The Adventures of Harry Revel
by Arthur Quiller-Couch · English · Gutenberg #20261 · 364,909 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Adventures of Harry Revel
Author: Arthur Quiller-Couch
Release date: January 3, 2007 [eBook #20261]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20261
Credits: E-text prepared by Lionel Sear
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ADVENTURES OF HARRY REVEL ***
E-text prepared by Lionel Sear
THE ADVENTURES OF HARRY REVEL.
by
ARTHUR THOMAS QUILLER-COUCH.
1903
This e-text prepared from a reprint of a version published in 1903
PREFACE
When I started to set down these early adventures of Harry Revel,
I meant to dedicate them to my friend Mr. W. F. Collier of Woodtown,
Horrabridge: but he died while the story was writing, and now cannot
twit me with the pranks I have played among his stories of bygone
Plymouth, nor send me his forgiveness--as he would have done.
Peace be to him for a lover of Dartmoor and true gentleman of Devon!
So now I have only to beg, by way of preface, that no one will bother
himself by inquiring too curiously into the geography, topography,
etc. of this tale, or of any that I have written or may write.
If these tales have any sense of locality, they certainly will not
square with the ordnance maps; and even the magnetic pole works loose
and goes astray at times--a phenomenon often observed by sailors off
the sea-coast of Bohemia.
It may be permissible to add that the story which follows by no means
exhausts the adventures, civil and military, of Harry Revel. But the
recital of his further campaigning in company with Mr. Benjamin Jope,
and of the verses in which Miss Plinlimmon commemorated it, will
depend upon public favour.
A.T. QUILLER-COUCH.
THE HAVEN, FOWEY,
March 28th, 1903.
CONTENTS.
Chapter
I. I FIND MYSELF A FOUNDLING.
II. I START IN LIFE AS AN EMINENT PERSON.
III. I AM BOUND APPRENTICE.
IV. MISS PLINLIMMON.
V. THE SHADOW OF ARCHIBOLD.
VI. I STUMBLE INTO HORRORS.
VII. I ESCAPE FROM THE JEW'S HOUSE.
VIII. POOR TOM BOWLING.
IX. SALTASH FERRY.
X. I GO ON A HONEYMOON.
XI. FLIGHT.
XII. I FALL AMONG SMUGGLERS.
XIII. THE MAN IN THE VERANDAH.
XIV. THE MOCK-ORANGE BUSH.
XV. MINDEN COTTAGE.
XVI. MR. JACK ROGERS AS A MAN OF AFFAIRS.
XVII. LYDIA BELCHER INTERVENES.
XVIII. THE OWL'S CRY.
XIX. CHECKMATE.
XX. ISABEL'S REVENGE.
XXI. I GO CAMPAIGNING WITH LORD WELLINGTON.
XXII. ON THE GREATER TESSON.
XXIII. IN CIUDAD RODRIGO.
XXIV. I EXCHANGE THE LAUREL FOR THE OLIVE.
CHAPTER I.
I FIND MYSELF A FOUNDLING.
My earliest recollections are of a square courtyard surrounded by
high walls and paved with blue and white pebbles in geometrical
patterns--circles, parallelograms, and lozenges. Two of these walls
were blank, and had been coped with broken bottles; a third,
similarly coped, had heavy folding doors of timber, leaden-grey in
colour and studded with black bolt-heads. Beside them stood a
leaden-grey sentry-box, and in this sat a red-faced man with a wooden
leg and a pigtail, whose business was to attend to the wicket and
keep an eye on us small boys as we played. He owned two books which
he read constantly: one was Foxe's _Martyrs_, and the other (which
had no title on the binding) I opened one day and found to be
_The Devil on Two Sticks_.
The arch over these gates bore two gilt legends. That facing the
roadway ran: "_Train up a Child in the Way he should Go,_" which
prepared the visitor to read on the inner side: "_When he is Old he
will not Depart from it._" But we twenty-five small foundlings, who
seldom evaded the wicket, and so passed our days with the second half
of the quotation, found in it a particular and dreadful meaning.
The fourth and last wall was the front of the hospital, a
two-storeyed building of grey limestone, with a clock and a small
cupola of copper, weather-greened, and a steeply pitched roof of
slate pierced with dormer windows, behind one of which (because of a
tendency to walk in my sleep) I slept in the charge of Miss
Plinlimmon, the matron. Below the eaves ran a line of eight tall
windows, the three on the extreme right belonging to the chapel; and
below these again a low-browed colonnade, in the shelter of which we
played on rainy days, but never in fine weather--though its smooth
limestone slabs made an excellent pitch for marbles, whereas on
the pebbles in the yard expertness could only be attained by
heart-breaking practice. Yet we preferred them. If it did nothing
else, the Genevan Hospital, by Plymouth Dock, taught us to suit
ourselves to the world as we found it.
I do not remember that we were unhappy or nursed any sense of injury,
except over the porridge for breakfast. The Rev. Mr. Scougall, our
pastor, had founded the hospital some twenty years before with the
money subscribed by certain Calvinistic ladies among whom he
ministered, and under the patronage of a Port Admiral of like belief,
then occupying Admiralty House. His purpose (to which we had not the
smallest objection) was to rescue us small jetsam and save us from
many dreadful Christian heresies, more especially those of Rome.
But he came from the north of Britain and argued (I suppose) that
what porridge had done for him in childhood it might well do for us--
a conclusion against which our poor little southern stomachs
rebelled. It oppressed me worse than any, for since the discovery of
my sleep-walking habit my supper (of plain bread and water) had been
docked, so that I came ravenous to breakfast and yet could not eat.
Nevertheless, I do not think we were unhappy. Perhaps we were too
young, and at any rate we had nothing with which to contrast our lot.
Across the roadway outside lay blue water, and of this and of roving
ships and boats and free passers-by glimpses came to us through the
wicket when Mr. George, the porter (we always addressed him as "Mr."
and supposed him to resemble the King in features), admitted a
visitor, or the laundress, or the butcher's boy. And sometimes we
broke off a game to watch the topmasts of a vessel gliding by
silently, above the wall's coping. But if at any time the world
called to us, we took second thoughts, remembering our clothes.
We wore, I dare say, the most infernal costume ever devised by man--a
tightish snuff-coloured jacket with diminutive tails, an orange
waistcoat, snuff-coloured breeches, grey-blue worsted stockings, and
square-toed shoes with iron toe-plates. Add a flat-topped cap with
an immense leathern brim; add Genevan neck-bands; add, last of all, a
leathern badge with "G.F.H." (Genevan Foundling Hospital) depending
from the left breast-button; and you may imagine with what diffidence
we took our rare walks abroad. The dock-boys, of course, greeted us
with cries of "Yellow Hammer!" The butcher-boy had once even dared
to fling that taunt at us within our own yard; and we left him in no
doubt about the hammering, gallant fellow though he was and wore a
spur on his left heel. But no bodily deformity could have corroded
us as did those thrice-accursed garments with terror of the world
without and of its laughter.
Of a world yet more distant we were taught the gloomiest views.
Twice a week regularly, and incidentally whenever he found occasion,
Mr. Scougall painted the flames of hell for us in the liveliest
colours. We never doubted his word that our chances of escaping them
were small indeed; but somehow, as life did not allure, so eternity
did not greatly frighten us. Meanwhile we played at our marbles.
We knew, in spite of the legend over the gateway, that at the age of
ten or so our elder companions disappeared. They went, as a fact,
into various trades and callings, like ordinary parish apprentices.
Perhaps we guessed this; if so, it must have been vaguely, and I
incline to believe that we confused their disappearance with death in
our childish musings on the common lot. They never came back to see
us; and I remember that we were curiously shy of speaking about them,
once gone.
From Miss Plinlimmon's window above the eaves I could look over the
front wall on to an edge of roadway, a straight dock like a canal--
crowded with shipping--and a fort which fired a gun in the early
morning and again at sunset. And every morning, too, the drums would
sound from the hill at our back; and be answered by a soldier, who
came steadily down the roadway beside the dock, halted in front of
our gates, and blew a call on his bugle. Other bugle-calls sounded
all around us throughout the day and far into our sleep-time: but
this was the only performer I ever saw. He wore a red coat, a high
japanned hat, and clean white pantaloons with black gaiters: and I
took it for granted that he was always the same soldier. Yet I had
plenty of opportunities for observing him, for Miss Plinlimmon made
it a rule that I should stand at the window and continue to gaze out
of it while she dressed.
One day she paused in the act of plaiting her hair. "Harry," said
she, "I shall always think of you and that tune together. It is
called the Revelly, which is a French word."
"But the soldier is English?" said I.
"Oh, I truly trust so--a heart of oak, I should hope! England cannot
have too many of them in these days, when a weak woman can scarce lay
herself down in her bed at night with the certainty of getting up in
the same position in the morning."
(They were days when, as I afterwards learnt, Napoleon's troops and
flat-bottomed boats were gathered at Boulogne and waiting their
opportunity to invade us. But of this scarcely an echo penetrated to
our courtyard, although the streets outside were filled daily with
the tramping of troops and rolling of store-wagons. We knew that our
country--whatever that might mean--was at war with France, and we
played in our yard a game called "French and English." That was all:
and Miss Plinlimmon, good soul, if at times she awoke in the night
and shuddered and listened for the yells of Frenchmen in the town,
heroically kept her fears to herself. This was as near as she ever
came to imparting them.)
"I have often thought of you, Harry," she went on, "as embracing a
military career. Mr. Scougall very kindly allows me to choose
surnames for you boys when you--when you leave us. He says (but I
fear in flattery) that I have more invention than he." And here,
though bound on my word of honour not to look, I felt sure she was
smiling to herself in the glass. "What would you say if I christened
you Revelly?"
"Oh, please, no!" I entreated. "Let mine be an English name.
Why--why couldn't I be called Plinlimmon? I would rather have that
than any name in the world."
"You are a darling!" exclaimed she, much to my surprise; and, the
next moment, I felt a little pecking kiss on the back of my neck.
She usually kissed me at night, after my prayers were said: but
somehow this was different, and it fetched tears to my eyes--greatly
to my surprise, for we were not given to tears at the Genevan
Hospital. "Plinlimmon is a mountain in Wales, and that, I dare say,
is what makes me so romantic. Now, you are not romantic in the
least: and, besides, it wouldn't do. No, indeed. But you shall be
called by an English name, if you wish, though to my mind there's a
_je ne sais quoi_ about the French. I once knew a Frenchman, a
writing and dancing master, called Duvelleroy, which always seemed
the beautifullest name."
"Was he beautiful himself?" I asked.
"He used to play a kit--which is a kind of small fiddle--holding it
across his waist. It made him look as if he were cutting himself in
half; which did not contribute to that result. But suppose, now, we
call you Revel--Harry Revel? That's English enough, and will remind
me just the same--if Mr. Scougall will not think it too
Anacherontic."
I saw no reason to fear this: but then I had no idea what she
meant by it, or by calling herself romantic. She was certainly
soft-hearted. She possessed many books, as well as an album in her
own handwriting, and encouraged me to read aloud to her on summer
mornings when the sun was up and ahead of us. And once, in the story
of _Maximilian, or Quite the Gentleman: Founded on Fact and Designed
to excite the Love of Virtue in the Rising Generation_, at a point
where the hero's small brother Felix is carried away by an eagle, she
dissolved in tears. "In my native Wales," she explained afterwards,
"the wild sheep leap from rock to rock so much as a matter of course
that you would, in time, be surprised if they didn't. And that
naturally gives me a sympathy with all that is sublime on the one
hand or affecting on the other."
Yet later--but I cannot separate these things accurately in time--I
awoke in my cot one night and heard Miss Plinlimmon sobbing.
The sound was dreadful to me and I longed to creep across the room to
her dark bedside and comfort her; though I could tell she was trying
to suppress it for fear of disturbing me. In the end her sobs ceased
and, still wondering, I dropped off to sleep, nor next day did I dare
to question her.
But it could not have been long after this that we boys got wind of
Mr. Scougall's approaching marriage with a wealthy lady of the town.
I must speak of this ceremony, because, as the fates ordained, it
gave me my first start in life.
CHAPTER II.
I START IN LIFE AS AN EMINENT PERSON.
Mr. Scougall was a lean, strident man who, if he lectured us
often, whipped us on the whole with judgment and when we deserved it.
So we bore him no grudge. But neither did we love him nor take any
lively interest in him as a bridegroom, and I was startled to find
these feelings shared by Mr. George in the porter's box when I
discussed the news with him. "I'm to have a new suit of clothes,"
said Mr. George, "but whoever gets Scougall, he's no catch."
This sounded blasphemous, while it gave me a sort of fearful joy.
I reported it, under seal of secrecy, to Miss Plinlimmon.
"Naval men, my dear Harry," was her comment, "are notoriously blunt
and outspoken, even when retired upon a pension; perhaps, indeed, if
anything, more so. It is in consequence of this habit that they have
sometimes performed their grandest feats, as, for instance, when
Horatio Nelson put his spy-glass up to his blind eye. I advise you
to do the same and treat Mr. George as a chartered heart of oak,
without remembering his indiscretions to repeat them." She went on
to tell me that sailor-men were beloved in Plymouth and allowed to do
pretty well as they pleased; and how, quite recently, a Quaker lady
had been stopped in Bedford Street by a Jack Tar who said he had
sworn to kiss her. "Thee must be quick about it, then," said the
Quaker lady. And he was.
I suppose this anecdote encouraged me to be more familiar with Mr.
George. At any rate, I confided to him next day that I thought of
being a soldier.
"Do you know what we used to say in the Navy?" he answered. "We used
to say, 'A friend before a messmate, a messmate before a shipmate, a
shipmate before a dog, and a dog before a soldier.'"
"You think," said I, somewhat discouraged, "that the Navy would be a
better opening for me?"
"Ay," he answered again, eyeing me gloomily; "that is, if so be ye
can't contrive to get to jail." He cast a glance down upon his
jury-leg and patted the straps of it with his open palm. "The leg,
now, that used to be here--I left it in a French prison called Jivvy,
and often I thinks to myself, 'That there leg is having better luck
than the rest of me.' And here's another curious thing. What d'ye
think they call it in France when you remember a person in your
will?"
I hadn't a notion, and said so.
"Why, 'legs,'" said he. "And they've got one of mine. If a man was
superstitious, you might almost call it a coincidence, hey?"
This was the longest conversation I ever had with Mr. George. I have
since found that sentiments very like his about the Navy have been
uttered by Dr. Samuel Johnson. But Mr. George spoke them out of his
own experience.
Mr. Scougall's bride was the widow of a Plymouth publican who had
sold his business and retired upon a small farm across the Hamoaze,
near the Cornish village of Anthony. On the wedding morning (which
fell early in July) she had, by agreement with her groom, prepared a
delightful surprise for us. We trooped after prayers into the
dining-hall to find, in place of the hateful porridge, a feast laid
out--ham and eggs, cold veal pies, gooseberry preserves, and--best of
all--plate upon plate of strawberries with bowl upon bowl of cool
clotted cream. Not a child of us had ever tasted strawberries or
cream in his life, so you may guess if we ate with prudence.
At half-past ten Miss Plinlimmon (who had not found the heart to
restrain our appetites) marshalled and led us forth, gorged and
torpid, to the church where at eleven o'clock the ceremony was to
take place. Her eyes were red-rimmed as she cast them up towards the
window behind which Mr. Scougall, no doubt, was at that moment
arraying himself: but she commanded a firm step, and even a firm
voice to remark outside the wicket, as she looked up at the
chimney-pots, that Nature had put on her fairest garb.
The day, to be sure, was monstrously hot and stuffy. Not a breath of
wind ruffled the waters of the dock, around the head of which we
trudged to a recently erected church on the opposite shore.
I remember observing, on our way, the dazzling brilliance of its
weathercock.
We found its interior spacious but warm, and the air heavy with the
scent--it comes back to me as I write--of a peculiar sweet oil used
in the lamps. Perhaps Mr. Scougall had calculated that a ceremony so
interesting to him would attract a throng of sightseers; at any rate,
we were packed into a gallery at the extreme western end of the
church, and in due time watched the proceedings from that respectful
distance and across a gulf of empty pews.
--That is to say, some of us watched. I have no doubt that Miss
Plinlimmon did, for instance; nay, that her attention was riveted.
Otherwise I cannot explain what followed.
On the previous night I had gone to bed almost supperless, as usual.
I had come, as usual, ravenous to breakfast, and for once I had
sated, and more than sated, desire. For years after, though hungry
often enough in the course of them, I never thought with longing upon
cold veal or strawberries, nor have I ever recovered an unmitigated
appetite for either.
It is certain, then, that even before the ceremony began--and the
bride arrived several minutes late--I slumbered on the back bench of
the gallery. The evidence of six boys seated near me agrees that, at
the moment when Mr. Scougall produced the ring, I arose quietly, but
without warning, and made my exit by the belfry door. They supposed
that I was taken ill; they themselves were feeling more or less
uncomfortable.
The belfry stairway, by which we had reached the door of our gallery,
wound upward beyond it to the top of the tower, and gave issue by a
low doorway upon the dwarf battlements, from which sprang a spire
some eighty feet high. This spire was, in fact, a narrowing octagon,
its sides hung with slate, its eight ridges faced with Bath stone,
and edged from top to bottom with ornamental crockets.
The service over, bride and bridegroom withdrew with their friends to
the vestry for the signing of the register; and there, while they
dallied and interchanged good wishes, were interrupted by the beadle,
a white-faced pew-opener, and two draymen from the street, with news
(as one of the draymen put it, shouting down the rest) that "one of
Scougall's yellow orphans was up clinging to the weathercock by his
blessed eyebrows; and was this a time for joking, or for feeling
ashamed of themselves and sending for a constable?"
The drayman shouted and gesticulated so fiercely with a great hand
flung aloft that Mr. Scougall, almost before comprehending,
precipitated himself from the church. Outside stood his hired
carriage with its pair of greys, but the driver was pointing with his
whip and craning his neck like the rest of the small crowd.
It may have been their outcries, but I believe it was the ringing of
the dockyard bell for the dinner-hour, which awoke me. In my dreams
my arms had been about some kindly neck (and of my dreams in those
days, though but a glimpse ever survived the waking, in those
glimpses dwelt the shade, if not the presence, of my unknown mother).
They were, in fact, clasped around the leg of the weathercock.
Unsympathetic support! But I have known worse friends. A mercy it
was, at any rate, that I kept my embrace during the moments when
sense returned to me, with vision of the wonders spread around and
below. Truly I enjoyed a wonderful view--across the roofs of
Plymouth, quivering under the noon sun, and away to the violet hills
of Dartmoor; and, again, across the water and shipping of the Hamoaze
to the green slopes of Mount Edgcumbe and the massed trees slumbering
in the heat. Slumber, indeed, and a great quiet seemed to rest over
me, over the houses, the ships, the whole wide land. By the blessing
of Heaven, not so much as the faintest breeze played about the spire,
or cooled the copper rod burning my hand (and, again, it may have
been this that woke me). I sat astride the topmost crocket, and
glancing down between my boot heels, spied the carriage with its pair
of greys flattened upon the roadway just beyond the verge of the
battlements, and Mr. Scougall himself dancing and waving his arms
like a small but very lively beetle.
Doubtless, I had ascended by the narrow stairway of the crockets: but
to descend by them with a lot of useless senses about me would be a
very different matter. No giddiness attacked me as yet; indeed I
knew rather than felt my position to be serious. For a moment I
thought of leaving my perch and letting myself slip down the face of
the slates, to be pulled up short by the parapet; but the length of
the slide daunted me, and the parapet appeared dangerously shallow.
I should shoot over it to a certainty and go whirling into air.
On the other hand, to drop from my present saddle into the one below
was no easy feat. For this I must back myself over the edge of it,
and cling with body and legs in air while I judged my fall into the
next. To do this thirty times or so in succession without mistake
was past hoping for: there were at least thirty crockets to be
manoeuvred, and a single miscalculation would send me spinning
backwards to my fate. Above all, I had not the strength for it.
So I sat considering for a while; not terrified, but with a brain
exceedingly blank and hopeless. It never occurred to me that, if I
sat still and held on, steeplejacks would be summoned and ladders
brought to me; and I am glad that it did not, for this would have
taken hours, and I know now that I could not have held out for half
an hour inactive. But another thought came. I saw the slates at the
foot of the weathercock, that they were thinly edged and of light
scantling. I knew that they must be nailed upon a wooden framework
not unlike a ladder. And at the Genevan Hospital, as I have
recorded, we wore stout plates on our shoes.
I am told that it was a bad few moments for the lookers-on when they
saw me lower myself sideways from my crocket and begin to hammer on
the slates with my toes: for at first they did not comprehend, and
then they reasoned that the slates were new, and if I failed to kick
through them, to pull myself back to the crocket again would be a
desperate job.
But they did not know our shoe-leather. Mr. Scougall, whatever his
faults, usually contrived to get value for his money, and at the
tenth kick or so my toes went clean through the slate and rested on
the laths within. Next came the most delicate moment of all, for
with a less certain grip on the crocket I had to kick a second hole
lower down, and transfer my hand-hold from the stone to the wooden
lath laid bare by my first kicks.
This, too, with a long poise and then a flying clutch, I
accomplished; and with the rest of my descent I will not weary the
reader. It was interminably slow, and it was laborious; but, to
speak comparatively, it was safe. My boots lasted me to within
twenty feet of the parapet, and then, just as I had kicked my toes
bare, a steeplejack appeared at the little doorway with a ladder.
Planting it in a jiffy, he scrambled up, took me under his arm, bore
me down and laid me against the parapet, where at first I began to
cry and then emptied my small body with throe after throe of
sickness.
I recovered to find Mr. Scougall and another clergyman (the vicar)
standing by the little door and gazing up at my line of holes on the
face of the spire. Mr. Scougall was offering to pay.
"But no," said the vicar, "we will set the damage down against the
lad's preservation; that is, if I don't recover from the contractor,
who has undoubtedly swindled us over these slates."
CHAPTER III.
I AM BOUND APPRENTICE.
