Cradock Nowell: A Tale of the New Forest. Vol. 2 (of 3)
by R. D. Blackmore · English · Gutenberg #47085 · 442,834 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Cradock Nowell: A Tale of the New Forest. Vol. 2 (of 3)
Author: R. D. Blackmore
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRADOCK NOWELL: A TALE OF THE NEW FOREST. VOL. 2 (OF 3) ***
CRADOCK NOWELL
A Tale of the New Forest.
BY
_RICHARD DODDRIDGE BLACKMORE_,
AUTHOR OF “CLARA VAUGHAN.”
“You have said: whether wisely or no, let the forest judge.”
AS YOU LIKE IT, Act III. Sc. 2.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. II.
LONDON:
CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY.
1866.
[_The right of Translation is reserved._]
LONDON:
PRINTED BY C. WHITING, BEAUFORT HOUSE, STRAND.
CONTENTS OF VOLUME II.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. 1
II. 35
III. 52
IV. 72
V. 91
VI. 111
VII. 128
VIII. 147
IX. 172
X. 190
XI. 217
XII. 236
XIII. 245
XIV. 253
XV. 274
XVI. 287
XVII. 300
CRADOCK NOWELL
CHAPTER I.
It was a Tuesday evening when Cradock Nowell and Amy Rosedew signed
and sealed, with the moonʼs approval, their bond to one another. On
the following day, Dr. Hutton and wife were to dine at Kettledrum
Hall; and the distance being considerable, and the roads so shockingly
bad—“even dangerous, I am told, to gentlemen who have dined _with
me_, sir,” said Kettledrum, in his proudest manner—they had accepted
his offer, and that of Mrs. Kettledrum, which she herself came over to
make, that they should not think of returning until after breakfast on
Thursday. In consequence of her husbandʼs hints, Rosa felt the keenest
interest in “that Mrs. Kettledrum. Leave her to me, dear Rufus. You
need not be afraid, indeed. Trust me to get to the bottom of it.” And
so she exerted her probing skill upon her to the uttermost, more even
than ladies usually do, when they first meet one another. Of course,
there was no appearance of it, nothing so ill–bred as that; it was
all the sweetest refinement, and the kindest neighbourly interest.
They even became affectionate in the course of half an hour, and
mutual confidence proved how strangely their tastes were in unison.
Nevertheless, each said good–bye with a firm conviction that she had
outwitted the other. “Poor thing, she was so stupid. What a bungler, to
be sure! And to think I could not see through her!”
But the return–match between these ladies, which was to have come off
at Kettledrum Hall—where, by–the–by, there appeared a far greater
performer than either of them—this interesting display of skill was
deferred for the present; inasmuch as Rosa was taken ill during the
mysteries of her toilet. It was nothing more serious, however, than the
“flying spasms,” as she always called them, to which she had long been
subject, and which (as she often told her husband) induced her to marry
a doctor.
Rufus administered essence of peppermint, and then a dose of magnesia;
but he would not hear of her coming with him, and he wanted to stop
at home with her, and see that she sat by the fire. She in turn would
have her way, and insisted that Rue should go, “for he had made himself
such a very smart boy, that she was really quite proud of him, and they
would all be so disappointed, and he was taller than Mr. Kettledrum,
she felt quite sure he was.” The bearing of that last argument I do not
quite perceive, but dare not say that she erred therein, and to Rue it
was quite conclusive. So Ralph Mohorn was sent for, the pony–carriage
countermanded, and Rufus set forth upon Polly, whose oats were now
restricted.
Kettledrum Hall stood forth on a rise, and made the very most of
itself. Expansive, and free, and obtrusively honest, it seemed to
strike itself on the breast (as its master did) with both gables. A
parochial assessment committee, or a surveyor for the property–tax,
would have stuck on something considerable, if they had only seen
the outside of it. Look at the balustrade that went (for it was too
heavy to run) all along the front of it, over the basement windows. No
stucco, either; but stone, genuine stone, that bellied out like a row
of Roman amphoræ, or the calves of a first–rate footman. After that,
to see the portico, “decempedis metata,” which “excipiebat Eurum”—not
Arcton in this climate. No wonder—although it was rotten inside, and
the whole of it mortgaged ten fathom deep—that Bailey Kettledrum hit
his breast, and said, “Our little home, sir!”
“Your great home, you mean,” said Rufus; “what a noble situation! You
can see all over the county.”
They had come to meet him down the hill, in the kindest country
fashion, Mr. and Mrs. Kettledrum, like Jack and Jill going for water.
“Not quite that,” replied Kettledrum; “but we saw you with my
binocular, between two and three miles off, and became so anxious about
Mrs. Hutton, that I said to my wife, ‘Put your bonnet on;’ and she
only said, ‘Bailey, put your hat on;’ nothing more, sir, I assure you;
nothing more, sir, upon my honour.”
Rufus could not see exactly why there should have been anything more,
but he could not help thanking them for their kindness, and saying to
himself, “What nice people! Quite an agricultural life, I see, in spite
of that grand mansion.”
“Now,” said Mr. Kettledrum, when Polly had been committed to one of
the stable–boys—but Rufus still wanted to look at her, for he never
grew tired of admiring anything that belonged to him, and he knew
they wouldnʼt do her legs right—“now, Dr. Hutton, you have come most
kindly, according to your promise, so as to give us an hour or two to
spare before the dinner–time. Shall we take a turn with the guns? I can
put my hand on a covey; or shall we walk round the garden, and have the
benefit of your advice?”
Rufus looked in dismay at his “choice black kerseymeres;” he had taken
his “antigropelos” off, and was proud to find not a flake on them. But
to think of going out shooting! He ought not to have dressed before he
left home, but he hated many skinnings. And he could only guess the
distance from the lodge to this place. So he voted very decidedly for a
walk in the kitchen–garden.
Into this he was solemnly instituted, and the beauties all pointed
out to him. What a scene of weeds and rubbish! How different from Bull
Garnetʼs dainty and trim quarters, or from his own new style of work at
Geopharmacy Lodge! Rotten beansticks crackling about, the scum of last
summerʼs cabbages, toad–stools cropping up like warts or arums rubbed
with caustic, a fine smell of potato–disease, and a general sense of
mildew; the wall–trees curled and frizzled up with aphis, coccus, and
honeydew; and the standards scraggy, and full of stubs, canker, and
American blight, sprawling, slouching, hump–backed, and stag–headed,
like the sick ward of a workhouse fighting with tattered umbrellas.
“Ah,” said Rufus, at his wits’ end for anything to praise, “what a
perfect paradise—for the songsters of the grove.”
“Oh,” replied Mr. Kettledrum, “you should hear the Dook admire it.
‘Kettledrum, my boy,’ he said, when he dined with me last Friday,
‘there is one thing I do envy you—no, sir, neither your most lady–like
wife, nor yet your clever children, although I admit that neither of
them can be paralleled in England—but, Kettledrum, it is—forgive
me—it is your kitchen–garden.’ ‘My kitchen–garden, your grace,’ I
replied, for I hate to brag of anything, ‘it is a poor thing, my lord
Dook, compared to your own at Lionshill.’ ‘May I be d—d,’ his grace
replied, for I never shall break him of swearing, ‘if I ever saw
anything like it, dear Kettledrum, and so I told the Duchess.’ And
after all, you know, Dr. Hutton, a man may think too little of what it
has pleased God to give him.”
“Well,” said Rufus to himself, “Iʼm blessed if _you_ do. But I donʼt
like you any the worse for a bit of brag. I have met great brags in
India, and most of them honest fellows. But I must peg him down a bit.
I must, I fear; it is my duty as an enlightened gardener.”
“But you see, now,” said Bailey Kettledrum, smacking his lips, and
gazing into profundity, “you see, my dear sir, there is nothing ‘ab
omni parte beatum;’ perhaps you remember the passage in the heroic
epistles of—ah, Cicero it was, I believe, who wrote all those epistles
to somebody.”
“No doubt of it,” said Rufus Hutton, who knew more of Hindustani than
of Latin and Greek combined; “and yet St. Paul wrote some.”
“Not in Latin, my dear sir; all St. Paulʼs were Greek. ‘Nihil est,’ I
now remember, ‘ab omni parte beatum.’ I donʼt know how it scans, which
I suppose it ought to do, but that isnʼt my look–out. Perhaps, however,
you can tell me?”
“Iʼm blowed if I can,” said Rufus Hutton, in the honesty of his mind;
“and I am not quite sure that it has any right to scan.”
“Well, I canʼt say; but I _think_ it ought,”—he was in the mists
of memory, where most of the trees have sensitive roots, though the
branches are not distinguishable. “However, that canʼt matter at all;
I see you are a classical scholar. And, Hutton, I like a classical
scholar, because he can understand me. But you see that these trees are
rather—ah, what is the expression for it——?”
“Cankered, and scabby, and scrubs.”
“That is to say—yes, I suppose, they would crop the better, if that be
possible, for a little root–pruning.”
“You have gathered the fruit for this year, I presume?”
“Well, no, not quite that. The children have had some, of course. But
we are very particular not to store too early.”
“I really donʼt think you need be.”
“Why, many people say, ‘let well alone;’ but my gardener talks of
making——”
“A jolly good bonfire of them, if he knows anything of his business.
Then drain the ground, trench, and plant new ones.”
Mr. Kettledrum looked quite thunderstruck; he caught hold of a tree to
help him, and a great cake of rotten bark, bearded with moss, came away
like the mask of a mummer. It was slimy on the under side, and two of
his fingers went through it.
“Nice state of things,” said Rufus, laughing. “I suppose the Dook likes
lepers?”
“Why, my dear sir, you donʼt mean to say——”
“That I would leave only one of them, and I would hang the
head–gardener upon it.”
That worthy was just coming round the corner, to obtain the applause
of a gentleman well known to the _Gardenerʼs Chronicle_; but now he
turned round abruptly, and scratched his head, and thought of his
family.
When Rufus came down and entered the drawing–room, he was perfectly
gorgeous; for although he had been in full dress for the main, he knew
better than to ride with his Alumbaggah waistcoat on. There was nothing
in all the three presidencies to come up to that waistcoat. It would
hold Dr. Hutton and Rosa too, for they had stood back to back and tried
it. And Rufus vainly sighed for the day when his front should come out
and exhaust it. He stole it, they say, from a petty rajah, who came to
a great durbar with it, worn like an Oxford hood. At any rate, there it
was, and the back of Cashmere stuff would fit either baby or giant. But
the front, the front—oh, bangles and jiminy! it is miles beyond me to
describe it.
All simple writers, from Job and Hesiod downwards, convey an impression
of some grand marvel, not by direct description of it, which would
be feeble and achromatic, but by the rebound, recoil, and redouble,
from the judgment of some eye–witness. If that eye–witness be
self–possessed, wide–awake, experienced, and undemonstrative, the
effect upon the readerʼs mind is as of a shell which has struck the
granite, burst there, and scattered back on him. So will I, mistrusting
the value of my own impressions, give a faint idea of Rufus his
waistcoat, by the dount of it on that assembly.
The host was away for the moment somewhere, perhaps blowing up
the butler, for his wife was telling her sister how nervous and
even fidgety her beloved Bailey was growing; but Mr. Corklemore was
there, and came forth to salute the great Rufus, when his heavy eyes
settled upon the waistcoat, and all his emotions exploded in a “haw”
of incredulous wonder. Mrs. Kettledrum rose at the same instant, and
introduced her sister.
“My sister, Dr. Hutton, whom I have so earnestly longed to make
acquainted with dear Mrs. Hutton, Mrs. Nowell Corklemore; Mr.
Corklemore, I know, has had the pleasure of meeting you. Georgie, dear,
you will like her so—oh, goodness gracious me!”
“I donʼt wonder you are surprised at me, Anna,” exclaimed Mrs.
Corklemore, with wonderful presence of mind. “How stupid I am, to be
sure! Oh, Nowell, why didnʼt you tell me? How shameful of you! But you
never look at me now, I think.” And she swept from the room in the
cleverest manner, as if something wrong in her own dress had caused her
sisterʼs ejaculation.
“Excuse me one moment,” said Mrs. Kettledrum, taking her cue very
aptly; and she ran out, as if to aid her sister, but in reality to
laugh herself into hysterics.
After all there was nothing absurd, _per se_, in Rufus Huttonʼs
waistcoat, only it is not the fashion, just at present, to wear
pictorial raiment; but the worthy doctor could not perceive any reason
why it should not be. He was pleased with the prospect of creating
a genuine sensation, and possibly leading the mode; and having lost
all chance of realizing these modest hopes at Nowelhurst, why, he
must content himself with a narrower stage for his triumphs. He had
smuggled it from home, however, without his wifeʼs permission: he had
often threatened her with its appearance, but she always thought he
was joking. And truly it required some strength of mind to present it
to modern society, although it was a work of considerable art, and no
little value.
