

It was true: _he_ could live no other. But the boy--why did she not
love the boy?

He drew up the blind, and the mellow moonlight fell on the sleeping
child. Surely he was a goodly child, so comely, and kindly, and honest.
As he looked at the boy his heart went out to him. He did not stoop and
kiss him as a woman would have done; he reverenced too much this fair
sleep which wrapped him round. He went back to his own room and got a
pillow. Then, laying his long length on the floor beside the little
bed, and with the child’s psalm still sounding in his ears, he too
slept.

The room was flooded with moonlight when Angus awoke. There was a sound
of regular and heavy breathing. Angus felt puzzled; puzzled, but not in
the least afraid. Such breathing must come from a man, or a dog; from
men and dogs the child had experienced nothing but kindness.

He sat up, and listening, looked about to see where the sound came
from. He shook his hair back from his forehead, and rubbed his eyes.
Yes! he was not mistaken, it _was_ his father who lay there on the
floor beside his bed.

Angus rose softly, and touched his father’s bare feet; they were very
cold. “Poor dad,” he said to himself--“and him so tired!”

Then suddenly he remembered his mother’s words: “You must take care of
father.” It was bad to sleep without a covering, Grannie had told him
that. He pulled his little quilt off his bed, and laid it lightly on
his father. To his delight the sleeping figure never stirred, but the
quilt was short, and Thomas Warden was long--by no amount of stretching
would it cover both his shoulders and his feet--poor cold feet! Then
Angus was seized by an inspiration, which even his mother could not
have called quite commonplace. He lay down at his father’s feet, and
unbuttoning the jacket of the new sleeping suit, he cuddled up so that
the cold feet rested on his own warm breast. Then he, too, fell asleep.

The kindly moon shone in upon them, and it was very still.

When Thomas Warden awoke the moonlight had changed to pearly dawn. He
was no longer cold, and when he realized why, he was no longer lonely.



A THROW BACK


Nana had at last gone out and left the coast clear. Kit seized her
little brother’s hand, and they sped down the long passage to the red
baize door which swung heavily but did not latch, shutting off the
nursery quarters from the house.

Kit was a person of dramatic instincts, and as they ran down the
passage she quoted in a deep and awful voice, “The tiger is a fearful
beast, He comes when you expect him least.” Addison gazed fearfully
over his shoulder, and ran at the top of his speed.

At last by a mighty effort they pushed open the heavy red door, and
the staircase and the house lay before them for exploration. It was a
very wide staircase, black and shiny and slippery, and as they went
down their little feet made a pattering noise which seemed to echo
and multiply in the silent house. Kit turned and said, “Hush!” in a
reproving voice to Addison, who was, like Agag, walking delicately, on
the banister side. “I can’t hush any more than I’m doing!” he replied
in an injured tone. “I must put my feet down firm or I’d skate!”

“Come on!” said Kit. “Let’s go and see if Jakes is in the dining-room,
and he’ll tell us what’s for lunch.”

They crossed the stone-flagged hall, and Kit opened the dining-room
door and marched boldly in. There was no one there; the big room was
wrapped in silence, and Addison felt very small and timid as he stood
on the threshold. Not so Kit; she walked boldly up to the table, which
was laid. There was a great deal of old silver on the table, and many
flowers; but its appearance was evidently most displeasing to Kit, for
she exclaimed angrily:

“Look here, Addison, just look here! Jakes has only laid lunch for
_one_!”

Even the mild and gentle Addison was roused to something like
indignation at this tremendous intelligence. To have breakfast and tea
in the nursery is an understood thing; but lunch--whoever heard of a
well-conducted child having lunch anywhere but in the dining-room, once
he or she could hold a spoon and fork? It was abominable; it had to be
seen into at once.

Kit gave an indignant sniff, saying: “I know it isn’t Jakes; it’s Nana.
She’d go and say we could have lunch with her till Miss Mercer came;
but I’ll go and speak to grandpapa at once; it’s a shame; I won’t stand
it. Come on!”

The obedient Addison trotted after Kit across the hall with some
alacrity. He hadn’t seen much of grandpapa; but what he had seen he
liked. How still the old house was, no sound to be heard but the drip,
drip of the rain on the ivy outside the windows and the sizzle and fiz
of the big logs in the great stone fireplace.

The children looked upon “Nanas” and their like as necessary evils.
They divided mankind into two classes, which they called respectively
“the dears” and “the deafs.” To the “dears” belonged father and mother,
all father’s friends and most of mother’s; Gaffer and all Gaffer’s
servants; orderlies--particularly orderlies--and grooms. To the “deafs”
belonged nurses, governesses, cross gardeners, and a great many young
ladies who wore smart frocks and were affectionate in public. These
latter were called “deafs” not because of any defect in their aural
arrangements, but simply because the children considered them incapable
of discussing anything interesting. “Stupid people!” Kit was wont to
observe, “who ask you how old you are, and who fetch stale cake out of
tin boxes, and one’s got to eat it for politeness’ sake. Oh, I hate
deafs!”

When Kit reached the study door she knocked, but there was no answer.
“Mother says he never hears if he’s writing,” she whispered. “Let’s
go in--come on!” So she turned the handle of the door and went in.
Grandfather was writing. His great knee-hole table was piled with open
books, and he had on his gold-rimmed spectacles. He never looked up as
Kit shut the door softly behind her. For one thing, doors never creaked
in grandfather’s house.

The children stood inside the door and waited, but he never looked
up. “Come on,” said Kit, as, holding Addison by the hand, they walked
leisurely across the room, till she stood close by their grandfather;
then she said in a loud and cheerful voice:

“Good-morning, Gaffer; we’ve come to see you!”

“We’ve come to see you!” echoed the ever-obedient Addison. Grandfather
was fond of old-fashioned things, and the name “Gaffer” was so
delightfully inappropriate that he encouraged the children to use it
when they spoke to him.

“Oh, you’ve come, have you?” he said, taking off his spectacles and
turning himself in his heavy revolving chair toward the children. “And
how are you, my dears? Did you sleep well after your long journey?”

It did not take long to install a child on each knee. Addison gazed
at him in adoring silence, but Kit hastened to unbosom herself of her
wrongs. “I’ve come to complain!” she began with dignity. “They’ve
only laid lunch for you in the dining-room. Now I know you’d like our
company. Mother said we were to keep you company--will you give orders
about it?”

Gaffer seemed duly impressed, as he said: “I will give orders at once.
Of course you are to have lunch with me while you are here. It’s a pity
it’s so wet for your first day, but it’s nice to think that those dear
people are going further and further away from the fogs and damp. It
will do mother so much good to be in a warm climate, and you must try
not to feel dull without them.”

“I wish they’d taken me!” said Kit. “I love hotels!” Gaffer looked at
her and laughed: “What a traveled little person you are! I never slept
in a hotel till I was seventeen.”

“Ah, but that’s long ago. People go about more now, and, you see, we
have to go with the regiment.”

“To go with the regiment,” echoed Addison.

Kit conversed affably with her grandfather for some time; she told him
who were her favorite officers, and which her favorite puddings. She
carefully explained that, as she was four years older than Addison, she
went to bed an hour later, and that she intended to spend that hour in
her grandfather’s society. She expressed her approval of the study as
a room, but thought it was a pity that, owing to the large number of
books, there was no space for any pictures on the walls. Addison stared
about him in solemn silence, till at last Gaffer suggested that, as he
had got to write to mother, they had better go back to the nursery till
lunchtime. Then they trotted across the room together, but when they
reached the door and Kit had gone out, Addison raced back and stood
by his grandfather’s chair, whispering breathlessly: “Will you let me
see some of the books some day--wivout Kit?” There was a passionate
eagerness in the question which startled Gaffer. He looked down at the
imploring, upturned face.

And then “a strange thing happened.” It was no longer Addison, his
namesake, that he saw; it was himself. Himself of sixty years ago.
There he stood, the quaint, serious-eyed boy, whose portrait hung in
his dead wife’s dressing-room. The boy who longed for books, and who
had asked the same question of a scholar in an Oxford library, on a
long-forgotten morning all those years ago. With a sudden rush of
gratitude he remembered how the question had been answered, and though
his smile was very pleasant, his voice was a trifle husky as he said:

“Assuredly!”

“Wivout Kit?” persistently questioned the little boy.

“Without Kit, I promise,” repeated Gaffer. Then he and Addison shook
hands, and Addison followed Kit.

She was waiting in the hall. “What did you say to Gaffer?” she asked
inquisitively, but Addison shook his head. He could keep his own
counsel even when coerced by pinches.

At lunch Gaffer inquired: “Addison, can you read?”

“Not well!” answered Kit. “He can’t read well; he’s only doing
‘sequel,’ and he’s six. He’s very backward!”

“I asked Addison, my dear,” said Gaffer, in gently reproving tones.

Addison blushed and held down his head; then he said: “I don’t like
what I read; it’s so uninteresting. They ask such silly questions, over
and over again.”

“He knows heaps of poetry!” said Kit magnanimously. “He can learn
anything when he’s heard it once, and he knows pages of verses, and
psalms, and that, but he’s no good on horseback. He’s got no nerve. Dad
says he’ll never be any good across country! And he’s afraid of the
dark!”

“Are you not nervous?” asked Gaffer.

“Me nervous!” said Kit with great scorn. “I can ride dad’s chargers!”

“Ah, you’re like your mother,” said Gaffer, smiling at her. “Now I, I
was never any good across country; but yet I haven’t found that it has
alienated my friends, or done me any great damage in life. Has Addison
begun Latin?”

“Oh, no; Miss Mercer doesn’t teach Latin, and he’s far too backward in
other things to begin.”

“I began Greek when I was his age,” said Gaffer dreamily; “but there’s
no reason why Addison should not begin Latin. He shall begin it with
me.”

Addison flushed up to the roots of his hair; then he scrambled off his
seat--a most unheard-of proceeding in the middle of lunch--and ran
round to his grandfather. He threw himself upon him, exclaiming: “I
love you; oh, how I love you!”

Kit regarded him with astonished eyes. That Addison, who never kissed
anybody but mother, who was so undemonstrative, so slow to show
feeling, should behave in this extraordinary manner, because he was
told he might have Latin lessons, was to her incomprehensible; and
Gaffer seemed to approve, for he lifted Addison on to his knee, and
said in such a queer voice: “I think we’re rather of a kidney, you and
I; we’re going to understand each other uncommonly well,” and Addison
sat enthroned on Gaffer’s knee all the rest of lunch, and shared his
cheese. Kit felt injured.

When Gaffer went back to his study he sat down before the fire, and he
pondered for a long time over his queer little grandson. Then he gave
his shoulders a shake and sighed: “I was a disappointment to my father,
and he’ll be a disappointment--he is a disappointment--poor little
chap, to his. He is unaccountably like me.”

A lonely child was Addison. The fact that he was always called Addison
from the time he ceased to be baby was proof enough. A child who is
understood gets a nickname. Kit had fifty. Addison was always called
by his baptismal name. It was Gaffer’s name, and Gaffer’s grandfather
had been called after a gentleman who wrote poetry and things. Little
Addison knew that much, and he wondered if the writings of that
far-away Mr. Addison were more interesting than “Step by Step.” Addison
was called an “old-fashioned child”; he was not very sure precisely
what that was, but that it was something a child ought not to be, he
was convinced. Kit was pretty, very pretty; so the officers said, not
infrequently to Kit herself. Kit was never afraid of anything by day
or by night. Kit always spoke the truth; Addison had been known to
prevaricate when he was frightened, and he was often frightened--at
nothing at all, Kit said.

But the worst and most unforgivable thing about Addison was this: he
had no wish to be a soldier--and said so. The sound of a pop-gun caused
his heart to thump against his breast in an unpleasantly violent
manner, and a review was to him a prolonged agony that made him ill for
days.

His mother--whom he worshipped--and who loved him tenderly, was quite
unconscious of his many sufferings. She was absolutely devoid of nerves
herself, and thought that Addison would grow out of his “delicacy,”
as she called it. She was proud of his remarkable resemblance to
her father, whom she admired above all mortal men--but she was
disappointed; and poor Addison, with the quick intuition of childhood,
was perfectly aware of it--at his being what her husband called “such a
Molly.”

So it came about that Kit was always brought forward, and Addison kept
in the background--to his own satisfaction certainly, but very much to
the detriment of Kit.

Edinburgh, where the regiment was stationed, was too cold for mother,
and dad obtained leave to take her to the Riviera for the worst months;
so Kit and Addison were sent to Gaffer, and for Addison it was the
turning-point of his life.

To most people, their initiation into the accidence of the Latin
language is not a very happy recollection. To Addison it is a
recollection little short of rapturous.

To him the first pages of a Latin grammar call up the picture of a
large, old-fashioned room, flooded with a mellow light like that of
the sun through a veil of yellowing beeches. There is a goodly smell
in the room, the smell of dressed and well-kept leather. The walls are
lined with books, books bound in calf and russet-colored Russia, and
in the middle of the room stands a knee-hole table both deep and wide.
It, too, is covered with books; but here they lie open, one upon the
other, a crowd of witnesses to the tastes of the owner of the room.
That gracious owner! Addison’s eyes grow dim as he thinks of the spare
upright figure seated in the revolving chair; the keen scholarly face
and noble white head. He hears again the kind, cultivated voice ever
ready to answer questions, to answer them so fully and so beautifully,
with such a tender sympathy for the eager childish questioner. And then
Addison goes down on his mental knees and thanks his God that as yet he
had brought no look of sorrow into those kind eyes, but many a look of
pride and joy.

Is there not one shelf in that library devoted to Addison’s prizes?
And the row is lengthening by leaps and bounds. Yet they wonder at
Winchester why he should be so fond of classics.



THE INTERVENTION OF THE DUKE


I

ENTER WIGGINS

The Reverend Andrew Methven stood at his study window gazing out to
sea. The sea was very blue, the sands yellow and smooth, but it was not
the sea that the Reverend Andrew saw.

Elgo, on the Fife coast, is growing fashionable. In summer every house
is let, and there are sometimes as many as fifty bathers at once in
the bay. At Elgo the bathers usually wear blue serge, adorned it may
be by red or white braid. Pale blue silk with white facings and short
sleeves is not the usual uniform. It impressed the Reverend Andrew,
and consequently he stood and stared. Moreover, the wearer of this
wonderful creation--he felt it was a “creation,” though he had never
heard the word so used--came out of the house next door to the Manse,
the house being that of his most worthy parishioner, Mrs. Urquhart,
Baker and Confectioner, who let her rooms during the summer months.

Elgo streets are somewhat one-sided, the town being built upon the
cliff with a railing near the outer edge for the protection of the
unwary.

The vision in pale blue silk tripped down the steep steps cut in the
rocks, and ran across the sands. She was followed by a small thin boy,
whose freckled face was broad and good-natured. On the sands they took
hands and danced into the water together.

The vision was tall and slim, with wonderful arms that flashed white
in the June sunshine, and the minister remarked that she could swim
magnificently. The little naked boy splashed after her, looking like a
terrier as he shook the water from his crop of curly hair.

The minister’s window was open, and across the sunlit sands came the
sound of a woman’s voice, crying: “Come on, Wiggins, get on my back,
and I’ll swim with you to the Cock’s-tail Rocks!”