Although holidays were a thing unknown at the Genevan Hospital,
yet discipline grew sensibly lighter during Mr. Scougall's honeymoon,
being left to Miss Plinlimmon on the understanding that in emergency
she might call in the strong and secular arm of Mr. George.
But we all loved Miss Plinlimmon, and never drove her beyond
appealing to what she called our better instincts.
Her dearest aspiration (believe it if you can) was to make gentlemen
of us--of us, doomed to start in life as parish apprentices!
And to this her curriculum recurred whether it had been divagating
into history, geography, astronomy, English composition, or religious
knowledge. "The author of the book before me, a B.A.--otherwise a
Bachelor of Arts, but not on that account necessarily unmarried--
observes that to believe the sun goes round the earth is a vulgar
error. For my part I should hardly go so far: but it warns us how
severely those may be judged who obtrusively urge in society opinions
which the wise in their closets have condemned." "The refulgent
orb--another way, my dears, of saying the sun--is in the vicinity of
Persia an object of religious adoration. The Christian nations,
better instructed, content themselves with esteeming it warmly, and
as they follow its course in the heavens, draw from it the useful
lesson to look always on the bright side of things." Humble
beneficent soul! I never met another who had learned that lesson
so thoroughly. Once she pointed out to me at the end of her
dictation-book a publisher's colophon of a sundial with the word
_Finis_ above it, and, underneath, the words "Every Hour Shortens
Life." "Now, I prefer to think that every hour lengthens it," said
she, with one of her few smiles; for her cheerfulness was always
serious.
Best of all were the hours when she read to us extracts from
her album. "At least," she explained, "I _call_ it an album.
I ever longed to possess one, adorned with remarks--moral or
sprightly, as the case might be--by the Choicest Spirits of our Age,
and signed in their own illustrious handwriting. But in my sphere of
life these were hard--nay, impossible--to come by; so in my dilemma I
had recourse to subterfuge, and having studied the career of this or
that eminent man, I chose a subject and composed what (as it seemed
to me) he would _most likely_ have written upon it, signing his name
below--but in print, that the signatures may not pass hereafter for
real ones, should the book fall into the hands of strangers.
You must not think, therefore, that the lines on Statesmanship which
I am about to read you, beginning 'But why Statesmans _ship_?
Because, my lords and gentlemen, the State is indeed a ship, and
demands a skilful helmsman'--you must not think that they were
actually penned by the Right Honourable William Pitt. But I feel
sure the sentiments are such as he would have approved, and perhaps
might have uttered had the occasion arisen."
This puzzled us, and I am not sure that we took any trouble to
discriminate Miss Plinlimmon's share in these compositions from that
of their signatories. Indeed, the first time I set eyes on Lord
Wellington (as he rode by us to inspect the breaches in Ciudad
Rodrigo) my memory saluted him as the Honourable Arthur Wellesley,
author of the passage, "Though educated at Eton, I have often caught
myself envying the quaintly expressed motto of the more ancient
seminary amid the Hampshire chalk-hills, i.e. _Manners makyth man_";
and to this day I associate General Paoli with an apostrophe
"O Corsica! O my country, bleeding and inanimate!" etc., and with
Miss Plinlimmon's foot-note: "N.B.--The author of these affecting
lines, himself a blameless patriot, actually stood godfather to
the babe who has since become the infamous Napoleon Bonaparte.
Oh, irony! What had been the feelings of the good Paoli, could he
have foreseen this eventuality, as he promised and vowed beside the
font! (if they have such things in Corsica: a point on which I am
uncertain)."
I dwell on these halcyon days with Miss Plinlimmon because, as they
were the last I spent at the Genevan Hospital, so they soften all my
recollections of it with their own gentle prismatic haze. In fact,
a bare fortnight had gone by since my adventure on the spire when I
was summoned to Mr. Scougall's parlour and there found Miss
Plinlimmon in conversation with a tall and very stout man: and if her
eyelids were pink, I paid more attention to the stout man's, which
were rimmed with black--a more unusual sight. His neck, too, was
black up to a well-defined line; the rest of it, and his cheeks, red
with the red of prize beef.
"This is the boy--hem--Revel, of whom we were speaking." Miss
Plinlimmon smiled at me and blushed faintly as she uttered the name.
"Harry, shake hands with Mr. Trapp. He has come expressly to make
your acquaintance."
Somehow I gathered that this politeness took Mr. Trapp aback; but he
held out his hand. It was astonishingly black.
"Pray be seated, Mr. Trapp."
"The furniture, ma'am!"
"Ah, to be sure!" Mr. Scougall's freshly upholstered chairs had all
been wrapped in holland coverings pending his return. "Mr. Trapp,
Harry, is a--a chimney-sweep."
"Oh!" said I, somewhat ruefully.
"And if I can answer for your character (as I believe I can)," she
went on with a wan, almost wistful smile, "he is ready to make you
his apprentice."
"But I had rather be a soldier, Miss Plinlimmon!"
She still kept her smile, but I could read in it that my pleading was
useless; that the decision really lay beyond her.
"Boys will be boys, Mr. Trapp." She turned to him with her air of
gentility. "You will forgive Harry for preferring a red coat to--to
your calling." (I thought this treacherous of Miss Plinlimmon.
As if she did not prefer it herself!) "No doubt he will learn in
time that all duty is alike noble, whether it bids a man mount the
deadly breach or climb a--or do the sort of climbing required in your
profession."
"I climbed up that spire in my sleep," said I, sullenly.
"That's just it," Mr. Trapp agreed. "That's what put me on the track
of ye. 'Here's a tacker,' I said, 'can climb up to the top of
Emmanuel's in his sleep, and I've been wasting money and temper on
them that won't go up an ord'nary chimbley when they're wideawake,
'ithout I lights a furze-bush underneath to hurry them.'"
"I trust," put in Miss Plinlimmon, aghast, "you are jesting, Mr.
Trapp?"
"Jesting, ma'am?"
"You do not really employ that barbarous method of acceleration?"
"Meaning furze-bushes? Why, no, ma'am; not often. Look ye here,
young sir," he continued, dismissing (as of no account) this subject,
so interesting to me; "you was wide awake, anyway, when you came
down, and that you can't deny."
"Harry," persisted Miss Plinlimmon, "has not been used to harsh
treatment. You will like his manners: he is a very gentlemanly boy."
Mr. Trapp stared at her, then at me, then slowly around the room.
"Gentlemanly?" he echoed at length, in a wondering way, under his
breath.
"I have used my best endeavours. Yes, though I say it to his face,
you will really--if careful to appeal to his better instincts--find
him one of Nature's gentlemen."
Mr. Trapp broke into a grin of relief; almost you could say that he
heaved a sigh.
"Oh, that's all?" said he. "Why, Lord love ye, ma'am, I've been
called that myself before now!"
So to Mr. Trapp I was bound, early next week, before the magistrates
sitting in petty sessional division, to serve him and to receive
from him proper sustenance and clothing until the age of twenty-one.
And I (as nearly as could be guessed, for I had no birthday) had
barely turned ten. Mr. Scougall arrived in time to pilot me through
these formalities and hand me over to Mr. Trapp: but at a parting
interview, throughout which we both wept copiously, Miss Plinlimmon
gave me for souvenir a small Testament with this inscription on the
fly-leaf:
H. REVEL,
_from his affectionate friend, A. Plinlimmon_.
_O happy, happy days, when childhood's cares
Were soon forgotten!
But now, when dear ones all around are still the same,
Where shall we be in ten years' time?_
"They were my own composition," she explained. Mr. George bade me a
gloomier farewell. "You might come to some good," he said
contemplatively; "and then again you mightn't. I ain't what they
call a _pessimist_, but I thinks poorly of most things. It's safer."
Mr. Trapp was exceedingly jocose as he conveyed me home to his house
beside the Barbican, Plymouth; stopping on the way before every
building of exceptional height and asking me quizzically how I would
propose to set about climbing it. At the time, in the soreness of my
heart, I resented this heavy pleasantry, and to be sure, after the
tenth repetition or so, the diversity of the buildings to which he
applied it but poorly concealed its sameness. But, in fact, he was
doing his best to be kind, and succeeded in a sort; for it roused a
childish scorn in me and so fetched back my heart, which at starting
had been somewhere in my boots.
I took it for granted that a sweep must inhabit a dingy hovel, and
certainly the crowded filth of the Barbican promised nothing better
as we threaded our way among fishermen, fish-jowters, blowzy women,
and children playing hop-scotch with the heads of decaying fish.
At the seaward end of it, and close beside the bow-fronted Custom
House, we turned aside into an alley which led uphill between high
blank walls to the base of the Citadel: and here, stuck as if it were
a marten's nest under the shadow of the ramparts, a freshly
whitewashed cottage overhung the slope, with a sweep's brush dangling
over its doorway and the sign "S. Trapp, Chimney Sweep in Season."
While I wondered what might be the season for chimney-sweeps, a small
bead-eyed woman emerged from the doorway and shook a duster
vigorously: in the which act catching sight of us, she paused.
"I've a-got en, my dear," said Mr. Trapp much as a man might announce
the capture of a fish: and though he did not actually lift me for
inspection his hand seemed to waver over my collar.
But it was Mrs. Trapp, who, after a fleeting glance at me, caught her
husband by the collar.
"And you actilly went in that state, you nasty keerless hulks!
O, you heart-breaker!"
Mr. Trapp in custody managed to send me a sidelong, humorous grin.
"My dear, I thought 'twould be a surprise for you--business taking me
that way, and the magistrates being used to worse."
"You heart-breaker!" repeated Mrs. Trapp. "And me slaving morn and
night to catch up with your messy ways! What did I tell you the
first time you came back from the Hospital looking like a malkin, and
with a clean shift of clothes laid out for you and the water on the
boil, that I couldn't have taken more trouble, no, not for a funeral?
Didn't I tell you 'twas positively lowering?"
"I ha'n't a doubt you did, my dear."
"That's what you are. You're a lowering man. And there by your own
account you met a lady, with your neck streaked like a ham-rasher,
and me not by--thank goodness!--to see what her feelings were; and
now 'tis magistrates. But nothing warns you. I suppose you thought
that as 'twas only fondlings without any father or mother it didn't
matter how you dressed!"
Mrs. Trapp, though she might seem to talk at random, had a wifely
knack of dropping a shaft home. Her husband protested.
"Come, come, Maria--you know I'm not that sort of man!"
"How do I know what sort of man you are, under all that dirt?
For my part, if I'd been a magistrate, you shouldn't have walked off
with the boy till you'd washed yourself, not if you'd gone down on
your hands and knees for it; and him with his face shining all over
like a little Moses on the Mount, which does the lady credit if she's
the one you saw; though how they can dress children up like
pickle-herrings it beats me. Your bed's at the top of the house,
child, and there you'll find a suit o' clothes that I've washed and
aired after the last boy. I only hope you won't catch any of his
nasty tricks in 'em. Straight up the stairs and the little door to
the left at the top."
"Unless"--Mr. Trapp picked up courage for one more pleasantry--"you'd
like to make a start at once and go up by way of the chimbley."
He was rash. As a pugilist might eye a recovering opponent supposed
to be stunned, so Mrs. Trapp eyed Mr. Trapp.
"I thought I told you plain enough," she said, "that you're a
lowering man. What's worse, you're an unconverted one. Oh, you
nasty, fat, plain-featured fellow! Go indoors and wash yourself,
this instant!"
I spent close upon four years with this couple: and good parents they
were to me, as well as devoted to each other. Mrs. Trapp may have
been "cracked," as she certainly suffered from a determination of
words to the mouth: but, as a child will, I took her and the rest of
the world as I found them. She began to mother me at once; and on
the very next morning took my clothes in hand, snipped the ridiculous
tails off the jacket, and sent it, with the breeches, to the dyer's.
The yellow waistcoat she cut into pin-cushions, two for upstairs and
two for the parlour.
Having no children to save for, Mr. Trapp could afford to feed and
clothe an apprentice and take life easily to boot. Mrs. Trapp would
never allow him to climb a ladder; had even chained him to _terra
firma_ by a vow--since, as she explained to me once, "he's an
unconverted man. There's no harm in 'en; but I couldn't bear to have
him cut off in his sins. Besides, with such a figure, he'd scatter."
I recollect it as a foretaste of his kindness that on the first early
morning, as he led me forth to my first experiment, we paused between
the blank walls of the alley that I might practise the sweep's call
in comparative privacy. The sound of my own voice, reverberated
there, covered me with shame, though it could scarcely have been
louder than the cheeping of the birds on the Citadel ramparts above.
"Hark to that fellow, now!" said my master, as the notes of a bugle
sang out clear and brave in the dawn. "He's no bigger than you, I
warrant, and has no more call to be proud of his business." In time
I grew bold enough and used to begin my "Sweep, Swee--eep!" at the
mouth of the alley to warn Mrs. Trapp of our return.
My first chimney daunted me, though it was a wide one, belonging to a
cottage, well fitted with climbing brackets, and so straight that
from the flat hearth-stone you could see a patch of blue sky with the
gulls sailing across it. Mr. Trapp instructed me well and I
listened, setting my small jaws to choke down the terror: but, once
started, with his voice guiding me from below and growing hollower as
I ascended, I found that all came easily enough. "Bravo!" he shouted
up from the far side of the street, whither he had run out to see me
wave my brush from the summit. In a day or two he began to boast of
me, and I had to do my young best to live up to a reputation; for the
fame of my feat on Emmanuel Church spire had spread all over the
Barbican. Being reckoned a bold fellow, I had to justify myself in
fighting with the urchins of my age there; in which, and in
wrestling, I contrived to hold my own. My shame was that I had never
learnt to swim. All my rivals could swim, and even in the winter
weather seemed to pass half their time in the filthy water of Sutton
Pool, or in running races, stark naked, along the quay's edge.
Our trade, steady and leisurable until the last week of March, then
went up with a rush and continued at high pressure through April and
May, so that, dog-tired in every limb, I had much ado to drag myself
to bed up the garret stairs after Mrs. Trapp had rubbed my ankles
with goose-fat where the climbing-irons galled them. While this was
doing, Mr. Trapp would smoke his pipe and watch and assure me that
mine were the "growing-pains" natural to sweeps, and Mrs. Trapp
(without meaning it in the least) lamented the fate which had tied
her for life to one. "It being well known that my birthday is the
15th of the month and its rightful motto in Proverbs thirty-one,
'She riseth also while it is yet night and giveth meat to her
household and a portion to her maidens'; and me never able to hire a
gel at eight pounds a year even!"
"If you did," retorted Mr. Trapp, "I don't see you turning out at
midnight to feed her."
Early in June this high-tide of business slackened, and by the close
of the second week we were moderately idle. On Midsummer morning I
descended to find, to my vast astonishment, Mr. Trapp seated at table
before a bowl of bread and milk and wearing a thick blue guernsey
tucked inside his trousers, the waist of which reached so high as to
reduce his braces to mere shoulder-straps. I could not imagine why
he, a man given to perspiration, should add to his garments at this
season.
Breakfast over, he beckoned me to the door and jerked his thumb
towards the lintel. The usual, sign had been replaced by a shorter
one: "S. Trapp. Gone Driving."
"If folks," said he, "ha'n't the foresight to get swept afore
Midsummer, I don't humour 'em."
"Are--are you really going for a drive, sir?" I stammered.
"To be sure I am. I drive every day in the summer. What do you
suppose?"
"It won't be a chaise and pair, sir?" I hazarded, though even this
would not have surprised me.
"Not to-day. Lord knows what we may come to, but to-day 'tis
mackerel and whiting; later on, pilchards."
He took me down to the quay; and there, sure enough, we stepped on
board a boat lying ready, with two men in her, who fended off and
began to hoist sails at once. Mr. Trapp took the helm. It turned
out that he owned a share in the vessel and worked her from Midsummer
to Michaelmas with a crew of two men and a boy. The men were called
Isaac and Morgan (I cannot remember their other names), the one
extremely old and surly, the other cheerful, curly-haired and active,
and both sparing of words. I was to be the boy.
We baited our hooks and whiffed for mackerel as we tacked out of the
Sound. And by and by we came to what Isaac called the "grounds"
(though I could see nothing to distinguish it from the rest of the
sea) and cast anchor and weighted our lines differently and caught a
few whiting while we ate our dinner. The wind had fallen to a flat
calm. After dinner Mr. Trapp looked up and said to Isaac:
"Got a life-belt on board?"
"What in thunder do 'ee want it for?" asked Isaac.
"That's my business," said Mr. Trapp.
So Isaac hunted up a belt made of pieces of cork and then was ordered
to lash one of the sweeps so that it stuck well outboard. "Now, my
lad," said Mr. Trapp, turning to me, "you've been a very good lad
'pon the whole, and I see you fighting with the tackers down 'pon the
quay and holding your own. But they can swim, and you can't, and
it's wearing your spirit. So here's a chance to larn. I can't larn'
ee myself, for the fashion's come up since I was a youngster.
Can you swim, Morgan?"
Morgan could not; and old Isaac said he couldn't see the use of it--
if you capsized, it only lengthened out the trouble.
"Well, then, you must larn yourself," said Mr. Trapp to me.
"I've heard that pigs and men are the only animals it don't come to
by nature. And that's a scandal however you look at it."
So strip I did, and was girt with the belt under my armpits, tied to
a rope, and slipped over the side in fear and trembling. I swallowed
a pint or two of salt water and wept (but they could not see this,
though they watched me curiously), I dare say, half a pint of it back
in tears of fright. I knew by observation how legs and arms should
be worked, but made disheartening efforts to put it into practice.
At length, utterly ashamed, I was hauled out and congratulated: at
which I stared.
"As for the swimmin'," said Isaac, "I can't call to mind that I've
seen worse: but for pluck, considering the number of sharks at about
this season, I couldn't ask better of his age."
I had not thought of sharks--supposed them, indeed, to inhabit the
tropics only. We caught one towards sunset, after it had fouled all
our lines, and smashed its head with the unshipped tiller as it came
to the surface. It measured five feet and a little over, and we
lashed it alongside the gunwale and carried it home in triumph next
morning (having shot the nets at sundown and slept and hauled them up
empty at sunrise--the pilchards being scarce as yet, though a few had
been caught off the Eddystone). I don't suppose the shark would have
interfered with my bath, but I gave myself airs on the strength of
him.
CHAPTER IV.
MISS PLINLIMMON.
Late in August, and a week or two before Mr. Trapp changed his
signboard and resumed his proper business, I was idling by the edge
of the Barbican one evening when a boy, whose eye I had blacked
recently, charged up behind me and pushed me over. I pretended to be
drowning, and sank theatrically as he and half a dozen others,
conveniently naked, plunged to the rescue. They dived for my body
with great zeal, while I, having slipped under the keel of a
trading-ketch and climbed on board by her accommodation-ladder
dangling on the far side, watched them from behind a stack of
flower-pots on her deck. When they desisted, and I had seen the
culprit first treated as a leper by the crowd, then haled before two
constables and examined at length, finally led homeward by the ear
and cuffed at every few steps by his mother (a widow), I slipped back
into the water, dived back under the ketch, and, emerging, asked the
cause of the disturbance. This made a new reputation for me, at the
expense of some emotion to Mrs. Trapp, to whom the news of my decease
had been borne on the swiftest wings of rumour.
But I have tarried too long over those days of my apprenticeship, and
am yet only at the beginning. Were there no story to be told, I
might fill a chapter by fishing up recollections of Plymouth in those
days; of the women, for instance, carried down in procession to the
Barbican and ducked for scolding. A husband had but to go before the
Mayor (Mr. Trapp sometimes threatened it) and swear that his wife was
a common scold, and the Mayor gave him an order to hoist her on a
horse and take her to the ducking-chair to be dipped thrice in Sutton
Pool. At last a poor creature died of it, and that put an end to the
bad business. Then there were the press-gangs. Time and again I
have run naked from bathing to watch the press as, after hunting from
tavern to tavern, it dragged a man off screaming to the steps, the
sailors often man-handling him and the officer joking with the crowd
and behaving as cool and gentlemanly as you please. Mr. Trapp and I
were by the door one evening, measuring out the soot, when a man came
panting up the alley and rushed past us into the back kitchen without
so much as "by your leave." Half a minute later up came the press,
and the young officer at the head of them was for pushing past and
into the house; but Mr. Trapp blocked the doorway, with Mrs. Trapp
full of fight in the rear.
"Stand by!" says the officer to his men. "And you, sir, what the
devil do you mean by setting yourself in the way of his Majesty's
Service?"
"An Englishman's house," said Mr. Trapp, "is his castle."
"D'ye hear that?" screamed Mrs. Trapp.
"An Englishman's house," repeated Mr. Trapp slowly, "is his castle.
The storms may assail it, and the winds whistle round it, but the
King himself cannot do so."
The officer knew the law and called off his gang. When the coast was
clear we went to search for the man, and found he had vanished,
taking half a flitch of bacon with him off the kitchen-rack.
All those days, too, throb in my head to the tramp of soldiers in the
streets, and ring with bugles blown almost incessantly from the
ramparts high above my garret. On Sundays Mr. Trapp and I used to
take our walk together around the ramparts, between church and
dinner-time, after listening to the Royal Marine Band as it played up
George Street and Bedford Street on the way from service in St.
Andrew's Church. If we met a soldier we had to stand aside; indeed,
even common privates in those days (so proudly the Army bore itself,
though its triumphs were to come) would take the wall of a woman--a
greater insult then than now, or at least a more unusual one.
A young officer of the '--'th Regiment once put this indignity upon
Mrs. Trapp, in Southside Street. The day was a wet one, and the
gutter ran with liquid mud. Mrs. Trapp recovered her balance,
slipped off her pattens, and stamped them on the back of his scarlet
coat--two oval O's for him to walk about with.
Those were days, too, which kept our Plymouth stones rattling.