The material of it was Indian silk of the very richest quality. It
had no buttons, but golden eyelets and tags of golden cowries. The
background of the whole was yellow, the foreground of a brilliant
green, portraying the plants of the jungle. On the left bosom leaped
and roared an enormous royal tiger, with two splendid jewels, called
“catʼs–eyes,” flashing, and a pearl for every fang. Upon the right side
a hulking elephant was turning tail ignominiously; while two officers
in the howdah poked their guns at the eyes of the tiger. The eyes of
the officers in their terror had turned to brilliant emeralds, and the
blood of the tramping elephant was represented by seed rubies. The
mahout was cutting away in the distance, looking back with eyes of
diamonds.
Beyond a doubt, it required uncommonly fine breeding, especially in
a lady, to meet that waistcoat at a dinner–party, and be entirely
unconscious of it. And perhaps there are but few women in England who
would not contrive to lead up to the subject, quite accidentally, of
course, before the evening was over.
The ladies came back as grave as judges; and somehow it was managed (as
if by the merest oversight) that Dr. Hutton should lead to dinner, not
the lady of the house, whom, of course, he ought to have taken, but
Mrs. Nowell Corklemore. He felt, as he crossed the hall with her, that
the beauty of his waistcoat had raised some artistic emotion in a bosom
as beautiful as its own. Oh, Rufus, think of Rosa!
Let none be alarmed at those ominous words. The tale of Cradock
Nowellʼs life shall be pure as that life itself was. The historian
may be rough, and blunt, and sometimes too intense, in the opinion
of those who look at life from a different point of view. But be
that as it will, his other defects (I trust and pray) will chiefly
be deficiencies. We will have no poetical seduction, no fascinating
adultery, condemned and yet reprieved by the writer, and infectious
from his sympathy. Georgiana Corklemore was an uncommonly clever woman,
and was never known to go far enough to involve her reputation. She
loved her child, and liked her husband, and had all the respect for
herself which may abide with vanity. Nevertheless she flirted awfully,
and all married women hated her. “Bold thing,” they called her, “sly
good–for–nothing; and did you see how she ogled? Well, if I only
carried on so! Oh, if I were only her husband! But, poor man, he knows
no better. Such a poor dear stick, you know. Perhaps that is what makes
her do it. And nothing in her at all, when you come to think of it. No
taste, no style, no elegance! When _will_ she put her back hair up? And
her child fit to put into long–clothes! Did you observe her odious way
of putting her lips up, as if to be kissed? My dear, I donʼt know how
_you_ felt; but I could scarcely stay in the room with her.”
Nevertheless the ladies did stay, and took good care to watch her, and
used to say to her afterwards, “Oh, if I were only like you, dear! Then
I need not be afraid of you; but you are—now donʼt tell stories—_so_
clever, and _so_ attractive. As if you did not know it, dear! Well, you
_are_ so simple–minded. I am always telling my Looey and Maggie to take
you for their model, dear!”
On the present occasion, “Georgie Corklemore,” as she called herself,
set about flirting with Rufus Hutton, not from her usual love of power,
nor even for the sake of his waistcoat, but because she had an especial
purpose, and a very important one. The Kettledrum–cum–Corklemore
conspiracy was this—to creep in once more at Nowelhurst Hall through
the interest of Dr. Hutton. They all felt perfectly certain that
Cradock Nowell had murdered his brother, and that the crime had been
hushed up through the influence of the family. They believed that the
head of that family, in his passionate sorrow and anger, might be
brought to their view of the subject, if he could only be handled
properly; and who could manage that more adroitly than his first cousin
once removed, the beautiful Mrs. Corklemore? Only let her get once
invited, once inducted there, and the main difficulty after that would
be to apportion the prey between them. They knew well enough that the
old entail expired with the present baronet; and that he (before his
marriage) held in fee pure and simple all that noble property. His
marriage–settlement, and its effects, they could only inkle of; but
their heart was inditing of a good matter, and Mr. Chope would soon
pump Brockwood. Not quite so fast, my Amphictyonics; a solicitor thirty
years admitted (though his original craft may not be equal) is not to
be sucked dry, on the surprise, even by spongy young Chope. However,
that was a question for later consideration; and blood being thicker
than water, and cleaving more fast to the ground, they felt that it
would be a frightful injustice if they were done out of the property.
Only two things need be added: one that Sir Cradock had always
disliked, and invited them but for appearance’ sake; the other, that
they fairly believed in the righteousness of their cause, and that
Rufus Hutton could prove it for them, as the principal witness tampered
with.
Mrs. Corklemore was now, perhaps, twenty–five years old, possibly
turning thirty; for that lustrum of a ladyʼs life is a hard one to beat
the bounds of; at any rate, she had never looked better than she did
at the present moment. She was just at the age to spread open, with
the memory of shyness upon them (like the dew when the sun is up), the
curving petals of beauty. Who understands the magnetic current? Who
can analyze ozone? Is there one of us able to formularize the polarity
of light? Will there ever be an age when chemists metaphysical will
weigh—no more by troy weight, and carat, as now the mode is, but by
subtle heart–gas—our liking for a woman? Let us hope there never will
be.
That soft Georgiana Corklemore, so lively, lovely, and gushing,
focussed all her fascinations upon Rufus Hutton. She knew that she had
to deal with a man of much inborn acuteness, and who must have seen
a hundred ladies quite as fair as Georgie. But had he seen one with
her—well, she knew not what to call it, though she thoroughly knew
how to use it? So she magnetized him with all her skill; and Rufus,
shrewdly suspecting her object, and confiding in a certain triarian
charge, a certain thrust Jarnacian, which he would deliver at the
proper moment, allowed her to smile, and to show her white teeth and
dimples of volatile velvet (so natural, so inevitable, at his playful,
delightful humour), and to loose whole quiverfuls of light shafts from
the arch flash under her eyelids. What sweet simplicity she was, what
innocent desire to learn, what universal charity. “How dreadful, Dr.
Hutton! Oh, please not to tell me of it! How could any ladies do it? I
should have fainted at once, and died half an hour afterwards.” She
turned up her large mild eyes, deeply beaming with centralized light,
in a way that said, “If I died, is there any one who would think it a
very, very great pity?”
Rufus had been describing historically, not dramatically, the trials
of the ladies, when following their regiment during a sudden movement
in the perils of the mutiny. With a manʼs far stiffer identity, he
did not expect or even imagine that his delicate listener would be
there, and go through every hour of it. But so it was, and without
any sham; although she was misusing her strange sympathetic power.
Mrs. Nowell Corklemore would have made a very great actress; she had
so much self–abandonment, such warm introjection, and hot indignant
sympathy; and yet enough of self–reservation to hoop them all in with
judgment. Meanwhile Mrs. Kettledrum, a lady of ordinary sharpness,
like a good pudding–apple—Georgie being a peach of the very finest
quality—she, I say, at the top of the table was watching them very
intently—delighted, amused, indignant; glad that none of her children
were there to store up Auntieʼs doings. As for Mr. Corklemore, he
was quite accustomed to it; and looking down complacently upon the
little doctor, thought to himself, “How beautifully my Georgie will
cold–shoulder him, when we have got all we want out of the conceited
chattering jackanapes.”
When the ladies were gone, Mr. Bailey Kettledrum, who had no idea of
playing dummy even to Mrs. Corklemore, made a trick or two from his own
hand.
“Corklemore, my dear fellow, you think we are all tee–totallers. On
with the port, if you please, ‘cessantem Bibuli Consulis amphoram,’
never shall forget that line. The bibulous consul, eh! Capital idea.
Corklemore, you can construe that?”
“Haw! Perhaps I canʼt. Really donʼt know; they beat a heap of stuff
into me when I was a very small boy; and it was like whipping—ha, haw,
something like whipping——”
“Eggs,” said Rufus Hutton, “all came to bubbles, eh?”
“Not at all, sir, not at all; you entirely misunderstand me. I mean
that it was similar to—to the result produced by the whipping of a
top.”
“Only made your head go round,” said Mr. Kettledrum, winking at Rufus;
and thenceforth had established a community of interest in the baiting
of “long Corklemore.” “Well, at any rate,” he continued, “Hutton is a
scholar—excuse my freedom, my dear sir; we are such rustics here, that
I seldom come across a man who appreciates my quotations. You are a
great acquisition, sir, the very greatest, to this neighbourhood. How
can we have let you remain so long without unearthing you?”
“Because,” said Rufus to himself, “you did not happen to want me; when
are you going to offer to introduce me to ‘the Dook?’”
“And now, gentlemen,” continued Mr. Kettledrum, rising, swelling his
chest out, and thumping it athletically, “it is possible that I may
be wrong; I have never been deaf to conviction; but if I am wrong,
gentlemen, the fault is in yourselves. Mark me now, I am ready, such
is the force of truth, I am ready here at my own board (humble as
it is) once for all to admit that the fault is in yourselves. But
the utterance I swell with, the great thought that is within me, is
strife—no, I beg your pardon—is—is—rife and strongly inditing of
a certain lady, who is an honour to her sex. I rise to the occasion,
friends; I say an honour to her sex, and a blessing to the other
one. Gentlemen, no peroration of mine is equal in any way to the
greatness of the occasion; could I say, with Cicero, ‘Veni, vidi,
vici,’ where would be my self–approval? I mean—you understand me. It
is the privilege of a man in this blessed country, the first gem of
the ocean—no, I donʼt mean that; it applies, I believe, to Scotland,
and the immortal Burns—but this, sir, I will say, and challenge
contradiction, a Briton, sir, a Briton, never, never, never will be
free! And now, sir, in conclusion, is there one of you, let me ask, who
will not charge his eyes, gentlemen, and let his glass run over——”
“Haw,” cried Mr. Corklemore, “charge his glass, come, Kettledrum, and
let his eyes run over—haw—I think that is the way we read it, Dr.
Hutton.”
“Gentlemen, I sit down; finding it impossible to obtain an adequate
bearing, I close my poor attempt at cleansing my bosom of the perilous
stuff, sir—you know the rest—the health of Mrs. Hutton, that most
remarkable children—excuse me, most remarkable woman, whose children,
I am quite convinced, will be an honour to their age and sex. Port of
‘51, gentlemen; a finer vintage than ‘47.”
He had told them that it was ‘34, but both knew better; and now “in
vino veritas.”
At last Mr. Bailey Kettledrum had hit the weak point of Rufus, and,
what was more, he perceived it. Himself you might butter and soap for
a month, and he would take it at all its value; but magnify his Rosa,
exalt the name of his Rosa, and you had him at discretion.
“Remarkable, sir,” he inquired, with a twinkle of fruity port stealing
out from his keen little eyes, “you really do injustice; so many ladies
are remarkable——”
“Haw, well, I never heard——”
“Confound you, Corklemore,” said Kettledrum to him aside, “can you
never hold your tongue? Sir,”—to Rufus—“I beg your pardon, if I
said ‘remarkable;’ I meant to say, sir, ‘_most_ remarkable!’ The most
remarkable lady”—this to Corklemore, in confidence—“I have ever been
privileged to meet. ‘What children,’ I said to my wife, but yesterday,
‘what children they will be blest with!’ Oh, heʼs a lucky dog. The
luckiest dog in the world, my boy.”
However, they were not so very far from the sloping shores of sobriety
when they rejoined the ladies, and made much of the small Misses
Kettledrum, tidy children, rather pretty, and all of the pink ribbon
pattern. After some melting melodies from soft Georgieʼs lips and
fingers, Mrs. Kettledrum said,
“Oh, Dr. Hutton, do you ever play chess? We are such players here; all
except my poor self; I am a great deal too stupid.”
“I used to play a little when I was in India. We are obliged to play
all sorts of games in India.” Dr. Hutton piqued himself not a little
on his skill in the one true game. At a sign from their mother, the
small Kettledrums rushed for the board most zealously, and knocked
their soft heads together. Mrs. Corklemore was declared by all to be
the only antagonist worthy of an Indian player, and she sat down most
gracefully, protesting against her presumption. “Just to take a lesson,
you know; only to take a lesson, dear. Oh, please, donʼt let any one
look at me.” Rufus, however, soon perceived that he had found his
match, if not his superior, in the sweet impulsive artless creature,
who threw away the game so neatly when she was quite sure of it.
“Oh, poor me! Now, I do declare—Isnʼt it most heartbreaking? I am such
a foolish thing. Oh, can you be so cruel?”
Thrilling eyes of the richest grey trembled with dewy radiance, as
Rufus coolly marched off the queen, and planted his knight instead of
her.
“Mrs. Corklemore, can I relent? You are far too good a player.” The
loveliest eyes, the most snowy surge, in the “mare magnum” of ladies,
would never have made that dry Rue Hutton, well content with his Rosa,
give away so much as the right to capture a pawn in passing.
Now observe the contrariety, the want of pure reason, the confusion of
principle—I am sorry and ashamed, but I canʼt express these things
in English, for the language is rich in emotion, but a pauper in
philosophy—the distress upon the premises of the cleverest womanʼs
mind. She had purposely thrown her queen in his way; but she never
forgave him for taking it.