The Reverend Andrew swung his telescope into position; he had the grace
to blush as he did so, but none the less did he eagerly follow that
swimmer by its aid. She did it, there and back; then she and the small
boy ran dripping over the sands and vanished through Mrs. Urquhart’s
side door.

An hour later the minister (he was the Free Kirk minister really; there
is an Established Church in Elgo, but as its pews are empty and its
incumbent of small account, he was “the minister” to Elgo) strolled
into Mrs. Urquhart’s shop to buy cookies. Mrs. Urquhart herself bustled
forward to serve him.

“You’ve let your rooms, I see, Mrs. Urquhart! And early in the season,
too!”

“Yes, sir! I’ve let my rooms, and to my own young lady that I was
nurse to; you’ll mind my telling you of Sir John Penberthy and his
bonny family. Well, Mrs. Burton is just my Miss Mary, married and
widowed too, poor lamb, and she and Master Wiggins have come all the
way from London to be with me, and it’s proud I am to have them!” Mrs.
Urquhart paused breathless.

The minister murmured something sympathetic, and taking up his bag of
cookies strode back to the Manse. “Mary, mother of names,” he thought,
as he turned over the information he had received. “Widowed! She
doesn’t wear much mourning anyway!” as he thought of the blue silk
bathing-dress. Then he said with a sigh, “She is very beautiful!” and
sat him down to write his Sunday sermon.

In the afternoon he met Wiggins on the beach: that gentleman was
digging while a French _bonne_ kept guard in the rear.

“Do you like Elgo?” asked the minister. He had a kindly way with
children; he was rather childlike himself, and they knew it.

“Awfully,” answered Wiggins, patting his castle walls, and barely
looking up.

“Have you ever been to the sea before?”

“Oh, dear, yes; haven’t you?”

“I live here,” said the minister, rather discomposed by this
exceedingly cool child.

“I wish I did!” sighed Wiggins. “I hate Kensington.”

“Ah, that’s London! I’ve never been there,” said the minister simply.
“I wish I had.”

“It’s not a very nice place. There’s gardens and busses, and sometimes
we ride in a hansom, and you always have to wear your shoes and
generally gloves, it’s beastly.” Wiggins spoke bitterly, as one who had
tasted the hollow shams of Kensington.

The minister sat down on the sand.

“Isn’t there a museum there, and an Art Gallery?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, but you mayn’t touch anything, and you have to wear your hat!”

“You seem to object to clothing,” remarked the minister.

“Don’t you?” responded this discomposing child.

“Well, no, I can’t say I do. It’s warm, and----”

“Oh, it’s warm enough in Kensington, if that’s what you want!” and
Wiggins turned to dig a fresh channel from his castle to the sea.

“M’sieu Wiggins, il faut aller à la maison pour le thé. Faites vos
adieux à M’sieu le Curé!” and Madeleine, the pretty French _bonne_,
folded up her crochet, and rose.

But Wiggins was smitten with deafness, and waded deeper into the water,
with a seraphically unconscious look.

Madeleine went down to the water’s edge, where she discoursed volubly
for about five minutes. The minister sat watching; he wondered why
French people speak so fast, and whether Wiggins understood. He
evidently did, for he answered derisively, and sat down suddenly in
the water. Then he came out, and grinning at the minister, remarked
gleefully as he took his dripping way homeward:

“That’s the third pair to-day, soon shan’t have any left to wear. What
a rux!”

“So that’s a London child!” mused the minister. “He’s a fine frank lad;
I must call upon his mother.”


II

A NEW ATMOSPHERE

But the days went on, and the minister did not call. He was a sociable
fellow, much beloved by his fisher folk, and by such summer visitors
as knew him. Elgo was his first “charge.” Had he been small, instead
of six-foot-three, he would doubtless long ago have been dubbed “The
Little Minister,” after Mr. Barrie’s immortal hero, for he was young as
a minister can be.

He did not call on Mrs. Burton because he had conceived for her an
extravagant admiration, or rather adoration. He met her constantly on
the beach and in the village street, and on these occasions gravely
lifted his hat. Had he followed his impulse, he would have gone down
on his knees and begged leave to kiss her feet. We do not follow our
impulses in these matters nowadays, and Mary Burton never wondered why
he did not call, for she thought about him not at all.

She did not go to church that first Sunday, but played with Wiggins on
the beach all the morning. Mrs. Urquhart was scandalized and suggested
the Episcopalian church at Pittenweem; but Mary only put her arms round
her old nurse and laughingly promised to come and sit in her pew next
Sunday.

The minister progressed in his friendship with Wiggins; while Mary was
scouring the country on her bicycle, Wiggins and his new friend played
on the beach or fished for poddlies from the rocks.

Madeleine with the inevitable crochet sat on the beach and beamed at
them.

“You’re a Presbyterian, aren’t you?” asked Wiggins abruptly of the
minister one afternoon.

“Yes, I’m a member of the Free Kirk.”

“Oh, you’re Free Kirk, and Madeleine’s a Roman Catholic, and mother and
me is Pagans!”

“Pagans?” echoed the minister in astonished tones.

“Well, mother says so. It means that you love the sun, and the sea, and
bare feet and meringues and music-halls and things!”

“Pagans, music-halls!” The minister gazed in horror at the unconscious
but breathless Wiggins. “Do you mean to say,” he asked solemnly, “that
you do not know anything about our Saviour who died for us?”

Wiggins turned and looked at him with something of reproachful scorn on
his broad freckled face; then he said slowly: “Of course, I know, but
we never talk about _that_ to strangers, mother and me. It is bad form,
like the people who give you tracts in busses.”

“I beg your pardon, I misunderstood,” said the minister.

They were silent for a few minutes, during which the minister digested
this, to him, new view of confessing your faith before men.

Although he himself never gave tracts either in busses or anywhere
else, he had certainly in a sort of hazy fashion considered that to do
so was praiseworthy, if mistaken.

“There’s mother!” announced Wiggins suddenly. “Let’s come and talk to
her.”

The minister scrambled to his feet, and in another moment he had shaken
hands with Mrs. Burton, and they all sat down on the beach together.

Wiggins did most of the talking, and then it began to rain.

“Will you come in and have a cup of tea with Wiggins and me?” asked
Mrs. Burton.

The minister felt that no words at all expressed the rapture with which
this proposal filled him.

Mrs. Urquhart’s parlor looked so different that afternoon. Many
photographs stood on the mantelpiece, books other than albums or Family
Bibles were scattered on the table, papers and magazines strewed the
horsehair sofa, while on the mantelpiece among the photographs and
the little vases full of roses were the ends of many half-smoked
cigarettes. Another shock was in store for the minister.

They had tea; he drank three cups and ate endless scones in order to
prolong the meal. To sit opposite to Mary and watch her white, heavily
ringed hands flit in and out among the cups as she made tea was a
wonderful thing. To listen to her as she praised Elgo, and Scotland
generally, in her soft Southern voice was wonderful; but most wonderful
of all was to gaze at her unrebuked, to drink in the beauty of her
face, to note the gracious line of cheek and chin as she turned her
head, and lose himself in the depths of her eyes, brown as the trout
stream beyond Glen Dynoch. When at last some small consciousness of
material things awoke in him and he rose to go, Mary reached to the
chimneypiece for a slim tin box.

“Will you have a cigarette?” she asked. “Dear Mrs. Urquhart forgives my
evil habits, and pretends she thinks that I smoke for asthma. I don’t
look asthmatical, do I?”

“Thank you,” faltered the minister. “I do not smoke now--I gave it
up after my student days, just as I gave up drinking anything, for
the sake of my people. I daresay it was useless, but I thought it was
right--then.”

He spoke diffidently, humbly, half expecting a flash of amused scorn in
her, such as he not infrequently encountered in Wiggins. But Mary held
out her hand, saying softly:

“I am sure it was right then, and is now; but don’t judge me hardly,
for I have no flock to influence. My boys will smoke, anyhow, when they
are big.”

“It is kind of you not to laugh at me,” he said, and with that took his
leave.

Mary lit her cigarette and smoked thoughtfully for some time. Wiggins
was once more searching for treasure on his beloved beach. She sat at
the open window and watched the boats come in. Presently she rang the
bell for Mrs. Urquhart. When that good lady appeared, breathless from
her ascent of the steep little stairs, Mary pushed her into an armchair
and sat down at her feet, with her head against the old woman’s knees.

“Amuse me, nursey; tell me about your minister. Where does he come
from? How is it that, without having been anywhere or seen anything,
he is such a perfect gentleman, and why--oh, why is he a Free Church
minister?”

“And what for no, my dearie? He’s an excellent, well-doing young man.
You should hear him preach; it’s just wonderfu’. His father’s a doctor
near Aberdeen; bein’ douce people they are--a large young family, and
all doing well. He was at the college in Edinburgh, and passed very
high. But it’s no his learning that we care about, it’s his kind,
friendly ways. He’d take his turn nursing a body that’s sick just like
one of the family; and he’s just a wonderful way with young men. To
be sure, he’s young himself--only just twenty-six--but he’s not a bit
bumptious or puffed up, like many young men. He’s greatly set up with
Master Wiggins; they’re grand friends.”

“He has been very kind to Wiggins. I’ll ask him to dinner. Will you
cook me a very nice dinner, nursey dear, on Thursday evening?”

“He’ll no come then, my dearie, for it’s prayer-meeting night. I just
wish you’d go yourself.”

“I’ve never been to a prayer-meeting. What’s it like? What happens?”

“It’s just beautiful, my dearie; and the gentry go too. Mrs. Braid, of
Elgo House, she always goes.”

Mary made a little face. “She called upon me yesterday. I didn’t find
her very exciting. I’ve got to dine there to-night, so I suppose I must
dress. You might send Madeleine to do my hair. Dear nursey, I’d far
rather stay with you than go to Elgo House.”


III

“ALL SECRET SHADOWS AND MYSTIC SIGHTS”

Dinner parties at Elgo House were not, as a rule, exciting. The
conversation generally vibrated between the harvest prospects and the
game prospects, with somewhat numerous flashes of silence, during which
each guest madly racked his brain for a fresh topic of conversation,
only to fall back finally upon the weather.

Andrew Methven did not expect to enjoy himself much on that particular
evening. His presence at Elgo House was something of an anomaly, for
the family were “established” by conviction, yet Mrs. Braid attended
the Free Kirk because she liked Andrew’s sermons.

He felt rather as though he were poaching on his neighbor’s preserves
when he went there. He liked his brother cleric (as he liked most
people), who, if old and somewhat dull, was kindly and human. So long
as his evening pipe and toddy were forthcoming with regularity the
“established” minister recked little if he preached to empty benches.
Andrew Methven felt the blood rush to his face as on entering the
Braids’ drawing-room he heard that voice which had been ringing in his
ears ever since his parting with Mary that afternoon.

Daylight lasts long in the North Country, and there were no candles
needed at Elgo House for dinner. Mary sat opposite the minister, and
had he been given to cursing he would have cursed the tall epergne of
fruit that hid her from his sight, especially as the majority of her
remarks were addressed to him.

The only other guests were an elderly colonel and his wife, who were
staying at the hotel. The colonel, whenever he looked at or spoke
to Mary, seemed by his very atmosphere to ejaculate “Monstrous fine
woman,” and Andrew felt an insane desire to choke him there and then in
his own high white collar.

Dinner over, they all strolled into the garden, and then that happened
which made an epoch in Andrew Methven’s life.

When they had all duly admired the roses and the goodly promise of
peaches on the south wall, someone brought a guitar out of the house
and Mary sat down to sing.

Her dress, some soft transparent blackness over white, faded into the
shadows among which she sat. Somehow it reminded Andrew of the silver
birch trees in the copse beyond. She bent her head as she tuned the
guitar, and the throb of the strings seemed an appropriate background
to the sweetness of her profile. Vision and sound became indissolubly
mixed. Andrew could never afterward separate Mary’s face from her
voice, and both were irresistibly a part of the beech copse seen dimly
in the evening light. The whole making a picture, subtle, detached,
vivid; an experience in which all the senses bore an equal part and
were indistinguishable.

Mary’s voice was a big, soft contralto, as unlike the usual
“drawing-room voice” as it is possible to be, and she sang seriously.
She gave her message to the four winds to be carried where they listed.
She sang to the scented night, to the distant sea, to the flowers and
the moonlight: not to the little handful of human beings, whose chairs
creaked as they sat, and who, saving one, only realized that she was a
beautiful woman who had a fine voice.

They thanked her when she had finished, all but Andrew, who,
white-faced and dumb, gazed into the deepening shadows as he stood by
Mary’s chair.

“It’s really most extraordinary to be able to sit out at night in
June in Scotland, is it not?” said the colonel’s wife in his ear. He
started, looking at her stupidly. “A very absent young man!” she said
to herself.

Truly he was absent, for he had been in heaven.

Mary, too, was silent, softly beating out a faint melody on her guitar
as it lay across her knees.

Suddenly she looked up at Andrew, saying under her breath: “The rest
may reason and welcome, ’tis we musicians know!”

“The rest” did not hear, or hearing did not understand; but Andrew
said: “Thank God!”

The colonel’s voice was heard declaring that it was “deucedly chilly,”
and everybody made a move to go indoors, except Andrew, who, pleading
work, fled down the drive, only to walk for miles aimlessly in a
direction leading further and further from the Manse.

Had he but known it, that walk was symbolical of the rest of his life.
When he did get home his rather ancient “evening shoes” were quit worn
out.


IV

THE EDUCATION OF THE MINISTER

“The Duke is coming at the end of the month,” announced Wiggins to the
minister, as they anchored and fished for poddlies in the bay.

“What Duke?”

“My brother; he’s at school at Leamington; he’s going to Eton in three
years. He’s ten, four years older nor me.” Wiggins was a model of
conciseness in the way he imparted information.

“Why do you call him the Duke?” asked the minister in rather an
abstracted voice; he was watching a tall lady on the distant links.

“’Cause he is one; his name’s Marmaduke, and he is a tremenjous Duke;
they all say so.”

“Who are _they_?”

“Oh, mother, and uncles, and boys, and people.”

“Is he like you?”

“Not a bit; he’s handsome; he’s exactly like mother.”

The minister smiled. Was Mary handsome? he wondered. For many days now
he had forgotten to take her beauty into account. He never compared her
with other women. She was not to him more beautiful, not more clever,
not more kind than other women; she was simply what that Frenchman said
of his lady--she was _mieux femme_. There was no one else.

“Are you very fond of your brother?” asked the minister, forcing
himself to attend to Wiggins.

“I’m glad he goes to school,” replied that gentleman guardedly. “He
rather bangs me about.”

“Is Wiggins a family name?” abruptly demanded the minister.

“You _are_ a jokey man,” said Wiggins admiringly. “Why, it’s because of
my hair they call me that; my name’s Tregenna--‘Tre, Pol, and Pen,’ you
know. Mother’s Cornish.”

At this moment Wiggins had a bite, therefore excitement reigned for the
next five minutes, and even the advent of the Duke was forgotten.

       *       *       *       *       *

Did Mary Burton know what she was doing when she admitted this obscure
Free Kirk minister to friendship and intimacy? Did she realize how
contact with her kindness, her simplicity, her gentlehood, was making
him every day more hopelessly her slave? In after years, when he walked
in darkness, with a hunger that nothing appeased, Andrew would ask
himself this question, and whichever way he answered it he blessed
her. He no more thought of blaming her than the sailor thinks of
tracing the storm to the evening star.