Besides the coaches--the "Quicksilver," which carried the mails and a
coachman and guard in scarlet liveries, the humdrum "Defiance" and
the dashing "Subscription" or "Scrippy" post-chaises came and went
continually, whisking naval officers between us and London with
dispatches: and sometimes the whole populace turned out to cheer as
trains of artillery wagons, escorted by armed seamen, marines, and
soldiers, horse and foot, rumbled up from Dock towards the Citadel
with treasure from some captured frigate. I could tell, too, of the
great November Fair in the Market Place, and the rejoicings on the
King's Jubilee, when I paid a halfpenny to go inside the huge hollow
bonfire built on the Hoe: but all this would keep me from my story--
for which I must hark back to Miss Plinlimmon.
For many months I heard nothing of this dear lady, and it seemed that
I had parted from her for ever, when one evening as I returned from
carrying a bag of soot out to Mutley Plain (where a market-gardener
wanted some for his beds), Mrs. Trapp put into my hands a letter
addressed in the familiar Italian hand to "H. Revel, residing with
Mr. S. Trapp, House Renovator, near the Barbican." It ran:
"My dearest Harry,--I wonder if, amid your new avocations, you
will take the pleasure in the handwriting of an _old friend_?
I remember you many times daily, and often when I wake in the
night; and commend you to God morning and evening, kneeling on
the place where your cot used to stand, for I have no one now to
care for in my room. There is little change in our life here;
though Mr. Scougall, as I foreboded, takes less heart in his
ministrations, and I should not wonder if he retired before
long. But this is between ourselves. Punctual as ever in his
duties, he rarely spends the night here, but departs at six p.m.
for his wife's farm, where Mrs. S. very naturally prefers to
reside. Indeed, I wish she would absent herself altogether; for
when she comes, it is to criticise the housekeeping, in which I
regret to say she does not maintain that generous spirit of
which she gave promise in the veal pies, etc., of that _ever
memorable_ morning. I never condescended to be a bride: yet I
feel sure, that had I done so, it would have given me an extra
compassion for the fatherless."
"But enough of myself. My object in writing is to tell you that
my birthday falls on Wednesday next (May 1st, dedicated by the
Ancient Romans to the Goddess of Flowers, as I was yearly
reminded in my happy youth. But how often Fate withholds from
us her seeming promises!). It might be a bond between us, my
dear boy, if you will take that day for your birthday too.
Pray humour me in this; for indeed your going has left a void
which I cannot fill, and perhaps do not wish to, except with
thoughts of you. I trust there used to be no _partiality_; but
for some reason you were dearer to me than the others; and I
feel as if God, in His mysterious way, sent you into my life
_with meaning_. Do you think that Mr. Trapp, if you asked him
politely (and I trust you have not forgotten your politeness),
would permit you to meet me at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, in Mr.
Tucker's Bun Shop, in Bedford Street, to celebrate your birthday
with an affectionate friend? Such ever is,"
"Amelia Plinlimmon."
"Oh, very well," said Mr. Trapp when I showed him the letter and put
my request; "only don't let her swell you out of shape. Chimbleys is
narrower than they used to be. May-day is Sweeps' Holiday, too,
though we don't keep it up in Plymouth: I dare say the lady thought
'pon that. In my bachelor days I used to be Jack in the Green
reggilar."
"It's just as well I never saw ye, then," said his wife tartly.
"And to imagine that a lady like Miss Plinlimmon would concern
herself with your deboshes! But you'd lower the King on his throne."
Indeed, Mr. Trapp went on to give some colour to this. "I wonder
what she means, talking about Roman goddesses?" he mused. "I seen
one, once, in a penny show; and it was marked outside 'Men only
Admitted.'"
Mrs. Trapp swept me from the room.
On May-day, then, I entered Mr. Tucker's Bun Shop with a beating
heart, a scrubbed face and a sprig of southernwood in my button-hole,
and Miss Plinlimmon fell on my neck and kissed me. All the formality
of the Genevan Hospital dropped away from her as a garment, and left
only the tender formality of her own nature, so human that it amazed
me. I had never really known her until now. She had prepared a
feast, including Mr. Tucker's famous cheese-cakes, "as patronised by
Queen Charlotte," and cakes called "maids of honour." "To my mind,"
said Miss Plinlimmon, taking one, "there is always an air of
refinement about this shop." She praised my growth, and the
cleanliness of my skin, and the care with which Mrs. Trapp kept my
clothes; and laughed when I reported some of Mrs. Trapp's sayings--
but tremulously: indeed, more than once her eyes brimmed as she gazed
across the table. "You cannot think how happy I am!" she almost
whispered, and broke off to draw my attention to a young officer who
had entered the shop, with two ladies in fresh summer gowns of
sprigged muslin, and who stood by the counter buying sweetmeats.
"If you can do so without staring, Harry, always make a point of
observing such people as that. You will be surprised at the little
hints you pick up." I told her, growing bold, that I knew no finer
lady than she, and never wanted to--which I still think a happy and
highly creditable speech for a boy of eleven. She flushed with
pleasure. "I have birth, I hope," she said, and with that her colour
deepened, perhaps with a suspicion that this might hurt my feelings.
"But since our reverses," she went on hurriedly, "we Plinlimmons have
stood still; and one should move with the times. I am not with those
who think good manners need be old-fashioned ones." She recurred to
Mrs. Trapp. "I feel sure she must be an excellent woman.
Your clothes are well kept, and I read more in needlework than you
think. Also folks cannot neglect their cleanliness and then furbish
themselves up in a day. I see by your complexion that she attends to
you. I hope you are careful not to laugh at her when she makes those
ludicrous speeches?"
But I shifted the talk from Mrs. Trapp.
"What did you mean, just now, by 'we,' Miss Plinlimmon?" I asked.
"Did I say 'we'?"
"You talked about your reverses--'our reverses,' you said. I wish
you would tell me about it: I never heard, before, of anyone
belonging to you."
"'We' means 'my brother and I,'" she said, and said no more until she
had paid the bill and we walked up to the Hoe together. There she
chose a seat overlooking the Sound and close above the amphitheatre
(in those days used as a bull-ring) where Corineus the Trojan had
wrestled, ages before, with the giant Gogmagog and defeated him.
"My brother Arthur--Captain Arthur Plinlimmon of the King's Own--is
the soul of honour. I do not believe a nobler gentleman lives in the
whole wide world: but then we are descended from the great Glendower,
King of Wales (I will show you the pedigree, some day), and have
Tudor blood, too, in our veins. When dear papa died and we
discovered he had been speculating unfortunately in East India
Stock--'buying for a fall' was, I am told, his besetting weakness,
though I could never understand the process--Arthur offered me a home
and maintenance for life. Of course I refused: for the blow reduced
him, too, to bitter poverty, and he was married. And, besides, I
could never bear his wife, who was a woman of fashion and
extravagant. She is dead now, poor thing, so we will not talk of
her: but she could never be made to understand that their
circumstances were altered, and died leaving some debts and one
child, a boy called Archibald, who is now close on twenty years old.
So there is my story, Harry; and a very ordinary one, is it not?"
"Where does Captain Plinlimmon live?" I asked.
"He is quartered in Lancaster just now, with his regiment: and Archie
lives with him. He had hoped to buy the poor boy a commission before
this, but could not do so honourably until all the debts were paid.
'The sins of the fathers--'" She broke off and glanced at me
nervously.
But I was not of an age to suspect why, or to understand my own lot
at all. "I suppose you love this Archibald better than anybody,"
said I with a twinge of jealousy.
"Oh, no," she exclaimed quickly, and at once corrected herself.
"Not so much as I ought. I love him, of course, for his father's
sake: but in features he takes after his mother very strikingly, and
that--on the few occasions I have seen him--chilled me. It is wrong,
I know; and no doubt with more opportunity I should have grown very
fond of him. Sometimes I tax myself, Harry, with being frail in my
affections: they require renewing with a sight of--of their object.
That is why we are keeping our birthdays together to-day."
She smiled at me, almost archly, putting out a hand to rest it on
mine, which lay on my knee; then suddenly the smile wavered, and her
eyes began to brim; I saw in them, as in troubled water, broken
images of a hundred things I had known in dreams; and her arm was
about my neck and I nestled against her.
"Dear Harry! Dear boy!"
I cannot tell how long we sat there: certainly until the ships
hung out their riding-lights and the May stars shone down on us.
At whiles we talked, and at whiles were silent: and both the talk and
the silences (if you will not laugh) held some such meanings as they
hold for lovers. More than ever she was not the Miss Plinlimmon I
remembered, but a strange woman, coming forth and revealing herself
with the stars. She actually confessed that she loathed porridge!--
"though for example's sake, you know, I force myself to eat it.
I think it unfair to compel children to a discipline you cannot
endure with them."
She parted with me under the moonlit Citadel, at the head of a
by-lane leading to the Trapps' cottage. "I shall not write often, or
see you," she said. "It is seldom that I get a holiday or even an
hour to myself, and we will not unsettle ourselves"--mark, if the
child could not, the noble condescension--"in our duties that are
perhaps the more blessed for being stern. But a year hence for
certain, if spared, we will meet. Until then be a gentleman always
and--I may ask it now--for my sake."
So we parted, and for a whole year I saw nothing of her, nor heard
except at Christmas, when she sent me a closely written letter of six
sheets, of which I will transcribe only the poetical conclusion:
"Christmas comes but once a year:
And why? we well may ask.
Repine not. We are probably unequal
To a severer task."
CHAPTER V.
THE SHADOW OF ARCHIBALD.
It is not only children who, having once tasted bliss, suppose fondly
that one has only to prepare a time and place for it again and it can
be repeated. But he must be a queer child who starts with expecting
any less. Certainly no doubts assailed me when the anniversary came
round and I made my way to Mr. Tucker's Bun Shop; nor did Miss
Plinlimmon's greeting lack anything of tenderness. She began at once
to talk away merrily: but children are demons to detect something
amiss, and there was a note in her gaiety which somehow did not sound
in key. After a while she broke off in the middle of a sentence and
sat stirring her tea, as with a mind withdrawn; recovered herself,
and catching at her last words, continued--but on a different
subject; then, reading some puzzlement in my eyes, exclaimed
abruptly, "My dear Harry, you have grown beyond knowledge!"
"Were you thinking of that?" I asked, for I had heard it twice
already.
She answered one question with another. "Of what were _you_
thinking?"
I hesitated, for in truth I had been thinking how much older she had
grown. A year is a long time to a child, but it did not account to
me for a curious wanness in her colour. Her hair was greyer, too,
and there were dark rings under her eyes. "You seem different
somehow, Miss Plinlimmon."
"Do I? The Hospital has been wearing me out, of late. I have
thought sometimes of resigning and trying my fortune elsewhere: but
the thought of the children restrains me. I make many mistakes with
them--perhaps more as the years go on: they love me, however, for
they know that I mean well, and it would haunt me if they fell into
bad hands. Now I am not sure that Mr. Scougall would choose the best
successor. Before he married I could have trusted his judgment."
She fell a-musing again. "Archibald is here in Plymouth," she added
inconsequently. "My nephew, you know."
I nodded, and asked, "Is he quartered here?"
"Why, how did you know he was in the Army?"
"You told me Major Arthur was saving up to buy him a commission."
"How well you remember!" she sighed. "Alas! no: the debts were too
heavy. Archibald is in the Army, but he has enlisted as a private,
in the 105th, the North Wilts Regiment. His father advised it: he
says that, in these days, commissions are to be won by young men
content to begin in the ranks; and the lad has (I believe) a good
friend in Colonel Festonhaugh, who commands the North Wilts. He and
Arthur are old comrades in arms. But garrison life does not suit the
poor boy, or so he complains. He is a little sore with his father
for subjecting him to it, and cannot take his stern view about paying
the debts. That is natural enough, perhaps." She heaved another
sigh. "His regiment--or rather the second battalion, to which he
belongs--was ordered down to Plymouth last January, and since then
has been occupied with drill and petty irritating duties at which he
grumbles sorely--though I believe there is a prospect of their being
ordered out to Portugal before long."
"You see him often?" I asked.
She seemed to pause a moment. "Yes; oh, yes to be sure, I see him
frequently. That is only natural, is it not?"
We left the shop and strolled towards the Hoe. I felt that something
was interfering to spoil our day; and felt unreasonably sure of it on
finding our old seat occupied by three soldiers--two of them
supporting a drunken comrade. We made disconsolately for an empty
bench, some fifty yards away.
"They belong to Archibald's regiment," said Miss Plinlimmon as we
settled ourselves to talk. I had noted that she scanned them
narrowly. "Why, here _is_ Archibald!" she exclaimed: and I looked up
and saw a young red-coat sauntering towards us.
Her tone, I was jealously glad to observe, had not been entirely
joyous. And Master Archibald, as he drew near, did not seem in the
best of tempers. He was beyond all doubt a handsome youth, and
straight-limbed; but apparently a sullen one. He kept his eyes on
the ground and only lifted them for a moment when close in front of
us.
"Good afternoon, aunt."
"Good afternoon, Archibald. This is Harry--my friend of whom you
have heard me speak."
He glanced at me with a curt nod. I could see that he considered me
a nuisance. An awkward silence fell between the three of us, broken
at length by a start and a smothered exclamation from Miss
Plinlimmon.
Archibald glanced over his shoulder carelessly. "Oh, yes," said he,
"they are baiting a bull down yonder."
The ridge hid the bull-ring from us. Dogs had been barking there
when we seated ourselves, but the noise held no meaning for us.
It was the bull's roar which had startled Miss Plinlimmon.
"Pray let us go!" She gathered her shawl about her in a twitter.
"This is quite horrible!"
"There's nothing to be afraid of," he assured her. "The brute's tied
fast enough. Don't go, aunt: I want a word with you."
He glowered at me again, and this time with meaning. I saw that he
wished me gone, and I moved to go.
"This is Harry's birthday. I am keeping it with him: his birthday as
well as mine, Archibald."
"Gad, I forgot! I'm sorry, aunt--Many happy returns of the day!"
"Thank you," said she drily. "And now if you particularly wish to
speak to me, I will walk with you, but only a short way. Harry shall
find another seat."
As they walked away side by side, I turned my head to look for a
bench farther removed from the bull-ring; and so became aware of
another soldier, in uniform similar to Mr. Archibald's, stretched
prone on the turf a few paces behind me.
When I stood up and turned to have a look at him, his head had
dropped on his arms and he appeared to be sleeping. But I could have
sworn that when I first caught sight of him he had been gazing after
the pair.
Well, there was nothing in this (you will say) to disturb me; yet for
some reason it made me alert, if not uneasy. I chose another seat,
but at no great distance, and kept him in view. He raised his head
once, stared around like one confused and not wholly awake, and
dropped into slumber again. Miss Plinlimmon and Archibald turned and
came pacing back; turned again and repeated this quarter-deck walk
three or four times. He was talking, and now and then using a slight
gesture. I could not see that she responded. At any rate, she did
not turn to him. But the man on the grass occupied most of my
attention, and I missed the parting. An odd fancy took me to watch
if he stirred again while I counted a hundred. He did not, and I
shifted my gaze to find Miss Plinlimmon coming towards me unescorted.
Archibald had disappeared.
Her eyes were red, and her voice trembled a little. "And now," said
she, "that's enough of my affairs, please God!" She began to put
questions about the Trapps. And while I answered them I happened
to look along the flat stretch of turf to the right, in time to see,
at perhaps a hundred yards' distance, a soldier cross it from behind
and go hurrying down the slope towards the bull-ring. I recognised
him at a glance. He was the black-avised man who had pretended to be
sleeping.
Almost at once, as I remember it--but I dare say some minutes had
passed--a furious hubbub arose below us, mixed with the yelling of
dogs and a few sharp screams. And, before we knew what it meant, at
the point where the black-avised man had disappeared, he came
scrambling back, found his legs and headed desperately towards us,
with a bull behind him in full chase.
I managed to drag Miss Plinlimmon off the bench, thrust her like a
bundle beneath it, and scrambled after her into shelter but a second
or two before the pair came thundering by; for the bull's hooves
shook the ground; and so small a space--ten or twelve yards at the
most--divided him from the man, that they passed in one rush, and
with them half a dozen bulldogs hanging at the brute's heels as if
trailed along by an invisible cord. Next after these pelted Master
Archibald, shouting and tugging at his side-arm; and after him again,
but well in the rear, a whole rabble of bull-baiters, butchers,
soldiers, boys and mongrels, all yelping together with excitement and
terror, the men flourishing swords and pitchforks.
To speak of the man first.--I have since seen soldiers crazed and
running in battle, but never such a face as passed me in that brief
vision. His lips were wide, his eyes strained and almost starting
from his head, the pupils turned a little backward as if fascinated
by the terror at his heels, imploring help, seeking a chance to
double--all three together--and yet absolutely fixed and rigid.
The bull made no account of us, though below the seat I caught the
light of his red eye as he plunged past, head to ground and so close
that his hot breath smote in our faces and the broken end of rope
about the base of his horns whipped the grass by my fingers.
Perhaps the red coat attracted his rage. But he seemed to nurse a
special grudge against the man.
This appeared when, a stone's-throw beyond our seat, the man sprang
sideways to the left of his course--in the nick of time, too, for as
he sprang he seemed to clear the horns by a bare foot. The bull's
heavier rush carried him forward for several yards before he swerved
himself on to the new line of pursuit; and this let up Master
Archibald, who by this time had his side-arm loose.
"Ham-string 'en!" yelled a blue-shirted butcher, pausing beside us
and panting. "Quick, you fool--ham-string 'en!"
For some reason the young man seemed to hesitate. Likely enough he
did not hear; perhaps had lost presence of mind. At any rate, for a
second or so, his arm hung on the stroke, and as the bull swerved
again he jabbed his bayonet feebly at the haunch.
The butcher swore furiously. "Murdered by folly if ever man was!
Ye bitter fool," he shouted, "it's pricked him on, ye've done!"
The black-faced man, having gained maybe a dozen yards by his
manoeuvre, was now heading for the Citadel gate; beside which--so far
away that we saw them as toys--stood a sentry-box and the figure of a
sentry beside it. Could he reach this gate? His altered course had
taken him a little downhill, to the left of the ridge, and to regain
it by the Citadel he must fetch a slight loop. Luckily the bull
could not reason: he followed his enemy. But there was just a chance
that by running along the ridge the chase might be headed off.
The crowd saw this and set off anew, with Master Archibald still a
little in front and increasing his lead. I scrambled from under the
seat and followed.
But almost at once it became plain that we were out-distanced.
Alone of us Master Archibald had a chance; and if the man were to be
saved, it lay either with him or with the sentry at the gate.
I can yet remember the look on the sentry's face as we drew closer
and his features grew distinct. He stood in the middle of the short
roadway which led to the drawbridge, and clearly it had within a few
moments dawned upon him that _he_ was the point upon which these
fatal forces were converging. A low wall fenced him on either hand,
and as he braced himself, grasping his Brown Bess--a fine picture of
Duty triumphing over Irresolution--into this narrow passage poured
the chase, rolled as it were in a flying heap; the hunted man just
perceptibly first, the bull and Archibald Plinlimmon cannoning
against each other at the entrance. Master Archibald was hurled
aside by the impact of the brute's hindquarters and shot, at first on
all fours, then prone, alongside the base of the wall; but he had
managed to get his thrust home, and this time with effect. The bull
tossed his head with a mighty roar, ducked it again and charged on
his prey, who flung up both arms and fell spent by the sentry-box.
The sentry sprang to the other side of the roadway and let fly his
charge at random as box, man, and bull crashed to earth together, and
a dreadful bellow mingled with the sharper notes of splintered wood.
It was the end. The bullet had cut clean through the bull's spine at
the neck, and the crowd dragged him lifeless, a board of the
sentry-box still impaled on his horns, off the legs of the
black-avised man--who, at first supposed to be dead also, awoke out
of his swoon to moan feebly for water.
While this was fetching, the butcher knelt and lifted him against his
knee. He struck me as ill-favoured enough--not to say ghastly--with
the dust and blood on his face (for a splinter had laid open his
cheek), and its complexion an unhealthy white against his matted
hair. I took note that he wore sergeant's stripes.
"What's the poor thing called?" someone inquired of the sentry.
The sentry, being an Irishman, mistook the idiom. "He's called a
Bull," said he, stroking the barrel of his rifle. "H'what the divvle
else?"
"But 'tis the man we mean."
"Oh, _he's_ called Letcher; sergeant; North Wilts."
Letcher gulped down a mouthful of water and managed to sit up,
pushing the butcher's arm aside.
"Where's Plinlimmon?" he asked hoarsely. "Hurt?"
"Here I am, old fellow," answered Archibald, reeling rather than
stepping forward. "A crack on the skull, that's all. Hope you're
none the worse?" His own face was bleeding from a nasty graze on the
right temple.
"H'm?" said Letcher. "Mean it? You'd better mean it by--!" he
snarled suddenly, his face twisted with pain or malice. "You weren't
too smart, the first go. Why the deuce didn't you hamstring the
brute? You heard them shouting?"
"That's asackly what I told 'en," put in the butcher.
"Oh, stow your fat talk, you silly Devonshire-man!" The butcher's
tongue was too big for his mouth, and Letcher mimicked him
ferociously and with an accuracy quite wonderful, his exhaustion
considered. He leaned back and panted. "The brute touched me--under
the thigh, here. I doubt I'm bleeding." He closed his eyes and
fainted away.
They found, on lifting him, that he spoke truth. The bull had gored
him in the leg: a nasty wound beginning at the back of the knee,
running upward and missing the main artery by a bare inch. A squad
of soldiers had run out, hearing the shot, and these bore him into
the Citadel, Master Archibald limping behind.
The crowd began to disperse, and I made my way back to Miss
Plinlimmon.
"A providential escape!" said she on hearing my report. "I am glad
that Archibald acquitted himself well." She went on to tell me of a
youthful adventure of her own with a mountain bull, in her native
Wales.
Some days later she sent me a poem on the occurrence:
"Lo, as he strides his native scene,
The bull--how dignified his mien!
When tethered, otherwise!
Yet _one_ his tether broke and ran
After a military man
Before these very eyes!"
"I feel that I have been more successful with the metre than usual,"
she added, "having been guided by a little poem, a favourite of mine,
which, as it also inculcates kindness to the brute creation, you will
do well, Harry, to commit to memory. It runs:
"'Poor little birds! If people knew
What sorrows little birds go through,
I think that even boys
Would never deem it sport, or fun,
To stand and fire a frightful gun
For nothing but the noise.'"