A glance shot from those soft bright eyes, when Rufus could not see
them, as if the gentle evening star, Venus herself, all tremulous,
rushed, like a meteor, up the heavens, and came hissing down on a poor
manʼs head.
She took good care to win the next game, for policy allowed it; and
then, of course, it was too late to try the decisive contest.
“Early hours. Liberty Hall, Liberty Hall at Kettledrum! Gentlemen stay
up, and smoke if they like. But early hours, sir, for the ladies.
We value their complexions. They donʼt. That I know. Do you now, my
dearest? No, of course you donʼt.” This was Mr. Kettledrum.
“Except for your sake, darling,” said Mrs. Kettledrum, curtseying, for
the children were all gone to bed ever so long ago.
“Well,” said Georgie, coming forward, because she knew her figure
would look well with three lamps upon it; such a figure of eight! “my
opinion is never worth having, I know, because I feel so much; but I
pronounce——” here she stood up like Portia, with a very low–necked
dress on—“gentlemen, and ladies, I pronounce that one is quite as bad
as the other.”
“Haw!” said Nowell Corklemore. And so they went to bed. And Rufus
Hutton wondered whether they ever had family prayers.
When all the rest were at breakfast, in came Mrs. Corklemore, looking
as fresh as daybreak.
“Oh, I am so ashamed of myself. What a sluggard you will think me! What
is it in the divine song of that great divine, Dr. Watts? Nowell, dear,
you must not scold me. I cannot bear being scolded, because I never
have tit for tat. Good morning, dearest Anna; how is your headache,
darling? Oh, Dr. Hutton, I forgot! No wonder I overlooked you. I shall
never think much of you again, because I beat you at chess so.”
“Game and game,” said Rufus, solemnly, “and I ought to have won that
last one, Mrs. Corklemore; you know I ought.”
“To be sure, to be sure. Oh, of course I do. But—a little thing
perwented him—his antagonist was too good, sir. Ah, weʼll play the
conqueror some day; and then the tug of war comes. Oh, Anna, I am so
conceited! To think of my beating Dr. Hutton, the best player in all
India.”
“Well, darling, we know all that. And we must not blame you therefore
for lying in bed till ten oʼclock.”
“Oh,” said Rufus, with a groan, “do look at ladies’ logic! Mrs.
Corklemore gained one game out of two—only because I was—ah–hem, I
mean by her very fine play—and now she claims absolute victory; and
Mrs. Kettledrum accepts it as a premise for a negative conclusion,
which has nothing on earth to do with it.”
But Rufus got the worst of that protest. He tilted too hard at the
quintain. All came down upon him at once, till he longed for a cigar.
Then Mrs. Corklemore sympathized with him, arose, their breakfast
being over, and made him a pretty curtsey. She was very proud of her
curtseys; she contrived to show her figure so.
“Confound that woman,” thought Rufus, “I can never tell when she is
acting. I never met her like in India. And thank God for that same.”
She saw that her most bewitching curtsey was entirely thrown away upon
him; for he was thinking of his Rosa, and looking out for the good
mare, Polly.
“Dr. Hutton, I thank you for your condescension, in giving me that
lesson. You let me win that last game out of pure good nature. I shall
always appreciate it. Meanwhile I shall say to every one—ʼOh, do you
know, Dr. Hutton and I play even?’ taking very good care meanwhile
never to play again with you. Shocking morality! Yes, very shocking.
But then I know no better, do I, Nowell, dear?”
“Haw! Well, Georgie, I am not so sure of that. My wife is absolute
nature, sir, simple, absolute—haw—unartificial nature. But
unartificial nature is, in my opinion—haw—yes, a very wise nature,
sometimes.”
“Haw!” said his wife, exactly like him, while everybody laughed. Then
she stood upon tiptoe to kiss him, she was so unartificial, even
before the company. All the pretty airs and graces of a fair Parisian,
combined with all the domestic snugness of an English wife! What a fine
thing it is to have a yoke–mate with a playful, charming manner!
“Good–bye, Dr. Hutton. We are on the wing, as you are. I fear you will
never forgive me for tarnishing your laurels so.”
Tarnishing laurels! What wonderful fellow so ingeniously mixed
metaphors?
“Now or never,” thought Rufus Hutton; “she has beaten me at chess, she
thinks. Now, Iʼll have the change out of her. Only let her lead up to
it.”
“Mrs. Corklemore, we will fight it out, upon some future occasion. I
never played with a lady so very hard to beat.”
“Ah, you mean at Nowelhurst. But we never go there now. There is—I
ought to say, very likely, there are mistakes on both sides—still
there seems to exist some _prejudice_ against us.—Anna, dear, you put
a lump of sugar too much in my tea. I am already too saccharine.”
“Well, dear, I put exactly what you always tell me. And you sent your
cup for more afterwards.”
“Matter of fact animal—how can she be my sister?” Georgie only
muttered this. Rufus Hutton did not catch it. Mr. Garnet would have
done so.
“Now is the time,” thought Rufus again, as she came up to shake hands
with him, not a bit afraid of the morning sun upon her smooth rich
cheeks, where the colour was not laid on in spots, but seemed to
breathe up from below, like a lamp under water. Outside he saw pet
Polly scraping great holes in the gravel, and the groom throwing all
his weight on the curb to prevent her from bolting homewards. “Hang
it, she wonʼt stand that,” he cried; “her mouth is like a sea–anemone.
Take her by the snaffle–rein. Canʼt you see, you fool, that she hasnʼt
seven coats to her mouth, like you? Excuse my opening the window,” he
apologized to Mrs. Corklemore, “and excuse my speaking harshly, for if
I had not stopped him, he would have thrown my horse down, and I value
my Polly enormously.”
“Especially after her behaviour the other night in the forest. It
is the same with all you gentlemen; the worse you are treated, the
more grateful you are. Oh yes, we heard of it; but we wonʼt tell Mrs.
Hutton.”
“No, indeed, I hope you wonʼt. I should be very sorry for her to get
even a hint of it.”
“To be sure,” laughed Georgie, “to be sure we will keep the secret,
for ever so many reasons; one of them being that Dr. Hutton would be
obliged to part with Miss Polly, if her mistress knew of her conduct.
But I must not be so rude. I see you want to be off quite as much as
fair Polly does. Ah, what a thing it is to have a happy home!”
Here Mrs. Corklemore sighed very deeply. If a woman who always has
her own way, and a woman who is always scheming, can be happy, she,
Georgie, must be so; but she wanted to stir compassion.
“Come,” she said, after turning away, for she had such a jacket on—the
most bewitching thing; it was drawn in tight at her round little waist,
and seemed made like a horseʼs body–clothes, on purpose for her to trot
out in,—“come, Dr. Hutton, say good–bye, and forgive me for beating
you.” Simple creature, of course she knew not the “sacra fames” of
chess–players.
“We must have our return–match. I wonʼt say ‘good–bye’ until you have
promised me that. Shall it be at my house?”
“No. There is only one place in the world where I would dare to attack
you again, and that is Nowelhurst Hall.”
“And why there, more than anywhere else?”
“Because there is a set of men there, with which I can beat anybody.
I believe I could beat Morphy, with those men at Nowelhurst. Ah! you
think me, I see, grossly and stupidly superstitious. Well, perhaps I
am. I do sympathise so with everything.”
“I hope we may meet at Nowelhurst,” replied Rufus, preparing his blow
of Jarnac, “when they have recovered a little from their sad distress.”
“Ah, poor Sir Cradock!” exclaimed the lady, with her expressive eyes
tear–laden, “how I have longed to comfort him! It does seem so hard
that he should renounce the sympathy of his relatives at such a time
as this. And all through some little wretched dissensions in the days
when he misunderstood us! Of course we know that you cannot do it;
that you, a comparative stranger, cannot have sufficient influence
where the dearest friends have failed. My husband, too, in his honest
pride, is very, very obstinate, and my sister quite as bad. They fear,
I suppose,—well, it does seem ridiculous, but you know what vulgar
people say in a case of that sort—they actually fear the imputation
of being fortune–hunters!” Georgie looked so arrogant in her stern
consciousness of right, that Rufus said, and for the moment meant it,
“How absurd, to be sure!”
“Yes,” said Georgie, confidentially, and in the sweetest of all
sweet voices, “between you and me, Dr. Hutton, for I speak to
you quite as to an old friend of the family, whom you have known
so long”—(“Holloa,” thought Rufus, “in the last breath I was a
‘comparative stranger!’”)—“I think it below our dignity to care for
such an absurdity; and that now, as good Christians, we are bound to
sink all petty enmities, and comfort the poor bereaved one. If you can
contribute in any way to this act of Christian charity, may I rely upon
your good word? But for the world, donʼt tell my husband; he would be
so angry at the mere idea.”
“I will do my best, Mrs. Corklemore; you may rely upon that.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you! I felt quite sure that you had a generous
heart. I should have been so disappointed—perhaps, after all, we shall
play our next game of chess at Christmas with the men I am so lucky
with. And then, look to yourself, Dr. Hutton.”
“I trust you will find a player there who can give me a pawn and two
moves. If you beat him, you may boast indeed.”
“What player do you mean?” asked Georgie, feeling rather less
triumphant. “Any Indian friend of yours?”
“Yes, one for whom I have the very greatest regard. For whose sake,
indeed, I first renewed my acquaintance with Sir Cradock, because I
bore a message to him; for the Colonel is a bad correspondent.”
“The Colonel! I donʼt understand you.” As she said these words, how
those eyes of hers, those expressive eyes, were changing! And her
lovely jacket, so smart and well cut, began to “draw” over the chest.
“Did you not know,” asked Rufus, watching her in a way that made her
hate him worse than when he took her queen, “is it possible that you
have not heard, that Colonel Nowell, Clayton Nowell, Sir Cradockʼs only
brother, is coming home this month, and brings his darling child with
him?” Now for your acting, Georgie; now for your self–command. We shall
admire, henceforth, or laugh at you, according to your present conduct.
She was equal to the emergency. She commanded her eyes, and her lips,
and bosom, after that one expansion, even her nerves, to the utmost
fibre—everything but her colour. The greatest actor ever seen, when
called on to act in real life, can never command colour if the skin
has proper spiracles. The springs of our heart will come up and go
down, as God orders the human weather. But she turned away, with
that lily–whiteness, because she knew she had it, and rushed up
enthusiastically to her sister at the end of the room.
“Dear Anna, darling Anna, oh, I am so delighted! We have been so
wretched about poor Sir Cradock. And now his brother is coming to mind
him, with such delightful children! We thought he was dead, oh, so many
years! What a gracious providence!”
“Haw!” said Nowell Corklemore.
“The devil!” said Bailey Kettledrum, and Rufus caught the re–echo, but
hoped it might be a mistake.
Then they all came forward, gushing, rushing, rapturous to embrace him.
“Oh, Dr. Hutton, surely this is too good news to be true!”
“I think not,” said Rufus Hutton, mystical and projecting, “I really
trust it is not. But I thought you must have heard it, from your close
affinity, otherwise I should have told you the moment I came in; but
now I hope this new arrival will heal over all—make good, I mean, all
family misunderstandings.”
“Colonel Clayton Nowell,” said Mr. Nowell Corklemore, conclusively,
and with emphasis, “Colonel Clayton Nowell was shot dead outside the
barracks at Mhow, on the 25th day of June, sir, in the year of our Lord
one thousand eight hundred and fifty–six. Correct me, sir, if I am
wrong.”
“Then,” said Rufus, “I venture to correct you at once.”
“Shot, sir,” continued Corklemore, “as I am, I may say—haw,—in a
position to prove, by a man called Abdoollah Manjee, believed to be a
Mussulman. Colonel Clayton Nowell, sir, commanding officer in command
of Her Majestyʼs Companyʼs native regiment, Nº· One hundred and
sixty–three, who was called,—excuse me, sir, designated, the ‘father
of his regiment,’ because he had so many illegitimate—haw, I beg your
pardon, ladies—because of his—ha, yes,—patriarchal manners, sir,
and kindly disposition,—he—haw, where was I?”
“I am sure I canʼt say,” said Rufus.
“No, sir, my memory is more tenacious than that of any man I meet
with. He, Colonel Clayton Nowell, sir, upon that fatal morning, was
remonstrated with by the two—ah, yes, the two executors of his
will—upon his rashness in riding forth to face those carnal, I mean to
say, those incarnate devils, sir. ‘Are you fools enough,’ he replied,
‘to think that _my_ fellows would hurt _me_? Give me a riding–whip, and
be ready with plasters, for I shall thrash them before I let them come
back.’ Now isnʼt every word of that true?”
“Yes, almost every word of it,” replied Rufus, now growing excited.
“Well, sir, he took his favourite half–bred—for he understood
cross–breeding thoroughly—and he rode out at the side–gate, where
the heap of sand was; ‘Coming back,’ he cried to the English sentry,
‘coming back in half an hour, with all my scamps along of me. Keep the
coppers ready.’ And with that he spurred his brown and black mare; and
no man saw him alive thereafter, except the fellows who shot him. Haw!”