“She shall have worship of me,” he said in those early days of wonder
and happiness. “She still has worship of me,” he said after years of
unsatisfied longing and ceaseless pain.

There was a song that Mary used to sing, a song he loved, written by a
man for whom and for whose writings in those youthful opinionated days
Andrew felt a hatred that was almost fear. Yet the song dominated him,
and in after years he would repeat it to himself with a curious fierce
sense of possession.

  O brother, the Gods were good to you.
  Sleep, and be glad while the world endures.
  Be well content as the years wear through;
  Give thanks for life, and the loves and lures;
  Give thanks for life, O brother, and death,
  For the sweet last sound of her feet, her breath,
  For gifts she gave you, gracious and few,
  Tears and kisses, that lady of yours.

Again across the silence he would hear Mary’s voice; again would he see
against the evening sky her delicate pale profile and the little head
weighted with its coils of shadowy hair; accompanying it all, the soft
plash of the waves as they rolled over the sands beneath her window and
the sharp salt wind which sighed foreboding things.

       *       *       *       *       *

“No! I won’t sing any more to-night; let us talk,” said Mary.

The weather had turned unkindly, a bright fire flickered on the
hearth, while the rain outside drove and pattered against the rattling
windows. The minister had come in “for some music” as had become his
habit during the last weeks, but, Mary was in no mood to sing, so she
laid the guitar aside.

“You told me that you intended to criticize my sermon of yesterday,”
said Andrew deferentially. “I gather that you altogether disagree with
me.”

Mary lit a cigarette and smiled at him, her own indulgent smile, which
always softened the severity of her remarks. “Yes, I think your view is
narrow, and in some respects unjust. Of course, I know it is the kind
of sermon that is popular; and it is certainly kind to the novelists
to abuse them from the pulpit--it increases the sale of their books so
enormously. But that was hardly your object, was it?”

“I do not know what was my object, unless it were to deliver a message
that I felt had been entrusted to me. I do feel strongly on this
question. It seems to me so pitiful that people should waste their time
in reading injurious trash, when all the time there waits in silent
patience the great company of the Immortals.”

“I like Schumann’s view best. He says, ‘Reverence what is old, but
have a warm heart also for what is new.’ Much that is new is true, and
beautiful, and helpful.”

Mary leant forward, looking eagerly through a little cloud of smoke at
the minister.

He shook his head. “A great deal is hopelessly false, and ugly and
lowering.”

“I think you overrate the influence of bad books,” said Mary. “It is
only the great books that live; a meretricious book may have a few
months’ popularity, and then no one reads it any more, it is forgotten
as absolutely as we forget the smell of decaying cabbage when we have
passed the rubbish heaps.”

“But surely you will allow that there is a great badness as well as a
great goodness. Look at those Frenchmen; you cannot say their work is
good, but it certainly will live, because it is great.”

The minister spoke earnestly. He hated that she should think him
narrow; but he had the courage of his opinions.

Mary was silent for a minute, then she looked at him and smiled, saying
frankly:

“That is true; but I believe that in all genius there must be something
of goodness. We are all going to heaven, and De Maupassant is going
too.”

“I would like to think they are all going, but it seems to me some of
them have much to answer for. Influence is an awful responsibility.
I believe it is the one thing for which we shall have to give the
strictest account.”

Mary looked grave. “Do you think that people always realize when they
have influence?”

“No, not always; they do not certainly realize the extent of their
influence. You, for instance, were you less noble-minded, might do
incalculable harm, for you never think about the effect you produce at
all.”

“Oh, please don’t be so seriously complimentary,” she exclaimed. “To
pose as ‘a good influence’ would be too dreadful! I should feel like
seven curates rolled into one. Confess now, though, that you always
thought a liking for cigarettes was the sign in a woman of moral
obliquity, now, didn’t you?”

Andrew blushed. “I have seen very little, and known few interesting
people,” he said modestly; “none from your world.”

“How far we are getting from your sermon on modern literature; that is
what we were going to talk about.”

“I spoke as I felt; I daresay I am wrong, but I can’t feel wrong yet.
It may be that I overestimate the influence of books; but you see, in
my case, books have been the only great influences I have known--until
lately,” he added softly.

Mary looked into the fire in silence for a few minutes, then she said:
“Never judge a man by one book any more than you would judge him by one
single act, but be grateful when you come across any piece of work that
you like. It always seems to me that we render so little gratitude to
the people who give us so much pleasure, and it must be sad for them.”

She threw the end of her cigarette into the fire, and stood up, holding
out her hand.

“I must send you away, for it’s half-past ten, and we are early folk
here.”

Andrew bowed over the fair kind hand, and went back to his study at the
Manse. Here there was no fire, no genial smell of smoke, everything was
orderly, cold, and dull. Andrew sat down by his writing-table, and laid
his head down on his arms. Truly the thoughts of youth are long, long
thoughts.

A sleepless night is interminable at six-and-twenty. At forty, one
takes it as something that has to be got through, probably with the aid
of chloral.


V

MARY

There are people who can stir up the worst that is in us; that strange,
inherent moral obliquity, which few are so happy as to be without, but
which most of us bury under our strivings after things lovely and of
good report. When success crowns the efforts of these moral dredgers,
and they are generally as successful as they are persevering, they
stand aside, apparently aghast, and proceed to cry “shame” noisily upon
our depravity. These are they who “compound for sins they are inclined
to” by damning, not “those they have no mind to,” but such sins as at
the time they happen to be tired of.

There are others, thank God for it, with whom intercourse is a sort
of festival, not merely because their own outlook is so generous and
kindly, but because they rouse what is best in one’s self. One leaves
such friends--they are friends if you have met them once--strong and
gay and full of belief in the infinite possibilities of life.

Mary Burton was of this latter class. She made no great sacrifices, she
enjoyed her life thoroughly, taking eagerly all pleasure that came in
her way; but her temper was generous, her mind broad, and because she
herself could not understand meanness, she never suspected others. She
was seldom disappointed. It is the narrow little soul who so constantly
encounters other narrow souls. The simple, kindly people meet with
simplicity and kindness.

Perhaps the fact that their outlook was so similar proved the great
bond between Mary and the minister of Elgo. Their upbringing and
environment were so absolutely dissimilar, their views of life so
unlike, yet beyond it all and through it all sounded the same note,
dominating the discords and making harmony.

“He’s such a lovable good fellow,” Mary would say to herself. “One
forgives him for always using shall and will in the wrong places,
and for denying himself everything that some people think makes life
endurable.”

“She is so kind and gracious, so dignified without being haughty, so
absolute an aristocrat in all her beautiful ways; she is a princess.
What does it matter if she does smoke and read French novels? If she
does it, it must be right for her.” So argued the minister, though he
kept his own sturdy Scottish opinion with regard to the unwholesomeness
for ordinary digestions of some of the literature which Mary affected.

So the days went on and these two lovable good people saw more and more
of one another, worshipper and worshipped, and although the parties
mainly concerned preserved the ostrich-like blindness of people in
their condition, the “summer visitors” of Elgo and the parish itself
took a lively interest in their doings and waited with a somewhat
impatient expectation of the climax.

One thing struck Andrew Methven as curious: in all their many
conversations Mary had never mentioned her husband. She talked frankly
of her father and her brothers, of the people she had met in India, and
of those she was in the habit of meeting in London, but of her husband,
never. Andrew found himself wondering what manner of man Captain Burton
had been; but it never occurred to him to try to find out anything
about Mary or her surroundings. He never spoke of her to anyone, and
winced if anyone spoke of her to him. About his own family and his own
“past,” if so uneventful life can be said to have a past, he was most
frank.

“My people are what you would call ‘nice middle-class’ people, perhaps
a little fonder of books than their sort are in England, but you have
never met anybody of that kind except me, and you would not find them
congenial.”

Mary made a little face. “I’m sure I never spoke of anybody as a ‘nice
middle-class person,’ I shouldn’t be such a snob, and I have met all
sorts of people--people you would think Bohemian and terrible!”

“I should like to meet literary people,” said Andrew wistfully, “but I
suppose I never shall.”

“Oh, yes, you will, and you won’t find them any more interesting than
your Fifeshire fisher folk. Epigrams pall upon you when they form the
staple commodity of conversation. The somewhat dingy journalist, who
has a trick of smart talking and who poses to himself as everything
he is not, is just as great a bore as the respectable city clerk who
lives at Hornsey and expatiates upon its advantages. You must not
mistake cleverness for genius. The one is often merely the result of
environment and atmosphere. The other nearly always appears in unlikely
and seemingly impossible places. You know what Swinburne says: ‘There
is only one thing we may reverence, and that is genius. There is only
one thing we may worship, and that is goodness.’”

“It seems to me,” said Andrew thoughtfully, “that you reverse it. You
reverence goodness and worship genius!”

“Perhaps I do, certainly and perhaps fortunately, the one is much rarer
than the other. The best things in life are the commonest. There are
flowers, and children, and love, and friendship for everybody, if they
will have them.”

“And death and disillusion.”

“You, turning pessimist, _Padre mio_! This will never do. You are
too serious--far too serious. I prescribe a course of Anthony Hope
immediately. I have the ‘Dolly Dialogues’ with me, and you must force
yourself to appreciate them. It’s plain you have met with little real
tragedy in your life, or you would be more cheerful.”

“Have you a tragic past, that you are always gay?”

Mary shivered, but she did not answer. She called to Wiggins to come
out of the water, for it was growing cold.

The minister scourged himself for four hours afterward, for he noticed
that she was pale, and that there were shadows under her brown eyes.
What had he said?


VI

MARY’S HUSBAND

Mary had gone to play golf at St. Andrews. The minister called on Mrs.
Urquhart anent some parish matters and she detained him, rather against
his will, to talk of Mary and her perfections. She never spoke of her
except as “My Miss Mary,” and it was apt to bewilder the uninitiated.
Suddenly she asked the minister:

“Does she ever talk to you of the wee girlie who was killed?”

“What wee girlie? Never!”

“Eh, it was just an awful thing. Sit down, Mr. Methven, and I’ll tell
you.”

“But, Mrs. Urquhart, do you think if it is so sad, and if she--Mrs.
Burton never told me herself--that she would like----”

“Tuts, sir! It’s nothing disgraceful; it’s just fearfully sad. Ye can
only admire her the more for her courage. Well, as I was saying, she
had a wee girlie just three years old when they all came home from
India on long leave. Master Wiggins was the baby, and Miss Molly was
the bonniest creature you ever saw. The Captain--a fine, free-handed
gentleman he was, if a wee thing wild--was just wrapped up in her,
the boys were nowhere; and he would aye go and fetch her out o’ her
cot every evening after dinner and play, and nothing Miss Mary could
say would stop him. Well, that August they had taken a house down in
Cornwall to be near Miss Mary’s father. And one evening Miss Mary had
gone to dine with an old aunt some miles off, and the Captain and a
gentleman staying dined alone. It is thought that the Captain may have
taken rather much champagne--he did whiles--but anyway he went and got
Miss Molly out of bed and wrapped her in a blanket and carried her
out-of-doors. It was no use for the nurse to say anything--he was a
masterful gentleman, and brooked no interference. The other gentleman
had gone to write letters in the study. Well, Miss Mary came home about
ten, and of course went straight up to the night nursery. The little
boys were both in bed asleep, but Miss Molly’s cot was empty, and the
nurse told her the Captain had not brought her up to bed yet. Miss Mary
was rather indignant, for she thought it so bad for the child, and
went down to fetch her. But the Captain was not in the study, and the
other gentleman had not seen him since dinner. He seemed rather alarmed
when he heard that Miss Molly was missing, and everybody went out to
search the garden, for they were nowhere in the house. They sought and
sought, and nothing could they find. Then Miss Mary sent the grooms out
with lanterns, and she and the gentleman took the carriage lamps and
went down to the foot of the garden where the cliff went sharp down to
the sea. There was a steep path cut in the cliff, and down this they
went. At the bottom, lying on the hard rock, they found the Captain,
with Miss Molly in his arms quite dead, and his back was broken. He
lived for three days, and he died with his hand in my dear lady’s.
She never spoke one word of reproach; but he didn’t need it, poor
man; his grief was terrible to see, they say. He must have stumbled
and fallen sheer over. It’s six years ago now; my young lady was only
three-and-twenty. Eh, it was a heavy sorrow for a young thing like
that!”

Mrs. Urquhart’s voice broke, and she stopped. The minister was very
white, he held out his hand to her, but did not speak. The Scotch
understand each other. They have realized this great truth--that some
things are unsayable. The minister held good Mrs. Urquhart’s hand in
both his for two silent minutes, then he took his hat and went his way.

“He’s a grand young man yon!” said Mrs. Urquhart to herself, “he’ll
make it up till her.”

But the young man in question felt that he was further off than
ever from his divinity. The wall of unshared experience is high and
impassable; we may break it down in places, but it stretches its gaunt
length along life’s highway and we each of us must keep to our own
side.


VII

“BESIDE THE IDLE SUMMER SEA”

“I rather like that minister person,” said the Duke to Wiggins in his
most patronizing voice, “he seems a decent chap.”

“He is,” ejaculated Wiggins with immense conviction; “he’s a splendid
chap--a bit Scotchy, you know, but he’s awfully kind.”

“The mater likes him too, doesn’t she?”

“Oh, yes. He’s always with us, you see, living next door and that. He
knows all the best places to fish, and he can build the most splendid
castles with moats and secret passages and no end!”

The Duke turned his handsome head and smiled indulgently at Wiggins. “I
bet he can’t shoot or play cricket much, or ride anything but a bike.
You can’t remember father, Wiggins; he was a soldier, you know, and he
used to say: ‘Ride straight, shoot straight, and speak the truth, and
you’ll be a gentleman, sonny.’ An officer and a gentleman. I remember
though it’s so long ago.”

The Duke’s eyes grew soft. He had loved that big handsome father of his
with the uncomprehending, admiring love of a little-noticed child. The
little daughter had been everything to Captain Burton, yet the Duke
cherished his memory and rendered him a devotion greater than that he
gave to the mother who understood him; a devotion which Mary took care
should never be disturbed by any word of hers.

As Captain Burton lay dying he had lifted his weak arms and dragged her
head down close to his face.

“Don’t tell the boys,” he whispered. “Let them think the best of me.
Duke is a fine chap; he’ll make it up to you. I’ve been a beast and a
fool, but I always loved you, Mary. Promise you won’t tell the boys.”

And Mary promised.

The Duke was a singularly handsome boy, with grave, beautiful manners.
He never looked untidy or slovenly. Like his mother, he wore his
clothes in such a way that he always seemed better and more suitably
dressed than other people. He was rather a silent person, but gave
one the impression that he was silent from choice, not because he had
nothing to say.

He was very unmistakably a member of the “classes,” and though
exceedingly urbane and gracious to what he was pleased to call mentally
his “inferiors,” he was so because it would be ungentlemanly to be
otherwise.

He would gravely assist a fishwife to raise her heavy creel to her
shoulders, and lift his cap to her with a Hyde Park flourish when
she started on her way. But he did so because he considered it the
duty of a gentleman to assist women--not as Wiggins would have done,
from a friendly interest in that particular fishwife. Slim, tall, and
aristocratic, with oval face, straight nose, and big brown eyes, the
Duke was a noticeable boy anywhere, and Mary was immensely proud of him.