The shadow of Mr. Archibald seemed doomed to rest upon our
anniversaries. This second one, though more than exciting enough,
had not answered my expectations: and, on the third, when I presented
myself at the Bun Shop it was to learn with dismay that Miss
Plinlimmon had not arrived; with dismay and something more--for I had
walked into the country towards Plympton early that morning and
raided an orchard under the trees of which grew a fine crop of
columbines, seeded from a neighbouring garden. Also I jingled
together in my pocket no less a sum than two bright shillings, which
Mr. Trapp had magnificently handed over to me out of a wager of five
he had made with an East Country skipper that I could dive and take
the water, hands first, off the jib-boom of any vessel selected from
the shipping then at anchor in Cattewater. I knew that Miss
Plinlimmon wanted a box to hold her skeins, and I also knew the price
of one in a window in George Street, and had the shopman's promise
not to part with it before five o'clock that evening. I wished Miss
Plinlimmon to admire it first, and then I meant to enter the shop in
a lordly fashion and, emerging, to put the treasure in her hands.
So I paced the pavement in front of Mr. Tucker's, the prey of a
thousand misgivings. But at length, and fully half an hour late, she
hove in sight.
"I have been detained, dear," she explained as we kissed, "--by
Archibald," she added.
Always that accursed Archibald! "Did he wish you many happy
returns?" I asked, thrusting my bunch of columbines upon her with a
blush.
"You dear, dear boy!" she chirruped. But she ignored my question.
When we were seated, too, she made the poorest attempt to eat, but
kept exclaiming on the beauty of my flowers.
The meal over, she drew out her purse to pay. "We shan't be seeing
Mr. Archibald to-day?" I asked wistfully, preparing to go.
"You may be certain--" With that she paused, with a blank look which
changed to one of shame and utter confusion. The purse was empty.
"Oh, Harry--what shall I do? There were five shillings in it
when--. I counted them out and laid the purse on the table beside my
gloves. I was just picking them up when--when Archibald--"
Her voice failed again and she turned to the shop-woman. "Something
most unfortunate has happened. Will you, please, send for Mr.
Tucker? He will know me. I have been here on several previous
occasions--"
I had not the slightest notion of the price of eatables; but I, too,
turned on the shopwoman with a bold face, albeit with a fluttering
heart.
"How much?" I demanded.
"One-and-ninepence, sir."
I know not which made me the happier--relief, or the glory of being
addressed as "sir." I paid, pocketed my threepence change, and in
the elation of it offered Miss Plinlimmon my arm. We walked down
George Street, past the work-box in the window. I managed to pass
without wincing, though desperately afraid that the shopman might pop
out--it seemed but natural he should be lying in wait--and hold me to
my bargain.
Our session upon the Hoe, though uninterrupted, did not recapture the
dear abandonment of our first blissful birthday. Miss Plinlimmon
could neither forget the mishap to her purse, nor speak quite freely
about it. A week later she celebrated her redemption in the
following stanza:
"A friend in need is a friend indeed,
We have oft-times heard:
And King Richard the Third
Was reduced to crying, 'My kingdom for a horse!'
O, may we never want a friend!
'Or a bottle to give him,' I omit, as coarse."
She enclosed one-and-ninepence in the missive: and so obtained her
work-box after all--it being, by a miracle, still unsold.
CHAPTER VI.
I STUMBLE INTO HORRORS.
It was exactly seven weeks later--that is to say, on the evening
of June 18th, 1811--that as I stood in the doorway whistling
_Come, cheer up, my lads_, to Mrs. Trapp's tame blackbird, the old
Jew slop-dealer came shuffling up the alley and demanded word with my
master.
His name was Rodriguez--"I. Rodriguez, Marine Stores"--and his shop
stood at the corner of the Barbican as you turn into Southside
Street. He had an extraordinarily fine face, narrow, emaciated, with
a noble hook to his nose (which was neither pendulous nor fleshy) and
a black pointed beard divided by a line of grey. We boys feared him,
one and all: but in a furred cloak and skull-cap he would have made a
brave picture. The dirt of his person, however, was a scandal.
I told him that Mr. Trapp had walked over and taken the ferry to
Cremyll, where his boat was fitting out for the summer. "But Mrs.
Trapp is washing-up at the back. Shall I call her?"
"God forbid!" said he. "I am not come to listen, but to speak."
I asked him then if I could take a message.
"As wine in a leaky vessel, so is a message committed to a child.
Two of my chimneys need to be swept."
"I can remember that, sir," said I.
He eyed me in a way that made me feel uncomfortable. "Yes; you will
remember," he said, as if somehow he had satisfied himself. Yet his
eyes continued to search me. "You have not swept my chimneys
before?"
"I have been working for Mr. Trapp almost three years," said I
demurely.
"Yes, I have seen your face. But I do not often have my chimneys
swept: it is dreadful waste of money. The soot, now--your master and
I cannot agree about it. I say that the soot is mine, that I made
it, in my own chimney, with my own fuel; therefore it should be my
property, but your master claims it. Five years ago I left my
chimneys un-swept while I argued this; but one of them took fire, and
so I lost my soot, and the Corporation fined me five shillings.
It was terrible." He fell back a pace and studied me again.
"If my brother Aaron could see your face, boy, he would want to paint
it and you might make money."
"Where does he live, sir?" I asked.
"Eh? Good boy--good boy! He lives in Lisbon, in the Ghetto off the
Street of the Four Evangelists." He laughed, high up in his nose, at
my discomfiture. "If you ever meet him, mention my name: but first
of all tell your master I shall expect him at five o'clock to-morrow
morning." He wished me good night and shuffled away down the alley,
still laughing at his joke.
At five o'clock next morning, or a little before, Mr. Trapp and I
started for the house. The Barbican had not yet awaked to business.
Its frowzy blinds were down, and out on the Pool nothing moved but a
fishing-boat sweeping in upon the first of the flood.
At the entrance of Southside Street, however, we almost overtook a
soldier walking towards the town. He walked slowly and with a very
slight limp, but seemed to quicken his pace a little, and kept ahead
of us. The barracks being full just then, many soldiers had their
billets about the town, and that one should be abroad at such an hour
was nothing suspicious: yet my eyes were still following him when Mr.
Trapp halted and knocked at the Jew's door. At the sound, I saw the
man start and hesitate for an instant in his stride: and in that
instant, though he held on his pace and was lost to sight around the
street-corner, I recognised him and understood the limp. He was the
man of the bull-chase--Sergeant Letcher (as the sentry had named him)
of the North Wilts.
Nobody answered Mr. Trapp's knock, though he repeated it four or five
times. He stepped back into the roadway and scanned the unshuttered
upper windows. They were uncurtained, too, every one, and grimed
with dust: and through this dust we could see rows of cast-off suits
dangling within like limp suicides.
"Very odd," commented Mr. Trapp. "You're sure he said five o'clock?"
"Sure," said I.
"Besides--five o'clock or six--why can't the old skin-flint answer?"
He knocked again vigorously. A blind-cord creaked, a window went up
over a ship-chandler's shop next door, and a man thrust out his head.
"What's wrong?" he demanded.
"Sorry to disturb ye, Clemow; but old Rodriguez, here, bespoke us to
sweep his chimneys at five, and we can't get admittance."
"Why, I heard him unbolt for ye an hour ago!" said the ship-chandler.
"He woke me up with his noise, letting down the chain."
The door had a latch-handle and Mr. Trapp grasped it. "Drat me, but
you're right!" he exclaimed, as he pressed his thumb and the door at
once yielded. "Huh!" He stared into the empty passage, out of which
a room opened on either hand, each hung with cast-off suits which
seemed to sway slightly in the scanty light filtered through the
shutter-holes. "I don't stomach moving among these. Even in broad
daylight I'm never too sure there ain't a man hidden in one of 'em.
He might be dead, too--by the smell."
He stepped to the foot of the uncarpeted stairs. "Mister Rodriguez!"
he called. His voice echoed up past the cobwebbed landing and seemed
to go wandering aloft among unclean mysteries to the very roof.
Nobody answered.
"Mister Rodriguez!" he called again, and waited. "Let's try the
kitchen," he suggested. "We started with that, last time: and, if my
memory holds good, 'tis the only chimney he uses. He beds in a small
room right over us, next the roof, and keeps a fire going there
through the winter: but the flue of it leads into the same shaft--a
pretty wide shaft as I rec'llect."
We groped our way by the foot of the staircase and along a line of
cupboards to the kitchen. The window of this looked out upon a
backyard piled with refuse timber, packing-cases, and plaster
statuary broken and black with soot. Within, the hearth had been
swept as if in preparation for us. On the dirty table stood a
milk-jug with a news-sheet folded and laid across its top, a
half-loaf of bread, and a plate of meat--but of what kind we did not
pause to examine. It looked nauseous enough. A brindled cat made a
dash past us and upstairs. Its unexpected charge greatly unsettled
Mr. Trapp.
"It daunts me--I declare it do!" he confided hoarsely. "But he's
been here, anyway; and he expects us." He waved a hand towards the
hearth. "Shall I call again? Or what d'ye say to getting it over?"
"I'm ready," said I. To tell the truth, the inside of the chimney
seemed more inviting to me than the rest of the house. I was
accustomed to chimneys.
"Up we go, then!" Mr. Trapp began to spread his bags. He always used
the first person plural on these occasions--meaning, no doubt, that I
took with me his moral support. "The shaft's easy enough, I mind--
two storeys above this, and all the flues leadin' to your right.
I'll be out in the street by the time you hail."
I hadn't a doubt he would. "One week to Midsummer!" I cried, to
hearten me--for we were both counting the days now between us and the
fishing. He grinned, and up I went.
The chimney was foul, to be sure, but once past the first ten or a
dozen feet I mounted quickly. Towards the top the shaft narrowed so
that for a while I had my doubts if it could be squeezed through: but
I found, on reaching it, that the brickwork shelved inwards very
slightly, though furred or crusted with an extra thick coating of
soot below the vent. Through this I broke in triumph, sweating from
my haste; and brushing the filth from my eyes, leaned both arms on
the chimney-pot while I scanned the roofs around for a glimpse
between them, down to the street and Mr. Trapp. I did so at ease,
for a flue entered the main shaft immediately below the stack, which
was a decidedly dumpy one--in fact, less than five feet tall; so that
I supported myself not by the arms alone but by resting my toes on
the ridge where flue and shaft met.
Now, as the reader will remember, it was the height of summer, and
the day had brightened considerably since we entered the house.
The sudden sunshine set me blinking, and while I cleared my eyes it
seemed to me that a man--a dark figure--something, at any rate, and
something a great deal too large to be mistaken for a cat--stole from
under the gable above which my chimney rose, and, swiftly crossing a
patch of flat leaded roof to the right, disappeared around a
chimney-stack on the far side of it.
I ceased rubbing my eyes and stared at the stack. It was a tall one,
rising from a good fifteen feet below almost to a level with mine,
and I could not possibly look over it. _Something_, I felt sure,
lurked behind it, and my ears seemed to hold the sound of a soft
footstep. I forgot Mr. Trapp. By pulling myself a little higher I
could get a better view, not of the stack, but of the stretch of roof
beyond it: nobody could break cover in that direction and escape me.
I took a firm grip on the corroded bricks and heaved on them.
Next moment they had given way under my hands, falling inwards: and I
was falling with them.
I kicked out, striving to find again with my toes the ridge where the
flue joined the shaft--missed it--and went shooting down to the right
through a smother of soot.
The total fall--or slide, rather--was not a severe one, after all;
twenty feet perhaps, though uncomfortable enough for sixty. I pulled
myself up quite suddenly, my feet resting on a ledge which, as I
shook the soot off and recovered my wits, turned out to be the upper
sill of a grate. Then, growing suddenly cautious when the need for
caution was over, I descended the next foot or two back foremost, as
one goes down a ladder, and jumped out into the room clear of the
hearthstone.
And with that, as I turned, a scream rose to my throat and died
there. I had almost jumped upon the stretched-out body of a man.
CHAPTER VII.
I ESCAPE FROM THE JEW'S HOUSE.
It was Mr. Rodriguez. He lay face downward and slantwise across the
front of the hearth, with arms spread, fingers hooked, and his neck
protruding from the collar of his dingy dressing-gown like a plucked
fowl's. He had cast a slipper in falling, and the flesh of one heel
showed through its rent stocking. For a moment I supposed him in a
fit; the next, I was recoiling towards the wall, away from a dark
moist line which ran from under his left armpit and along the uneven
boards to the far corner by the window, and there, under a disordered
truckle-bed, spread itself in a pool.
With my eyes glued upon this horrid sight I slowly straightened
myself up--having crouched back until I felt the wall behind me--and
so grew aware of a door beside the chimney-breast, and that it stood
ajar upon the empty landing. The dead man's heels pointed towards
it, his head towards the window at the foot of the bed.
And still my shaken wits could not clutch at the meaning of what I
saw. I only felt that there was something horrible, menacing,
hideously malignant in the figure at my feet: only craved for
strength of will to dash by it, reach the door and fling myself down
the stairs--anywhere--away from it. Had it stirred, I believe it had
then and there destroyed my reason.
But it did not stir. And all the while I knew that the thing lay
with its breast in a bath of blood; that it had been stabbed in the
back and the blood welling down under the clothes had gathered in a
pool, ready to gush and spread on all sides as soon as the body
should be lifted or its attitude interfered with. I cannot tell how
I found time to reason this out; but I did.
I knew, too, that I could not scream aloud if I tried: but I had no
desire to try. _It_ might wake and lift up its head! I felt
backwards with my hand along the wall, groping unconsciously for
something to aid my spring towards the door; but desisted. For the
moment I could not lift a foot.
With that--either this was all a dream or I heard footsteps on the
flat roof outside; very slow, soft footsteps, too, as of somebody
walking on tiptoe. But if on tiptoe, why was he coming _towards_ me?
Yet so it was; my ear told me distinctly.
As his feet crunched the leads close outside the window I caught a
gleam of scarlet; then the frame grew dark between me and the
daylight, and through the pane a man peered cautiously into the room.
It was Archibald Plinlimmon.
He peered in, turning his face sideways for a better view and shading
it, after a moment, with his hand. So shaded, and with the daylight
behind it, his face after that first instant became an inscrutable
blur.
But while he peered speech broke from me--words and a wild laugh.
"Look at it! Look at it!" I cried, and pointed.
He drew back instantly, and was gone.
"Don't leave me! Mr. Plinlimmon--please don't leave me!" I made a
leap for the window--halted helplessly--and fell back again from the
body. I was alone again. But power to move had come back, and I
must use it while it lasted. If I could gain the stairs now . . .
Stealthily, and more stealthily as the fear returned and grew, I
reached the door, pushed it open, and looked out on the landing. But
for a worm-eaten trunk and a line of old suits dangling from pegs
around the wall, it was bare. The little light filtered through a
cracked and discoloured window high up in the slope of the roof.
The stairhead lay a short two yards from me, to be reached by one
bold leap.
This, however, was not what I first saw; nay, how or when I saw it is
a wonder still. For, across the landing, a door faced me; and, as I
pushed mine open, this door had moved--was moving yet, as if to shut.
It did not quite shut. It came to a standstill when almost a foot
ajar. Beyond it I could see yet other suits of clothes hanging: and
among these lurked someone, watching me, perhaps, through the chink
by the hinges. I was sure of it--was almost sure I had seen a hand
on the edge of the door; a hand with a ring on one of its fingers,
and just the edge, and no more, of a black cuff.
For perhaps five seconds I endured it, my hair lifting: then, with
one sharp scream I dashed back into the room and across the corpse;
struggled for a moment with the window-sash; and flinging it up,
dropped out upon the leads.
Out there, in the restorative sunshine, my first thought was to crawl
away as fast and as far as possible; to reach some hiding-place where
I might lie down and pant, unpursued by the horrors of that house.
The roofs on my right were flat; I staggered along them, halting at
every few steps to lean a hand for support against one or other of
the chimney-stacks, now growing warm in the sunshine.
From the far side of one, as I leaned clinging, a man sprang up,
almost at my feet. It was Archie Plinlimmon again. He had been
flattening himself against its shadow; and at first--so white and
fierce was his face--I made sure he meant to hurl me over and on to
the street below.
"What do you want? What have you seen?" Though he spoke fiercely,
his teeth chattered. "Oh--it's you!" he exclaimed, recognising me
through my soot.
"Mr. Plinlimmon--" I began.
"I didn't do it. I didn't--" He broke off. "For Heaven's sake, how
are we to get down out of this?"
"There's no way on the street side," I answered, "unless--"
He took me up short. "The street? We can't go that way--it's as
much as my neck's worth. Yours, too."
"Mr. Trapp's waiting for me," I answered stupidly.
"Who knows who isn't waiting?" he snapped. "We'll have to cut out of
this." He pointed downward on the side away from the street.
"I say, what happened? Who did it, eh?"
"I slipped in the chimney," I answered again. "He wanted his
chimneys swept this morning. We knocked--Mr. Trapp and I--and no one
answered: then we tried the door, and it opened. There was no one
about, and no one in the street but Sergeant Letcher."
He began to shake. "Sergeant Letcher? What do you know about
Sergeant Letcher?"
"Nothing, except that he was in the street--the man the bull chased,
you know."
He was shaking yet. "I ought to kill you," said he. "But I didn't
do it. Look here, show me a way down and I'll let you off.
You're used to this work, ain't you?"
"How did you come up?" I asked, innocently enough.
"By the Lord, if you ask questions, I'll strangle you! You were in
the room with--with _it_! I saw you: I'll swear I saw you. Get me
down out of this, and hide--get on board some ship, and clear.
See? If you breathe a word that you've seen me, I'll cut your heart
out. You understand me?"
I hadn't a doubt then that he was guilty. His fear was too craven.
"There's a warehouse at the end here," said I, and led the way to it.
But when we reached it, its roof rose in a sharp slope from the low
parapet guarding the leads where we stood.
"But I don't see," he objected; "and, anyway, I can't manage that."
I pointed to a louver skylight half-way up the roof. "We can prise
that open, or break it. It's easy enough to reach," I assured him.
He was extraordinarily clumsy on the slates, but obeyed my
instructions like a child. I wrenched at the wooden louvers.
"Got a knife?" I asked.
He produced one--an ugly-looking weapon, but clean. By good luck, we
did not need it; for as he passed it to me, the louver at which I was
tugging broke and came away in my hand. We easily loosened another
and, squeezing through, dropped into the loft upon a sliding pile of
grain.
The loft was dark enough; but a glimmer of light shone through the
chinks of a door at the far end. Unbolting it, we looked down, from
the height of thirty feet or so, into a deserted lane. Or rather _I_
looked down: for while I fumbled with the bolts Master Archie had
banged his head into something hard, and dropped, rubbing the hurt
and cursing.
It proved to be the timber cross-piece of a derrick used for hoisting
sacks of grain into the loft, working on an axle, and now swung
inboard for the night. A double rope ran through the pulley at its
end and had been hitched back over the iron winch which worked it.
We pushed the derrick out over the lane and I manned the winch
handle, while Master Archie caught hold of the hook and pulley at the
end of the double line. Checking the handle with all my strength I
lowered him as noiselessly as I could. As his feet touched the
cobbles below he let go and, without a thought of my safety, made off
down the lane.
I tugged the derrick inboard and recaptured the rope; cogged the
winch, swung out, dropped hand over hand into the lane, and raced up
it with all the terrors of the law at my heels.
CHAPTER VIII.
POOR TOM BOWLING.
Master Archibald's advice to me--to escape down to the water-side and
conceal myself on shipboard--though acute enough in its way, took no
account of certain difficulties none the less real because a soldier
would naturally overlook them. To hide in a ship's hold you must
first get on board of her unobserved, which in broad daylight is next
to impossible. Moreover, to reach Cattewater I must either fetch a
circuit through purlieus where every householder knew me and every
urchin was a nodding acquaintance, or make a straight dash close by
the spot where by this time Mr. Trapp would be getting anxious--if
indeed Southside Street and the Barbican were not already resounding
with the hue and cry. No: if friendly vessel were to receive and
hide me, she lay far off, across the heart of the town, amid the
shipping of the Dock. Yonder, too, Miss Plinlimmon resided.
If you think it absurd that my thoughts turned to her, whose weak
arms could certainly shield no one from the clutches of the law, I
beg you to remember my age, and that I had never known another
protector. She, at least, would hear me and never doubt my
innocence. She must hear, too, of Archie's danger.
That to reach her, even if I eluded pursuit to the Hospital gate, I
must run the gauntlet of Mr. George--who would assuredly ask
questions--and possibly of Mr. Scougall, scarcely occurred to me.
To reach her--to sob out my story in her arms and hear her voice
soothing me--this only I desired for the moment; and it seemed that
if I could only hear her voice speaking, I might wake and feel these
horrors dissolve like an evil dream. Meanwhile I ran.
But at the end of a lane leading into Treville Street, and as I leapt
aside to avoid colliding with the hind-wheels of a hackney-coach
drawn in there and at a standstill close by the kerb, to my
unspeakable fright I felt myself gripped by the jacket-collar.
"Hi! Bring-to and 'vast kicking, young coal-dust! Where're ye
bound, hey? Answer me, and take your black mop out of a gentleman's
weskit."
"To--to Dock, sir," I stammered. "Let me go, please: I'm in a
hurry."
My captor held me out at arm's length and eyed me. He was a sailor,
and rigged out in his best shore-going clothes--tarpaulin hat, blue
coat and waistcoat, and a broad leathern belt to hold up his duck
trousers, on which my sooty head had left its mark. He grinned at me
good-naturedly. I saw that he had been drinking.
"In a hurry? And what's your hurry about? Business?"
"Ye--es, sir."
"'Stonishing what spirit boys'll put into work nowadays! I've seen
boys run for a leg o' mutton, and likewise I've seen 'em run when
they've broken ship; but on the path o' duty, my sonny, you've the
legs of any boy in my ex-perience. Well, for once, you'll put
pleasure first. I'm bound for Dock or thereabouts myself, and under
convoy." He waved his hand up the street, where twelve or fifteen
hackney-coaches stood in line ahead.