“Yes,” said Rufus Hutton, “one man saw him alive, after they shot him
in the throat, and one man saved his life; and he is the man before
you.”
“What you, Dr. Hutton! What you! Oh, how grateful we ought to be to
you.”
“Thank you. Well, I donʼt quite see that,” Rufus replied, most dryly.
Then he corrected himself: “You know I only did my duty.”
“And his son?” inquired Georgie, timidly, and with sympathy, but the
greatest presence of mind. She had stood with her hands clasped, and
every emotion (except the impossible one of selfishness) quivering on
her sweet countenance; and now she was so glad, oh, so glad, she could
never tell you. “His poor illegitimate son, Dr. Hutton? Will he bring
the poor child home with him? How glad we shall be to receive him!”
“The child he brings with him is Eoa, dear natural odd Eoa, his
legitimate daughter.”
“Then you know her, Dr. Hutton; you could depose to her identity?”
A very odd question; but some women have almost the gift of prophecy.
“Oh, yes! I should rather think so. I have known her since she was ten
years old.”
“And now they are coming home. How pleasant! How sweet to receive them,
as it were from the dead! By the overland route, I suppose, and with a
lac of rupees?”
“No,” said the badgered Rufus, “you are wrong in both conjectures.
They come round the Cape, by the clipper–ship _Aliwal_; and with very
few rupees. Colonel Nowell has always been extravagant, a wonderfully
fine–hearted man, but a hand that could never hold anything—except,
indeed, a friendʼs.”
By the moisture in Rue Huttonʼs eyes, Georgie saw that her interests
would fare ill with him, if brought into competition with those of
Colonel Nowell. Meanwhile Polly was raving wild, and it took two
grooms to hold her, and the white froth dribbling down her curb was to
Rufus Hutton as the foam of the sea to a sailor. He did love a tearing
gallop, only not through the thick of the forest.
“Good–bye, good–bye! I shall see you soon. Thank you, I will take a
cheroot. But I only smoke my own. Good–bye! I am so much obliged to
you. You have been so very kind. Mrs. Hutton will be miserable until
you come over to us. Good–bye; once more, good–bye!”
Rufus Hutton, you see, was a man of the world, and could be false
“on occasion.” John Rosedew could never have made that speech on the
back of detected falsehood. Away went Polly, like a gale of wind; and
Rufus (who was no rogue by nature, only by the force of circumstances,
and then could never keep to it), he going along twenty miles an
hour, set his teeth to the breeze, which came down the funnel of his
cigar as down a steamerʼs chimney, stuck his calves well into Pollyʼs
sides, and felt himself a happy man, going at a rocketʼs speed, to
a home of happiness. All of us who have a home (and unless we leave
our heart there, whenever we go away, we have no home at all), all
of us who have a hole in this shifting sandy world—the sand as of
an hour–glass—but whence we have spun such a rope as the devil can
neither make nor break—I mean to say, we, all who love, without any
hems, and haws, and rubbish, those who are only our future tense
(formed from the present by adding “so”)—all of us who are lucky
enough, I believe we may say good enough, to want no temporal augment
from the prefix of society, only to cling upon the tree to the second
aorist of our children, wherein the root of the man lurks, the grand
indefinite so anomalous; all these fellows, if they can anyhow
understand this sentence, will be glad to hear that Rufus Hutton had a
jolly ride.
Rosa waited at the gate; why do his mareʼs shoes linger? Rosa ran in,
and ran out again, and was sure that she heard something pelting down
the hill much too fast, for her sake! but who could blame him when he
knew he was coming home at last? Then Rosa snapped poor Jonahʼs head
off, for being too thick to hear it.
Meanwhile, a mighty senate was held at Kettledrum Hall, Mrs. Corklemore
herself taking the curule chair. After a glimpse of natural life, and
the love of man and woman, we want no love of money; so we lift our
laps (like the Roman envoy) and shake out war with the whole of them.
Fools who think that life needs gilding—life, whose flowing blood
contains every metal but gold and silver—because they clog and poison
it! Blessed is he who earns his money, and spends it all on a Saturday.
He looks forward to it throughout the week; and the beacon of life is
hope, even as God is its pole–star.
CHAPTER II.
Mr. Garnetʼs house, well away to the west, was embraced more closely
and lovingly by the gnarled arms of the Forest than the Hall, or even
the Rectory. Just in the scoop of a sunny valley, high enough to
despise the water, and low enough to defy the wind, there was nothing
to concern it much, but the sighing of the branches. Over the brown
thatch hung two oak–trees, whispering leaves of history, offering the
acorn cup upon the parlour hearth, chafing their rheumatic knuckles
against the stone of the chimneys, wondering when the great storm
should come that would give them an inside view of it. For though the
cottage lay so snugly, scarcely lifting its thatched eyebrows at the
draught which stole up the valley, nevertheless those guardian oaks had
wrestled a bout or two with the tempests. In the cyclone on the morning
of November 29th, 1836, and again on the 7th of January, 1842, they
had gripped the ground, and set hard their knees, and groaned at the
thought of salt water. Since then the wind had been less of a lunatic
(although there had been some ruffianly work in 1854), and they hoped
there was a good time coming, and so spread their branches further and
further, and thought less of the price of timber. There was only one
wind that frightened them much, and that was two points north of west,
the very direction whence, if they fell, crash they must come on the
cottage. For they stood above it, the root–head some ten feet above the
back–floor of the basement, and the branches towering high enough for a
wood–pigeon not to be nervous there.
Now we only get heavy pressure of squalls from the west–north–west
after a thorough–going tempest which has begun in the southward, and
means to box half the compass. So the two great oaks were regarded by
their brethren up the hill as jolly fellows, happy dogs, born with a
silver spoon in their mouths, good for another thousand years, although
they might be five hundred old; unless, indeed—and here all the trees
shuddered—there came such another hurricane as in 1703. But which
of us knows his own brotherʼs condition? Those two oaks stood, and
each knew it, upon a steep bank, where no room was for casting out
stay–roots to east–south–east.
Bull Garnet hated those two trees, with terror added to hatred. Even
if they never crushed him, which depended much on the weather, they
_would_ come in at his bedroom window when the moon was high. Wandering
shapes of wavering shadow, with the flickering light between them,
walking slowly as a ghost does, and then very likely a rustle and tap,
a shivering, a shuddering; it made the ground–floor of his heart shake
in the nightmare hours.
Never before had he feared them so much, one quarter so much, as
this October; and, during the full and the waning moon after Clayton
Nowellʼs death, he got very little sleep for them. By day he worked
harder than ever, did more than three men ought to do, was everywhere
on the estates, but never swore at any one—though the men scratched
their ears for the want of it—laboured hard, and early, and late, if
so he might come home at night (only not in the dark), come home at
night thoroughly weary. His energy was amazing. No man anywhere felling
wood—Mr. Garnetʼs especial luxury—no man hedging and ditching,
or frithing, or stubbing up fern and brambles, but had better look
out what he had in his bag, or “the governor would be there, and no
mistake.” A workman could scarcely stand and look round, and wonder how
his sick wife was, or why he had got to work so hard, could scarcely
slap himself on the breast, or wet his hard hands for a better grip,
but there was Bull Garnet before him, with sad, fierce, dogged eyes,
worse than his strongest oaths had been.
Everybody said it was (and everybody believed it; for the gossip had
spread from the household in spite of the maidens’ fear of him) the
cause of it was, beyond all doubt, the illness of his daughter. Pearl
Garnet, that very eccentric girl, as Rufus Hutton concluded, who had
startled poor Polly so dreadfully, was prostrate now with a nervous
fever, and would not see even the doctor. Our Amy, who pleaded hard to
see her, because she was sure she could do her good, received a stern
sharp negative, and would have gone away offended, only she was so
sorry for her. Not that any fervid friendship, such as young ladies
exult in for almost a fortnight incessant, not that any rapturous love
exclusive of all _man_kind had ever arisen between them, for they had
nothing whatever in common, save beauty and tenacity, which girls do
not love in each other: only that she was always sorry for any one deep
in trouble. And believing that Pearl had loved Clayton Nowell, and was
grieving for him bitterly, how could Amy help contrasting that misery
with her own happiness?
For Amy was nice and happy now, in spite of Cradockʼs departure, and
the trouble he had departed in. He loved her almost half as much, she
believed, as she loved him; and was not that enough for anybody? His
troubles would flow by in time; who on earth could doubt it, unless
they doubted God? He was gone to make his way in the world, and her
only fear was lest he should make it too grand for Amy to share in.
She liked the school–children so, and the pony, and to run out now
and then to the kitchen, and dip a bit of crust in the dripping–pan;
and she liked to fill her dear fatherʼs pipe, and spread a thin
handkerchief over his head. Would all these pleasures be out of her
sphere, when Cradock came back, with all London crowning him the
greatest and best man of the age? Innocent Amy, never fear. “Nemo, nisi
ob homicidium, repente fuit clarissimus.”
Mr. Garnet would have felled those oaks, in spite of Sir Cradockʼs
most positive orders, if there had not been another who could not
command, but could plead for them. Every morning as the steward came
out, frowned and shook his fist at them, the being whom he loved most
on earth—far beyond himself, his daughter, and the memory of their
mother, all multiplied into each other,—that boy Bob came up to him,
and said, “Father, donʼt, _for my sake_.”
We have not heard much of Bob Garnet yet; we have scarcely shaped him
feebly; by no means was he a negative character, yet described most
briefly by negatives. In every main point, except two, he was his
fatherʼs cardinal opposite. Those two were generosity (which combines
the love of truth with a certain warmth of impulse) and persevering
energy. Even those two were displayed in ways entirely different, but
the staple was very similar.
Bob Garnet was a naturalist. Gentle almost as any girl, and more so
than his sister, he took small pleasure in the ways of men, intense
delight in those of every other creature. Bob loved all things God
had made, even as fair Amy did. All his day, and all his life, he
would have spent, if he had the chance, among the ferns and mosses,
the desmidiæ of the forest pools, the sun–dew and the fungi, the
buff–tips and red underwings, privet–hawks, and emperors. He knew all
the children of the spring and handmaids of the summer, all of autumnʼs
laden train and the comforters of winter. The happiest of mankind is he
whose stores of life are endless, whose pure delights can never cloy,
who sees and feels in every birth, in every growth or motion, his own
Almighty Father; and loving Him is loved again, as a child who spreads
his arms out.
Mr. Garnetʼs affection for this boy surpassed the love of women. He
petted, and patted, and coaxed him, and talked nonsense to him by the
hour; he was jealous even of Bobʼs attachment to his sister Pearl; in
short, all the energy of his goodness, which, like the rest of his
energies, transcended the force of other menʼs, centred and spent
itself mainly there. But of late Bob had passed all his time with his
mother—I mean, of course, with Nature; for his mother in the flesh was
dead many a year ago. He had now concluded, with perfect contentment,
that his education was finished; and to have the run of the forest at
this unwonted season more than consoled him for the disgrace of his
recent expulsion from school.
Scarcely any one would believe that Bob Garnet, the best and gentlest
boy that ever cried over Euripides—not from the pathos of the poet
certainly, but from his own—Bob Garnet, who sang to snails to come
out, and they felt that he could not beat them, should have been
expelled disgracefully from a private school, whose master must
needs expel his own guineas with every banished pupil. However, so
it was, and the crime was characteristic. He _would_ sit at night in
the lime–trees. Those lime–trees overhung the grey stone wall of the
playground near Southampton; and some wanton boys had been caught
up there, holding amoibæans with little nursemaids and girls of all
work, come out to get lung–and–tongue food. Thereupon a stern ukase
was issued that the next boy caught up there would be expelled without
trial, as the corrupter of that pure flock. The other boys laughed, I
am sorry to say, when “Bob, the natural,” as they called him, meaning
thereby the naturalist, was the first to be discovered there, crawling
upon a branch as cleverly as a looper caterpillar. Even then the
capital sentence was commuted that time, for every master knew, as well
as every boy, that Bob could never “say bo” to anything of the feminine
gender capable of articulating. So Bob had to learn the fourth Georgic
by heart, and did most of it (with extreme enjoyment) up in that very
same tree. For he kept all his caterpillars there, his beetle–traps,
his moth–nets, even some glorious pupæ, which were due at the end
of August; and he nursed a snug little fernery, and had sown some
mistletoe seeds, and a dozen other delicious things, and the lime–hawks
wanted to burrow soon; in a word, it was Bobʼs hearth and heart–place,
for no other boy could scale it. But just when Bob had got to the
beginning of Aristæus, and the late bees were buzzing around him,
although the linden had berried, an officious usher spied him out—a
dirty little fellow, known and despised by all the more respectable
_σιωπητέαι_ of Southampton. With hottest indignation, that mean low
beggar cried out—
“Boy in the tree there! I see you! Your name this moment, you rascal!”
“Garnet, sir, Bob Garnet. And if you please, sir, I am not a rascal.”