He was good at most games, and quick to learn. He ferreted out a pony
in the next village and rode about the country, to the admiration of
the natives. He golfed on the gentlemen’s links and played a very good
game for his age. He went fishing with the minister and Wiggins, and he
bicycled with his mother.

Since the advent of her eldest boy, it seemed to the minister that
there was a certain remoteness about Mary. Certainly her time was very
much taken up. The Duke required other amusements than those afforded
by the beach, a bucket, and a wooden spade. He expected and received
the constant companionship of his mother. On several occasions the
minister was allowed to join their bicycling expeditions. To watch
Mary bicycle was a never-ending wonder to him. She never seemed to go
fast; it was only when you rode after her that you found she was hard
to catch. The minister always wondered why her skirts never seemed to
bunch and blow as did those of other women. He knew nothing of tailors
as a great artistic power, but he was keenly alive to the result of
their labors in the grace and symmetry of her appearance.

The Duke also was a constant surprise, but for him the minister’s frank
admiration was tempered by a subtle but searching discomfort in his
society.

“Do you know,” he said ruefully one day to Mary, “that the Duke makes
me conscious of my boots, and the lack of trees to keep them on? I
never thought of it before, but I am sure now that it has been a
serious omission.”

“The Duke is the descendant of generations of dandies, and has all
the faults and the good qualities that belong to the class. In many
respects the dandy is a limited person both for good and evil; certain
social solecisms are, of course, impossible to him, but he generally
is lacking in imagination. The Duke, for instance, is less sympathetic
than Wiggins, but he is harder on himself also.”

“Can a woman be a dandy?” inquired the minister in a tone of grave
interest.

Mary laughed. “Every woman of the world is more or less a dandy, but
she takes the position less seriously than does a man. If in some
directions our sense of proportion is undeveloped, it has arrived at
perfection in matters of clothes.”

“I’m glad I can only wear one sort of clothes; it saves so much
trouble, and I should be certain to get the wrong ones.”

“I think you would. Be thankful for your uniform; it is becoming!”

“It’s very hot and uncomfortable in summer. I almost feel I could echo
Wiggins in his abuse of clothing.”

“Why don’t you wear flannels?”

“I do for tennis, but one can’t call on one’s parishioners in flannels;
they’d think it casual and disrespectful.”

“So they would. Well, you must dree your weird!” Mary spoke lightly,
but for the minister her last words had an ominous sound.

Presently they all halted “to give the bicycles a feed” as the Duke put
it--the fact being that they had arrived at the foot of what was for
Fife a very steep hill. The day was hot, and they had six more miles
to do before they reached the East Neuk, whither they were escorting
the Duke. Grass and the shade of trees looked inviting. Mary and
the minister decided to rest, but the energetic Duke went off on an
exploring expedition in an adjacent wood.

The minister and Mary sat quite silent for some minutes; then Mary said
slowly:

“Mrs. Urquhart told you of my great trouble six years ago. I am glad. I
wanted you to know, and I wanted you to know that I am glad.” Her voice
was very soft, her eyes were bent on the grass.

Andrew Methven looked at her but he did not speak.

She looked up a little surprised, and saw his face working strangely.
She understood.

“Don’t try to say anything,” she said, laying her hand on his arm. “You
are sorry. You are a good friend of mine.”

Somehow the touch of the little gloved hand on his arm made the
minister lose his head. He did not attempt to hold it in his own--his
reverence for her was too great for that--but he told her simply
and forcibly what he felt for her. She did not try to stop him. The
sunshine and the summer had got into her blood, and this worship that
was offered to her was sweet and precious. There was nothing ridiculous
in it, nothing impossible. He did not ask her to be his wife; in his
wildest dreams of happiness he had never reckoned on the possibility
of that. He did not ask to be anything to her; all he told her was what
she was to him.

And in the very middle of it all the Duke came back, saying:

“If we are to get to the East Neuk by teatime, we’d better be off; it’s
four already.”

So they rode off, and very silent companions the Duke found them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Seven years before in Simla, Mary had had a great success. She had been
made much of, and had enjoyed it. Many men had made love to her, and
she had enjoyed it. A beautiful, healthy girl accepts admiration as her
natural right.

But the men who made love to her did not enjoy it, for many of them had
the misfortune to be serious, and although Mary accepted their flowers
and their compliments and their devotion in her own gay, gracious
fashion, she gave nothing in return but that gay graciousness and the
privilege of her society.

“If she were in love with that card-playing, drinking fool, her
husband, I could understand it,” said Major Molyneux of the 42nd;
“but she isn’t in love with him, not a bit; and yet she’s an icicle
to every other chap. It’s not as if she were one of those cold,
saint-in-a-shrine sort of women; she’s as human as she can be. She’s no
fool, either. What, in heaven’s name, made her marry her husband?”

“Calm yourself, my dear Molly! Calm yourself,” answered the elderly
civilian to whom he was unburdening himself. “You have yet to learn
that the selective faculty is latest of development in women. Most
women, especially if they are pretty, marry before it has developed
at all. If they are good as well as pretty, they take care it shan’t
develop afterwards.”

“Burton hasn’t even the grace to be jealous; he lets her do just what
she pleases. He’s so mighty conceited that he never seems to think she
may come across a man capable of understanding her.”

The commissioner smiled. “I don’t think much of Burton’s intellectual
capacity, but I do give him credit for this--he understands his wife,
and because he understands her, he trusts her absolutely. It’s no use,
my dear boy, Simla will never have the pleasure of discussing Mrs.
Burton in connection with any sort of scandal; she’s not that kind!”

The commissioner was right. Her husband never had reason to find fault
with Mary, and since his death she had devoted herself to her boys and
to the cultivation of her mind. She took it as a matter of course that
men should fall in love with her; they always did. But her experience
did not make her eager to investigate further the realms of marriage.

Men made love to her because they wanted to possess her. She was so
tired of hearing, “Don’t you understand? I want you for myself, for my
very own.”

Mary understood, but as yet she had felt no desire to belong to anybody
in that exclusive fashion.

Andrew Methven touched her. Here at last was the Princely Giver she
had dreamed of, as women will dream, the man ready to give everything,
asking only for leave to lay his homage at her feet, nothing more.

When she had first met him, she set him down as one of those who are
destined “to do something.” It was not his fate to remain an obscure
Free Kirk minister, of that she was sure. The more she saw of him the
more she felt the reality of the strange power that lay behind his
apparently commonplace views of men and things. “It is there,” she said
to herself exultingly, and now that he had made love to her in this
strange, unusual way, she was seized with a passionate desire to take
this man into her life, and help him to give form and substance to that
latent force of his.

So Mary dreamed dreams while she listened to the minister as he
discoursed upon the historical interests of the East Neuk; as they rode
home swiftly and for the most part silently; as, the Duke having gone
to bed, she sat at the open window and watched the moonlight on the sea.

Then she went and looked at the boys in their two little straight beds
side by side. As she bent over the Duke he smiled, and threw his arm
round her neck, murmuring sleepily, “Dear mater.”

Shading the candle with her hand, she looked long and greedily at the
sleeping children, and, like all women at such moments, the triumphant
sense of possession swamped every other feeling.

As she reached her own room and stood before her glass, she looked into
the reflected eyes, saying: “Take ship, for happiness is somewhere to
be had!”


VIII

THE COLONEL INTERFERES

“There’s little Burton. I’ll ask him if it’s true,” ejaculated Colonel
Colquhoun, as he noticed three or four small red-coated figures coming
down the long slope at the far end of the gentlemen’s links.

“No, not the child; I would not ask the child if I were you,
Colquhoun.” Mr. Braid spoke earnestly, laying his hand on the colonel’s
arm to detain him. “He may know nothing about it, you know, there may
be nothing to know. In any case I wouldn’t ask the boy.”

But Colonel Colquhoun had just made an inferior drive, he was in a
bad temper as are many people during the royal and ancient game,
so he bustled off, ignoring his friend’s remonstrance, toward the
putting-green where the Duke was triumphantly holing in after a
specially brilliant placing of his ball.

The caddie shouldered the colonel’s clubs, and Mr. Braid followed more
slowly. He felt a curious disinclination to join the little group on
the putting-green. His own lad--just home from Fettes--was one of the
players; he had said kind things of the pluck and perseverance of
little Burton. Mr. Braid’s heart was tender, and he himself had not
forgotten the moment when he first heard of a possible stepfather. He
walked more and more slowly.

The hole that the Duke and his friends were playing was the last on
the links; the boyish figures were outlined sharply against the sky.
Mr. Braid saw the Duke lift his cap as the colonel came up. He could
not hear what passed, but he saw the four boys turn, and one after
another tee their balls and drive. The colonel was left alone on the
putting-green, where his ball was not. The caddie stood grinning, and
the colonel cuffed his ears, declaring that the young ruffian had
stolen his ball.

Mr. Braid waited in patience till the ball was discovered in some
distant bents, but the colonel did not again mention little Burton or
his mother.

The Duke was playing abominably. Halfway home he said: “Braid, would
you think me an awful cad if I break up the foursome? I can’t play a
hang.” The child’s lips were quivering, and his sunburnt cheeks looked
white under the tan.

Braid put his arm round his shoulders affectionately. “You go home,
old chap. You’re hipped, but never mind that old beast Colquhoun, he’s
always making mischief. Don’t you notice him.”

“I didn’t--much, did I?” the Duke asked anxiously. “I hope I
didn’t--show.”

“Not you--not a bit. Here, scoot! I’ll bring your clubs.”

The Duke broke into a run, and regardless of the enraged “fores” which
sounded on every side, made straight across the links to the rocky
shore. There he would be alone--alone with this terrible possibility
that flashed its lurid light across his path.

Once behind the rocks he sat down and sobbed, even as he did so
wondering when he had cried before. The Duke did not “blub”--never--he
considered tears unworthy of a man, “of an officer and a gentleman,”
had not the father whose memory he adored once said to him: “Curse if
you like, old man, but never cry.” So the Duke never cried, though his
language on occasions would have surprised his mother by its forcible
variety. Before ladies, though, “gentlemen do not swear,” so Mary
remained in blissful ignorance of her son’s proficiency in certain
forms of objurgation.

Now, however, the Duke sobbed, great tearing, dreadful sobs that racked
his slender body with a pain that was almost physical.

The colonel had done his work. As he walked across the green to
enlighten Duke, he had said to himself: “I’ll make it hot for Mrs.
Burton, haughty minx; the boy’s a tartar.”

Mary had found it necessary to snub the colonel on more than one
occasion; so he no longer called her “a monstrous fine woman.” A
fancied slight rankles in the mean and narrow soul; revenge is doubly
sweet if one near and dear to the offender can be made the instrument
of punishment.

The Duke sat behind the rocks and sobbed until he felt sick and stupid.
Had he not heard of that horrible institution called a stepfather? Had
he not read only last holidays a book called “David Copperfield,”
wherein the iniquities of such an one were set forth with terrible
distinctness.

He was not a religious child. Mary was not dogmatic in her teaching,
she influenced more by her example and her mental attitude than by
conscious effort. Yet here and now the boy felt that circumstances were
too strong for him, and he prayed in a hopeless, muddled fashion that
if his mother did this thing, God would take him to join the father she
seemed to have forgotten.

It is a mistake to think that children never come face to face with
despair. They do, more often than the superior, omniscient grown-ups
themselves. There is a finality about every sorrow for children, they
cannot realize that such pain as they feel _can_ pass; they do not
believe it. That saddest of all poets must have thought of sorrowing
children when he wrote:

  We are most hopeless, who had once most hope,
  And most beliefless, who had most believed.

What matter if the grief be short, its poignancy while it lasts is none
the less acute.

The Duke stopped crying, and looked at the bare wall of rock before
him with hopeless, unseeing eyes. Then as he prayed, a great wave of
tenderness, of longing for his mother, broke over his child soul, and
he got up. Scrambling over the great boulder he had hidden behind, he
set off to run home. If this amazing, this shameful news were true, he
would set a seal on his misery, and uncertainty would be at an end. If
it were false, the Duke set his teeth as he thought of the colonel,
then he squared his shoulders and dropped into the swinging run which
made him such an admirable hare at “hare and hounds.”

He ran by the beach, a good three miles, and burst into their little
sitting-room, tear-stained and breathless, just as Mary had arranged
her writing-board on her knee.

She looked up in astonishment at his somewhat noisy entrance. He still
wore his cap in the room, before her, and his face was dirty. Who had
seen the Duke with a dirty face since he arrived at years of discretion?

“My darling boy, what has happened? Is it Wiggins? Is he hurt?” Mary
stood up in her excitement, and the paper and envelopes were scattered
about the floor.

The Duke only looked at her, his lips trembling.

“Speak, Duke, what is it? Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“No one is hurt, mother, except me, and I’m only hurt in my heart.” The
tears ran down his cheeks as he spoke. “Mother, is it true--are you
going to marry Mr. Methven? Oh, say it isn’t true. It’s so dreadful!”

Mary drew the boy to her, and sitting down she took him on her knee. He
buried his dirty face in her neck and sobbed.

“My dearest, who has said that I am going to marry Mr. Methven? Surely
you do not suspect me of telling people--other people--before I would
tell you such a thing as that! Oh, Duke, I thought you trusted me.”

“But, mother, you might not have _told_ them, they might have guessed,
and it’s not the not knowing that I mind, it’s--it’s--Mr. Methven!”

“Dear Duke, did it never strike you as possible that I might marry
again?”

“Never! Never! You belong to Wiggins and me--and father. Have you
forgotten father?”

“No, sonny, no. I have not forgotten.”

“Oh, mother, say it isn’t true, say it isn’t true, or I shall die!”

Mary folded the boy closer in her arms. “It is not true, dear. Mr.
Methven has not even asked me to marry him.”

As she spoke she remembered her own words as she looked into the glass
the night before. Her face grew very sad.

“But if he did ask you, mother, you would say no? You would say no?”

The Duke’s voice, husky with long crying, was very pathetic.

Mary leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. She held her boy
very close, and her breath came quickly.

“I don’t think he will ask me, dear, but if he does, I must say no, for
his sake!”

The Duke sat up and gazed at his mother in absolute amazement.

“For his sake,” he repeated in a hushed, almost frightened voice. “Do
you want to marry him, mother?”

“It does not matter much what I want to do, my little son; it’s what I
must _not_ do that we have to do with. I shall not marry Mr. Methven.
Some day when you are a man you will realize what I have given up for
you--and for him!” And Mary fell a-weeping with her boy clasped in her
arms.

The Duke felt her hot tears on his short-cropped hair, and he trembled;
then, releasing himself from his mother’s arms, got off her knee and
stood beside her, very pale and grave.

“Dear!” he said solemnly, “if you want to marry this--gentleman--if it
will make you happier, you shall. Do you hear, darling? You shall.”
And throwing himself into his mother’s arms, they cried together. When
it came to the point, he found that he loved his mother better--than
himself.

Presently Mary began to laugh. “Oh, Duke, Duke, how funny you are! You
talk as if I were a little girl, as if--but it doesn’t matter--some day
you will understand.... It’s not going to happen, Duke dear. It’s been
a storm in a teacup. You must never listen to what ignorant people say.”