"If you please, sir--"
He threw open the coach door. "Jump in. The frigate sets the rate
o' sailing. That's Bill."
I hesitated, rebellious.
"That's Bill. Messmate o' mine on the _Bedford_, and afore that on
the _Vesuvius_ bomb. There, sonny--don't stand gaping at me like a
stuck pig: I never expected ye to _know_ him! And now the time's
past, and ye'll go far afore finding a better. Bill Adams his name
was; but Bill to me, always, and in all weathers." Here for a moment
he became maudlin. "Paid off but three days agone, same as myself,
and now--cut down like a flower! He's the corpse, ahead, in the
first conveyance."
"Is this a funeral, sir?"
"Darn your eyes, don't it look like one? And after the expense I've
been to!" He paused, eyed me solemnly, opened his mouth, and pointed
down it with his forefinger. "Drink done it." His voice was
impressive. "Steer you wide of the drink, my lad; or else drop down
on it gradual. If drink must be your moorings, don't pick 'em up too
rash. 'A boiled leg o' mutton first,' says I, persuasive; '_and_
turnips,' and got him to Symonds's boarding-house for the very
purpose, Symonds being noted. And Symonds--I'll do him that
justice--says the same. Symonds says--"
But at this point a young woman--and pretty, too, though daubed with
paint--thrust her hat and head out of a window, three carriages away,
and demanded to know what in the name of Moses we were waiting for.
"Signals, my dear. The flagship's forra'd; and keep your eye lifting
that way, _if_ you please. I'm main glad you fell in with us," he
went on affably, turning to me; "because you round it up nicely.
Barring the sharks in black weepers, you're the only mourning-card in
the bunch, and I'll see you get a good position at the grave."
"Thank you, sir."
"Don't mention it. We're doin' our best. When poor Bill dropped
down in Symonds's"--he jerked his thumb towards the boarding-house
door--"Symonds himself was for turning everyone out. Very nice
feeling he showed, I will say. 'Damn it, here's a go!' he says;
'and the man looked healthy enough for another ten year, with proper
care!'--and went off at once to stop the fiddlers and put up the
shutters. But, of course, it meant a loss to him, the place being
full at the time; and I felt a sort of responsibility for having
introduced Bill. So I went after him and says I, 'This is a most
unforeseen occurrence.' 'Not a bit,' says he; 'accidents will
happen.' I told him that the corpse had never been a wet blanket;
it wasn't his nature; and I felt sure he wouldn't like the thought.
'If that's the case, says Symonds, 'I've a little room at the back
where he'd go very comfortable--quite shut off, as you might say.
We must send for the doctor, of course, and the crowner can sit on
him to-morrow--that is, if you feel sure deceased wouldn' think it
any disrespect.' 'Disrespect?' says I. 'You don't know Bill.
Why, it's what he'd arsk for!' So there we carried him, and I sent
for the undertaker same time as the doctor, and ordered it of oak;
and next morning, down I tramped to Dock and chose out a grave,
brick-lined, having heard him say often, 'Plymouth folk for wasting,
but Dock folk for lasting.' I won't say but what, between whiles,
we've been pretty lively at Symonds's; and I won't say--Hallo!
Here's more luck! Your servant, sir!"
He stepped forward--leaving me shielded and half hidden by the coach
door--and accosted a stranger walking briskly up the pavement towards
us with a small valise in his hand; a gentlemanly person of about
thirty-five or forty, in clerical suit and bands.
"Eh? Good-morning!" nodded the clergyman affably.
"Might I arsk where you're bound?" Then, after a pause, "My name's
Jope, sir; Benjamin Jope, of the _Bedford_, seventy-four, bo'sun's
mate--now paid off."
The clergyman, at first taken aback by the sudden question, recovered
his smile. "And mine, sir, is Whitmore--the Reverend John Whitmore--
bound just now in the direction of Dock. Can I serve you
thereabouts?"
Mr. Jope waved his hand towards the coach door. "Jump inside! Oh,
you needn't be ashamed to ride behind Bill!"
"But who is Bill?" The Rev. Mr. Whitmore advanced to the coach door
like a man in two minds. "Ah, I see--a funeral!" he exclaimed as a
mute advanced--assailed from each coach window, as he passed, with
indecorous obloquy--to announce that the _cortege_ was ready to
start. For the last two minutes heads had been popping out at these
windows--heads with dyed ringlets and heads with artificially
coloured noses--and their owners demanding to know if Ben Jope meant
to keep them there all day, if the corpse was expected to lead off
the ball, and so on; and I, cowering by the coach step, had shrunk
from their gaze as I flinched now under Mr. Whitmore's.
"Hallo!" said he, and gave me (as I thought) a searching look.
"What's this? A chimney-sweep?"
"If your Reverence will not object?"
I turned my eyes away, but felt that this clergyman was studying me.
"Not at all," said he quietly after a moment's pause. "Is he bound
for Dock, too?"
"He said so."
"Eh? Then we'll see that he gets there. After you, youngster!"
To my terror the words seemed charged with meaning, but I dared not
look him in the face. I clambered in and dropped into a seat with my
back to the driver. He placed himself opposite, nursing the valise
on his knees. Ben Jope came last and slammed-to the door after him.
"Way-ho!" he shouted. "Easy canvas!" and with that plumped down
beside me, and took off his tarpaulin hat, extracted a handkerchief,
and carefully wiped his brow and the back of his neck.
"Well!" he sighed. "Bill's launched, anyhow."
"Shipmate?" asked the clergyman.
"Messmate," answered Mr. Jope; and, opening his mouth, pointed down
it with his forefinger. "Not that a better fellow ever lived."
"I can quite believe it," said Mr. Whitmore sympathetically. He had
a pleasant voice, but somehow I did not want to catch his eye.
Instead I kept my gaze fastened upon the knees of his well-fitting
pantaloons. No divine could have been more correctly attired, and
yet there was a latent horsiness about his cut. I set him down for a
sporting parson from the country, and wondered why he wore clothes so
much superior to those of the Plymouth parsons known to me by sight.
"Just listen to that now!" exclaimed Mr. Jope. A cornet in one of
the coaches ahead had struck up _Tom Bowling_, and before we reached
the head of the street from coach after coach the funeral party broke
into song:
"Here, a sheer hulk, lies poor Tom Bowling,
The darling of his crew-ew;
No more he'll hear the te--empest how--wow--ling,
For death has broach'd him to.
His form was of the--e ma--hanliest beau--eau--ty--"
"I wouldn't say that, quite," observed Mr. Jope pensively. "To begin
with, he'd had the small-pox."
"_De gustibus nil nisi bonum_," Mr. Whitmore observed soothingly.
"What's that?"
"Latin."
"Wonderful! Would ye mind saying it again?"
The words were obligingly repeated.
"Wonderful! And what might be the meaning of it, making so bold?"
"It means 'Speak well of the dead.'"
"Well, we're doing of it, anyhow. Hark to 'em ahead there!"
The _cortege_, in fact, was attracting general attention. Folks on
the pavement halted to watch and grin as we went by: one or two,
catching sight of familiar faces within the coaches, waved their
handkerchiefs or shouted back salutations: and as we crawled out of
Old Town Street and past St. Andrew's Church a small crowd raised
three cheers for us. And still above it the cornet blared and the
mourners' voices rose uproarious:
"His friends were many and true-hearted,
His Poll was kind and fair;
And then he'd sing so blithe and jolly,
Ah, many's the time and oft!
But mirth is turned to melanchol--ol--y--
For Tom is gone aloft."
"Bill couldn't sing a note," Mr. Jope murmured: "but as you say,
sir--Would you oblige us again?" Again the Latin was repeated, and
he swung round upon me. "Think of that, now! Be you a scholar,
hey?--read, write and cipher? How would you spell 'sojer' for
instance?"
The question knocked the wind out of me, and I felt my face whitening
under the clergyman's eyes.
"Soldier--S.O.L.D.I.E.R," I managed to answer, but scarce above a
whisper.
"Very good: now make a rhyme to it."
"I--please, sir, I don't know any rhymes."
"Well, that's honest, anyway. Now I'll tell you why I asked."
He turned and addressed Mr. Whitmore. "I'm Cornish born, sir; from
Saltash, up across the river. Afore I went to sea there was a maid
livin' next door to us that wanted to marry me. Well, when she found
I wasn't to be had, she picked up with a fellow from the Victualling
Yard and married he, and came down to Dock to live. Man's name was
Babbage, and they hadn't been married six months afore he tumbled
into a brine-vat and was drowned. 'That's one narrow escape to me,'
I said. Next news I had was a letter telling me she'd a boy born,
and please would I stand godfather? I didn't like to say no, out of
respect to her family. So I wrote home from Gibraltar that I was
agreeable, only it must be done by proxy and she mustn't make it no
precedent. That must be ten years back; and what with one thing and
another I never set eyes 'pon mother or child till yesterday when--
having to run down to Dock to order Bill's grave--I thought 'twould
be neighbourly to drop 'em a visit. I found the boy growed to be a
terrible plain child, about the size of this youngster. I didn't
like the boy at all. So I says to his mother, 'I s'pose he's
clever?'--for dang it! thinks I, he must be clever to make up for
being so plain-featured as all that. 'Benjy'--she'd a-called him
Benjamin after me--'Benjy's the cleverest child for his age that ever
you see,' she says. 'Why,' says she, 'he'll pitch-to and make up a
rhyme 'pon anything!' 'Can he so?' I says, pulling a great
crown-piece out of my pocket (not that I liked the cut of his jib,
but the woman had been hinting about my being his godfather):
'Now, my lad, let's see if you're so gifted as your mother makes out.
There's a sojer now passin' the window. Make a rhyme 'pon he, and
you shall have the money.' What d'ye think that ghastly boy did?
'Aw, that's easy,' he says--"
'Sojer, sojer,
Diddy, diddy, dodger!'
"'Now hand me over the money,' he says. I could have slapped his
ear."
Almost as he ended his simple story, the procession came to a halt:
the strains of _Tom Bowling_ changed into noisy--and, on the part of
the ladies, very unladylike--expostulations. Mr. Jope started
forward and leaned out of the window.
"I think," said the Rev. Mr. Whitmore, "we have arrived at the
toll-gate."
"D'ye mean to say the sharks want to take toll on Bill?"
"Likely enough."
"On Bill? And him a-going to his long home? Here--hold hard!"
Mr. Jope leapt out into the roadway and disappeared.
Upon us two, left alone in the coach, there fell a dreadful silence.
Mr. Whitmore leaned forward and touched my knee; and I met his eye.
The face I looked into was thin and refined; clean-shaven and a
trifle pale as if with the habit of study. A slight baldness by the
temples gave the brow unusual height. His eyes I did not like at
all: instead of soothing the terror in mine they seemed to be
drinking it in and tasting it and calculating.
"I passed by the Barbican just now," said he; "and heard some
inquiries about a small chimney-sweep."
He paused, as if waiting. But I had no speech in me.
"It was a very strange story they were telling--a very dreadful and
strange story: still when I came upon you I saw, of course, it was
incredible. Boys of your size"--he hesitated and left the sentence
unfinished. "Still, you may have seen something--hey?"
Again I could not answer.
"At any rate," he went on, "I gave you the benefit of the doubt and
resolved to warn you. It was a mistake to run away: but the
mischief's done. How were you proposing to make off?"
"You--you won't give me up, sir?"
"No, for I think you must be innocent--of what they told me, at
least. I feel so certain of it that, as you see, my conscience
allows me to warn you. In the first place, avoid the Torpoint Ferry.
It will without doubt be watched. I should make for the docks, hide
until night, and try to stow myself on shipboard. Secondly"--he put
out a hand and softly unfastened the coach door--"I am going to leave
you. Our friend Mr. Jope is engaged, I see, in an altercation with
the toll-keeper. He seems a good-natured fellow. The driver
(it may help you to know) is drunk. Of course, if by ill-luck they
trace me out, to question me, I shall be obliged to tell what I know.
It amounts to very little: still--I have no wish to tell it.
One word more: get a wash as soon as you can, and by some means
acquire a clean suit of clothes. I may be then unable to swear to
you: may be able to say that your face is as unfamiliar to me as it
was--or as mine was to you--when Mr. Jope introduced us. Eh?"
His look was piercing.
"Thank you, sir."
He picked up his valise, nodded, and after a swift glance up the
street and around at the driver, to make sure that his head was
turned, stepped briskly out upon the pavement and disappeared around
the back of the coach.
CHAPTER IX.
SALTASH FERRY.
Apparently the hackney coachman was accustomed to difficulties with
the toll-gate; for he rested on the box in profoundest slumber,
recumbent, with his chin sunk on his chest; and only woke up--with a
start which shook the vehicle--when a black hearse with plumes waving
went rattling by us and back towards Plymouth.
A minute later Mr. Jope reappeared at the coach door, perspiring
copiously, but triumphant.
"Oh, it's been heavinly!" he announced. "Why, hallo! Where's his
Reverence?"
"He couldn't wait, sir. He--he preferred to walk."
"Eh? I didn't see 'en pass the toll-bar. That's a pity, too; for
I wanted to take his opinion. Oh, my son, it's been heavinly!
First of all I tried argyment and called the toll-man a son of a
bitch; and then he fetched up a constable, and, as luck would have
it, Nan--she's in the second coach--knew all about _him_; leastways,
she talked as if she did. Well, the toll-man stuck to his card of
charges and said he hadn't made the law, but it was threepence for
everything on four wheels. 'Four wheels?' I said. 'Don't talk so
weak! We brought nothing into the world and we can't take it out;
but you'd take the breeches off a Highlander,' I says. 'He's on four
wheels,' says the fellow, stubborn as ever. 'So was Elijah,' says I;
'but if you're so mighty particular, we'll try ye another way.'
I paid off the crew of the hearse, gave the word to cast loose, and
down we dumped poor Bill slap in the middle of the roadway.
'Now,' says I, 'we'll leave talking of wheels. What's your charge
for 'en on the flat?' 'Eight bearers at a ha'penny makes fourpence,'
he says. 'No, no, my son,' I says, 'there ain't a-going to be no
bearers. _He's_ happy enough if he stops here all night. You may
charge 'en as a covered conveyance, as I see you've a right to; but
the card says nothing about rate of drivin', except that it mustn't
be reckless; and, you may lay to it, Bill won't be that.' At first
the constable talked big about obstructing the traffic: but Nan was
telling the crowd such terrible things about his past that for very
shame he grew quiet, and the pair agreed that, by lashin' Bill a-top
of the first coach, we might pass him through _gratis_ as personal
luggage--Why, what's the boy cryin' for? It's all over now; and a
principle's a principle."
But still, as the squadron got under way again and moved on amid the
cheers of the populace, I sat speechless, dry-eyed, shaken with
dreadful sobs.
"Easy, my lad--don't start the timbers. In trouble--hey?"
I nodded.
"I thought as much, when I shipped ye. Sit up, and tell me; but
first listen to this. All trouble's big to a boy, but one o' your
age don't often do what's past mendin', if he takes it honest.
That's comfort, hey? Very well: now haul up and inspect damages, and
we'll see what's to be done."
"It's about a Jew, sir," I stammered at length.
He nodded. "Now we're making headway."
"He--he was murdered. I saw him--"
"Look here," said Mr. Jope, very grave but seemingly not astonished:
"hadn't you best get under the seat?"
"I--I didn't do it, sir. Really, I didn't."
"I'm not suggestin' it," said Mr. Jope. "Still, all circumstances
considered, I'd get under the seat."
"If you wish it, sir."
"I wouldn't go so far as to say _that_: but 'tis my advice." And
under the seat I crawled obediently. "Now, then," said he, with an
absurd air of one addressing vacancy; "if you didn' do it, who did?"
"I don't know, sir."
"Then where's your difficulty?"
"But I saw a man staring in at the window--it was upstairs in a room
close to the roof; and afterwards I found him on the roof, and he was
all of a tremble, and in two minds, so he said, about pitching me
over. I showed him the way down. If you please, sir," I broke off,
"you're not to tell anyone about this, whatever happens!"
"Eh? Why not?"
"Because--" I hesitated.
"Friend of yours?"
"Not a friend, sir. He's a young man, in the Army; and his aunt--she
used to be very kind to me. I ran away at first because I was
afraid: but they can't do anything to me, can they? I didn't find
the--the--the--Mr. Rodriguez, I mean--until he was dead. But if they
catch me I shall have to give evidence, and Mr. Archie--though I
don't believe he did it--"
"Belay there!" commanded Mr. Jope! "I'm beginning to see things
clearer, though I won't say 'tis altogether easy to follow ye yet.
Far as I can make out, you're not a bad boy. You ran away because
you were scared. Well, I don't blame ye for that. I never seen a
dead Jew myself, though I often wanted to. You won't go back if you
can help it, 'cos why? 'Cos you don't want to tell on a man: 'cos
his aunt's a friend o' yourn: and 'cos you don't believe he's guilty.
What's your name?"
"Harry, sir: Harry Revel."
"Well, then, my name's Ben Jope, and as such you'll call me.
I'm sorry, in a way, that it rhymes with 'rope,' which it never
struck me before in all these years, and wouldn't now but for
thinkin' 'pon that ghastly godson o' mine and how much better I
stomach ye. I promise nothing, mind: but if you'll keep quiet under
that seat, I'll think it over."
Certainly, having made my confession, I felt easier in mind as I lay
huddled under the seat, though it seemed to me that Mr. Jope took
matters lightly. For the squadron ahead had resumed the singing of
_Tom Bowling_ and he sat humming a bar or two here and there with
evident pleasure, and paused only to bow out of window and
acknowledge the cheers of the passers-by.
At the end of five minutes, however, he spoke aloud again.
"The first thing," he announced, "is to stay where you are.
Let me think, now--Who seen you? There's the parson: he's gone.
And there's the jarvey: he's drunk as a lord. Anyone else?"
"There was one of the young ladies that looked out of window."
"True: then 'tis too risky. When the company gets out, you'll have
to get out. Let the jarvey see you do it: the rest don't matter.
You can pretend to walk with us a little way, then slip back and
under the seat again--takin' care that this time the jarvey _don't_
see you. That's easy enough, eh?"
I assured him I could manage it.
"Then leave the rest to me, and bide still. I got to think of Bill,
now; and more by token here's the graveyard gate!"
He thrust the door open and motioned me to tumble out ahead of him.
As the rest of the funeral guests alighted, he worked me very
skilfully before him into the driver's view, having taken care to set
the coach door wide on the off side.
"It's understood that you wait, all o' ye?" said Mr. Jope to the
driver.
The man lifted a lazy eye. "Take your time," he said: "don't mind
me. I hope "--he stiffened himself suddenly--"I knows a gentleman
when I sees one."
Mr. Jope turned away and from that moment ignored my existence.
The coffin was unlashed and lowered from the leading coach; the
clergyman at the gate began to recite the sacred office, and the
funeral train, reduced to decorum by his voice, followed him as he
turned, and trooped along the path towards the mortuary chapel.
I moved with the crowd to its porch, drew aside to make way for a
lady in rouge and sprigged muslin, and slipped behind the chapel
wall. The far end of it hid me from the view of the coaches, and
from it a pretty direct path led to a gap in the hedge, and a stile.
Reaching and crossing this, I found myself in a by-lane leading back
into the high road. There were no houses with windows to overlook
me. I sauntered around at leisure, took the line of coaches in the
rear, and crawled back to my hiding-place--it astonished me with what
ease. Every driver sat on his box, and every driver slumbered.
The mystery of this was resolved when--it seemed an hour later; but
actually, I dare say, Bill's obsequies took but the normal twenty
minutes or so--Mr. Jope shepherded his flock back through the gates
and, red-eyed, addressed them while he distributed largess along the
line of jarveys.
"I thank ye, friends," said he in a muffled voice which at first I
attributed to emotion. "The fare home is paid to the foot of George
Street--I arranged that with the jobmaster, and this here little gift
is private, between me and the drivers, to drink Bill's health. And
now I'll shake hands." Here followed sounds of coughing and choking,
and he resumed in feeble gasping sentences, "Thank ye, my dear; I've
brought up the two guineas, but you've a-made me swallow my quid o'
baccy. Hows'ever, you meant it for the best. And that's what I had
a mind to say to ye all." His voice grew firmer--"You're a pleasant
lot, and we've spent the time very lively and sociable, and you done
this here last service to Bill in a way that brings tears to my eyes.
Still, if you won't mind my saying it, a little of ye lasts a long
time, and I'm going home to live clean. So here's wishing all well,
and good-bye!"
Not one of the party seemed to resent this dismissal. The women
laughed hilariously and called him a darling. There was a smacking
exchange of kisses; and the coaches, having been packed at length,
started for home to the strains of the cornet and a chorus of cheers.
Mr. Jope sprang in beside me, and leaning out of the farther window,
waved his neckerchief for a while, then pensively readjusted it, and
called to the driver--
"St. Budeaux!"
The driver, after a moment, turned heavily in his seat, and answered,
"Nonsense!"
"I tell ye, I want to drive to St. Budeaux, by Saltash Ferry."
"And _I_ tell _you_, 'Get out!' St. Budeaux? The idea!"
"Why, what's wrong with St. Budeaux?"
"Oh, I'm not goin' to _argue_ with you," said the driver. "I'm goin'
home."
And he began to turn his horse's head. Mr. Jope sprang out upon the
roadway. The driver, with sudden and unexpected agility, dropped
off--on the other side.
"Look here, it's grindin' the faces of the poor!" he pleaded,
breathing hard.
"It _will_ be," assented Mr. Jope grimly.
"I been up all night: at a ball."
"If it comes to that, so've I: at Symonds's."
"Mine was at Admiralty House," said the driver. "I wasn' dancin'."
"What about the horse?"
"The horse? the ho--Oh, I take your meanin'! The horse is all right:
he's a fresh one. Poor I may be," he announced inconsecutively,
"but I wouldn' live the life of one of them there women of fashion,
not for a million of money." He ruminated for a moment. "Did I
say a million?"
"You did."