“Come down, sir, this very instant; or else Iʼll come up after you.”
“I donʼt think you can, sir,” replied Bob, looking down complacently;
for, as we shall see by–and–by, he was no coward in an emergency. “If
you please, sir, no boy in the school can climb this tree except me,
sir, since Brown senior left.”
“I can tell you one thing, Garnet: itʼs the last time youʼll ever climb
it.”
“Oh, then I must collect my things; I am sorry to keep you waiting,
sir. But they are such beauties, and I canʼt see well to pack them.”
Bob packed up his treasures deliberately in his red
pocket–handkerchief, and descended very cleverly, holding it with his
teeth. The next morning he had to pack his box, and became in the
school a mere legend.
His father flew into a violent passion, not with the son, but the
schoolmaster: however, he was so transported with joy at getting his
own Bob home again, that he soon forgave the cause of it. So the boy
got the run of the potato–fields, pollard–trees, and rushy pools, and
hunted and grubbed and dabbled, and came home sometimes with three
handkerchiefs, not to mention his hat, full. One lovely day this
October, before the frost set in—a frost of a length and severity most
rare at that time of year—Bob Garnet took his basket and trowel, nets,
lens, &c., and set out for a sandy patch, not far from the stream by
the Rectory, where in his July holidays he had found some Gladiolus
Illyricus, a bloom of which he had carried home, and now he wanted some
roots of it. He could not think why his father left him so very much to
himself now, and had ceased from those little caresses and fondlings,
which used to make Bob look quite ashamed sometimes in the presence of
strangers. He felt that his father loved him quite as much as ever,
and he had found those strong eyes set upon him with an expression,
as it appeared to him, of sorrow and compassion. He had a great mind
to ask what the matter was; but his love for his father was a strange
feeling, mixed with some dread and uncertainty. He would make Pearl
tell him all about it, that would be the best way; for she as well had
been carrying on very oddly of late. She sat in her own room all day
long, and would never come down to dinner, and would never come out for
a stroll with him, but slipped out by herself sometimes in the evening;
that, at least, he was sure of. And to tell him indeed, him going on
now for seventeen years of age, that he was too young to ask questions!
He would let her know, he was quite resolved, that because she happened
to be two years older—a pretty reason that was for treating him like a
baby! She who didnʼt know a wire–worm from a ring–worm, nor an elater
from a tipula, and thought that the tippet–moth was a moth that fed
upon tippets! Recalling fifty other instances of poor Pearlʼs deep
ignorance, Bob grew more and more indignant, as he thought of the way
she treated him. He would stand it no longer. If she was in trouble,
that was only the greater reason—— Holloa!
Helter–skelter, off dashed Bob after a Queen of Spain fritillary,
the first he had ever seen on the wing, and a grand prize for any
collector, even of ten times his standing. It was one of the second
brood, invited by the sun to sport awhile. And rare sport it afforded
Bob, who knew it at once from the other fritillaries, for the shape of
the wings is quite different, and he had seen it in grand collections.
An active little chap it was, greatly preferring life to death, and
thoroughly aware that man is the latterʼs chief agent. Once Bob made
quite sure of it, for it had settled on a blackberry–spray, and smack
the net came down upon it, but a smack too hard, for the thorns came
grinning out at the bottom, and away went the butterfly laughing. Bob
made good the net in a moment with some very fine pins that he carried,
and off again in still hotter pursuit, having kept his eyes on dear
Lathonia. But the prey was now grown wondrous skeary since that narrow
shave, and the huntsman saw that his only chance was a clever swoop in
mid air. So he raised his net high, and zig–zagged recklessly round the
trees, through the bushes, up the banks and down them. At last he got
quite close to her, but she flipped round a great beech–trunk; Bob made
a cast at hazard, and caught not the Queen, but Amy.
Amy was not frightened much, neither was she hurt, though her pretty
round head came out through the net—for she had taken her hat off—and
the ring lay upon her shoulders, which the rich hair had shielded from
bruises. She would have been frightened terribly, only she knew what
was going on, and had stepped behind the tree to avoid the appearance
of interfering. For she did not wish—she knew not why—but, by some
instinct, she did not wish to have much to do with the Garnets. She
regarded poor Bob as a schoolboy, who was very fond of insects, and
showed his love by killing them.
But if Amy was not frightened much, Bob, the captor, was. He dropped
the handle of his net, and fell back against the beech–tree. Then Amy
laughed, and took off the net, or the relics of the gauze at least, and
kindly held out her hand to him, and said,
“Oh, how you are grown!”
“And so are you. Oh dear me, have you seen her? Have you seen her?”
“Seen whom?” asked Amy, “my Aunt Eudoxia? She is on there, by the
ash–tree.”
“The Queen of Spain, Miss Rosedew, the Queen of Spain fritillary! Oh,
tell me which way she went! If I lose her, I am done for!”
“Then, I fear, Master Garnet”—[“Confound it,” thought Bob, “how all
the girls do patronize me!”]—“I am very much afraid you must make up
your mind to annihilation, if by the ‘Queen of Spain’ you mean that
common brown little butterfly you wanted just now to kill so much.”
“Is she gone across the river, then? That is nothing, I assure you. I
would go through fire after her. Oh, tell me, only tell me.”
Amy could not help laughing; poor Bob looked so ridiculous, fitting a
new net all the time upon the ring of the old one, the crown of his hat
come to look for his head, his trousers kicked well up over his boots,
and his coat an undoubted ventilator.
“I really donʼt know,” said Amy; “how could you expect me to see
through your shrimp–net, Master Garnet?”
“Oh, I beg your pardon—how stupid I am, to be sure—I beg your pardon
a thousand times; really I might have hurt you. I would not do that
for——”
“Even the Queen of Spain. To tell you the truth, Master Garnet, if I
knew where she was gone I would not tell you, because I canʼt bear to
have things killed. In my opinion, it is so cruel.”
“Oh!” cried Bob, a very long “oh,” drawn out into half an ell; and he
looked at Amy all the time he was saying it, which was a wonderful
thing for him to do. Then it occurred to his mind, for the first time
possibly, what a beautiful creature she was, more softly shaded than a
Chalk–hill blue, and richer than a cream–spotted tiger–moth! The moment
he felt this Bob was done for; Amy had caught her captor.
Flushed as he was with the long hot chase, his cheeks grew hotter and
redder, as he got a dim consciousness of a few of the things which he
was feeling. He was like a chrysalis, touched in the winter, when it
goes on one side from the crust of the thorax, and sometimes can never
get right again. After having said “oh,” with emphasis and so much
diæresis, Bob did not feel called upon for any further utterance till
Amy was gone to her Aunt Eudoxia; and then he contrived to say, “Ah!”
He was more put out than he had been even when his pet poplar–hawk
caterpillar was devoured alive by ichneumon grubs. He went round the
tree ever so many times, and wondered what was the matter with him, how
he came there, and what he was doing.
Alas, poor Bob! Nature, who overlooks nothing, was well aware of the
difficulties when she cried, “Jump up on my lap, Bob, and never be
weaned from me.” She knew that things of all sorts would come between
herself and her child, some of them drawn from her own mother–milk,
but most of them from manʼs muzzling. Of the latter she had not much
fear with Bob; but the former, she knew, were beyond her, and she had
none but herself to thank for them. She knew that the lad, so strongly
imbued with her own pleasant affluences, was almost sure to be touched
with that one which comes from her breast the warmest. And then what
would become of zoology, phytology, entomology, and all the other
yard–long names which her children spin out of her apron–strings?
While Bob was still fiddling with his fingers, and forgetting all about
butterflies, Miss Eudoxia, fetched by Amy, came to hold discourse with
him.
“Why, Master Robert, I do declare, Robert, my butterfly boy! I have not
seen you for such a time, Robert.” And she held out her hand, which Bob
took with very little sense of gratitude. To be called a “butterfly
boy” before Amy, and Amy to acquiesce in it!
“Ah, you think I have nothing for you, Robert. You school–boys live
upon suction. But just wait a moment, my dear.”
She drew forth an old horn comfit–box, which had belonged to her
grandmother, and was polished up like amber from the chafing of
many a lining. This she opened with much ado, poured three crinkled
sugar–plums on her gloved palm, and a smooth one as large as a
hazel–nut, and offered them all to Robert, with a smile of the finest
patronage.
“No, thank you, Miss Rosedew; no, thank you. I am very much obliged to
you.”
Miss Eudoxia had been wondering at her own generosity, and thought that
he was overcome with it. So her smile became one of encouragement and
assurance against self–sacrifice.
“Oh, you need not be afraid, Robert. And you can put some under your
pillow, and wake up in the night and suck them. How nice that will be,
to be sure! You see I know what boys are. And I have plenty left for
the infant–school. And they donʼt deserve them as you do, Robin.”
“Miss Rosedew,” said Bob, in his loftiest manner, though he was
longing for them, only that Amy was there; “you will believe me when I
assure you that I never touch sweets of any sort; not even at a late
dinner–party.”
Miss Eudoxia turned her eyes up, and almost dropped the sugar–plums.
But Amy, instead of being impressed, merrily laughed, and said,
“Give them to me, then, auntie, please. Some of the men at the
night–school eat sweets after early suppers.”
Bob said “good–bye” disconsolately, for he knew that he had affronted
Miss Doxy, without rising in Amyʼs opinion. He forgot all about the
gladiolus, and let many great prizes escape him; for the day was the
last of the soft and sunny, which tempt forth the forest denizens ere
the frosty seal is set on them. In the glimpses of every brown arcade,
in the jumbled gleam of the underwood, in the alleys between the
upstanding trees, even in the strong light where the golden patches
shone, and the wood fell back to look at them, in all of these he
seemed to see and then to lose his angel. Her face he could not see
clearly yet, hard as he strove to do it; affection is, but love is not,
a photographic power. Still he could see her shadowly; her attitude,
the fall of her hair, the manner of her gestures; even the ring of her
voice would seem to dwell about the image. But he never got them all
together; one each time was the leading thing; vague; and yet it went
through him.
He made one attempt—for he feared from the first, although he never
could feel it so, that his love was a thorough wild–goose chase—the
poor boy made one last attempt to catch at some other pursuit.
“Father,” he said that very same night, after sitting for hours of
wandering, “will you give me a gun and let me take to shooting?”
“A gun!” cried Bull Garnet, starting; “a gun, Bob! What do you mean by
it?”
“I meant nothing at all, father. Only I know the way to stuff birds,
and there are some rare ones here sometimes, and I want to make a
collection.”
“Bob Garnet, as long as I am alive, you never shall have a gun.”
“Then, will you lend me yours, father? I know very well how to use it.
I mean your patent——”
“Never, Bob. My son, if you love me, never speak of it again.”
CHAPTER III.
When Miss Rosedew and her niece came in to get ready for dinner, Amy
cried out suddenly, “Oh, only look at the roses, aunt; how they have
opened to–day! What delicious Louise Odier, and just look at General
Jacqueminot! and I do declare Jules Margottin is finer than he was at
Midsummer. I must cut a few, for I know quite well there will come a
great frost if I donʼt, and then where will all my loves be?”
Amyʼs prediction about the weather was as random a guess as we may find
in great authorities, who are never right, although they give the winds
sixteen points of the thirty–two to shuffle in. But it so turned out
that the girl was right—a point of the compass never hit till a day
too late by our weather–clerks.
That very same night such a frost set in as had not been known in
October for very nearly a century. It lasted nine nights and eight
days; twice the mercury fell more than half way from the freezing
point to zero, and the grass was crisp in the shade all day, though
the high sun wiped off the whiteness at noon wherever he found the
way to it. Boys rejoiced, and went mitching, to slide on the pools of
the open furzery: no boys since the time of their great–grandfathers
had done the heel–tap in October. But the birds did not appreciate
it. What in the world did it mean? Why, there were the hips not ripe
yet, and the hollyberries come to no colour, and half the blackberries
still too acid, and, lo! it was freezing hard enough to make a worm
cold for the stomach, even if you could get him! Surely there was some
stupid mistake of two months in the piperʼs almanac. All they could
say was that, if it were so, those impudent free–and–easy birds who
came sponging on them in the winter—and too stuck up, forsooth! to
live with them after sucking all the fat of the land, and winning their
daughters’ affections—those outlandish beggars—be hanged to them—had
got the wrong almanac too.
Why, they had not even heard the chatter, the everlasting high–fashion
clack, of those jerk–tail fieldfares yet; nor had a missel–thrush
come swaggering to bully a decent throstle that had sung hard all
the summer, just because his breast and his coarse–shaped spots were
bigger. Why, they had not even seen a clumsy short–eared owl flopping
out of the dry fern yet—much good might it do him, the fern that
belonged to themselves!—nor a single wedge of grey–lag geese, nor a
woodcock that knew his business. And those nasty dissolute quacking
mallards that floated in bed all day, the sluggards, and then wouldnʼt
let a respectable bird have a chance of a good nightʼs roost—there
they were still on the barley–stubble; please God they might only get
frozen!