“May I contradict them, politely?” asked the Duke eagerly, with an
immense relief shining in his eyes.

“Certainly, if anyone has the impertinence to speak of such a thing
again. It is an insult to Mr. Methven and to me. Oh, Duke, there’s
somebody coming upstairs. Quick, go and say I’ve got a headache and
can’t see people.”

It flashed across the boy’s mind that he was not very presentable
either. However, the staircase was dark, and he shut the sitting-room
door behind him. A tall, black-coated figure was ascending the stairs.

“Mother can’t see anyone to-day, Mr. Methven; she’s got a headache.”

But even as he spoke the door at the top of the stairs opened, and Mary
said:

“I’ll see Mr. Methven, sonny, but ask Mrs. Urquhart to say I am engaged
if anyone else calls.”

The sitting-room door closed behind the minister and Mary. The Duke
went to his own room to wash his face, and to ponder over his mother’s
words.


IX

VALE

Somebody has said that women have no sense of humor. It is one of those
knock-me-down assertions that provoke argument. The sense of humor is
so blessed a gift, it were unjust indeed to deny its benefits to the
larger half of humanity. The gods had bestowed it with no niggardly
hand upon Mary. It had stood her in good stead during many a crisis;
its divine attribute did not desert her now.

There was a poetic justice in the appearance of Andrew Methven at that
particular moment that appealed to her sense of artistic inevitability;
and as Andrew shut the door behind him, though the tears shone wet upon
her cheeks, she laughed.

“I am sorry you have a headache,” began Andrew lamely. “Shall I go
away?”

“No, sit down; I want to talk to you. I’ve just been through a somewhat
trying scene with the Duke, and I long that somebody should horsewhip
Colonel Colquhoun.”

“I don’t possess a horsewhip, but I have a good stout stick.” The
minister’s manner was most unclerical as his grasp tightened on the
weapon in question.

“You do not even ask what he has done.”

“He has annoyed you--that is quite enough; but I wish he was a younger
man.”

“He is not young enough to thrash, and he is not quite old enough to
ignore; all the same, we shall have to ignore him. But, you Quixotic
person, would you really thrash a man because I asked you to?”

“If you asked me to thrash a man, I should know he well deserved
thrashing, and I--should enjoy it.”

“You’re more man than minister, after all,” said Mary, more to herself
than to him.

“Better man, better minister. Do you think I could have had any sort of
influence over my colliers at Cowdenbeath if I couldn’t fight? I can’t
fence, but I can box. I’ll teach the Duke, if you like.”

“Why don’t you ask me what Colonel Colquhoun has done?”

“Because if you want to tell me, you will tell me; and if it is
unpleasant to you to tell me, why should you?”

“It’s as unpleasant as it is necessary I should tell you, because we
must both publicly contradict a foolish report that has got spread
abroad in Elgo to the effect that we are to be married.”

Mary did not blush as she spoke, but the minister crimsoned to the
roots of his hair. “I am too sorry you should have been subjected to
this annoyance. You know what my feeling for you is; you also know that
I have not the right to ask a fisher lass to marry me. I am nothing,
and have nothing; but you have let me lay my great love at your feet.”

Mary made a little sound, half sob, half laugh, and held out her hands
to him in a helpless, unseeing way that went to his heart. He caught
them in his own, and looking into the dear face with purple shadows
painted by tears under the eyes, he knew that she, too, cared.

What does it avail to tell in words how these two plighted their troth,
that was to be ever unfulfilled? The tenderest and truest of lovers
have generally small literary value.

For half an hour they went to heaven together.

Then they faced realities, and Andrew asked: “Will you write to me?”

Mary shook her head. “No; if we write we shall simply waste our lives
in everlasting watching for the postman. We are very human, you and I,
and how can we hope to be better and wiser than other people?”

“You are hard,” murmured Andrew. “I can find no comfort in virtuous
soliloquy. A letter would be something tangible.”

“No, I am not hard; but I am old who once was young, and I know. As it
is we shall have a perfect and unspoiled memory, full of tenderness
and grace and poetry; but if we write we shall be miserable, ever
unsatisfied, hanging, like Mahomet’s coffin, between heaven and earth.
No; let us keep this sweet experience untarnished by impotent tears and
regrets.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Three days after, Mary and her boys had joined some of the numerous
uncles at a shooting-box near Kingussie. The Duke was very happy; but
Wiggins missed his beloved sea. “I think my minister must miss me,” he
said. “I miss him so very much; he’s such a kind man.”



PART III

CHILDREN OF THIS



JEAN, A PORTRAIT


She was remarkable in the first place because she never rode in a
perambulator like other children; either she walked--on bare, shapely,
pink feet--or her own personal attendant, Elspeth (a very tall woman
indeed), carried her in a plaid slung over one of her broad shoulders.
Elspeth despised the “bit barrows” of the other nurses, and was quite
strong enough to have carried Jean’s mother as well as Jean. “She will
go barefoot,” Elspeth would say, “till she iss seven, and when she iss
a woman she will walk like a queen, and not like a hen!”

Jean, if possible, went bareheaded as well as “barefoot,” and perhaps
that is the reason why her hair is so abundant, so curly, so full of
golden light that in the sunshine it almost makes you blink. Moreover,
her eyes are big and blue. Sunshine and rain, and kind fresh winds have
tinted her face with the loveliest warm browns and pinks; she is not
yet five years old, and she can dance the sword dance! It is really a
great sight to see Jean’s pink feet twinkling in and out between two
unsheathed swords of her father’s, and he is a proud man.

Yet there never was such a “girly” girl as Jean.

She has an enormous family of dolls--for her adorers all bring dolls,
and _they_ are as the sands of the sea in number--she takes a motherly
interest in them all, both dolls and adorers, but her inseparable
companion is one “Tammy,” an ancient and dirty-faced rag soldier; with
arms and legs resembling elongated sausages, a square body, no feet,
and a head shaped like a breakfast “bap.” Not an attractive personality
to the uninitiated, but he and Jean were as Ruth and Naomi. It is
something of a sorrow to her that the exigencies of Tammy’s figure do
not admit of a kilt, just as she puzzled all last summer in sorrowful
surprise that her father never once donned the uniform she so admires.

Jean’s people live at a house on the Terrace, which has at the back a
shady old-fashioned garden with a big square lawn in the centre. There
Jean’s brothers, Colin and Andrew, played cricket, while Jean fielded
or drilled her dolls under the trees. In the evening, after dinner,
there would be a sound of men’s voices and an occasional thrum of the
banjo under those same trees, and a cheerful clink of glasses, while
men with brown faces and trim, well-set heads laughed and rejoiced in a
coolness that concealed no malaria.

Jean’s father had a reprehensible habit of bringing her, wrapped in a
blanket, out into the garden at ten o’clock at night, when she would
be handed about from knee to knee like a superior sort of refreshment.
To be fetched out of bed in this fashion would have been upsetting
to some children, but Jean, with an adorable sleepy smile, would make
herself agreeable for half an hour or so, and when carried back and
tucked into bed--always by her father--fell asleep again directly,
and never seemed a scrap the worse. On such occasions she was always
expected to sing. She never sang anything but Scottish songs--mournful
or martial, mostly Jacobite, and her repertory was enormous. While
other children were learning “Little Jack Horner,” or “Hey diddle
diddle!” Jean, thanks to Elspeth, learned “Hey Johnny Cope,” or “Cam’
ye by Athol,” and her voice was as the voice of Katherine of France,
“broken music,” for her voice was music, and her English broken.
Sometimes a belated passer-by would wait outside to listen in wonder to
someone singing in the clearest baby voice:

  Sing Hey, my bra’ John Hielandman,
  Sing Ho, my bra’ John Hielandman,

and at the end of each refrain she always kissed her father, for
there was no one in the world to match with him in Jean’s eyes.
She absolutely declined to sing the last verse after that day upon
which she discovered what “hanging” meant, Colin and Andrew having
suspended Tammy from the apple tree. At times, Jean could raise her
voice otherwise than in song, and on that occasion the whole Terrace
resounded with her shrieks.

Next door there dwelt a very grumpy gentleman. With that easy
confidence in a neighbor’s neighborliness generally manifested by
people who have lived much abroad, Jean’s father, on taking up his
quarters, had written asking permission to put some wire-netting on
the top of the party wall to prevent cricket balls going over. To his
immense surprise he received a curt and discourteous refusal, which
terminated in a warning to the effect that, if balls did come over,
there they would have to stay, as the writer would in no circumstances
have boys running in and out of his house, and there was no back
entrance. Of course balls went over; but Colin and Andrew found an
unexpected ally in Mr. Knagg’s housekeeper, who threw the balls back
again without consulting him; and Mr. Knagg felt rather aggrieved that,
as yet, he had found no cause for complaint. Complaint in some form or
other was as the breath of life to him; he had gone to law with so many
of his fellow-townsmen that his society was no longer sought after, and
his exceedingly clean steps were untrodden by strangers. He intended at
first to complain that the banjo-playing in the garden disturbed him at
his studies, when he happened to hear Jean sing “This iss no my plaid,”
and somehow he gave up the idea.

Colin and Andrew possessed a “mashie” each, and a game of “putting
golf.” It was reserved for Sunday afternoons as being of a quiet and
decorous nature.

But one Sunday afternoon Andrew forgot to “putt,” and gave his ball
a drive that lifted it high over the wall into the next garden. Now,
the wall was too high to climb; besides, the fear of Mr. Knagg was
upon them, and the housekeeper was out--they had seen her go. They had
only two balls, and it was yet a long two hours off teatime. Father and
mother were both out. They retired to consult Jean under the trees.

“If he wasn’t such an old beast, I’d go and ask for it myself,” growled
Andrew.

“You wouldn’t get it if you did,” said Colin the practical.

“Why shouldn’t Jean go? He’d give it to her,” suggested Andrew, who had
noted the weakness of his sex where Jean was concerned.

“Of course he would. You must go, Jean. Hurry up!”

“What, all on my lonely?” exclaimed Jean in pained astonishment.

“Oh, we’ll come with you to the door and ring the bell for you, and
then cut away before he can open it. Then you ask him nicely. Come on,
Jean!”

She seldom long opposed her brothers. She had what Elspeth called a
“tender head,” and strongly objected to having her hair pulled. Between
them they marched her up the flagged path to Mr. Knagg’s front door,
rang loudly, and departed precipitately.

Maighda, the great deerhound who shared with Elspeth the guardianship
of Jean, rose from amidst the company of dolls, where she had been
reposing, and walking gravely into the front garden, jumped the iron
fence, and joined Jean at the top of the steps.

Jean clasped Tammy firmly with one arm and coiled the other round
Maighda’s neck as the door opened rather noisily to disclose an
irate-looking little gentleman in gold-rimmed _pince-nez_.

“If you please,” began Jean, in a still, small voice, “there iss a wee
ball-y wass putted into your garden--will I get it?”

Mr. Knagg stood staring at his strange visitors, while Jean rubbed one
pink foot over the other and Maighda sniffed at him dubiously. Tammy,
with his customary reserve, betrayed no emotion whatever.

“Come!” said Mr. Knagg shortly, holding out his hand. As Jean
disappeared Colin and Andrew flew into the back garden and swarmed up
an apple tree, whence they surveyed their sister’s proceedings with
interest.

“Wonder why men are so much decenter to girls than to us?” mused Andrew.

“Oh, well; his housekeeper likes us best, anyway. Everyone’s got their
cranks.”

“Fore,” cried a clear little voice, and the ball fell with a soft
“plop” at the foot of the apple tree.

“She throws very well for a girl,” said Colin as he dropped onto the
grass. “Let’s finish the game.”

“What do you mean by ‘fore’?” asked Mr. Knagg.

“Heads, you know,” said Jean; but her host was more puzzled than ever,
for he had not even a bowing acquaintance with the royal and ancient
game. They stared at each other in silence for a minute, then Jean,
remembering that one of the most important precepts of her clan was to
accept no service without rendering some return, said shyly: “Will I
sing you a song?”

“Pray do!” exclaimed Mr. Knagg; and his eyeglasses flew off his nose,
he frowned so hard.

“My love’s in Germanie--send him hame! send him hame! My love’s in
Germanie--send him hame!” Jean only sang three verses. Elspeth never
taught her the last two, and when the last notes full of longing had
died away, she added cheerfully: “But he iss at home just now.”

“Who is?”

“My father. Nearly all my songs iss about father.”

“Really!” ejaculated Mr. Knagg, and blew his nose noisily. “So that’s
Scotch?”

“All my songs iss Scottish. I promised Elspeth, and I will know them
all some day. Goot-bye!” and Jean, settling Tammy more comfortably on
her arm, prepared to depart. As she spoke she had lifted her face to be
kissed, and Mr. Knagg kissed her.

“He iss a dull man,” said Jean confidentially to Colin; “but he was
douce enough to me.”

The man in question sat in his favorite chair and read his Sunday
newspaper upside down. It was thirty-five years since he had kissed a
child!

Colin and Andrew were at school, father and mother had gone out in the
dog-cart, taking Maighda with them for the run, Elspeth was ironing
frocks, and Jean entertaining Tammy and all the dolls at tea on the
lawn. Suddenly she threw back her head and listened--no one had such
quick ears as Jean--the color rushed to her face, and she scampered
across the grass, round by the side of the house, and out at the garden
gate; bareheaded, with flying rosy feet, she raced to the end of the
terrace, and as she ran the sound which so excited her grew louder. It
was the pipes!

Would she find “the regiment,” she wondered? Had it come to show what
Elspeth called “this wee stuck-up bit towney” what real John Hielandman
were like? Jean pictured the frowning castle and windy Esplanade, the
steep, stony street, flanked by tall grey houses, down which “the
regiment” “in tartan plaid and philabeg” swept with swinging steps.
That was the setting in which she knew her father’s men. How would they
look in this trim Southern town? And would she dare to stop them to ask
after her friends?

No, it was not a march the piper was playing, and very soon she
discovered that there was no regiment--only a solitary piper playing
the “Keel Row,” with a crowd of unkempt children following him.

Jean pushed in among the children, who made way for this hatless,
shoeless person in some astonishment.

“He iss not the ‘Forty-second,’ nor the ‘Gordons,’ nor the ‘Seaforth,’”
said Jean to herself, “and why will he wear two tartans?” Then, pulling
at the piper’s kilt, she cried shrilly, above the skirl of the pipes:
“Can you play ‘Oran an Aoig’?”

The piper took the chanter out of his mouth, and smiled down at the
eager, upturned face, asking: “_Wot_, my dear?”

“‘Oran an Aoig,’” repeated Jean eagerly.

“Sorry I cawn’t oblige you, but I never ’eard tell of that toon,” and
the “Keel Row” sounded with renewed and aggressive vigor.

Jean loosed her hold of the kilt and turned to go. There was something
uncanny in the speech of this piper, and as she looked more closely,
a certain incongruity in his uniform which chilled and disappointed
her. The children, however, having recovered from their surprise at her
sudden appearance in their midst, decided to have some fun with Jean,
and she speedily discovered that to be the only shoeless person in a
heavily shod crowd is to be in a most unpleasant minority. Also, she
had never been alone in the street before.