"Well I don't wishaggerate. I don't, if you understand me,
wish--to--exaggerate: so we'll put it at half a million."
"All right: jump up!"
To my astonishment, no less than to Mr. Jope's (who had scarcely time
to skip back into the coach), the man scrambled up to his seat
without more ado, flicked his whip, and began to urge the horse
forward. At the end of five minutes or so, however, he pulled up
just as abruptly.
"Eh?" Mr. Jope put forth his head. "Ah, I see--public-house!"
He alighted, and entered; returned with a pot of porter in one hand
and a glass of brandy in the other; dexterously tipped half the
brandy into the porter, and handed up the mixture. The driver took
it down at one steady draught.
The pot and glass were returned and we jogged on again. We were now
well beyond the outskirts of Stoke and between dusty hedges over
which the honeysuckle trailed. Butterflies poised themselves and
flickered beside us, and the sun, as it climbed, drew up from the
land the fragrance of freshly mown hay and mingled it with the stuffy
odour of the coach. By and by we halted again, by another roadside
inn, and again Mr. Jope fetched forth and administered insidious
drink.
"If this is going to last," said the charioteer dreamily, "may I have
strength to see the end o't!"
I did not catch this prayer, but Mr. Jope reported it to me as he
resumed his seat, with an ill-timed laugh. The fellow, who had been
gathering up his reins, lurched round suddenly and gazed in through
the glass front.
"You was sayin'?" he demanded.
"Nothing," answered Mr. Jope hastily. "I was talking to myself,
that's all."
"The point is, Am I, or am I not, an objic of derision?"
"If you don't drive on this moment, I'll step around and punch your
head."
"Tha's all right. Tha's right as ninepence. It's not much I arsk--
only to have things clear." He drove on.
We halted at yet another public-house--I remember its name, the Half
a Face--and must have journeyed a mile or so beyond it when the end
came. We had locked wheels in the clumsiest fashion with a
hay-wagon; and the wagoner, who had quartered to give us room and to
spare, was pardonably wroth. Mr. Jope descended, pacified him, and
stepped around to the back of the coach, the hinder axle of which, a
moment later, I felt gently lifted beneath me and slewed clear of the
obstruction.
"My word, mister, but you've a tidy strength!" exclaimed the wagoner.
"No more than you, my son--if so much: 'tain't the strength, but the
application. That's 'Nelson's touch.' Ever heard of it?"
"I've heard of _him_, I should hope. Look y' here, mister, did you
ever know him? Honour bright, now!"
"Friends, my son: dear, dear friends! And the gentleman 'pon the
box, there, drunk some of the very rum he was brought home in.
He's never recovered it."
"And to think of my meeting you!"
"Ay, 'tis a small world," agreed Mr. Jope cheerfully: "like a cook's
galley, small and cosy and no time to chat in it. Now then, my
slumb'ring ogre!"
The driver, who from the moment of the mishap had remained comatose,
shook his reins feebly and we jogged forward. But this was his last
effort. At the next sharp bend in the road he lurched suddenly,
swayed for a moment, and toppled to earth with a thud. The horse
came to a halt.
Mr. Jope was out in a moment. He glanced up and down the road.
"Tumble out, youngster! There's no one in sight."
"Is--is he hurt?"
"Blest if _I_ know." He stooped over the prostrate body. "Hurt?" he
asked, and after a moment reported, "No, I reckon not: talkin' in his
sleep, more like--for the only word I can make out is 'Jezebel.'
That don't help us much, do it?" He scanned the road again.
"There's only one thing to do. I can't drive ye: I never steered yet
with the tiller lines in front--it al'ays seemed to me un-Christian.
We must take to the fields. I used to know these parts, and by the
bearings we can't be half a mile above the ferry. Here, through that
gate to the left!"
We left the man lying and his horse cropping the hedgerow a few paces
ahead; and struck off to the left, down across a field of young corn
interspersed with poppies. The broad estuary shone at our feet, with
its beaches uncovered--for the tide was low--and across its crowded
shipping I marked and recognised (for Mr. Trapp had often described
them to me) a line of dismal prison-hulks, now disused, moored head
to stern off a mudbank on the farther shore.
"Plain sailing, my lad," panted Mr. Jope, as the cornfield threw up
its heat in our faces. "See, yonder's Saltash!" He pointed up the
river to a small town which seemed to run toppling down a steep hill
and spread itself like a landslip at the base. "I got a sister
living there, if we can only fetch across; a very powerful woman;
widowed, and sells fish."
We took an oblique line down the hillside, and descended, some two or
three hundred yards below the ferry, upon a foreshore firm for the
most part and strewn with flat stones, but melting into mud by the
water's edge. A small trading ketch lay there, careened as the tide
had left her; but at no great angle, thanks to her flat-bottomed
build. A line of tattered flags, with no wind to stir them, led down
from the truck of either mast, and as we drew near I called Mr.
Jope's attention to an immense bunch of foxgloves and pink valerian
on her bowsprit end.
"Looks like a wedding, don't it?" said he; and turning up his clean
white trousers he strolled down to the water's edge for a closer
look. "Scandalous," he added, examining her timbers.
"What's scandalous?"
He pointed with his finger. "Rotten as touch"; and he pensively drew
out an enormous clasp-knife. "A man ought to be fined for treating
human life so careless. See here!"
He drove the knife at a selected spot, and the blade sank in to the
hilt.
From the interior, prompt on the stroke, arose a faint scream.
CHAPTER X.
I GO ON A HONEYMOON.
"Sure-ly I know that voice?" said Mr. Jope.
He drew out the knife reflectively. It relieved me to see that no
blood dyed the blade.
"Oh, Mr. Jope, I was afraid you'd stabbed him!"
"'Tisn't a him, 'tis a her. I touched somebody up, and that's the
truth."
"Ahoy there!" said a voice immediately overhead; and we looked up.
A round-faced man was gazing down on us from the tilted bulwarks.
"You might ha' given us notice," he grumbled.
"I knew 'twas soft, but not so soft as all that," Mr. Jope explained.
"Got such a thing as a scrap o' chalk about ye?"
"No."
The round-faced man felt in his pocket and tossed down a piece.
"Mark a bit of a line round the place, will ye? I'll give it a lick
of paint afore the tide rises. It's only right the owner should have
it pointed out to him."
"Belong to these parts?" asked Mr. Jope affably, having drawn the
required circle. "I don't seem to remember your face."
"No?" The man seemed to think this out at leisure. "I was married
this morning," he said at length with an air of explanation.
"Wish ye joy. Saltash maid?"
"Widow. Name of Sarah Treleaven."
"Why that's my sister!" exclaimed Mr. Jope.
"Is it?" The round-faced man took the news without apparent surprise
or emotion. "Well, I'm married to her, any way."
"Monstrous fine woman," Mr. Jope observed cheerfully.
"Ay; she's all that. It seems like a dream. You'd best step on
board: the ladder's on t'other side."
As we passed under the vessel's stern I looked up and read her name--
_Glad Tidings, Port of Fowey_.
"I've a-broken it to her," our host announced, meeting us at the top
of the ladder. "She says you're to come down."
Down the companion we followed him accordingly and so into a small
cabin occupied--or, let me rather say, filled--by the stoutest woman
it has ever been my lot to meet. She reclined--in such a position
as to display a pair of colossal feet, shoeless, clothed in thick
worsted stockings--upon a locker on the starboard side: and no one,
regarding her, could wonder that this also was the side towards
which the vessel listed. Her broad recumbent back was supported by a
pile of seamen's bags, almost as plethoric as herself and containing
(if one might judge from a number of miscellaneous articles
protruding from their distended mouths) her bridal outfit.
Unprepared as she was for a second visitor in the form of a small
chimney-sweep, she betrayed no astonishment; but after receiving her
brother's kiss on either cheek bent a composed gaze on me, and so
eyed me for perhaps half a minute. Her features were not uncomely.
"O.P.," she addressed her husband. "Ask him, Who's his friend?"
"Who's your friend?" asked the husband, turning to Mr. Jope.
"Chimney-sweep," said Mr. Jope; "leastways, so apprenticed, as I
understand."
The pair gazed at me anew.
"I asked," said the woman at length, "because this is a poor place
for chimbleys."
"He's in trouble," Mr. Jope explained; "in trouble--along o' killing
a Jew."
"Oh no, Mr. Jope!" I cried. "I didn't--"
"Couldn't," interrupted his sister shortly, and fell into a brown
study. "Constables after him?" she asked.
Mr. Jope nodded.
Her next utterance struck me as irrelevant, to say the least of it.
"Ben, 'tis high time you followed O.P.'s example."
"Meaning?" queried Ben.
"O, Onesimus. P, Pengelly. Example, marriage. There's the
widow Babbage, down to Dock: she always had a hankering for you.
You're neglecting your privileges."
"Ever seen that boy of hers?" asked Ben in an aggrieved voice.
"No, of course you haven't, or you wouldn't suggest it. And why
marry me up to a widow?"
"O.P.," said the lady, "tell him you prefer it."
"I prefer it," said Mr. Pengelly.
"Oh," explained Ben, "present company always excepted, o' course.
I wish you joy."
"Thank ye," the lady answered graciously. "You shall drink the same
by and by in a dish o' tea; which I reckon will suit ye best this
morning," she added eyeing him. "O.P., put on the kettle."
Ben Jope winced and attempted to turn the subject. "What's your
cargo, this trip?" he asked cheerfully.
"I didn't write," she went on, ignoring the question. "O.P. took me
so sudden."
"Oh, Sarah!" Mr. Pengelly expostulated.
"You did; you know you did, you rogue!"
Mr. Pengelly took her amorous glance and turned to us. "It seems
like a dream," he said, and went out with the kettle.
The lady resumed her business-like air. "We sail for Looe next tide.
It's queer now, your turning up like this."
"Providential. I came o' purpose, though, to look ye up."
"I might ha' been a limpet."
"Eh?"
"By the way you prised at me with that knife o' yours. And you call
it Providence."
Ben grinned. "Providence or no, you'll get this lad out o' the way,
Sarah?"
"H'm?" She considered me. "I can't take him home to Looe."
"Why not?"
"Folks would talk," she said modestly.
"'Od rabbit it!" exclaimed Ben. "He's ten year old; and you were
saying just now that the man took ye sudden!"
"Well, I'll see what can be done: but on conditions."
"Conditions?"
"Ay, we'll talk that over while he's cleanin' himself." She lifted
her voice and called, "O.P., is that water warm?"
"Middlin'," came O.P.'s voice from a small cuddy outside.
"Then see to the child and wash him. Put him inside your
foul-weather suit for the time, and then take his clothes out on the
beach and burn 'em. That seam'll be the better for a lick of pitch
afore the tide rises, and you can use the same fire for the caldron."
So she dismissed me; and in the cuddy, having washed myself clean of
soot, I was helped by Mr. Pengelly into a pair of trousers which
reached to my neck, and a seaman's guernsey, which descended to my
knees. My stockings I soaped, scrubbed, wrung out and laid across
the companion rail to dry: but, as it turned out, I was never to use
them or my shoes again. My sweep's jumper, waistcoat, and breeches
Mr. Pengelly carried off, to burn them.
All this while Ben Jope and his sister had been talking earnestly: I
had heard at intervals the murmur of their voices through the
partition; but no distinct words save once, when Mrs. Pengelly called
out to her husband to keep an eye along the beach and report the
appearance of constables. Now so ludicrous was the figure I cut in
my borrowed clothes that on returning to the cabin I expected to be
welcomed with laughter. To my surprise, Ben Jope arose at once with
a serious face and shook me by the hand.
"Good-bye, my lad," he said. "She makes it a condition."
"You're not leaving me, Mr. Jope!"
"Worse'n that. I'm a-goin to marry the widow Babbage."
"Oh, ma'am!" I appealed.
"It'll do him good," said Mrs. Pengelly.
"I honestly think, Sarah," poor Ben protested, "that just now you're
setting too much store by wedlock altogether."
"It's my conditions with you; and you may take it or leave it, Ben."
His sister was adamant, and he turned ruefully to go.
"And you're doing this for me, Mr. Jope!" I caught his hand.
"Don't 'ee mention it. Blast the child!" He crammed his tarpaulin
hat on his head. "I don't mean you, my lad, but t'other one.
If he makes up a rhyme 'pon me, I'll--I'll--"
Speech failed him. He wrung my hand, staggered up the companion, and
was gone.
"It'll be the making of him," said Mrs. Pengelly with composure.
"I don't like the woman myself, but a better manager you wouldn't
meet."
She remembered presently that Ben had departed without his promised
dish of tea, and this seemed to suggest to her that the time had
arrived for preparing a meal. With singular dexterity and almost
without shifting her posture she slipped one of the seamen's bags
from somewhere beneath her shoulders, drew it upon her lap, and
produced a miscellaneous feast--a cheek of pork, a loaf, a saffron
cake; a covered jar which, being opened, diffused the fragrance of
marinated pilchards; a bagful of periwinkles, a bunch of enormous
radishes, a dish of cream wrapped about in cabbage-leaves, a basket
of raspberries similarly wrapped; finally, two bottles of stout.
"To my mind," she explained as she set these forth on the table
beside her, each accurately in its place, and with such economy
of exertion that only one hand and wrist seemed to be moving,
"for my part, I think a widow-woman should be married quiet. I don't
know what _your_ opinion may be?"
I thought it wise to say that her opinion was also mine.
"It took place at eight o'clock this morning." She disengaged a pin
from the front of her bodice, extracted a periwinkle from its shell,
ate it, sighed, and said, "It seems years already. I gathered these
myself, so you may trust 'em." She disengaged another pin and handed
it to me. "We meant to be alone, but there's plenty for three.
Now you're here, you'll have to give a toast--or a sentiment," she
added. She made this demand in form when O.P. appeared, smelling
strongly of pitch, and taking his seat on the locker opposite, helped
himself to marinated pilchards.
"But I don't know any sentiments, ma'am."
"Nonsense. Didn't they learn you any poetry at school?"
Most happily I bethought me of Miss Plinlimmon's verses in my
Testament--now alas! left in the Trapps' cottage and lost to me; and
recited them as bravely as I could.
"Ah!" sighed Mrs. Pengelly, "there's many a true word spoken in jest.
'Where shall we be in ten years' time?' Where indeed?"
"Here," her husband cheerfully suggested, with his mouth full.
"Hush, O.P.! You never buried a first."
She demanded more, and I gave her Wolfe's last words before Quebec
(signed by him in Miss Plinlimmon's Album).
"'They run!'--but who? 'The Frenchmen!' Such
Was the report conveyed to the dying hero.
'Thank Heaven!' he cried, 'I thought as much.'
In Canada the glass is frequently below zero."
On hearing the author's name and my description of Miss Plinlimmon,
she fell into deep thought.
"I suppose, now, she'd look higher than Ben?"
I told her that, so far as I knew, Miss Plinlimmon had no desire to
marry.
"She'd look higher, with her gifts, you may take my word for it."
But a furrow lingered for some time on Mrs. Pengelly's brow, and
(I think) a doubt in her mind that she had been too precipitate.
The meal over, she composed herself to slumber; and Mr. Pengelly and
I spent the afternoon together on deck, where he smoked many pipes
while I scanned the shore for signs of pursuit. But no: the tide
rose and still the foreshore remained deserted. Above us the ferry
plied lazily, and at whiles I could hear the voices of the
passengers. Nothing, even to my strained ears, spoke of excitement;
and yet, in the great town beyond the hill, murder had been done and
men were searching for me. So the day dragged by.
Towards evening, as the vessel beneath us fleeted and the deck
resumed its level, Mr. Pengelly began to uncover the mainsail.
I asked him if he expected any crew aboard? For surely, thought I,
he could not work this ketch of forty tons or so single-handed.
He shook his head. "There was a boy, but I paid him off. Sarah
takes the helm from this night forth. You wouldn't believe it, but
she can swig upon a rope too: and as for pulling an oar--"
He went on to tell me that she had been rowing a pair of paddles when
his eye first lit on her: and I gathered that the courtship had been
conducted on these waters under the gaze of Saltash, the male in one
boat pursuing, the female eluding him in another, for long
indomitable, but at length gracefully surrendering.
My handiness with the ropes, when I volunteered to help in hoisting
sail, surprised and even perplexed him. "But I thought you was a
chimney-sweeper?" he insisted. I told him then of my voyages with
Mr. Trapp, yet without completely reassuring him. Hitherto he had
taken me on my own warrant, and Ben's, without a trace of suspicion:
but henceforth I caught him eyeing me furtively from time to time,
and overheard him muttering as he went about his preparations.
As he had promised, when the time came for hauling up our small
anchor, Mrs. Pengelly emerged from the companion hatch like a _geni_
from a bottle. She bore two large hunches of saffron cake and handed
one to each of us before moving aft to uncover the wheel.
CHAPTER XI.
FLIGHT.
The sails drew as we got the anchor on board; and by the time O.P.
and I had done sluicing the hawser clean of the mud it brought up, we
were working down the Hamoaze with a light and baffling wind, but
carrying a strong tide under us. Evening fell with a warm yellow
haze: the banks slipping past us grew dim and dimmer: here and there
a light shone among the long-shore houses. I felt more confident,
and no longer concealed myself as we tacked under the sterns of the
great ships at anchor or put about when close alongside.
As we cleared Devil's Point and had our first glimpse of the grey
line where night was fast closing down on open sea, I noted a certain
relaxation in Mr. Pengelly, as if he too had been feeling the strain.
He began to chat with me. The wind, he said, was backing and we
might look for this spell of weather to break up before long.
Once past the Rame we should be right as ninepence and might run down
the coast on a soldier's wind: it would stiffen a bit out yonder
unless he was mistaken. He pulled out his pipe and lit it.
Aft loomed the bulk of Mrs. Pengelly at the wheel. Save for a call
now and again to warn us that the helm was down, to put about, she
steered in silence. And she steered admirably.
We had opened the lights of Cawsand and were heading in towards it on
the port tack when, as O.P. smoked and chatted and I watched the
spark of the Eddystone growing and dying, her voice reached us, low
but distinct.
"There's a boat coming. Get below, boy!"
Sure enough as I scrambled for the hatchway in a flutter, someone
hailed us out of the darkness.
"Ahoy, there!"
"Ahoy!" O.P. called back, after a moment, into the darkness.
"What's your name?"
"The _Glad Tidings_, of Looe, and thither bound. Who be you?"
"Water-guard. Is that you speaking, Mr. Pengelly?"
"Ay, sure. Anything the matter?"
"Seen such a thing as the body of a young chimney-sweep on your way
down? Age, ten or thereabouts. There's one missing."
"You don't say so! Drowned?"
His wife having put about, Mr. Pengelly obligingly hauled a sheet or
two to windward, and brought the _Glad Tidings_ almost to a
standstill, allowing the boat to come close alongside.
"Drowned?" he asked again.
"Worse than that," said the officer's voice (and it sounded
dreadfully close); "there's been murder committed, and the child was
in the house at the time. The belief is, he's been made away with."
"Save us all! Murder? Whereto?"
"On the Barbican--an old Jew there, called Rodriguez. Who's that
you've got at the helm?"
"Missus."
"Never knew ye was married."
"Nor did I, till this mornin'."
"Eh? Wish ye luck, I'm sure; and you, ma'am, likewise!"
"Thank ye, Mr. Tucker," answered the lady. "The same to you and many
of 'em--which by that I don't mean wives."
"Good Lord, is that _you_, Sally? Well, I'm jiggered! And I owe you
ninepence for that last pair of flatfish you sold me!"
"Tenpence," said Mrs. Pengelly. "But I can trust a gentleman.
Where d'ye say this here murder was committed?"
"Barbican."
"I don't wonder at anything happening there. They're a stinking lot.
Why don't ye s'arch the shipping there and in Cattewater?"
"We've been s'arching all day. And now the constables are off
towards Stoke--it seems a child answering all particulars was seen in
that direction this morning."
"That don't look like being made away with."
"In a case like this," answered Mr. Tucker sagely, "as often as not
there's wheels within wheels. Well, I won't detain ye. Good-night,
friends!"
"Good-night!"
I heard the creak of thole-pins as the rowers gave way, and the wash
of oars as the boat shot off into the dark. Mr. Pengelly sent me a
low whistle and I crept forth.
"Hear what they said?" he asked.
"They--they didn't give much trouble."
"Depends what you call trouble." He seemed slightly hurt in his
feelings, and added, with asperity and obvious truth, "Carry it off
how you will, a honeymoon's a honeymoon, and a man doesn't expect to
be interrupted with questions about a sweep's apprentice."
"Stand by!" cautioned the voice aft, low and firm as before.
"By the sound of it they've stopped rowing."
"If they come on us again, we're done for. That Tucker's a fool, but
I noticed one or two of the men muttering together."
"Sounds as if they were putting about. Can the boy swim?" asked Mrs.
Pengelly anxiously.
"I'll bet he can't."
"But I can," said I. "If you'll put the helm down, ma'am, and hold
in, I think she'll almost fetch Penlee Point. I don't want to get
you into trouble."
We all listened. And sure enough the sound of oars was approaching
again out of the darkness.
"Mr. Pengelly can lower me overside," I urged, "as soon as we're near
shore. It's safest in every way."
"So best," she answered shortly, and again put the _Glad Tidings_
about. I began to pluck off my clothes.
The boat was evidently watching us: for, dark as the evening had
grown, almost as soon as our helm went down the sound of oars ceased
astern--to begin again a few seconds later, but more gently, as if
someone had given the order for silence. O.P. peered under the slack
of the mainsail.
"There she is!" he muttered. "Tucker will be trying to force her
alongside under our lee." He picked up and uncoiled a spare rope.
"You'd best take hold o' this and let me slip ye over the starboard
side, forra'd there, as she goes about. Bain't afeard, hey?"
"I'm not afraid of anything but being caught, sir."
"Sarah will take her in close: there's plenty water."
"O.P.," said the voice aft.
"My angel."
"Tell 'en he's a good boy, and I wouldn' mind having one like him."
"You're a good boy," said O.P., and covered the remainder of the
message with a discreet cough. "Seems to me Tucker's holdin' off a
bit," he added, peering again under the sail. "Wonder what his game
is?"