And yet, confound it all, what was the weather coming to? You might
dig, and tap, and jump with both feet, and put your head on one side
in the most knowing manner possible, and get behind a tuft of grass,
and wait there ever so long, and devil a worm would come up! And,
as for the slugs, oh, donʼt let me hear of them! Though the thieves
had not all got home yet, they were ten degrees too cold for even an
oyster–catcherʼs stomach: feathers and pip, my dear fellow! it gives me
the colic to think of one. Put your head under my wing, Jenny Wren; oh,
my darling, how cold your beak is!
Such, so far as I could gather them, were the sentiments of the birds,
and their confabulation, when they went to roost, half an hour earlier
than usual—for bed is the warmest place after all; besides, what was
there to do?—on the 24th of October, 1859. And they felt the cold
rime settling down on grey twig, and good brown leaf. Yet some of the
older birds, cocks of long experience, buffers beyond all chaff, perked
one eye at the eastern heavens, before tucking it under the scapular
down—the eastern heavens all barred with murky red. Then they gave a
little self–satisfied tweedle, which meant to the ear of Melampus,
“Ah ha! an old bird like me knows something about the weather! Bless
my drumsticks and merrythought, I shanʼt be so cold and hungry, please
God, this time to–morrow night.”
Oh you little wiseacres, much you know what impendeth! A worse row than
all the mallards you grumble at could make in a thousand years will
spoil your roost to–morrow night. Think it a mercy if you do not get
your very feathers blown off of you—ay, and the tree of your ancestors
snapped beneath your feet—before this time to morrow night.
John Rosedew met the prettiest bird that ever had nest in the
New Forest, his own little duck of an Amy, in the passage by the
parlour–door, at eight oʼclock in the morning of that 25th of October.
He kissed her white forehead lovingly, according to early usage; then
he glanced at the weather–glass, and went nearer, supposing that his
short sight had cheated him.
“Why, Amy dear, you must have forgotten to set the glass last night.”
“No, indeed, papa. I set it very carefully. You know I can do it as
well as you can, since you showed me the way. It was just a little
hollow last night, and I moved the Verrier scale just a hundredth part
of an inch downwards, and then it was ten oʼclock.”
“Then may the Lord have mercy on all seafaring men, especially our poor
boatmen, and the dredging people off Rushford!”
Mr. Rosedew, as has been said before, was parson of Rushford as well as
of Nowelhurst. At the former place he kept a curate, but looked after
the poor people none the less, for the distance was only six miles; and
now, as his legs were getting stiff, he had bought Coræbus to help him.
Rushford lies towards the eastern end of the great Hurst shingle bank,
the most dangerous part of Christchurch Bay, being fully exposed to the
south–west gales, and just in the run of the double tide; in the eddy
of the Needles.
“Why, what is the matter, papa? Even if it rains, it wonʼt hurt them
much. And itʼs as lovely a morning as ever was seen, and the white
frost sparkling beautifully. What a magnificent sunrise! Or, at least,
a very strange one.”
“ʼSibi temperat unda carinis.’ All is smooth for the present. But I
heard the lash of the ground–sea last night, when I lay awake. Fetch
my telescope, darling, and come with me to the green room. We can see
thence to St. Albanʼs Head; but the danger is for those beyond it. All
the ships on this side of it will have time to work up the Solent.
Never before have I known the mercury fall as it has done now. An inch
and a tenth in only ten hours!”
When they went to bed on the previous night, the quicksilver stood at
30° 10´. Now it was at 29°, and cupped like the bottom of a champagne
bottle, which showed that it still fell rapidly. But as yet the silver
of the frost was sparkling on the lawn, and the morning sun looked up
the heavens, as if he felt all right. Nevertheless, it was but show:
he is bound to make the best of it, and, like all other warm–hearted
beings, sometimes has sorry work there.
When they saw that no large craft had rounded St. Albanʼs Head, only
that the poor cement–dredgers were working away at septaria, John and
his daughter went to breakfast, hoping that no harm would be, while
Miss Eudoxia lay in bed, and reflected on her own good qualities.
Amy came out after breakfast, without any bonnet or hat on, to make her
own observations. That girl so loved the open air, the ever glorious
concave, the frank palm of the hand of God—for in cities we get His
knuckles—that she felt as if she had not bowed before her Friend and
Maker, the all–giving, the all–loving One, until she had paid her
orisons and sung her morning hymn with His own ceiling over her. So now
she walked beneath the branches laden with His jewellery, and over the
ground hard–trodden by ministers doing His will, and beside the spear
and the flat–grass, chilled with the awe of His breath, and among the
wailing flowers, wailing and black and shrivelled up, because His face
was cold to them.
For these poor Amy grieved sadly, for she was just beginning to care
again for the things whose roots were outside of her. Lo the bright
chrysanthemums, plumed, reflex, and fimbriate; lo the gorgeous dahlias,
bosses quilled and plaited tight, and wrought with depth of colour;
and then the elegant asters, cushioned, cochleate, praying only to
have their eyes looked into; most of all, her own sweet roses, chosen
flowers of the chosen land—they hung their heads, and stuck together,
as brown as a quartered apple. Who could look at them, who could think
of them, and not feel as if some of herself were dead?
Now, walking there, this youthful maiden, fairest of all His works
and purest, began to observe, as He has taught us, the delicacies,
the pores, and glints of the grand universal footprint. Not that the
girl perceived one–tenth of the things being done around her, any more
than I can tell them; for observation grows from as well as begets
experience; and the girlish mind (and the boyish too, at any rate for
the most part) has very lax and indefinite communion with nature. How
seldom do we meet a lady who knows what way the wind is! They all
believe that it must freeze harder when the sky is cloudy; not one in
fifty but trembles more at the thunder than at the lightning.
Yet Amy, with true womanʼs instinct, being alarmed for the lives of
others, after her fatherʼs prediction, looked around her narrowly. And
first her eyes went upwards, and they were right in doing so. Of the
sky she knew less than nothing—although herself well known there; but
the trees—come now, she was perfectly sure she knew something about
the trees. So you do, you darling; and yet a very wee little; though
more than half the ladies do. You know an elm from a wych–elm, and a
hornbeam from a beech; and what more can we expect of you?
The rime upon the dark tree–boles and the forward push of the branches,
the rime of white fur, newly breathen but an hour ago, when a flaw
from the east came cat–like, and went through without moving anything;
this delicate down from the lips of morning, silk work upon the
night–fleece, was, as all most beautiful is, the first to fleet and
vanish. Changing into a doubtful glister, which you must touch to be
sure of it, then trickling away into beaded drops, like a tear which
will have no denial, it came down the older and harder rime, and
perhaps would bring that into its humour, and perhaps would get colder
and freeze again into little lumps, like a tap leaking. Then the white
face of the rough pillared trunks, pearled with glistening purity, was
bighted into with scoops and dark bays, like the sweep of a scythe in
the morning. On the bars of the gate, the silver harvest, spiked and
cropping infinitely, began to sheave itself away, and then the sheaves
were full ripe tears, and the tears ran down if you thought of them.
But the notable sight of all, at least to a loitering mind the most
striking, was to see how the hoar–frost gradually was lifting its light
wing from the grass. In little tufts and random patches—random to us
who know not why—the spangles, the spears, and the crusted flakes,
the fairy tinsel, the ermine of dew, the very down of moonlight, the
kiss of the sky too pure for snow, and the glittering glance of stars
reflected—all this loveliness, caught and fastened, by the nightʼs
halourgic, in one broad sheet of virgin white, was hovering off in
tufts and patches, as if a blind angel had breathed on it, with his
flight only guided by pity.
But through, and in, and between it all, the boles of the trees, and
the bars of the gate, the ridge of the ruts, and dapples of lawn, one
thing Amy observed which puzzled her, for even she knew that it was
a thing against all usage. The thaw was not on the south side or the
south–east side of anything, though the sickly sun was gazing there;
but the melting came from the north, and took the frost aback. She
wondered vainly about it, but the matter was simple enough, like most
of the things which we wonder at, instead of at our own ignorance. A
flaw of warm air from the north had set in; a lower warp which shot
through and threaded the cold south–eastern woof. This is not a common
occurrence. Since my vague, unguided, and weak observations began, I
have only seen it thrice. And on each of those three times it has been
followed by a fearful tempest. Usually, a frost breaks up with a shift
of the wind to the south–east, a gradual relaxing, a fusion of warmer
air, and a great effusion of damp, a blanket of clouds for the earth,
and a doubt in the sky how to use them. Then the doubt ends—as many
other doubts end—in precipitation. The wind chops round to the west of
south; the moisture condenses outside our windows, instead of starring
the inside; and then come a few spits of rain. But the rain is not
often heavy at first, although it is stinging and biting,—a rain which
is half ashamed of itself, as if it ought to be hail.
But, after all, these things depend on things we cannot depend
upon,—moods of the air to be multiplied into humours of the earth and
sea, and the product traversed, indorsed, divided, touched, and sliced
at every angle by solar, lunar, and astral influences.
“Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.”
Lucky the man who knows when to take out his umbrella.
That morning, the north wind crept along, sponging the rime from the
grass, and hustling it rudely from the tree–sprays, on many of which
the black leaves draggled, frozen while yet in verdure. Then the sky
began to be slurred across with white clouds breathing out from it,
as a child breathes on the blade of a knife, or on a carriage window.
These blots of cloud threw feelers out, and strung themselves together,
until a broad serried and serrate bar went boldly across the heavens,
from south–east to north–west. It marked the point whence the gale
would begin, and the quarter where it would end. From this great
bar, on either side, dappled and mottled, like the wash of sepia on a
drawing, little offsets straggled away, and began to wisp with a spiral
motion, slow and yet perceptible.
This went on for an hour or two, darkening and deepening continually,
amassing more and more of the sky, gathering vapours to it, and
embodying as it got hold of them; but still there was some white wan
sunshine through the mustering cloud–blots and the spattering mud of
the heavens; and still the good folks who had suffered from chilblains,
and found it so much milder, exclaimed, “What a beautiful day!”
Then about noon a mock sun appeared, feeble, wild, and haggard, whose
mates on the crown and the east of the arc could scarcely keep him in
countenance. Over all this, and over the true sun and the cirrhous
outrunners, heavily drove at one oʼclock the laden and leaden cumulus,
blurred on the outskirts with cumulostrate, and daubed with lumps of
vapour which mariners call “Noahʼs arks.”
Then came the first sough of the wind, a long, prolonged, deep–drawn,
dry sob, a hollow and mysterious sound, that shivered through the brown
leaves, and moaned among the tree–boles. Away went every beast and bird
that knew the fearful signal: the deer lanced away to the holm–frith;
the cattle in huffs came belloking to the lew of the boughy trees; the
hogs ran together, and tossed their snouts, and skittered home from the
ovest; the squirrel hied to his hollow dray, the weasel slunk to his
tuffet lair, and every rabbit skipped home from grass. The crows and
the magpies were all in a churm; the heavy–winged heron flapped off
from the brook–side; the jar–bird flicked out from the ivy–drum; the
yaffingale darted across the ride with his strange discordant laugh;
even the creepers that ply the trees crept into lichened fastnesses,
lay flat to the bark, and listened.
Nor less the solid, heavy powers that have to stay and break the storm,
no less did they, the beechen clump, the funnelled glens, the heathery
breastwork, even the depths of forest night—whence common winds shrink
back affrighted—even the bastions of Norman oak, scarred by many a
tempest–siege, and buckled by the mighty gale of 1703,—one and all
they whispered of the stress of heaven impending.
First came fitful scuds of rain, “flisky” rain they call it, loose
outriders of the storm, spurning the soft ice, as they dashed by, and
lashing the woodmanʼs windows. Then a short dark pause ensued, in which
the sky swirled up with clouds, and the earth lay mute with terror.
Only now and then a murmur went along the uplands.
Suddenly, ere a man might say, “Good God!” or “Where are my children?”
every tree was taken aback, every peat–stack reeled and staggered,
every cot was stripped of its thatch, on the opposite side to that on
which the blow was expected.
The first squall of that great tempest broke from the dark south–east.
It burst through the sleet, and dashed it upwards like an army of
archers shooting; ere a man could stay himself one way, it had caught
him up from another. The leaves from the ground flew up again through
the branches which had dropped them; and then a cloud of all manner of
foliage, whirling, flustering, capering, flitting, soared high over the
highest tree–tops, and drove through the sky like dead shooting–stars.
All that afternoon, the squalls flew faster, screaming onward to one
another, furious maniacs dashing headlong, smiting themselves and
everything. Then there came a lull. So sudden that the silence was more
stunning than the turmoil. A pause for sunset; for brave men countless
to see their last of sunlight. That evening, the sundown gun from
Calshot was heard over all the forest. I remember to have expected
fully that the next flaw of air would come, like a heavy sigh, from the
south–west. The expectation showed how much I underrated the magnitude
of that broad stormʼs area. If the wind had chopped then, it would have
been only a hard gale, not a hurricane.