Mr. Knagg heard the pipes on his way home to lunch, and having the
greatest abhorrence of all street noises, holding that they were, every
one, “disturbing to the peace of His Majesty’s lieges,” was hurrying
across the road to expostulate with the perpetrator of this new outrage
upon his ears, when he caught sight of a familiar shining in the very
middle of that rabble of children. He laid about him with his white
cotton umbrella, presently emerged from the crowd, bearing a very
tearful Jean in his arms, and hailed a cab. The cab and the dog-cart
drove up to Jean’s door at the same moment. Mr. Knagg left Jean on the
pavement and stalked into his house.

“I said he was a douce man,” sobbed Jean, in the safe shelter of her
father’s arms; “but it wass a pittence piper, not one of ours at all.”
They say that she felt the deception even more than the bruises on her
toes. Her father never managed to thank Mr. Knagg though he called
three times.

       *       *       *       *       *

“Of course the master’s gone to the war with the regiment. He only got
six months’ leave, after all, and Miss Jean talks and sings about him
all day long, and the mistress just listens. But she says if Master
Colin and Master Andrew were older, she’d send them, too; for there’s
aye been some of our family for the men to follow.” Elspeth left
Mr. Knagg’s housekeeper standing at the wire fence, for she “never
encouraged clash.”

In the wintry days her neighbors saw less of Jean, as play in the
garden was impossible. But even then the pink feet splashed bravely
through the puddles and over the wet stones.

One evening about six, just as Mr. Knagg was turning into the Terrace,
a newspaper boy, shouting with raucous voice, proclaimed: “Serious
British Reverse!” “’Ighland regiment trapped and cut to pieces!” The
old gentleman darted across the road, crying: “Stop that infernal din,
and I’ll buy every rag you’ve got! Don’t come down here again, mind!”

He hurried down the Terrace with a great bundle of pink papers under
his arm. Just outside his own house he paused and looked up. Jean’s
nursery window was open at the top, the curtains were not drawn, and
the room was full of rosy light. Suddenly a child’s voice soared into
the stillness:

  He’s as brave as brave can be;
    Send him hame, send him hame!
  He’s as brave as brave can be;
          Send him hame!

Mr. Knagg took off his hat and bent his head.



THE DOLL’S-HOUSE FLAGS (1917)


To begin with the youngest.

“Me an’ the war’s the same age,” said Jasper, for Jasper was born on
August 4th, 1914.

Perhaps that was why he manifested such a decided and independent
disposition almost from his earliest months.

It may have been that everybody was so busy he was more thrown upon his
own resources than are babies in more leisurely times. But whatever the
reason, he ran about when he was one, talked fluently--if in somewhat
impressionistic fashion--when he was eighteen months old, and by the
time he was two he had attained very definite characteristics.

Barbara came next, four long years older than Jasper. She had a round,
rosy face and kind brown eyes that readily filled with tears, and her
little heart overflowed with love and pity for the wounded.

Alison was quite old when war broke out. She could remember times when
sweets “were nothing so very much--everybody eat them,” when “gentlemen
often had _two_ eggs for breakfast and lots of other things as well,”
when “Mummy could buy anything she liked in shops, and nearly everybody
had motors.”

Alison was six when Jasper was born.

Tall and pale was Alison, with straight black hair that reached her
waist. She took the war very seriously indeed, and was implacable in
her conviction that nothing else mattered. She was even rather shocked
that mummy could take comfort in the thought that it would probably be
over before Jasper was old enough to join up.

Then there was George.

He was an American and the same age as Alison and lived quite near,
though after the unfriendly fashion of London, they might never have
known him but that it happened his mummy and theirs worked at the same
hospital.

He was an “only,” and when they first knew him went as a day boy to
a preparatory school quite a long way off; but as time went on and
transport of every kind became more crowded and difficult, he came to
do lessons with Alison and Barbara.

Nothing made Barbara so happy as to be allowed to visit the “dear poor
ones” in the hospital where mummy worked; but when she first saw the
blind soldiers from St. Dunstan’s and they were explained to her, it
seemed as though she really could not bear the knowledge. The children
lived on the south side of Regent’s Park, and Nannie always took them
there for their walks.

“Will they never be able to see?” she would ask piteously.

“I fear not in this life,” was Nannie’s invariable answer.

“Not anything? Ever?”

“Nothing at all. But they are very brave, Miss Barbara; _they_ don’t
cry.”

For days after when Barbara met them in Regent’s Park, her mouth would
go down at the corners, and though she did not actually cry she was,
as nurse said, “queer and quiet” for a long time afterward. Their
inexorable doom weighed on her little soul, and even her serene faith
in a kind God and protecting angels and the “tender Shepherd” of her
prayers was somewhat shaken that such a cruel thing could be. Ah! if
they could only have met _Him_! He would have “touched their eyes”
and all would have been well. Perhaps some day---- In the meantime
the fairies--and she believed in them as firmly as in the heavenly
hierarchy itself--came to her aid, and by some process of reasoning she
decided that the blinded soldiers were under an enchantment. That a
wicked ogre, a German ogre, had taken away their sight (even as trolls
and cruel step-mothers and evilly disposed fairies blinded her favorite
heroes in the “Tales from the Norse”), but that some day a kind fairy
or wise, friendly beast would put them in the way of getting their eyes
back again. Surely among all the animals in the Zoo there would be one
who knew exactly under what tree in the Park the healing dew might be
found.

She never spoke of the St. Dunstan’s men as blind, but as the “poor
enchanted ones,” to distinguish them from the “dear poor ones” of the
hospital, and she would never speak of “Blindman’s Buff,” but always of
“Enchanted Buff.”

Jasper had learned to salute and was immensely proud of himself. Every
man in khaki or hospital blue that came in his way, from brass-hats to
the most newly joined recruits, received his respectful and ecstatic
salutation. Two-foot-six in a white Persian lamb coat and white gaiters
would stand rigidly to attention and bring up a diminutive hand clad in
a white glove smartly to his forehead. If the man he desired to honor
happened to be in hospital blue, he then kissed his hand to express
affection as well as respect. When the warrior in question perceived
Jasper he invariably returned the courtesy with _empressement_.
Generals were most punctilious in this matter, and when Jasper saw
one coming he would trot forward, plant himself firmly in the line
of vision of the eyes under the brass hat, and, rosy and triumphant,
wait till Nannie came up, announcing proudly: “I t’luted ’im _and_ he
t’luted me.”

Everyone smiled upon Jasper. He was so small and round and earnest,
and his absurd hair curled around the edge of his cap in the most
entrancing fashion. He knew he was popular and enjoyed it amazingly.

Therefore was he surprised and chilled when one day, having as usual
trotted ahead of Nannie, he stopped opposite two blue soldiers resting
on a seat in the park and they took not the slightest notice of him.

They seemed to be looking right at him as he stood at salute, but they
neither “t’luted,” nor did they smile or speak.

Jasper kissed his hand.

Still no response.

He kissed his hand, and blew the kiss right at them.

Puzzled, he looked from one to the other. They weren’t asleep. Their
eyes were wide open, and their faces kind and patient, but they didn’t
seem a bit glad to see him.

They just took no notice--no notice at all. And Nannie came up with the
pram.

“I t’luted ’em,” he said in rather trembling tones, quite unlike his
usual strong treble, “but they don’t seem to like me.”

“Eh, what?” said one of the men suddenly. “What’s that?”

Nannie said something hurriedly in a low voice. “He’s only two and a
bit,” she added. Then, “It’s too cold for you to be sitting there. Have
you lost your bearings?”

“That’s about it,” said the man who had first spoken. “Perhaps you’ll
put us on our way. It’s time we were getting back.”

“We’ll go with you. Give him your hand, dear, and bring him along.”

“I _did_ t’lute ’em,” Jasper said again, feeling that an important
ceremony had somehow been scamped.

Both the men stood up, and the one who had spoken to Nannie jogged his
friend with his elbow, saying: “And so do we salute you, young man,”
and they both did.

The man put down his hand and touched the top of Jasper’s Persian lamb
cap, and laughed:

“What a big man!” he said.

And hand in hand they followed Nannie to St. Dunstan’s.

       *       *       *       *       *

“Now you know what it’s like for the poor enchanted ones,” Barbara
said, taking her hands from Jasper’s eyes.

Jasper looked very solemn. “Poor ’chanted ones,” he echoed; “I’ll
t’lute ’em and kiss my hand _and_ kirtsey ne’st time I meet ’em.”

“You talk to them, my dear,” said sensible Nannie; “they’ll like that
better than all your salutin’s.”

This Jasper was most ready to do at great length in his little high
voice that the poor enchanted ones came to recognize a long way off.
But all the same he never failed to “t’lute and kiss his hand _and_
kirtsey.” No signs of respect and affection could be too much, Barbara
said.

“It’s the worst thing of all, so we must love them most.”

Fairies and angels were inextricably mixed up in Barbara’s mind, and
when her mother came to kiss her good-night on Christmas Eve, she
murmured sleepily: “I simply can’t ’astinguish between God and Father
Christmas, so I mus’ just let it alone.”

Even the toys were much affected by the war. Jasper’s Teddy Bear wore
an expression not unlike the pathetic puzzled look of his brethren
in the Mappin Circle, now that nobody threw them buns, sat they on
their tails never so pleadingly. Alison had made him the brassard of a
special constable, and he always wore it when he went out with Jasper
in the pram. The lady dolls had all become V.A.D.’s or bus conductors
or window-cleaners, and one quite recent acquisition was a land girl.

As for the doll’s house, it wore a martial yet festive air, for the
flags of all the allies were stuck in a tight band of string with which
Alison had bound it thrice just under the roof.

It was not a new doll’s house. In fact as doll’s houses go it was
almost venerable. It had belonged to grannie’s mother, and was built in
the early part of Queen Victoria’s reign. Unlike modern doll’s houses,
it did not open in front. In front it was square and solid, with two
large windows on either side of the door, which had glass panels, and
actually opened and shut, and there were three oblong windows on the
next floor. The roof was made of real little slates, with chimneys at
either end of it. The ground floor was a shop, with two black counters
that could be taken out and dusted, and the walls were fitted with
innumerable shelves and cupboards. It was a silversmith’s shop, and
on the brass plates under the windows were, on one, “David Strachan,
Silversmith and Jeweler,” on the other, “By Appointment to Her Majesty
Queen Victoria.” By which it could be seen that it was a Scottish
jeweler’s shop, for nobody called “Strachan” could be of any other
nationality. Moreover, there were tiny toddy-ladles of various sizes
among the stock-in-trade.

Daddy used to tell the children an entrancing serial story about the
inhabitants of this wonderful house, whereof most of the plenishings
remained in their original form, though Mr. and Mrs. Strachan, the two
shop assistants, and the baby, had been renewed from time to time,
but always as nearly as possible resembling their predecessors. Thus
it came about that Mr. Strachan had side-whiskers--daddy painted them
himself--a stock and peg-top trousers, and Mrs. Strachan a crinoline
and an amazingly slender waist; while Jenny, the maid, who slept in
a box-bed in the kitchen, had a mob-cap and always wore her sleeves
rolled up. The bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. Strachan was much bemuslined,
and the parlor had green rep chairs and a round table.

“It’s all of our doll’s house,” Barbara used to say. “It doesn’t belong
to anyone partickler. Grannie said so.”

“George’s, too,” Jasper always added. He couldn’t bear George to be
left out of anything.

And perhaps because George was an American he was a little less on his
dignity than an English boy of the same age. He didn’t despise girls,
he treated them in a comradely fashion that Alison and Barbara greatly
appreciated. And Jasper adored him, for George realized that a person
might be not quite three, with nether garments so abbreviated as to
be almost indistinguishable from petticoats, with woolly gaiters and
shoes so small they refused to make a martial tramp, however much one
tried--and yet the said person might possess the most boyish soul in
the world.

Therefore was George made free of the doll’s house, and assisted Alison
with the serial story which she had taken over since that day, early
in the war, when daddy went with his Territorial battalion to France.

It was on New Year’s Day in 1917 that George brought Alison the
American flag for the doll’s house. It was a beautiful little silk one,
and he had selected it himself at Selfridge’s.

“I’d like Mr. Strachan should have it,” he said. “We want the allies to
win. You bet we do.”

But Alison shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I hate not to take
it--I’ll have it myself if you like, but it can’t go on the house. Not
yet it can’t. America’s not in, you see.”

“After all,” said George, “we’ve done a good bit, haven’t we? Look at
my dad--he’s been driving an ambulance--he gave it himself--ever since
the beginning of the war, and he’s been wounded.”

“I know,” Alison answered, “I know all that, but”--and her grave
little face was set like a flint--“you’re not in it yet, you’re not
_fighting_, and only countries that are fighting _with_ us can have
their flags on the doll’s house. Mr. Strachan’s most partickler about
that. My daddy’s been wounded twice.”

“Wouldn’t he have it at the back?” Barbara suggested. She couldn’t bear
people to be hurt, and George looked very much hurt.

“No, thank you,” he said haughtily. “If it can’t be put with the
others, you needn’t have it at all. It’s a great flag.”

“I know,” said Alison, “and I’m awfully sorry. Mr. Strachan would love
it the minute you’re really in ... but till you are----”

“We’re in right enough,” George said bitterly, “in up to the neck.
Mother says so. It’s only the President hasn’t said ‘Go’ yet--you know
what Governments are, ‘waiting and seeing,’ and all that rot. Look at
your own! And everybody getting killed all the time.”

“I know,” Alison said. “But that’s what makes the difference. We _are_
getting killed, all the time, even here in London.”

George put the little flag in his pocket. “I came to wish you a happy
New Year, Alison,” he said with an effort to speak pleasantly. “I’ll
have to get you something else. There’s some little silver things for
the shop for you, Barbara, and a machine-gun for Jasper. Perhaps the
partickler Mr. Strachan wouldn’t mind having that on his roof to fire
at the Huns when they come over.”

“Won’t you let me keep the flag?” Alison asked. “Then if ever
America....”

“If ever,” George interrupted scornfully. “That’s all you know about
it. If you’ll wait you’ll jolly well see this time. And you won’t wait
long!”

But he kept the flag in his pocket; and that night he put it in an
envelope to keep it clean.

George was right. She didn’t have to wait so very much longer, for on
April 6th, America declared war on Germany, and he appeared directly
after breakfast waving a Stars and Stripes large enough to have covered
the doll’s house like a tablecloth, so they hung it out of the nursery
window instead, and Jasper “t’luted” it when he went out in his pram.
And Alison got the little flag from George and put it between that of
England and France on the doll’s house, and he further presented the
Strachans with two little khaki gunners to man the gun on the roof, for
there were rumors to the effect that London would get it particularly
hot that summer. The Huns were so angry about America.

That very morning great-uncle Jasper came to see the children, and gave
each of them, including George, a bright new half-crown.

Jasper was much pleased with his, and refused to be parted from it
even after Nannie had dressed him to go out. He declared he would hold
it exceedingly tight and not “jop” it. Nannie had taken him with her
down to the kitchen to get the list of wanted groceries from cook,
and before you could say “knife” he had raced into the scullery,
mounted a chair, and thrust the new half-crown down into one of the
divisions of the knife-machine, proclaiming triumphantly that it was
“a bid money-box.” And there the half-crown remains to this day unless
somebody has been demobilized who understands Kent’s knife-machines.