But I was already stripped, and already the high land loomed over us.
Down went the helm again, and "Now's your time," muttered O.P. as we
scrambled forward to cast off sheets. Amid the flapping of her head
sails as she hung for a moment or two in stays, I slipped overside
and took the water easily while the black mass of her stern swung
slowly round and covered me from view of the boat. Then, as the tall
side began to gather way and slip by me, I cast a glance towards land
and dived.
I came to the surface warily and trod water whilst I spied for the
boat, which--as I reckoned--must be more than a gunshot distant.
The sound of oars guided me, and I dived again in a terror. For she
had not turned about to follow the ketch, but was heading almost
directly towards me, as if to cut me off from the shore.
My small body was almost bursting when I rose for air and another
look. The boat had not altered her course, and I gasped with a new
hope. What if, after all, she were not pursuing me? I let my legs
sink and trod water. No: I had not been spied. She was pointing
straight for the shore. But what should take a long-boat, manned (as
I made out) by a dark crowd of rowers and passengers, at this hour to
this deserted spot? Why was she not putting-in for Cawsand, around
the point? And did she carry the water-guard? Was this Tucker's
boat after all, or another?
Still treading water, I heard her nose take the ground, and presently
the feet of men shuffling, as they disembarked, over loose stones:
then a low curse following on a slip and a splash. "Who's that
talking?" a voice inquired, quick and angry. "Sergeant! Take that
man's name." But apparently the sergeant could not discover him.
The footfalls grew more regular and seemed to be mounting the cliff,
along the base of which, perhaps a hundred yards from shore, the tide
was now sweeping me. I gave myself to it and noiselessly, little by
little working towards land, was borne out of hearing.
Another ten minutes and my feet touched bottom. I pulled myself out
upon a weed-covered rock, and along it to a slate-strewn foreshore
overhung by a low cliff of shale, grey and glimmering in the
darkness. But even in the darkness a ridge of harder rock showed me
a likely way. I remembered that the cliff hereabouts was of no great
height and scalable in a score of places. Very cautiously, and
sometimes sitting and straddling the ridge while my fingers sought a
new grip, I mounted to the edge of a heathery down; and there, after
pricking myself sorely among the furze-bushes that guarded it, found
a passage through and cast myself at full length on the short turf.
For a while I lay and panted, flat on my back, staring up at the
stars: for the wind had chopped about and was now drawing gently off
shore, clearing the sky. But, though gentle, it had an edge of chill
which by and by brought me to my feet again. Far out on the dark
waters of the Sound glimmered the starboard light of the _Glad
Tidings_, and it seemed to me that she was heading in for shore.
Had the Pengellys too discovered that the boat was not the
water-guard's? And was O.P. working the ketch back to give me a
chance of rejoining her? Else why was she not slackening sheets and
running? Vain hope! I suppose that the new slant of wind took some
time in reaching her; for, just as I was preparing to creep back
between the furze-whins and scramble down to the foreshore again, the
green light was quenched. She had altered her helm and was clearing
the Sound.
I dared not hail her. Indeed, had I risked it, the odds were against
my voice carrying so far, to be recognised. And while I stood and
searched the darkness into which she had disappeared, my ear caught
again the muffled tramp of the soldiers, this time advancing towards
me. I waited no longer, but started running for dear life up the
shoulder of the down.
The swim and the chill breeze had numbed my legs and arms. After a
few hundred yards, however, I felt life coming back to them, and I
ran like a hare. I was stark naked, and here and there my feet
struck a heather root pushed above the turf, or wounded themselves on
low-lying sprouts of furze; but as my eyes grew used to the dark
sward I learned to avoid these. So close the night hung around me
that even on the sky-line I had no fear of being spied. I crossed
the ridge and tore down the farther slope; stumbled through a muddy
brook and mounted another hillside. My heart was drumming now, but
terror held me to it--over this second ridge and downhill again.
I supposed myself but half-way down this slope, or only a little
more, when in springing aside to avoid a low bush I missed footing
altogether; went hurling down into night, dropped plumb upon another
furze-bush--a withered one--and heard and felt it snap under me;
struck the cliff-side, bruising my hip, and slid down on loose stones
for another few yards. As I checked myself, sprawling, and came to a
standstill, some of these stones rolled on and splashed into water
far below.
For a minute or so, at full length on this treacherous bed, I could
pluck up no heart to move. Then, inch by inch at first, I drew
myself up to the broken bush and found beside it a flat ledge, smooth
and grassy, which led inland and downwards. I think it must have
been a sheep-track. I kept to it on hands and knees, and it brought
me down to the head of a small cove where a faint line of briming
showed the sea's edge rippling on a beach of flat grey stones.
My hip was hurting me, and I could run no farther. I groped along
the base of the eastern cliff and crawled into a shallow cave close
by a pile of seaweed which showed the high mark of the tide now
receding. With daylight I might discover a better hiding-place.
Meanwhile I snuggled down and drew a coverlet of seaweed over me for
warmth.
CHAPTER XII.
I FALL AMONG SMUGGLERS.
I awoke to a most curious sensation. The night was still black and
only the ridge of the cliff opposite showed, by the light of the many
stars, its dull outline above; yet I felt that the whole beach had
suddenly become crowded with people--that they were moving stealthily
about me, whispering, picking their way among the loose stones,
hunting me and yet hushing their voices as though themselves afraid.
At first, you may be sure--wakened as I was from sleep--I had no
doubt but that this unseen band of folk was after me. All that
followed my awakening passed so quickly that I cannot separate dreams
now from guesses nor apprehensions from realities. I do remember,
however, that, whereas the soldiers from whom I had run had been on
foot, my first fears were of a pursuit by cavalrymen, and therefore
it seems likely that some sound of horses' trampling must have set
them in train: but, though I strained my ears, they detected nothing
of the sort--only a subdued murmur, as of human voices, down by the
water's edge, and now and again the cautious crunch of a footstep
upon shingle. Even this I had not heard but for the extreme quiet on
the sea under the off-shore wind.
Gradually, by the light of the stars, I separated from the
surrounding shadows that of a whole mass of people inert and darkly
crowded there: and then--almost as I guessed their business--the
cliff above me shot up a flame; and their forms and their dismayed
upturned faces stood out distinct in the glare of it.
"Loose the horses and clear!" yelled someone; and another voice deep
and wrathful began to curse, but was drowned by a stampede of hoofs
upon the shingle. Straight forth from the sea--or so it looked to
me--some twenty or thirty naked horses, without rider, bit, or
bridle, broke from the crowd and came plunging up the beach at a
gallop. They were met by a roar from the cove-head, and with that a
line of glittering helmets and cuirasses sprang out of the night and
charged past me.
"Dragoons! Dragoons!"
As the yell reached me from the waterside and the men there scattered
and ran, I saw the shock of the double charge--the flame overhead
lighting up every detail of it. The riderless horses, though they
opened and swerved, neither turned tail nor checked their pace, but
heading suddenly towards the left wing of the troop went through it
as water through a gate, the dragoons either vainly hacking at them
with their sabres, or leaning from their saddles and as vainly
attempting to grip the brutes. Grip there was none to be had.
These were smugglers' horses, clipped to the skin, with houghed
manes, and tails and bodies sleek with soft soap. Nor did the
dragoons waste more trouble upon them, but charged forward and down
upon the crowd at the water's edge.
And as they charged I saw--but could not believe--that on a sudden
the crowd had vanished. A moment before they had been jostling,
shouting, cursing. They were gone now like ghosts. The light still
flared overhead. It showed no boat beyond the cove--only the
troopers reaching right across it in an irregular line, as each man
had been able to check his horse--the most of them on the verge of
the shingle, but many floundering girth-deep, and one or two even
swimming. The Riding Officer, who had followed them, was bawling and
pointing with his whip towards the cliff--at what I could not tell.
I had no time to wonder: for an unholy din broke out, on the same
instant, at the head of the beach. A couple of the smugglers' horses
had been hurled over by the dragoons' impact, and lay, hurt beyond
recovery, lashing out across the shingle with their heels. A third
had gone down under a sabre-cut, but had staggered up and was lobbing
after his comrades at a painful canter. They had traversed the heavy
shingle, reached the harder stones at the cove's head and were
sailing away at stretched gallop when a volley rang out from the
shadow of the cliff there, and the scream of more than one mingled
with fresh shouting. At that moment, and just before the flame above
me sank and died almost as swiftly as it had first shot up, a
soldier--not a dragoon, but a man in red coat and white breeches--ran
forward and sprang at the girth of the wounded horse, which had
stumbled again. He did the wise thing--for a single girth was these
horses' only harness: but whether he caught it or not I could not
tell. Ten or a dozen soldiers followed, to help him. And, the next
instant, total darkness came down on the scene like a shutter.
It did not last long. The red-coats, it turned out, had brought
lanterns, and now, at a shouted order from their commanding officer
answering the call of the dragoon officer below, began to light them.
They meant, I doubted not, to make a strict search of the cliffs;
and, if they did--my cave being but a shallow one--there was no hope
for me. But just then a dismounted trooper came running up the
beach, his scabbard scraping the shingle as he went by: and his first
words explained the mystery of the crowd's disappearance.
"Where's your officer commanding?" he panted. "The devils have got
away into the next cove through a kind of hole in the cliff--a kind
of archway so far as we make out. They've blocked it with stones and
posted three-four men there, threatening sudden death. By their own
account they're armed. Major Dilke's holding them to parley, and
wants the loan of a lantern while you, sir, march your men round and
take the gang in the rear. They reckon they've none but us to deal
with."
The infantry officer grunted that he understood, sent the trooper
back with a lantern, and quietly formed up and marched off his
company. From my hiding-place I caught scraps of the parley at the
lower end of the beach--or rather of Major Dilke's share in it; for
the smugglers answered him through a tunnel, and I could only hear
their voices mumbling in response to the threats which he flung forth
on the wide night. He was in no sweet temper, having been cheated of
a rich haul: for the flare had, of course, warned away the expected
boat, and I supposed that some of the red-coats had been dispatched
at once to search the headland for the man who lit it. Revenge was
now the Major's game, and, by his tune, he meant to have it.
But while I lay listening, a stone trickled from the cliff overhead
and plumped softly upon the seaweed at the mouth of my cave. It was
followed by a rush of small gravel (had the Major not, at the moment,
been declaiming at his loudest, his men must surely have heard it):
and this again by the plumb fall of a heavy body which still lay for
a full five seconds after alighting, and then emitted a groan so
eloquent that it raised the roots of my hair.
I held my breath. More seconds passed, and the body groaned again,
still more dolefully.
We were within three yards of one another; and, friend or foe,
if he continued to lie and groan like this for long, flesh and blood
could not stand it.
"Are you hurt?" I summoned up voice to ask.
"The devil!" I had feared that he would scream. But he sat up--
I saw his shoulders fill the mouth of the cave between me and the
starlight. By his attitude he was peering at me through the
darkness. "Who are you?"
"If you please, sir, I'm a boy."
"Glad to hear it. I took you at first for one of those cursed
soldiers. Hiding, eh?"
"Yes, sir."
"So am I: but this is a mighty poor place for it. They may be here
any moment with their lanterns: we had better cut across while
everything's dark. Gad!" he said, throwing his head back as if to
stare upwards, "I must have dropped twenty feet. Wonder if I've
broken anything?" He stood up, and appeared to be feeling his limbs
carefully. "Sound as a bell!" he announced. "Come along, youngster:
we'll get out of this first and talk afterwards."
He put out a hand, seeking for mine; but, missing it, touched my ribs
with his open palm and drew it away sharply.
"Good Lord, the boy's naked!"
"I've been swimming," said I.
"All right. Get out of this first and talk afterwards, that's the
order. There's a rug in my tilbury, if we can only reach it. Now
then, follow me close--and gently over the shingle!"
Like shadows we stole forth and across the cove. No one spied us,
and, thanks perhaps to Major Dilke's sustained oratory, no one heard.
"There's a track hereabouts," my new friend whispered as we gained
the farther cliff. "This looks like it--no--yes, here it is!
Close after me, sonny, and up we go. Surely, 'tis Robinson Crusoe
and man Friday with a touch of something else thrown in--can't think
what, for the moment, unless 'tis the scaling of Plataea. Ever read
Thucydides?"
"No, sir."
"He's a nigger. He floored me at Brasenose: but I bear the old cock
no malice. Now you wouldn't think I was a University man, eh?"
"No, sir." I had not the least notion of his meaning.
"I am, though; and, what's more, I'm a Justice of the Peace and
Deputy-Lieutenant for the county of Cornwall. Ever heard of Jack
Rogers of Brynn?"
Once more I had to answer "No, sir."
"Then, excuse me, but where in thunder do you come from?" He halted
and confronted me in the path. This was a facer, for the words
"Justice of the Peace" had already set me quaking.
"If you please, sir, I'd rather not tell."
"No, I dare say not," he replied magisterially. "It's my fate to get
into these false positions. Now there was Josh Truscott of
Blowinghouse--Justice of the Peace and owned two thousand acres--what
you might call a neat little property. _He_ never allowed it to
interfere, and yet somehow he carried it off. Do I make myself
plain?"
"Not very, sir."
"Well, for instance, one day he was expecting company. There was a
fountain in the middle of the lawn at Blowinghouse, and a statue of
Hercules that his old father had brought home from Italy and planted
in the middle of it. Josh couldn't bear that statue--said the
muscles were all wrong. So, if you please, he takes it down, dresses
himself in nothing at all--same as you might be, bare as my palm--and
a Justice of the Peace, mind you--and stands himself in the middle of
the fountain, with all the guests arriving. Not an easy thing to
pass off, and it caused a scandal: but folks didn't seem to mind.
'It was Truscott's way,' they said: 'after all, he comes of a clever
family, and we hope his son will be better.' A man wants character
to carry off a thing like that."
I agreed that character must have been Mr. Truscott's secret.
"Now _I_ couldn't do that for the life of me," Mr. Rogers sighed, and
chuckled over another reminiscence. "Josh had a shindy once with a
groom. The fellow asked for a rise in wages. 'You couldn't have
said anything more hurtful to my feelings,' Josh told him, and
knocked him down. There was a hole in one of his orchards where
they'd been rooting up an old apple-tree. He put the fellow in that,
tilled him up to his neck in earth, and kept him there till he
apologised. Not at all an easy thing for a Justice of the Peace to
pass off: but, bless you, folks said that he came of a clever county
family, and hoped his son would be better. The fellow didn't even
bring an action." Mr. Rogers broke off suddenly, and seemed to
meditate a new train of thought. "Hang it!" he exclaimed. "I
believe 'tis a hundred pounds. I must look it up when I get back."
"What is a hundred pounds, sir?" I asked.
"Penalty for showing a coast-light without authority. Lydia laid me
ten pounds I hadn't the pluck, though; and that'll bring it down to
ninety at the worst. She'd a small fortune in this trip, too, which
she stood to lose: but, as it turns out, I've saved that for her.
Oh, she's a treasure!"
"Did you light the flare?" I began to see that I had fallen in with
an original, and that he might be humoured.
"Eh?--to be sure I did! 'Slocked away the man in charge by mimicking
Pascoe's voice--he's the freighter, and talks like a man with no roof
to his mouth. I'm a pretty good mimic, though I say it. Nothing
easier, after that. You see, Lydia had laid me ten pounds that as a
Justice of the Peace I hadn't wit nor pluck to spoil her next run;
honestly, that is. She knows I wouldn't blow on her for worlds.
Oh, we understand one another! Now you and I'll go off and call on
her, and hear what she says about it. For in a way I've won, and in
a way I've not. I stopped the run, but also I've saved the cargo for
her: for the devil a notion had I that the soldiers had wind of it;
and, but for the flare, the boats would have run in and lost every
tub. Here we are, my lad!"
We had climbed the cliff and were crossing a field of stubble grass,
very painful to my feet. I saw the shadow of a low hedge in front,
but these words of Mr. Rogers conveyed nothing to me. "Soh, soh, my
girl!" he called softly, advancing towards the shadow: and at first I
supposed him to be addressing the mysterious Lydia. But following I
saw him smoothing the neck of a small mare tethered beside the hedge,
and the next moment had almost blundered against a light two-wheeled
carriage resting on its shafts a few yards away.
Mr. Rogers whispered to me to lift the shafts. "And be quiet about
it: there's a road t'other side of the hedge. Soh, my girl--sweetly,
sweetly!" He backed the mare between the shafts, harnessed her, and
led her along to a gate opening on the road.
"Jump up, my lad," he commanded, as he steered the tilbury through;
and up I jumped. "There's a rug somewhere by your feet, and
Lydia'll do the rest for you. Cl'k, my darling!"
Away we bowled.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE MAN IN THE VERANDAH.
The mare settled down to a beautiful stride and we spun along
smoothly over a road which, for a coast road, must have been well
laid, or Mr. Rogers's tilbury was hung on exceptionally good springs.
We were travelling inland, for the wind blew in our faces, and I
huddled myself up from it in the rug--on which a dew had fallen,
making it damp and sticky. For two miles or so we must have held on
at this pace without exchanging a word, meeting neither vehicle nor
pedestrian in all that distance, nor passing any; and so came to a
sign-post and swerved by it into a broader road, which ran level for
maybe half a mile and then began to climb. Here Mr. Rogers eased
down the mare and handed me the reins, bidding me hold them while he
lit a cigar.
"We're safe enough now," said he, pulling out a pocket tinder-box:
"and while I'm about it we'd better light the lamps." He slipped
them from their sockets and lit the pair cleverly from the same
brimstone match. "The _Highflier_'s due about this time," he
explained; "and Russell's Wagon 's another nasty thing to hit in the
dark. We're on the main road, you know." Before refixing the lamp
beside him, he held it up for a good stare at me, and grinned.
"Well, you're a nice guest for a spinster at this hour, I must say!
But there's no shyness about Lydia."
"Is she--is this Miss Lydia unmarried?" I made bold to ask.
"Lydia Belcher 's a woman in a thousand. There's no better fellow
living, and I've known worse ladies. Yes, she's unmarried."
He took the reins from me and the mare quickened her pace. After
sucking at his cigar for a while he chuckled aloud. "She's to be
seen to be believed: past forty and wears top-boots. But she was a
beauty in her day. Her mother's looks were famous--she was daughter
to one of the Earl's cottagers, on the edge of the moors"--here Mr.
Rogers jerked his thumb significantly, but in what direction the
night hid from me: "married old Sam Belcher, one of his lordship's
keepers, a fellow not fit to black her boots; and had this one child,
Lydia. This was just about the time of the Earl's own marriage.
Folks talked, of course: and sure enough, when the Earl came to die,
'twas found he'd left Lydia a thousand a year in the funds.
That's the story: and Lydia--well she's Lydia. Couldn't marry where
she would, I suppose, and wouldn't where she could; though they do
say Whitmore 's trimming sail for her."
"Whitmore?" I echoed.
"Ay, the curate: monstrous clever fellow, and a sportsman too:
Trinity College Dublin man. Don't happen to know him, do you?"
"Is he a thin-faced gentleman, very neatly dressed? Oh, but it can't
be the gentleman I mean, sir! The one I mean has a slow way of
speaking, and the hair seems gone on each side of his forehead--"
"That's Whitmore, to a T. So you know him? Well, you'll meet him at
Lydia's, I shouldn't wonder. He's there most nights."
"If you please, sir, will you set me down? I can shift for myself
somehow--indeed I can! I promised--that is, I mean, Mr. Whitmore
won't like it if--if--"
While I stammered on, Mr. Rogers pulled up the mare, quartering at
the same time to make room for the mail-coach as it thundered up the
road from westward and swept by at the gallop, with lamps flashing
and bits and swingles shaken in chorus.
"Look here, what's the matter?" he demanded. "Why don't you want to
meet Whitmore?" Then as I would not answer but continued to entreat
him, "There's something deuced fishy about you. Here I find you,
stark naked, hiding from the soldiers: yet you can't be one of the
'trade,' for you don't know the country or the folks living
hereabouts--only Whitmore: and Whitmore you won't meet, and your name
you won't tell, nor where you come from--only that you've been
swimming. 'Swimming,' good Lord! You didn't swim from France, I
take it." He flicked his whip and fell into a muse. "And I'm a
Justice of the Peace, and the Lord knows what I'm compounding with."
He mused again. "Tell you what I'll do," he exclaimed; "I'll take
you up to Lydia's as I promised. If Whitmore's there, you shan't
meet him if you don't want to: and if the house is full, I'll drop
you in the shrubbery with the rug, and get them to break up early.
Only I must have your solemn davey that you'll stay there and not
quit until I give you leave. Eh?"
I gave that promise.
"Very well. I'll tip the wink to Lydia, and when we've cleared the
company, we'll have you in and get the rights of this. Oh, you may
trust Lydia!"
As he said this we were passing a house the long whitewashed front of
which abutted glimmering on the road. A light shone behind the blind
of one lower window and showed through a chink under the door.
"The Major 's sitting up late," observed Mr. Rogers, and again
flicked up the mare.
Two minutes later he pulled the left rein and we swung through an
open gateway and were rolling over soft gravel. Tall bushes of
laurel on either hand glinted back the lights of the tilbury, and
presently around a sweep of the drive I saw a window shining.
Mr. Rogers pulled up once more.
"Jump out and take the path to the left. It'll bring you out almost
facing the front door. Wait among the laurels there."
I climbed down and drew my rug about me as he drove on and I heard
the tilbury's wheels come to a halt on the gravel before the house.
Then, following the path which wound about a small shrubbery, I came
to the edge of the gravel sweep before the porch just as a groom took
the mare and cart from him and led them around to the left, towards
the stables. I saw this distinctly, for on the right of the porch,
where there ran a pretty deep verandah, each window on the ground
floor was lit and flung its light across the gravel to the laurel
behind which I crouched. There were in all five windows; of which
three seemed to belong to an empty room, and two to another filled
with people. The windows of this one stood wide open, and the racket
within was prodigious. Also the company seemed to consist entirely
of men. But what surprised me most was to see that the tables at
which these guests drank and supped--as the clatter of knives and
plates told me, and the shouting of toasts--were drawn up in a
semicircle about a tall bed-canopy reaching almost to the ceiling in
the far right-hand corner. The bed itself was hidden from me by the
broad backs of two sportsmen seated in line with it and nursing a
bottle apiece under their chairs.