Like a wave of the sea, it came on solidly, and from the old direction;
no squall, no blast, any more; but one bodily rush of phalanxed air
through a chasm in the firmament. Black, and tossing stone and metal as
a girl jerks up her hat–plume, it swept the breadth of land and sea, as
bisons horded sweep the snow–drifts, as Niagara sweeps the weeds away.
Where the full force of that storm broke, any man must have been mad
drunk who attempted to go to bed. Houses unroofed, great trees snapped
off and flung into another tree, men caught like chaff from the
winnowing and dropped somewhere in pond or gravel–pit, the carrierʼs
van overthrown on the road, and three oaks come down to lie upon
it,—some blown–away people brought news of these things, and fetched
their breath up to tell them.
Our own staunch hearths rocked under us, and we looked for the walls to
fall in upon us, as every mad rush came plunging.
Miss Eudoxia sat with Amy, near the kitchen fire; at least where
the fire should have been, but the wind had quenched it long ago.
Near them cowered Jemima and Jenny, begging not to be sent to bed.
They had crawled up–stairs to see about it, and the floor came up to
them—so they said—like the shifting plate of the oven. The parlour
chimney–stack had fallen; but, in Godʼs mercy, clear and harmless from
the roof of the house. No fear of the thatch taking fire: that wind
would have blown out the fire of London.
Now as they sat, or crouched and sidled, watching the cracks of the
ceiling above, jumping every now and then, as big lumps of mortar
fell down the chimney, and shrinking into themselves, every time the
great stack groaned and laboured so, Miss Eudoxia, full of pluck, was
reading aloud—to little purpose, for she scarcely could hear her own
voice—the prayers which are meant to be used at sea, and the 107th
Psalm. And who shall say that she was wrong, especially as the devil is
supposed to be so busy in a gale of wind?
Jemima and Amy were doing their best to catch her voice at intervals.
As for Jenny, she did not care much what became of her now. She knew
at the last full moon that her sweetheart was thoroughly up for
jilting her; and now when she had ventured out—purely of her own
self–will—the wind had taken her up anyhow, and whisked her like a
snow–flake against the wash–house door. She was sure to have a black
eye in the morning, and then it would be all up with her; and Jemima
might go sweethearting, and she could not keep her company.
The roar through the wood, the yells at the corners, the bellowing
round the chimneys, the thunder of the implacable hurricane; any mortal
voice was less than a whisper into a steam–whistle. Who could tell what
trees were falling? A monster might be hurled on the roof, and not one
of them would know it until it came sheer through the ceiling. Amy
was pale as the cinders before her, but firm as the bars of iron, and
even trying to smile sometimes at the shrieks and queer turns of the
tempest. No candle could be kept alight, and the flame of the parlour
lamp quivered like a shirt badly pinned on a washing–line. But Amy was
thinking dearly of the father of the household, the father of the
parish, out in the blinding wind and rain, and where the wild waves
were lashing. And now and then Amy wondered whether it blew so hard in
London, and hoped they had no big chimneys there.
John Rosedew had taken his little bundle, in a waterproof case, and
set out on foot for Rushford, when the storm became unmistakeable. He
would not ride Coræbus; first because he would have found it impossible
to wipe him dry, secondly because the wind has such purchase upon a
man when he is up there on the pommel. So the rector strode off in his
stoutest manner, an hour or so before nightfall, and the rain went into
him, neck and shoes, before he got to the peat–rick. To a resolute man,
who feels sometimes that the human hide wants tanning, there are few
greater pleasures than getting basted and cracklined by the wet wind;
only it must not come too often, neither last too long.
So John was in excellent spirits, quelching along and going pop like
a ball of India–rubber, when he came on a weaker fellow–mortal, stuck
fast in a chair of beech–roots.
“Why, Robert!” said Mr. Rosedew, and nine–tenths of his voice went to
leeward; “Robert, my boy;—oh dear!”
That last exclamation followed in vain Johnʼs favourite old hat, which
every one in the parish loved, especially the children. The hat went
over the crest of the hill, and leaped into an oak–tree, and was seen
no more but of turtle–doves, who built therein next summer, and for
three or four generations; and all the doves were blessed, for the sake
of the man who sought peace and ensued it.
“Let me go after it,” cried Bob, with his knees and teeth knocking
together.
“To be sure I will,” replied John Rosedew—the nearest approach to
irony that the worst wind ever took him—“now, Robert, come with me.”
He hooked the light stripling, hard and firm, to his own staunch
powerful frame, and, like a steamer lashed alongside, forced him
across the wind–brunt. And so, by keeping the covered ways, by running
the grooves of the hurricane, they both got safe to Rushford; to
which achievement Bobʼs loving knowledge of every inch of the forest
contributed at least as much as the stern strength of the parson.
Pretty Bob had no right, of course, to be out there at that time; but
he had heard of a glorious company of the deathʼs–head caterpillar,
in a snug potato–field, scooped from out the woodlands. He knew that
they must have burrowed now, and so he set out to dig for them with
his little handfork, directly the thaw allowed him. Anything to divert
his mind, or rather revert it into the natural channel. He had dreamed
about sugar–plums, and Amy, and butterfly–nets, and Queens of Spain,
and his father scowling over all, until his brain, at that sensitive
time, was like a sirex, trying to get out but stuck fast by the
antennæ. Now, Bob, though awake to the little tricks and pleasant ways
of Nature, as observed in cricks and crannies, knew nothing as yet of
her broader moods, her purging sweeps, her clearances,—in a word,
he was a stranger to the law of storms. Therefore he got a bitter
lesson, and one which set him a thinking. John Rosedew, with his grand
bare head bent forward to the wind–blow, and the grey locks sweeping
backward—how Amy would have cried!—towed Bob Garnet down the combe
which spreads out to the sea at Rushford. The fall of the waves was
short and hard—no long ocean rollers yet, only an angry beating surf,
sputtering under the gravel–cliff.
They found some shelter in the hollow, which opens to the
south–south–west; for, though it was blowing as hard as ever, the wind
had not canted round yet; and the little village of Rushford, upon
which the sea is gaining so, was happy enough in its “bunney,” and
could keep its candles burning.
“Iʼll go home with the boy at sundown, when the gale breaks, as I hope
it will. His father will be in a dreadful way, and I know what that man
is. But I could not leave the boy there, neither could I go back again.”
So said John Rosedew, lulled by the shelter, feeling as if he had
frightened himself and all his household for nothing; almost ashamed
to show himself at Octavius Pellʼs sea–cottage, the very last dwelling
of the village. But Octave Pell knew better. He had not lived upon
that coast, fagging out as a cricketer of the Church of England, with
his feet and his hands ready always, and his spiked shoes holding
the ground,—he had not been on the outside of all things, hoping
for innings some day, without looking up at the skies sometimes, and
guessing about promotion. So he knew that his rector, whom he revered
beyond all the fathers of men or women—for he too was soft upon
Amy—he saw that his rector was right in coming, except for his own
dear sake.
John came in, with his shapely legs stuck all tight in the shrunk
kerseymere (shrunk, and varnished, and puckered like plaiting, from the
pelt of the rain), and by one hand still he drew the quenched and welyy
Bob. The wind was sucking round the cliff, and the door flew open hard
enough for a weak manʼs legs to go with it. But “Octave” Pell—as he
was called, because he would sing, though he could not—the Reverend
Octavius was of a sturdy order, well–balanced and steady–going. He drew
in his reeking visitors, and dried, and fed, and warmed them; Bob being
lodged in a suit of clothes which he could only inhabit sparsely. Then
Pell laid aside his rose–root pipe out of deference to his rector, and
made Bob drink hot brandy–and–water till he chattered more than his
teeth had done.
That curate was a fine young fellow, a B.A. of John Rosedewʼs college,
to whom John had given a title for orders—not sold it, as some rectors
do, for a twelvemonthʼs stipend. A tall, strong, gentlemanly parson,
stuck up in no wise, nor stuck down; neither of the High nor Low Church
rut, although an improvement on the old type which cared for none of
these things. He did his duty by his parish; and, as follows almost of
necessity, his parish loved and admired him. He never lifted a poor
manʼs pot–lid to know what he had for dinner; he never made much of
sectarian squabbles, nor tried to exorcise dissent. In a word, he kept
his place, because he felt and loved it.
Only two rooms had Pell to boast of, but he was wonderfully happy in
them. He could find all his property in the dark, and had only one
silver spoon. And the man who can be happy with one, was born with it
in his mouth. Those two rooms he rented from old Jacob Thwarthawse, or
rather from Mrs. Jacob, for the old man was a pilot on the Southampton
Water, and scarcely home twice in a twelvemonth. The little cot looked
like a boat–house at the bottom of the bunney; so close it was to the
high–water mark, that the froth of the waves and the drifting skates’
eggs came almost up to the threshold when the tide ran big, and the
wind blew fresh.
And in the gentle summer night—pray what is it in Theocritus? John
Rosedew could tell, but not I—at least, I mean without looking—
“Along the pinched caboose, on every side,
With mincing murmur swam the ocean tide.”
_Id._ xxi. 17.
CHAPTER IV.
By the time Octavius Pell had clothed, and fed, and warmed his drenched
and buffeted guests, the sun was slipping out of sight, and glad to be
quit of the mischief. For a minute or two, the cloud–curtain lifted
over St. Albanʼs Head, and a narrow bar of lively green striped the
lurid heavens. This was the critical period, and John Rosedew was
aware of it, as well as Octave Pell. Either the wind would shift to
south–west quicker than vanes could keep time with it, and then there
would be a lively storm, with no very wide area; or else it would come
on again with one impetuous leap and roar, and no change of direction,
and work to the south–west gradually, blowing harder until it got
there. The sea was not very heavy yet, when they went out to look at
it; the rain had ceased altogether; there was not air enough to move
the fur of a ladyʼs boa; but, out beyond the Atlantic offing, ridges
like edges of knives were jumping, as if to look over the sky–line.
“Nulla in prospectu navis,” said John Rosedew, who always talked Latin,
as a matter of course, when he met an Oxford man; “at least, so far as
I can see with the aid of my long–rangers.”
“No,” replied Pell, “and Iʼm heartily glad that there is no ship in
sight; for, unless Iʼm much mistaken—run, sir, run like lightning.
_Iʼve got no more dry clothes._”
They ran for it, and were just in time before the fury came down again.
Bob Garnet was ready to slip away, for he knew that his father would be
wild about him; he had taken his drenched hat from the firetongs, and
was tugging at the latch of the door. But now there was no help for it.
“We are in for it now,” cried Mr. Rosedew; “I have not come down for
nothing. It is, what I feared this morning, the heaviest storm that
has broken upon us for at least a generation. And we are not yet in
the worst of it. God grant there be no unfortunate ship making for the
Needles. All our boats, you say, Pell, are in the Solent long ago. Bob,
my boy, you must not expect to see your father to–night. I hope he will
guess what has happened.”
The beach, or pebble bank of Hurst, is a long and narrow spit of land,
growing narrower every year, which forms a natural breakwater to the
frith of the Solent. It curves away to the south of east from the
straighter and more lofty coast of Barton, Hordle, and Rushford. Hurst
Castle, in which it terminates, is the eastern horn of Christchurch
Bay, as Hengistbury Head is the western. The Isle of Wight and the
Needle Rocks protect this bay from the east windʼs power, but a due
south wind brings in the sea, and a south–west the Atlantic. Off this
coast we see at times those strange floating or rising islands known
by the name of the “Shingles;” which sometimes stay above water so
long, that their surface is clad with the tender green of bladderwort
and samphire; but more often they disappear after taking the air for a
few short hours. For several years now they have taken no air; and a
boatman told me the other day, that, from the rapid strides of the sea,
he thought it impossible for the “Shingles” ever to top the waves again.
Up and down the Solent channel the tide pours at a furious speed;
and the rush of the strong ebb down the narrows, flushed with the
cross–tide from St. Helenʼs, combs and pants out into Christchurch Bay,
above the floodmark of two hours since. This great eddy, or reflux,
is called the “double–tide;” and an awkward power it has for any poor
vessel to fall into.
All that night it blew and blew, harder and harder yet; the fishermenʼs
boats on the beach were caught up, and flung against the gravel–cliff;
the stout men, if they ventured out, were snatched up as a mother
snatches a child from the wheels of a carriage; the oaks of the wood,
after wailing and howling, as they had done to a thousand tempests,
found that outcry go for nothing, and with it went themselves. Seven
hundred towers of Natureʼs building showed their roots to the morning.
The old moon expired at O·32; and many a gap the new moon found,
where its mother threw playful shadows. The sons of Ytene are not
swift–witted, nor deeply read in the calendar; yet they are apt to mark
and heed the great convulsions of nature. The old men used to date
their weddings from the terrible winter of 1787; the landmark of the
young menʼs annals is the storm of 1859.
All that night, young Robert Garnet was strung by some strange tension.