Nannie hated to take Jasper to shops instead of the Park, but she
had to do it sometimes because things had to be got and there was no
one else to fetch them; besides, the “pram was handy for parcels.”
He thoroughly enjoyed these expeditions and certainly cheered up the
shopping of other people.

That morning when they arrived at the grocer’s there was the usual
tired, cross-looking throng of housewives bearing string bags,
irascible old gentlemen with leather ones, and the inevitable slate
with the restrictive announcement: “No Matches. No Jam. No Bacon. No
Tea. No Cheese. No Lard.”

“Tut, tut,” muttered Nannie. “No cheese again!”

“No tzeeze adain,” Jasper instantly repeated, but in ringing tones that
might have indicated glorious news, and everybody laughed.

“Bless his heart,” said Nannie when she got home, “he does his bit as
well as anybody.”

Alison was always ready enough to take care of Jasper, and was
thoroughly trustworthy as regards letting no harm befall him; but she
looked upon such “minding” in the light of “war work,” and her methods
were somewhat austere.

She was annoyed that he should constantly interrupt mummy when she
read aloud the latest war news from _The Times_ by frivolous calls for
admiration of his clock-work rabbit, and that mummy never failed to
respond. And Alison was positively shocked that he could go on playing
absorbedly with the said rabbit even when mummy read to them a letter
from daddy in France.

She forgot that, for Jasper, daddy was chiefly known as a picture in
a frame that stood on a table by mummy’s bed, whereof he kissed the
glass, making a smudge on it, every night when he had said his prayers;
whereas the familiar rabbit was furry and comforting to carry, and went
across the floor in a succession of exciting hops when it was wound up.

After all, Jasper was but a very little boy.

As for Barbara, she followed where Jasper led. Barbara was no sort of
use for minding. Yet she could devise most delightful games, and gave
dolls’ tea-parties when all the vanished delicacies that used to grace
such festivities before the war appeared again. So lavish was she with
chocolate éclaires and cream buns and “white and pink sugar cakes” that
Alison, the conscientious, was moved to expostulate, exclaiming: “What
about the rationing, Barbara?”

“There’s no war in fairyland,” Barbara answered serenely, “and this is
a fairy tea, so you can have as many lumps of sugar as ever you like.”

Jasper was a cause of anxiety at these functions, because he _would_
put a whole plate in his mouth at once. The V.A.D. doll fell over
backward, she was so shocked. Such voluptuous gastronomic joys as
chocolate éclaires and cream buns woke no responsive thrill in Jasper’s
breast, for he had never either seen nor tasted one or the other, so
when called upon to pretend to eat something, he seized the nearest
thing of handy size.

       *       *       *       *       *

The children’s house had a basement, but George’s mother lived in a
beautiful Willet house that had none, so that autumn he and his mother
and their maids used to run over “to spend the raid” with Jasper’s
household when the first maroons sounded.

After the Zeppelin raids the doll’s house had been brought down from
the nursery to a room in the basement where there was a gas fire,
and the children used to play with it and enact many thrilling dramas
while the raids were going on. As George had prophesied, London got it
particularly hot during the harvest moon of 1917, with five raids in
eight nights.

They had all just got back from a holiday in the country and, with the
exception of Barbara, who was gun-shy and hated the noise, they really
felt the strain far less than the grown-ups.

Jasper usually slept most of the time in his mother’s arms, but after
a particularly loud crash would rouse himself to murmur with sleepy
complacency: “That was a good one. We got ’em that time.”

But Barbara, when the barrage was unusually deafening and prolonged,
remarked rather piteously: “How it must ’asturb the poor angels!”

It was during the very last raid of all, in May of the following
year, that something happened to the doll’s house. It was on a Sunday
night, and the maroons didn’t start till eleven o’clock. George and
his household hurried over as soon as he had got some clothes on, and
Jasper woke up and was very talkative and cheerful. Arrayed in a blue
dressing-gown and bed-shoes, he ran about the room, interfering with
George and his sisters in their arrangement of the Strachan family, and
shouting lustily in concert with the louder crashes.

He wasn’t often allowed to touch the interior of the doll’s house,
for his methods were too Bolshevist, and he was inclined to instigate
conduct wholly opposed to the characters of so _douce_ and respectable
a family.

That night Barbara insisted that Jeannie, the maid, and the baby should
take refuge under one of the counters, while Mr. and Mrs. Strachan and
the shop assistants crouched behind the other.

It happened that just then Jasper had developed a mania for collecting
smooth, round stones, and Alison had suggested he should form an
ammunition dump to supply the Strachans’ machine-gun. This dump he
was allowed to build near the stumpy little low oak table on casters
that had supported the doll’s house from the time it was first built.
Mummy had carefully explained to him that he must on no account throw
the stones _at_ anything, because Jasper came of three generations of
left-hand bowlers, and had already shown that he could throw a ball in
the direction he wanted it to go. So far he had never thrown a stone
either at things or people, for he was a kind little soul and no more
disobedient than the generality of small boys of three. But he carried
a stone in his hand all day long unless Nannie discovered it and took
it from him. He liked the feel of it, its smoothness, its roundness,
its vast potentialities.

That night he had been shooed away from the doll’s house half a dozen
times, for Alison and George were absorbed in a thrilling play in which
the Strachans captured a German spy who was guiding enemy air-craft by
means of forbidden lights.

Just as the “Archies” were barking their loudest, and an unmistakable
bomb dropped somewhere, Jasper, on the other side of the room, gave a
whoop and let fly the stone he had in his left hand straight at the
doll’s-house roof. It took one of the wooden chimneys broadside on
and broke it clean off, narrowly missing the massed heads of his two
sisters and George, which were luckily almost inside the house absorbed
in the spy drama.

It also cracked some of the neat little slates on the roof.

There was a general consternation and excitement, and Jasper scurried
across the room to secure another stone from the dump, when he would
have undoubtedly had a shot at the other chimney had not Nannie caught
him and held him tight.

Then it was that Alison astonished her family, for instead of demanding
instant and condign punishment for her destructive little brother, she
danced about the room and burst into poetry, shouting at the top of her
voice:

  The Strachans are in the War Zone, their house has been hit,
  They’ve caught a bad spy and they’re all done their bit.

“She’s a most onaccountable child, Miss Alison,” said Nannie to cook
next day; “she was actually sorry that the stone didn’t go right
through the roof, an’ you’d have thought she’d have gone on ever so ...
anyway, it kept them from caring much about the raid.”



CONCERNING CHRIS AND EASTER (1916)


Easter is the only girl, a sort of happy afterthought at the end of
a long family of five boys, with six years between her and her next
brother.

Chris is the only precious child, born after a good many years of
marriage to devoted and adoring parents.

Easter doesn’t think much of boys. They are common as blackberries in
her family and she is keenly sensible of her own distinction in having,
as she puts it, “chosen to come as a girl.”

Thus it came about that her mental attitude struck Chris with something
of a shock; not wholly unpleasant; stimulating; the tingle of
resentment tempered by a thrill of amused surprise. It was so odd and
new to meet anyone who felt like that.

Besides, till he came to live in Easter’s village he had been rather
lonely, and she supplied a felt want. Especially had this been so
in the last two bewildering years, for his parents had seemed less
absorbed in him than was quite dutiful. And for the last year his
father had vanished altogether to that mysterious place that swallowed
up so many pleasant and familiar folk; that overshadowing, omnipotent,
vastly extending region known as “the front.”

Easter, on her part, welcomed the society of Chris. She, too, was
lonely by reason of the very same cause as Chris. Little girls were
scarce in that village and Easter’s mother was busy all day long with
war work of one sort and another, and owing to the same cause Chris’s
governess, Miss Radley, only gave him her society during the bare hours
of lessons, which lessons had for some time been shared by Easter.

Now Easter was much better at lessons than Chris; much quicker, in
most things far more intelligent and receptive. Only in arithmetic did
Chris shine, and in this subject he had soared away from Easter and did
abstruse calculations in the end of the book all by himself with Miss
Radley.

Easter was born on an Easter Day, and this year she was eight years
old. Chris was born on Christmas Day, and last Christmas he was eight.
Therefore, in spite of his prowess in arithmetic, he maintains that he
is a year older than Easter.

“Weren’t you born in 1908?” he demands sternly.

“Ye-es,” answers Easter, “on an Easter Sunday. They _were_ so pleased.”

“And I,” says Chris, “was born in 1907. Take seven from eight and what
remains?”

“One, but it isn’t a real, whole one,” Easter objects.

No one knows this better than Chris, but he stoutly maintains: “A
year’s a year, and you’re either born in it or you’re not--so there.”

However, in spite of this and many other differences of opinion, they
had decided to get married when they came to what Easter’s nurse calls
“a suitable age.”

As a rule Chris follows blindly where Easter leads, giving in to her
stronger will and considerably stronger body, though not always without
protest.

Easter is tall for her age and very muscular. She has a gentle,
early-Victorian, regularly featured, delicately tinted face, with a
high forehead, abundant curly, fair hair, and large pathetic blue
eyes that are entirely misleading. In fact, her appearance is as
unlike her real character as it is possible for such an extremely
agreeable exterior to be. She looks all softness and gravity and gentle
melancholy. Whereas she is a ruthless and determined young person
who cares nothing for “moral suasion” and less for punishments and
penalties, provided she gets her own way.

Chris, on the contrary, is soft-hearted and easily ruled through his
affections. He would rather not be disobedient and troublesome unless
such breakings of the law are expressly commanded by Easter.

But to be called a “muff” is more than he can bear, and rather than
Easter should think this of him he will offend his whole dynasty of
friends.

       *       *       *       *       *

Chris and Easter were sitting under a hedge brilliant with scarlet hips
and cloudy with “traveler’s joy.” The hedge topped a fairly steep
bank, with a ditch full of muddy water at the bottom of the bank.

A heated argument was in progress as to the names of their eight
daughters. Easter had already chosen the names, and they ran as
follows: Irene, Semolina, Rosalind, Majorca, Minorca, Vinolia, Larola,
and Salonica. Chris objected to Semolina and Vinolia.

“I hate semolina,” he observed gloomily, “almost as bad as I hate rice.”

“But it sounds so much nicer.”

“And Vinolia, too--greasy stuff you smear on chapped legs.”

“It’s got a lovely smell,” said Easter.

“And why,” demanded Chris, who was in a bold and captious mood, “should
there be eight of ’em? Why can’t there be some boys?”

“I won’t have boys, I tell you,” Easter declared firmly. “Girls are far
prettier.”

“_Are_ they?” asked Chris incredulously. “I’ve never seen any pretty
ones.”

Instead of asking “Where are your eyes?” Easter said huffily, in
life-like imitation of nurse: “That’s as it may be. Anyway they wear
far prettier clothes.”

“You don’t,” Chris pointed out.

Easter looked down at her extremely short and faded navy-blue skirt,
at her long legs stuck out in front of her, at her muddy boots, at the
large hole in the knee of her stocking. Save for the said skirt she
was dressed almost exactly like Chris, in muffin cap, reefer and brass
buttons.

“Sometimes I do,” she maintained; “but anyway, Irene, Semolina, and
Rosalind, and Majorca, and Minorca, and Vinolia, and Larola, and
Salonica will all have lovely frocks, silk ninon, with sashes. Chris,
they’ll be perfectly sweet, and we’ll make them walk two and two in
front of us to church.”

“I tell you,” Chris declared, unmoved by this entrancing vision, “that
I don’t _want_ so many daughters. I don’t like them, I don’t want ’em
and I won’t have ’em.”

“Then,” Easter ejaculated in breathless tones that should have warned
him, “I shan’t marry you.”

“I don’t care,” the callous Chris announced. “The country wants men. I
heard my daddy say so the last time he was home. There’s far too many
women as it is. They can’t fight.”

“Can’t they?” the indignant Easter exclaimed ironically, and giving
Chris a vigorous and wholly unexpected push, rolled him down the steep
bank and into the ditch with a mighty splash; and then, adding insult
to injury, she dug her heels into the wet grass, and taking off with
skill and surety, jumped over his prostrate body on to the road,
whereupon she ran away, laughing derisively.

Chris got most uncommonly wet, for the bottom of the ditch was slimy
and soft. Even after he had struggled to his feet they slipped about
and sank in far over the tops of his boots. And when he did manage to
scramble up the bank to the road, he certainly looked a deplorable
object, covered with mud and green slime and with water oozing from
every bit of him. He stamped his feet and rubbed them on the wet grass
that bordered the road without much visible betterment.

There was no going back through the village in such a plight, so
he climbed the first five-barred gate he saw and started on a long
cross-country journey that was to bring him home by unfrequented ways.
He found the unfrequented ways, for he didn’t meet a soul, but he lost
his bearings altogether. The wind got up and there followed cold, gusty
showers of rain and hail. He felt chilled and miserable and dreadfully
tired. Field after field he traversed and yet found no familiar
landmarks, till, having toiled uphill over a heavy ploughed field, he
reached a road that stood fairly high, and below him on the far horizon
he recognized the square tower of his own church. He plodded on and on
till at last he trotted wearily up his own drive, and there he saw that
not only Miss Radley but the three maids were all gathered on the steps
of the front door. The moment Miss Radley saw him she ran toward him,
exclaiming:

“Oh, Chris! Where _have_ you been? We were getting so anxious. Do you
know it’s half-past five? My dear boy, how wet you are! Come in and get
changed at once.”

The maids went back into the house when they saw Chris, and Miss Radley
hurried him in and upstairs, not even waiting to make him wipe his feet.

“We’ve been so anxious,” she repeated. “I went to Easter’s, and she
said you’d parted ever so long ago. Why did you go off by yourself like
that?”

Chris was half in, half out of his sailor blouse by this time, and
mumbled something about having got tired of Easter.

Miss Radley didn’t worry him much with questions, nor did she comment
severely upon his dirty state. She was extraordinarily kind and got her
hands all over mud in helping him to take off his boots; and it was
not until he was lying luxuriously in a hot bath that it struck him
as odd that his mother didn’t come to him. All the time, too, he had
the feeling that Miss Radley wanted to tell him something and yet she
couldn’t seem to begin.

“Where’s mummy?” he asked at last. “Isn’t she back yet? I wish she’d
come and talk to me.”

Miss Radley looked queerly at him, almost as though she were going to
cry. “Chris dear,” she said, and waited for quite a long time, “mummy
has had to go away....”

“Away! For the night? Where to? Why?”

“Chris dear”--again Miss Radley seemed to find it difficult to go
on--“she had a telegram, just after you went out, from the War Office,
asking her to go at once. Your father is in a hospital at Boulogne,
very ill ... wounded.”

“Dangerously wounded?” asked Chris, who was familiar with war terms.

Miss Radley nodded, and two tears ran down her cheeks. “That’s what it
said.”

“I think,” said Chris, “I’d like to get out of this bath now.”

When he was dressed he didn’t seem to want the long-delayed tea, even
though there was a beautiful brown egg and lovely buttered toast. In
spite of the hot bath and a bright fire in the schoolroom he felt
horrid, cold trickles running down his back all the time. He was
extremely tired, too, yet only conscious of one overwhelming want--to
be taken on his mother’s knee and comforted. Miss Radley took him on
hers and sat with him right in front of the fire. She was very kind and
told him how sorry mummy had been to go off in such a hurry without
saying good-bye, but there was just one train that would reach London
that night if she caught it at the junction; and the squire, Easter’s
father, had driven her himself in his motor, and they just managed; and
she was crossing to France that night in charge of a brother officer of
dad’s--she had her passport long ago.