Now while I wondered, Mr. Jack Rogers passed briskly through the room
with the closed windows towards this chamber of revelry, preceded by
an elderly woman with a smoking dish in her hands. I could not see
the doorway between the two rooms; but the company announced his
appearance with a shout, and several guests pushing back their chairs
and rising to welcome him, in the same instant were disclosed to me,
first, the pale face of the Rev. Mr. Whitmore under a sporting print
by the wall opposite, and next, reclining in the bed, the most
extraordinary figure of a woman.
So much of her as appeared above the bedclothes was arrayed in an
orange-coloured dressing-gown and a night-cap the frills of which
towered over a face remarkable in many ways, but chiefly for its
broad masculine forehead and the firm outline of its jaw and chin.
Indeed, I could hardly believe that the face belonged to a woman.
A slight darkening of the upper lip even suggested a moustache, but
on a second look I set this down to the shadow of the bed-canopy.
A round table stood at her elbow, with a bottle and plate upon it:
and in one hand she lifted a rummer to Mr. Rogers's health, crooking
back the spoon in it with her forefinger as she drank, that it might
not incommode her aquiline nose.
"Good health, Jack, and sit you down!" she hailed him, her voice
ringing above the others like a bell. "Tripe and onions it is, and
Plymouth gin--the usual fare: and while you're helping yourself, tell
me--do I owe you ten pounds or no?"
"That depends," Mr. Rogers answered, searching about for a clean
plate and seating himself amid the hush of the company. "All the
horses back?"
"Five of 'em. They came in together, nigh on an hour ago, and not a
tub between 'em. The roan's missing."
"Maybe the red-coats have him," said Mr. Rogers, holding out his
tumbler. "Here, pass the kettle, somebody!"
"Red-coats?" she cried sharply. "You don't tell me--" But the
sentence was drowned by a new and (to me) very horrible noise--the
furious barking of dogs from the stables or kennels in the rear of
the house. Here was a new danger: and I liked it so little--the
prospect of being bayed naked through those pitch-dark shrubberies by
a pack of hounds--that I broke from my covert of laurel, hurriedly
skirted the broad patch of light on the carriage sweep, and plumped
down close to the windows, behind a bush of mock-orange at the end of
the verandah, whence a couple of leaps would land me within it among
Miss Belcher's guests. And I felt that even Mr. Whitmore was less
formidable than Miss Belcher's dogs.
Their barking died down after a minute or so, and the company, two or
three of whom had started to their feet, seemed to be reassured and
began to call upon Jack Rogers for his explanation. It now turned
out that, quite unintentionally, I had so posted myself as to hear
every word spoken; and, I regret to say, was deep in Mr. Rogers's
story--from which he considerately omitted all mention of me--when my
eye caught a movement among the shadows at the far end of the
verandah.
A man was stealing along it and towards me, close by the house wall.
He reached the first of the lighted windows, and peeped warily round
its angle. This room, as I have said, was empty: but while he
assured himself of this, the light rested on his face, and through
the branches of the mock-orange bush I saw his features distinctly.
It was Sergeant Letcher.
He wore his red uniform and white pantaloons, but had slipped off his
boots and--as I saw when he rapidly passed the next two panels of
light--was carrying them in his hand. Reaching the first of the open
windows, he stood for a while in the shade beside it, listening; and
then, to my astonishment, turned and stole back by the way he had
come. I watched him till he disappeared in the darkness beyond the
house-porch.
Meanwhile Miss Belcher had been calling to clear away the supper and
set the tables for cards.
"Nonsense, Lydia!" Mr. Rogers objected. "It's a good
one-in-the-morning, and the company tired. Where's the sense, too,
of keeping the place ablaze on a night like this, with Gauger
Rosewarne scouring the country, and the dragoons behind him, and all
in the worst possible tempers?"
"My little Magistrate," Miss Belcher retorted, "there's naught to
hinder your trotting home to bed if you're timorous. Jim's on his
way to the moor by this time with the rest of the horses: 'twas at
his starting the dogs gave tongue just now, and I'll have to teach
them better manners. As for the roan, if he's hurt or Rosewarne
happens on him, there's evidence that I sold him to a gipsy three
weeks back, at St. Germans fair. Here, Bathsheba, take the keys of
my bureau upstairs; you'll find some odd notes in the left-hand
drawer by the fire-place. Bring Mr. Rogers down his ten pounds and
let him go. We'll not compromise a Justice of the Peace if we can
help it."
"Don't play the fool, Lydia," growled Mr. Rogers, and added
ingenuously, "The fact is, I wanted a word with you alone."
"Oh, you scandalous man! And me tucked between the sheets!" she
protested, while the company haw-haw'd. "You'll have to put up with
some more innocent amusement, my dear. There's a badger somewhere
round at the back, in a barrel: we'll have him in with the dogs--
unless you prefer a quiet round with the cards."
"Oh, damn the badger at this hour!" swore Mr. Rogers. "Cards are
quiet at any rate. Here, Raby--Penrose--Tregaskis--which of you'll
cut in? Whitmore--you'll take a hand, won't you?"
"The Parson's tired to-night, and with better excuse than you.
He's ridden down from Plymouth."
"Hallo, Whitmore--what were you doing in Plymouth?"
Mr. Whitmore ignored the question. "I'm ready for a hand, Miss
Belcher," he announced quietly: "only let it be something quiet--a
rubber for choice."
"Half-guinea points?" asked somebody.
"Yes, if you will."
I heard them settle to cards, and their voices sink to a murmur.
Now and again a few coins clinked, and one of the guests yawned.
"You're as melancholy as gib-cats," announced Miss Belcher.
"The next that yawns, I'll send him out to fetch in that badger.
Tell us a story, somebody."
"I heard the beginning of a queer one," said Mr. Whitmore in his
deliberate voice. "The folks were discussing it at Torpoint Ferry as
I crossed. There's, been a murder at Plymouth, either last night or
this morning."
"A murder? Who's the victim?"
"An old Jew, living on the Barbican or thereabouts. My deal, is it
not?"
"What's his name?"
"His name?" Mr. Whitmore seemed to be considering. "Wait a moment,
or I shall misdeal." After a pause, he said, "A Spanish-sounding
one--Rodriguez, I think. They were all full of it at the Ferry."
"What! Old Ike Rodriguez? Why, he was down in these parts buying up
guineas the other day!" exclaimed Mr. Rogers.
"Was he?"
"Why, hang it all, Whitmore," said a guest, "you know he was!
More by token I pointed him out to you myself on Looe hill."
"Was that the man?"
"Of course it was. Don't you remember admiring his face? It put you
in mind of Caiaphas--those were your very words, and at the moment I
didn't clearly recollect who Caiaphas was. It can't be three weeks
since."
"Three weeks less two days," said Miss Belcher; "for he called here
and bought fifteen off me: gave me twenty-four shillings and sixpence
apiece for all but one, which he swore was light. Who's murdered
him?"
"There was talk of a boy," said Mr. Whitmore, still very
deliberately. "At least, a boy was missing who had been seen in the
house just previously, and they were watching the ferries for him.
Why, surely, Rogers, that's a revoke!"
"A revoke?" stammered Mr. Rogers. "So it is--I beg your pardon,
Tregaskis! Damn the cards! I'm too sleepy to tell one suit from
another."
"That makes our game then, and the rubber. Rub and rub--shall we
play the conqueror? No? As you please then. How do we stand?"
"We owe three guineas on points," growled a voice which, to judge by
its sulkiness, belonged to Mr. Tregaskis.
"I'm a clumsy fool," Mr. Rogers again accused himself. "Here,
Whitmore, give me change out of a note."
"With pleasure. It's as good as a gift, though, with the cards you
held," said Mr. Whitmore, and I heard the coins jingle in changing
hands, when from the shrubbery, where the gravel sweep narrowed,
there sounded the low hoot of an owl. Being town-bred and unused to
owls, I took it for a human cry in the darkness and shrank closer
against my mock-orange bush.
"Hallo, Whitmore, you've dropped a guinea. Here it is, by the
table-leg. Take twenty-four shillings for it, now that old Rodriguez
is gone?"
Mr. Whitmore thanked the speaker as the coin was restored to him.
"The room's hot, as Mr. Rogers says, and I think I'll step out for a
mouthful of fresh air. Phe--ew!" he drew a long breath as he
appeared at the window.
He strolled carelessly out beneath the verandah and stood for a
moment by one of its pillars. And at that moment the owl's cry
sounded again, but more softly, from the shrubbery on my left.
I knew, then, that it came from no true bird. With a swift glance
back into the room Mr. Whitmore stepped out upon the gravel and
followed the sound, almost brushing the mock-orange bush as he
passed.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE MOCK-ORANGE BUSH.
To my dismay, he halted but five paces from me.
"Is that you, Leicester?" he whispered.
"Sergeant Letcher, if you please," answered a quiet voice close by;
"unless you wish to be called Pickthall."
"Not so loud--the windows are open. How on earth did you come here?
You're not with the van to-night?"
"I came on a horse, and a lame one: one of your tub-carriers.
The captain saw me mount him, down at the cove, and sent me off to
scour the country for evidence. I guessed pretty well in what
direction he'd take me. But you're a careless lot, I will say.
Look at this bit of rope."
"For God's sake don't talk so loud! Rope? What rope?"
"Oh, you needn't be afraid! It's not _your_ sort! Here--if you can't
see, take hold and feel it. Left-handed, you'll notice--French
sling-stuff. And that Belcher woman has no more sense of caution
than to tie up her roses with it! Now see here, my son"--and his
voice became a snarl--"it may do for her to play tricks. All the
country knows her, the magistrates included. But for the likes of
you this dancing on the edge of the law is risky, and I can't afford
it. Understand? Why the devil you haunt the house as you do is more
than I can fathom, unless maybe you're making up to marry the old
fool." He paused and added contemplatively, "'Twould be something in
your line to be sure. Women were always your game."
"You didn't whistle me out to tell me this," said Mr. Whitmore
stiffly.
"No, I did not. I want ten pounds."
Mr. Whitmore groaned. "Look here, Leicst--"
"Be careful!"
"But this makes twice in ten days. It's pushing a man too hard
altogether!"
"Not a bit of it," Letcher assured him cheerfully. "You're too
devilish fond of your own neck, my lad; and I know it too devilish
well to be come over by that talk." He chuckled to himself.
"How's the beauty down at the cottage?"
"I don't know," Mr. Whitmore answered sulkily. "Is Plinlimmon
there?"
"No, he's not; and you ought to know he's not. Where have you been,
all day?"
The curate was silent.
"He'll be down again on Saturday, though. Leave of absence is going
cheap, just now. I've an idea that our marching orders must be about
due. Maybe I'll be able to run down myself, though my father hadn't
the luck to be a friend of the Colonel's. If I don't, you're to keep
your eye lifting, and report."
"Is there really a chance of the order coming?" asked Mr. Whitmore,
with a shake in his low voice.
"Dissemble your joy, my friend! When it comes, I shall call on
you for fifty. Meanwhile I tell you to keep your eye lifting.
The battalion's raw, yet. About the order, it's only my guesswork,
and before we sail you may yet do the christening."
"It's damnable!"
"Hush, you fool! Gad, if somebody hasn't heard you! Who's _that_?"
They held their breath; and I held mine, pressing my body into the
mock-orange bush until the twigs cracked. Mr. Jack Rogers stepped
out upon the verandah, and stood by one of the pillars, not a dozen
yards from me, contemplating the sky where the dawn was now beginning
to break over the dark shrubberies. I heard the two men tip-toeing
away through the laurels.
He, too, seemed to catch the sound, for he turned his head sharply.
But at that moment Miss Belcher's voice called him back into the
room.
A minute later he reappeared with a loaf of bread in either hand, and
walked moodily past my bush without turning his head or observing me.
I faced about cautiously and looked after him. From the end of the
verandah the ground, sheltered on the right by a belt of evergreen
trees, fell away steeply to a valley where, under the paling sky, a
sheet of water glimmered. Towards this, down the grassy slope, Mr.
Rogers went with long strides. I broke cover, and ran after him.
I ran as fast as my hurt hip and the trailing folds of the rug
allowed. The grass underfoot was grey with dew, and overhead the
birds were singing. An old horse that had been sleeping in his
pasture heaved himself up and gazed at me as I went by, and either
his snort of contempt or the sound of my footsteps must have struck
on Mr. Rogers's ear. He turned and allowed me to catch up with him.
"It's you, eh?" He eyed me between pity and distrust. "Here, catch
hold, if you're feeling peckish."
He thrust a loaf into my hands and I fell on it ravenously, plucking
off a crust and gnawing it while I trotted beside him.
"Got to feed her blessed swans now!" he muttered. "The deuce is in
her for perversity to-night."
He kept growling to himself, knitting his brow and pausing once or
twice for a moody stare. He was not drunk, and his high complexion
showed no trace of his all-night sitting; and yet something had
changed him utterly from the cheerful gentleman of a few hours back.
The water in the valley bottom proved to be an artificial lake, very
cunningly contrived to resemble a wild one. At the head of it, where
we trod on asphodels and sweet-smelling mints and brushed the young
stalks of the loose-strife, stood a rustic bridge partly screened by
alders. Here Mr. Rogers halted, and a couple of fine swans came
steering towards him out of the shadows.
He broke his loaf into two pieces. "That's for you," he exclaimed,
hurling the first chunk viciously at the male bird. The pair turned
in alarm at the splash and paddled away, hissing. "And that's for
you!" The second chunk caught the female full astern, and Mr. Rogers
leaned on the rail and laughed grimly. He thrust his hand into his
breeches pocket and drew forth a guinea. The young daylight touched
its edge as it lay in his palm.
"I'm a Justice of the Peace; or I'd toss that after the bread."
"What's the matter with it, sir?"
He turned it over gingerly with his forefinger. "See?" he said.
"I put that mark on it myself, for sport, three weeks ago, and this
very night I won it back."
"Was it one you sold to Mr. Rodriguez?"
"Hey?" I thought he would have taken me by the collar. "So you
_are_ the boy! What do you know of Rodriguez, boy?"
"I--I was listening in the verandah, sir. And oh, but I've something
to tell you! I'm the boy, sir, that Mr. Whitmore spoke about--the
boy that's being searched for--"
"Look here," Mr. Rogers interrupted, "I'm a Justice of the Peace, you
know."
"I can't help it, sir--begging your pardon. But I was in the house,
and I saw things: and if they catch me, I must tell."
"Tell the truth and shame the devil," said Mr. Rogers.
"But the more truth I told, sir, the worse it would look for someone
who's innocent."
"Whitmore?"
"You changed a note with Mr. Whitmore, didn't you, sir?"
This confused him. "You've been using your ears to some purpose," he
growled.
"I don't know how Mr. Whitmore comes to be mixed up in it.
But here's another thing, sir--You remember that he walked out after
the game--for fresh air, he said?"
"Well?"
"And he didn't come back?"
"Well?"
"He stepped out because he was whistled out. There was a man waiting
for him."
"What man?"
"His name's Letcher--at least--"
"I don't know the name."
"He was one of the soldiers on the beach this evening."
"The devil!"
"But he hadn't come about _that_ business."
"About what, then?"
"Well now, sir, I must ask you a question. They were talking about
'the beauty down at the cottage.' Who would that be?"
"That," said he slowly, "would be Isabel Brooks, for a certainty."
"And the cottage?"
"Remember the one we passed on the road?--the one with a light
downstairs? That's it. She lives there with her father--an old
soldier and three-parts blind. There's no mischief brewing against
_her_, I hope?"
"I don't know sir," I went on breathlessly. "But if you please, go
on answering me. Do you know a young man called Plinlimmon--
Archibald Plinlimmon?"
"Plinlimmon? Ay, to be sure I do. Met him there once--another
soldier, youngish and good-looking--in the ranks, but seemed a
gentleman--didn't catch his Christian name. The Major introduced him
as the son of an old friend--comrade-in-arms, he said, if I remember.
He was there with a black-faced fellow, whose name I didn't catch
either."
"That was Letcher!"
"What? The man Whitmore was talking with? What were they saying?"
"They said something about a christening. And Letcher asked for
money."
"A christening? What in thunder has a christening to do with it?"
"That's what I don't know, sir."
Mr. Rogers looked at me and rubbed his chin. "I meant to take you to
Lydia," he said; "but now that Whitmore's mixed up in this, I'll be
shot if I do. That fellow has bewitched her somehow, and where he's
concerned--" He glanced up the slope and clutched me suddenly by the
shoulder: for Whitmore himself was there, walking alone, and coming
straight towards us. "Talk of the devil--here, hide, boy--duck down,
I tell you, there behind the bushes! No! Through the hedge, then--"
I burst across the hedge and dropped through a mat of brambles,
dragging my rug after me. The fall landed me on all-fours upon the
sunken high road, along which I ran as one demented--stark naked,
too--a small Jack of Bedlam under the broadening eye of day; ran past
Miss Belcher's entrance gate with its sentinel masses of tall
laurels, and had reached the bend of the road opening the low cottage
into view, when a sudden jingling of bells and tramp of horses drove
me aside through a gate on the left, to cower behind a hedge there
while they passed.
Two wagons came rumbling by, each drawn by six horses and covered by
a huge white tilt bearing in great letters the words "Russell and
Co., Falmouth to London." On the front of each a lantern shone pale
against the daylight. At the head of each team rode a wagoner,
mounted on a separate horse and carrying a long whip. Beside the
wagons tramped four soldiers with fixed bayonets, and two followed
behind: they wore the uniform of the North Wilts Regiment.
I knew them well enough by repute--these famous wagons conveying
untold treasure between London and the Falmouth Packets.
They passed, and I crept out into the road again, to stare after
them.
With that, turning my head, I was aware of a girl in the roadway
outside the cottage door. But if she had come out to gaze after the
wagons, she was gazing now at me. It was too late to hide, and
moreover I had come almost to the end of my powers. With a cry for
pity I ran towards her.
CHAPTER XV.
MINDEN COTTAGE.
Stark naked though I was, she did not flinch as I came; only her eyes
seemed to widen upon me in wonder. And for all my desperate hurry I
had time to see, first, that they were graver than other girls' eyes,
and next that they were exceedingly beautiful.
In those days I had small learning (I have little enough, even now),
or I might have fancied her some goddess awaiting me between the
night and the dawn. She stood, tall and erect, in a loose white
wrapper, the collar of which had fallen open and revealed the
bodice-folds of her nightgown--a cloud at the base of her firm
throat. Her feet were thrust into loose slippers: and her hair hung
low on her neck in dark masses as she had knotted them for the night.
"Where do you come from, boy?" she asked; but an instant later she
put that question aside as an idle one. "Someone has been
ill-treating you! Come indoors!"
She held out a hand and, as I clung to it, led me to the door; but
turned with her other hand on the latch. "Is anyone following?"
I shook my head. She was attempting now, but gently, to draw back
the hand to which I clung; and, in resisting, my fingers met and
pulled against a ring--a single ring of plain gold.
Seeing that I had observed it, she made no further effort, but let
her hand lie, her eyes at the same moment meeting mine and searching
them gravely and curiously.
"Come upstairs," she said; "but tread softly. My father is a light
sleeper."
She took me to a room in the corner of which stood a white bed with
the sheets neatly turned down, prepared and ready for a guest.
The room was filled with the scent of flowers--fragrant scent of
roses and clean aromatic scent of carnations. There were fainter
scents, too, of jasmine and lavender; the first wafted in from a
great bush beyond the open lattice, the second (as I afterwards
discovered) exhaled by the white linen of the bed. But flowers were
everywhere, in bowls and jars and glasses; and as though other
receptacles for them had failed, one long spray of small roses
climbed the dressing-table from a brown pitcher at its foot.
She motioned me to a chair beside the bed, and, almost before I knew
what was intended, she had fetched a basin of water and was kneeling
to wash my feet.
"No--please!" I protested.
"But I love children," she whispered; "and you are but a child."
So I sat in a kind of dream while she washed away the dust and blood,
changing the water twice, and afterwards dried each foot in a towel,
pressing firmly but never once hurting me.
When this was done, she rose and stood musing, contemplating me
seriously and yet with a touch of mirth in her eyes.
"You are such a little one!" she said. "Father's would never fit."
And having poured out fresh water and bidden me wash my body, she
stole out.
She returned with a white garment in her hand and real mirth now in
her eyes. My toilet done, she slipped the garment over me. It fell
to my feet in long folds, yet so lightly that I scarcely felt I was
clothed: and she clapped her hands in dumb-show. It was one of her
own night-gowns.
I glanced uneasily towards the bed. Its daintiness frightened me,
used as I was to the housekeeping--coarse if clean--of Mrs. Trapp.
"Your prayers first," she whispered. "Don't you know any?" She eyed
me anxiously again. "But you are a good boy? Surely you are a good
boy? Don't boys say their prayers? They ought to."
Since passing out of Miss Plinlimmon's tutelage, I had sadly
neglected the habit: but I knelt down obediently and in silence.
She stepped close behind me. "But you're not speaking," she
murmured. "Father always says his aloud, and so do I. You mustn't
pretend, if you don't really know any. I can teach you."
She knelt down beside me, and began to say the Lord's Prayer softly.
I repeated it after her, sentence by sentence: and this was really
shamming, for of course I knew it perfectly. At the time I felt only
that she--this beautiful creature beside me--was in a strange state
of exaltation which I could not in the least understand. I know now
something of the springs I had touched and loosened within her--I, a
naked waif coming to her out of the night and catching her hand for
protection. It was not I she taught, nor over me that she yearned.
She was reaching through me to a child unknown, using me to press
against a strange love tearing at the roots of her body, and to break
the pain of it--the roots of her body, I say; for he who can separate
a woman's soul from her body is a wiser man than I.
She rose from her knees; threw back the sheets and tucked them about
me as I snuggled down.
"What is your name?"
"Harry
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