Every now and then Miss Radley lightly touched his face, which was
very hot, and then she would hold his hand, which was very cold.
Half-asleep, Chris would murmur from time to time, “dangerously
wounded,” but somehow he couldn’t feel about it as he knew he ought to
feel. Though he adored his daddy, all he felt was this overpowering
ache of longing for his mother.

Easter’s scornful refusal to have any boys in her family had hurt him
very much. He felt lonely and pushed out, somehow; and he badly wanted
the one person who never failed in her appreciation of little boys,
even if they were thin and small and not particularly good looking, and
could not run so fast as ... certain little girls. He was conscious of
being all these undesirable things, and yet he was convinced it was a
great and glorious thing to be a boy, even if Easter didn’t think so.
Once, after a long and acrimonious discussion with her on this very
subject, he had said to his mother: “I choosed to come as a boy, didn’t
I?”

“God chose,” said his mother gravely.

“Me and God settled it together,” Chris announced complacently, and his
mother got up suddenly and looked in a cupboard for something she never
found.

In Chris’s mind God and Father Christmas were inextricably mixed up.
He had no fear of either one or the other. Both were beneficent and
considerate and ready to give people their choice both as to presents
or other things.

Yet when he was put to bed that night he couldn’t dream of pleasant,
soothing things, but was pursued by eight strong daughters in
embroidered ninon frocks and pink sashes, who formed themselves into
a solid phalanx and drove him to the edge of an awful precipice, and
were just pushing him over ... when he would wake to find Miss Radley
standing beside his bed, looking anxious and troubled, shading a candle
with her hand.

       *       *       *       *       *

The war had not touched Easter very nearly. Her mother had forbidden
nurse to talk about it to her; and her father (judging her
sensitiveness wholly from her gentle, Early-Victorian appearance) was
careful to keep all frightening or depressing news from her as far
as was possible. All her life she had been sheltered and adored and
spared and spoiled. Her brothers, being so much older, had “given
in” to her from the very first, and although the two eldest were
fighting--one in the navy, the other in the army--their doings did not
seem to affect her particularly. And of the three still at school she
had, of late, seen very little, for in the holidays they were always
doing O.T.C. training, or making munitions somewhere.

Yet one thing had impressed her during the last two years. She was
always hearing that some of their acquaintances had “lost” a son, a
brother, or a husband. They did not talk of “killed” or “missing” to
Easter; but they did speak of this continual and mysterious “loss,” and
with the queer secretive puzzledom of childhood she never asked people
outright what they meant by the phrase.

It worried her, this continual losing. She never heard that these
lost ones got found again. Suppose she herself got lost in this
irretrievable way? How dreadful it would be. What would her family do?
In justice to Easter one must allow that the thought of her people’s
consternation quite overshadowed any possibly unpleasant consequences
to herself.

She had never discussed the question with Chris, who knew a lot
about the war and wanted to talk about it to the exclusion of more
interesting topics--such as daughters. But this was easily overruled.
Moreover, Easter’s mother had decided that far too much was said about
the war in Chris’s hearing, and she had asked Miss Radley to warn him
not to talk about it to Easter lest it should upset her.

Miss Radley had her own opinion of Easter’s sensibility. She had not
taught the children for six months without discovering which was the
more susceptible and imaginative. But she did as she was bid, and Chris
had done his best to obey in his turn. Perhaps in a lofty masculine way
he was rather proud that he should be allowed to know things closely
hidden from the domineering Easter, and was therefore the less anxious
to share his knowledge with her.

He whole-heartedly admired Easter. She was so strong, so good at
things, so invariably cheerful and well, with a never-failing fund of
good spirits and energy. It is very possible that one of her chief
attractions for him lay in the fact that she seemed so entirely outside
those great and grave anxieties that obsessed everybody else.

Easter was brought up to understand that any “career” that she
chose was open to her. She should have an equal chance with any of
her brothers; she might be a doctor for a factory inspector, or a
police-woman, or go in for any art or craft she fancied. Literature,
art, music, even the stage, were to be open to her, should she so
wish. But, so far, her sole ambition was centred in the possession of
a husband, a meek husband, and eight meek daughters to move and have
their being at her decree.

It was the swing of the pendulum with a vengeance.

No one told Easter about Chris’s daddy that afternoon. In the evening
she prepared her lessons with her customary energy and intelligence,
and giggled cheerfully from time to time at the recollection of Chris’s
comical appearance as he lay floundering in the ditch.

“That’ll teach him,” said Easter to herself, “whether it’s to be
daughters or not!”

Next morning at breakfast her mother said: “Miss Radley can’t take you
to-day, Easter dear, so it’s no use your going over. They had very bad
news yesterday, and Mrs. Denver has had to go to France. The major is
very ill.”

“Has Chris gone?” Easter asked.

“No, dear; but Miss Radley sent over a note quite early to say he has
got a bad, feverish cold (he got so wet yesterday--it’s a pity he
didn’t come back with you), and we don’t know what it may turn to. So
you must just take a holiday, for I’m due at the hospital supplies at
ten, and shall be away all day.”

“What’s the matter with Major Denver?”

“I fear,” said her mother, anxiously watching the earnest, delicately
tinted face upturned to hers, “I fear he is very badly wounded.”

“Oh!” said Easter, and she looked very grave.

“Be as happy as you can, my precious,” her mother called to her as she
drove away. “I’ll get home as early as possible.”

That was a very long day for Easter.

For one thing, it rained all the morning; for another, her father had
to go a long way off on business connected with special constables, and
couldn’t take her; and Amelia, the usually cheerful housemaid, went
about the house with red eyes and a perpetual sniff, because she had
heard that morning she’d lost a cousin in the “big push on the Somme.”

Amelia was distinctly depressing.

Easter knitted a few rows of her scarf--the scarf that was always begun
by her and finished by somebody else because she got tired of it.
She found she was missing Chris far more poignantly than was at all
pleasant.

After all, even if he didn’t always quite give in to her, he was good
company; and Easter found herself remembering many kind things he had
done. The chocolates he had always shared so generously, the apples so
unequally divided always in her favor. Once when she fell off a wall
and scratched her hands and tore her frock so badly, he hadn’t laughed,
and he was so seldom rough in play, only when unbearably provoked.
Easter was too honest not to admit that even at the time.

It cleared up in the afternoon and she ran over to the Denvers’ house
to see if Chris was up yet and could play.

Emma, the parlormaid, was firm in her refusal to admit Easter.

“Master Chris is that bad, so feverish it might turn to anything, the
doctor says. Miss Radley said no one was to come in, and she haven’t
left Master Chris a single minute herself. It’s dreadful, and us all in
such trouble about the major, too.”

“You haven’t lost him, have you?” Easter asked.

“Good gracious! no, not yet, so far as we knows. But he’s as bad as
bad, and,” she added, “if anything was to happen to Master Chris and
his ma away an’ all--but, there! I can’t bear to think of it. You run
along home, Miss Easter. I’ll tell Miss Radley you came to ask.”

And the door was shut in Easter’s face.

Next day the news was no better. Even Easter’s mother could not keep
from her the universal anxiety as to Major Denver. He had been their
doctor for a year before the war, and in that time had managed to
endear himself to everybody.

It was said he had taken a country practice because he thought the
bracing air would be good for Chris. Every soul in the village felt a
special right to know the latest news of the major, and Miss Radley had
the telegrams pinned on the front door as soon as she got them.

All day long people came up the drive to read these telegrams, and
presently there was a bit of white paper as well, concerning Chris, for
the doctor’s little son lay grievously sick at home, while his father,
they feared, was dying of his wounds in France. A white-capped hospital
nurse had come to help Miss Radley.

Easter was a very lonely little girl. She felt, too, that in some
inexplicable fashion she was shut out from things, that more was
happening than she was allowed to know; and, worst of all, Chris had so
entirely disappeared that she began to fear that he, too, was lost, and
they were afraid to tell her.

At the end of nearly a week she felt she could not bear this
furtiveness and suspense a minute longer, and she determined to go to
Chris’s house and find out for herself just what had happened and was
happening. She would not ring the bell. She would go round to the side
of the house and see if the schoolroom window was open, and get in and
find Miss Radley and force her to tell the truth. If Chris was lost,
then she, Easter, must herself set forth to find him without more delay.

All fell out as she had planned.

The schoolroom window, which opened like a door divided down the
middle, was open, and Miss Radley, with her back to it, sat at the
table, writing.

Easter could move quietly as a cat when it suited her. She came in
without making a sound, and stood just behind Miss Radley, who was so
absorbed she noticed nothing.

“Have you lost Chris, Miss Radley?” Easter asked loudly.

Miss Radley started violently, and Easter came round to her side, and
she noticed that Miss Radley’s usually round, rosy face was pale and
much less round than it used to be.

“Oh, Easter dear, how you startled me! Don’t suggest such a dreadful
thing! We’re awfully anxious, with his mother away and all this other
trouble, but ... we must hope always, always hope--for if anything
happened to Chris....”

“What _has_ happened to Chris?” Easter asked, searching the very soul
of Miss Radley with her large clear gaze.

“He got so wet after he left you that day last week--I can’t think
how--and he got a real bad chill, and now there are all sorts of
complications--and his temperature keeps up so.”

“What are complications?” Easter interrupted.

“You wouldn’t understand.... Oh, Easter, child, don’t stare at me like
that! Aren’t you sorry?”

“I know how Chris got so wet,” Easter said slowly. “I pushed him into
the ditch.”

Miss Radley drew back a little from Easter; then she put out her hand
and laid it on the child’s arm.

“I expect it was only in fun ... you couldn’t know....”

“Can’t I play with him a bit? Is it catching?” Easter’s voice was still
quite loud and matter-of-fact. “It’s rather dull and lonely for me.”

“For _you_!” Miss Radley echoed indignantly. “Don’t you understand?
Don’t you care, you hard child? But you never did care for anybody but
yourself.”

“Does Chris?”

“Yes, indeed he does. He’s always been a dear, kind boy. Easter, you
must go home. I can’t stop to talk to you now. Try to think about other
people a little....”

Miss Radley did not finish her sentence, for Easter had gone from her
as silently as she had come. For a minute the governess sat quite
still. Then she sighed and shivered, and went on with her letter.

Easter fled down the Denvers’ drive and out into the road, but she
didn’t go home. She ran and ran till she could run no more, and
dropping into a walk, turned downhill along a winding lane thickly
bordered by trees so high that they almost met overhead, forming an
arch. The light in this avenue was curiously lurid, for the trees were
beeches, and though rapidly thinning, were still gorgeous in reds and
yellows. The avenue led to a church in the next parish (Easter had run
such a long way), and she had been there quite lately with Chris to
a fruit and flower service in aid of the local hospital. Miss Radley
had taken them both, and now Easter remembered there were very large
vegetable marrows at the base of one of the pillars, and wondered if
they were still there. She and Chris had sat next each other at that
service, and during the sermon he had let her hold his knife. It had a
corkscrew and a thing for taking stones out of horses’ hoofs, as well
as blades, and all were very difficult to open. Chris was good about
lending his things. And he never told of people. What did old Raddles
mean when she called her hard? She did care for Chris, but she wasn’t
going to say so to Raddles. Yet Raddles looked awfully sad. Supposing
they _had_ lost Chris, after all, and were afraid to say? Supposing
she, Easter, got lost, now, to-day? This was a long, lonely, unfamiliar
road, with such a queer light in it. Supposing it were enchanted and
she couldn’t find her way back? Then she would be like all those sons
she had heard about lately. Her heart began to beat very fast. Ah!
somebody was coming up the road. She would ask her way. It would be
dreadful to be lost.

A very tall lady came toward her walking slowly up the hill. She was
dressed in black, with a long thin veil turned back from her face.
She looked restlessly from side to side, as though trying to find
somebody in the shadows. This seemed quite natural to Easter. Timidity
or shyness with strangers was unknown to her. She was glad to see
somebody, and the tall lady’s face was very gentle.

“Have _you_ lost anybody?” Easter asked as they met.

The tall lady stopped, and though she looked straight down at Easter,
the child was uncomfortably conscious that she didn’t really see her.

“I have lost my only son,” said the lady.

“You, too!” cried Easter, and what she could not say to Miss Radley
she found it easy to say now to this pale lady who looked at her so
strangely. “Oh, I _am_ sorry!”

And she took one of the lady’s hands in both her own.

The lady did not draw her hand away; with her eyes still fixed on
Easter’s face with that queer, unseeing look, she said: “Dear child!
And you?”

“Not yet,” said Easter. “Not yet--at least, they say so, but I’m
dreadfully afraid.”

“Don’t be afraid,” said the lady. “Don’t be afraid. That’s what he
always said.”

“Everyone,” said Easter, and her hard little voice grew soft, “everyone
seems losing sons and people. Won’t you never, never find him again?”

Into that lady’s face there leapt a sudden radiance as when a clearly
burning lamp is carried into a dark room. Her eyes were luminous and
bright, and Easter felt that she was really seeing her at last.

“We shall all find them again,” she said almost joyously. “Everyone of
us.”

“Are you sure?” Easter questioned.

“In sure and certain hope,” said the lady.

“In sure and certain hope,” Easter repeated. “I like that. You _are_
sure?”

“Absolutely. Tell me, dear, who is it you are anxious about?”

Hand in hand they had started slowly to mount the hill.

“It’s Chris,” she said. “He plays with me a lot and we do lessons
together ... and they won’t let me see him, and I want to tell him I’m
sorry.”

“But why won’t they let you see him?”

“Because they’re afraid they’ll lose him--I heard _that_, though
Raddles denied it when I asked her.”

“Then he’s ill?”

“I suppose so.”

The lady looked curiously at Easter. There was no doubt whatever that
she was troubled, and yet ... how oddly the child spoke.

As they walked on, hand in hand, the lady said, more to herself than to
Easter: “Does the road wind uphill all the way?”

“No,” said Easter; “when we get to the end of this it’s quite flat.”

When they came to the main road Easter took her hand out of the lady’s.
“I know my way now,” she said. “Good-bye.”

The lady stooped and kissed her. “I should write to Chris if I were
you,” she said. “He’ll probably like a letter very much when he’s a
little better.”

Easter nodded and started to run, with that swift, long-distance,
steady running that had so often worn out Chris; that was his
admiration and his despair. And as she ran she repeated over and over
again: “In sure and certain hope” all the way.

She would write to Chris directly she got in. Her copies were always
neater than his.

But she couldn’t do it the minute she got in, for tea was ready, and
her mother there to have it with her. Her mother looked pleased, too.
Better news had come from France. There was hope that Major Denver
might pull through, after all; and she had seen Miss Radley, and
Chris’s temperature was nearly down to normal.

It was a lovely tea; and directly after it Easter sat down at
her mother’s desk and wrote to Chris. Very large, with beautiful
up-and-down strokes:

  “DEAR CHRIS,

  “I’m sory I pushed you. Sum of them shall be boys. The ones with the
  names you don’t like. Please don’t get lost.

                                                “Your loving
                                                               “EASTER.”

She licked the flap of the envelope with copious completeness, and in
one corner of the address, very thick and black, in inch-long printed
letters was the word “EARGUNT.”



TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.



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