Of course he could not sleep, amid that fearful uproar, although he
was plunged and lost from sight in Octavius Pellʼs great chair. The
only luxury Pell possessed—and that somehow by accident—was a deep,
and soft, and mighty chair, big enough for three people. After one of
the windows came in, which it did, with a crash, about ten oʼclock,
scattering Pellʼs tobacco–jars, and after they had made it good with
books and boxes and a rug, so that the wind was filtered through it,
John Rosedew and his curate sat on a couple of hard old Windsors,
watching the castle of Hurst. Thence would come the signal flash, if
any hapless bark should be seen driving over the waters. There they
sat, John Rosedew talking, as he could talk to a younger man, when
his great heart was moved to its depth, and the multitude of his mind
in march, and his soul anticipating it: talking so that Octave Pell,
following his silver tones, even through that turmoil, utterly forgot
the tempest, and the lapse of hours, and let fall on his lap the pipe,
which John had made him smoke.
The thunder of the billows waxing, for the wind was now south–west,
began to drown the roar of the gale, and a storm of foam was flying,
when the faint gleam of a gun at sea was answered by artilleryʼs flash
from the walls of old Henry the Eighth. Both men saw the landward light
leap up and stream to leeward; but only the younger one descried the
weak appeal from the offing.
“Where is she, Pell? Have you any idea?”
“She is away, sir, here to the right: dead in the eye of the wind.”
“Then may our God and Father pity our brothers and our sisters!”
Out ran both those strong good men, leaving poor Bob (as they thought)
asleep in the depth of the easy–chair. The little cottage was partly
sheltered by an elbow of the cliff; otherwise it would have been flying
up the bunney long ago. The moment the men came out of the shelter,
they were driven one against the other, and both against the cliff.
“My castle will go at high–water,” said Pell, though none could hear
him; “but I shall be back in time enough to get the old woman out.”
Then, as far as Pell could make out in the fierce noise and the
darkness, John Rosedew begged him to go back, while himself went
on alone. For it was Johnʼs especial business; he had procured the
lifeboat, chosen the crew, and kept the accounts; and he thought
himself responsible for any wreck that happened. But what good on earth
could Pell do, and all his chattels in danger?
“No good, very likely,” Pell shouted, “and a good deal perhaps
in–doors! Keep the sea out with a besom.”
Octave had a dry way with him, not only when he sang, but when he
thought he saw the right, and did not mean to argue it. So rector and
curate, old man and young man, trudged along together, each bending
low, and throwing his weight, like a quoit, against the wind; each
stopping and crouching at every tenth yard, as the blast irresistible
broke on them. Crusted with hunks of froth pell–mell, like a storm of
eggs on the hustings, drenched by pelting sheets of spray, deafened by
the thundering surf, and often obliged to fly with the wind from a wave
that rushed up scolloping, they battled for that scoop of the bay where
the ship must be flung by the indraught.
Up to the present, Christchurch Point, and St. Albanʼs Head beyond it,
broke (as the wind was westering) some little of the wildest sea–brunt.
But now they stood, or rather crouched, where the mountain rollers
gathering, sweeping, towering onward, avalanche upon avalanche, burst
on their destined barrier. A thousand leagues of water, swelled by
the whole weight of heaven flung on it, there leaped up on the solid
earth, and to the heaven that vexed it. As a strong man in his wrath
accepts his wifeʼs endorsement, so the surges took the minor passion of
a fierce spring–tide, rolled it in their own, and scorned the flat land
they looked down upon. Tush, the combing of their crests was bigger
than any town there. On they came, too grand to be hurried even by
the storm that roused them; each had a quarter of a mile to himself,
and who should take it from him? The white foam fell back in the wide
water valleys, and hissed and curdled away in flat loops, and the storm
took the mountain ridges again and swept the leaping snow off. Anon,
as it struck the shelving shore, each rolling monster tossed its crest
unspeakably indignant; hung with impending volume, curling like the
scroll of God; then thundered, as in judgment, down, and lashed the
trembling earth.
Among them, not a mile from shore, as the breaking daylight showed it,
heaved, and pitched, and wallowed hog–like in the trough of waters, a
large ship, swept and naked. Swept of her masts, of her canvas naked;
but clad, alas! with men and women, clustering, clinging, cowering
from the great white grave beneath them. As she laboured, reeled, and
staggered up to the storm–rent heavens, and then plunged down the
yawning chasm, every attitude, every gesture of terror, love, despair,
and madness could be descried on the object–glass of the too–faithful
telescope. As a ghastly wan gleam from the east lit up all that
quivering horror, all that plight of anguish, John Rosedew turned away
in tears, and fell upon his knees.
But Pell caught up the clear Munich glass, blocked every now and then
with foam; he wiped it with his cuff, and levelled it on a stony ledge.
There he lay behind the pebbles, himself not out of danger, unable to
move, or look away, spellbound by the awe of death in numbered moments
coming. Round him many a sturdy boatman, gazing, listening, rubbing his
eyes, wondering about the wives and children of the brave men there.
The great disaster imminent was known all over the village, and all who
dared to cross the gale had crept, under shelter, hitherwards. None was
fool enough to talk of boat, or tug, or lifeboat; a child who had then
first seen the sea must have known better than that. The best ship in
the British navy could not have come out of the Needles in the teeth of
such a hurricane.
Some of the tars had brought their old Dollonds, preventive glasses
long cashiered, and smugglersʼ night–rakers cheek by jowl, and
every sort of “perspective,” fifty years old and upward, with the
lenses cracked and rattling, and fungoid tufts in the object–glass.
Nevertheless, each man would swear that his own glass was the best of
the lot, and his neighbourʼs “not of much count.” To their minds,
telescopes like spectacles suit the proprietor only.
“By Jove, I believe sheʼll do it!” cried Pell, the chief interpreter,
his glass being the only clear one.
“Do what, sir? what?” asked a dozen voices, hurriedly.
“Get her head round to windward, and swing into smoother water. Theyʼre
in the undertow already. Oh, if they only knew it!”
They knew it, he saw, in a moment. They ran up a spare sail, ere he
could speak, to the stump of the mizen–mast, and a score of brave men
strained on the sheets until they had braced them home. They knew that
it could not stand long; it would fly away to leeward most likely
when once they mounted the wave–crest; but two or three minutes might
save them. With eight hands jamming the helm up, and the tough canvas
tugging and bellying, the ship, with the aid of the undertow, plunged
heavily to windward. All knew that the ship herself was doomed, that
she never could fetch off shore; but, if she could only hold her
course for some half–mile to the westward, she would turn the flank of
those fearful rollers, and a good stout boat might live. For there a
south–western headland broke the long fury of the sea.
Every eye was intent, every bosom drew a deep breath, as the next great
billow rose under the ship, and tossed her up to the tempest. They
had brought her as near to the wind as they dared, so as still to
have steerage way on her, and she took the whole force of the surge on
her port bow, not on her beam, as the people on shore had feared. The
sea broke bodily over her, and she staggered back from the blow, and
shook through every timber, then leaped and lurched down the terrible
valley, but still, with the good sail holding. She was under noble
seamanship, that was clear to every one, and herself a noble fabric. If
she could but surmount two billows more, without falling off from the
wind, within three points of which her head lay, most of the crew might
be rescued. Already a stout galley, manned with ten oars, was coming
out of Christchurch Harbour, dancing like a cork on the waves, though
sheltered by the headland.
Our ship rode over the next billow gallantly; it was a wave that had
some moderation, and the lungs of the gale for the moment were panting,
just as she topped the comb of it. “Hurrah!” shouted the men ashore;
“By God, sheʼll do it yet!”
By God alone could she do it. But the Father saw not fit; the third
billow was the largest of all that had yet rolled up from the ocean.
Beam–end on she clomb the mountain, heeling over heavily, showing to
the shore her deck–seams,—even the companion–finial, and the poor
things clinging there; a wail broke from them as the great sea struck
her, and swept away half a score of them.
“Nowʼs your chance, men. D—n your eyes! She wonʼt hang there two
minutes. Out with the boats you—— lubbers. Look sharp, and be d—d to
you.”
The ancient pilot, Thwarthawse, dancing and stamping, his blue jacket
flapping in the wind, and his face of the deepest plum colour, roared
to windward his whirlwind of oaths up an old split trumpet, down which
the wind came bellowing harder than his voice went up it.
“Stow that, Jacob!” cried an old Scotchman, survivor of many a wreck;
“can ye nae see his reverence, mon? Itʼs an unco thing for an auld
mon like you to swear at your mates in their shrouds, chap. I ken the
skipper of that there ship, and heʼs no lubber, no more than I be.”
Sandy Macbride was known to fear God, and to have fifty pounds in the
savings bank. Therefore no one flouted him.
“Youʼre right, Mac; youʼre right, by George!” cried Pell. “What a
glorious fellow! I can see him there holding on by the stanchion,
giving his orders as coolly as if for the cabin dinner. I could die
with that man.”
The tear in Octavius Pellʼs right eye compelled him to shift the glass
a bit. He was just the man who would have done even as that captain did.
“Hurrah, hurrah! theyʼve got the launch out; only she and the gig are
left. Troops on the deck, drawn up in a line, and the women hoisted in
first. Give them three cheers, men, though they canʼt hear you! Three
cheers, if you are Englishmen! Glorious, glorious! There they go; never
saw such a fine thing in all my life. Oh, I wish I had been a sailor!”
The tears ran down the young parsonʼs cheeks, and were blown into the
eyes of old Macbride; or else he had some of his own.
“Shove off, shove off; nowʼs your time, for the under–current is
failing her. Both of them off, as Iʼm alive; and yet a third boat I
could not see. What magnificent management! That man ought to command a
fleet. Two of them off for Christchurch Harbour; away, away, while the
wind lulls; but what is the third boat doing?” Every one was looking:
no one answered. Old Mac knew what it was, though his eyes were too old
to see much.
“Captain Roberts, Iʼll go bail, at his old tricks again. And thereʼs
none with the sense to mutiny on him, and lash his legs, as we did in
the _Samphire_.”
“At the side of the ship there is some dispute. The boat is laden to
the waterʼs edge, and the ship paying off to leeward, for there is no
man at the wheel; there goes the sail from the bolt–ropes. If they
donʼt push off, ere an oarʼs length, they will all be sucked into the
rollers! Good God! now I see what it is. There is only room for one
more, and not one of those three will take it. Two white–haired men
and a girl. Life against honour with the old men; and what is life
compared with it? Both resolved not to stir a peg; now they join to
make the girl go. Her father has got her in his arms to pitch her into
the boat; she clings around his neck so that both must go, or neither.
He could not throw her; she falls on her knees, and clings to his legs
to die with him. Smack—there, the rope is parted, and it is too late
for further argument. The troops in the boat salute the officer, and he
returns it as on parade.”
“Name of that ship?” said Jacob, curtly, to old Sandy Macbride.
“_Aliwal_, East India trader, Captain Roberts. Calcutta to Southampton.”
“Then itʼs all up now with the _Aliwal_, and every soul on board of
her.”
“Donʼt want a pilot to tell us that,” answered old Mac, testily.
“Youʼve seed a many good craft, pilot, but never one as could last five
minutes on the Shingle Bank, with this sea running.”
“Ropes, ropes!” cried Octave Pell; “in five minutes sheʼll be ashore
here.”
“No, she ‘ont, nor yet in ten,” answered his landlord, gruffly; “sheʼll
fetch away to the eastward first, now she is in the tide again,
specially with this gale on; and sheʼll take the ground over yonner,
and go to pieces with the next breaker.”
She took her course exactly as old Jacob mapped it out for her. He knew
every run and flaw of the tide, and how it gets piled in the narrows by
a very heavy storm, and runs back in the eddy which had saved so many
lives there. This has nothing to do with the “double tide;” that comes
after high–water. As the good ship traced the track of death, doing
as the waves willed (like a little boyʼs boat in the Serpentine), the
people on shore could see those three, who had contested the right of
precedence to another world.
They were all upon the quarter–deck; and three finer figures never
yet came to take the air there, in the weariness of an Indian voyage.
Captain Roberts, a tall, stout man, with ruddy cheeks and a broad white
beard, stood with his hands in his pockets, and his feet asunder,
and a sense of discipline in his face, as of a man who has done his
duty, and now obeys his Maker. No sign of flinching or dismay in his
weather–beaten eyes, as he watched his death roll towards him; though
the gazers fancied that one tear rose, perhaps at the thought of his
family just coming down–stairs at Lymington. The military man beside
him faced his death quite differently; perhaps with even less of
fear, but with more defiance, broken, every now and then, by anguish
for his daughter. He had not learned to fear the Lord, as those men
do who go down into the great deep. He looked as if he ought to be
commanding–officer of the tempest. The ship, running now before wind
and sea, darted along as a serpent darts over the graves in the
churchyard; she did not lurch any more, or labour, but rose and fell,
just showing her fore–foot or stern–post, as the billows passed under
her. And so that young maiden could stand and gaze, with her fatherʼs
arm thrown round her.
She was worthy to be his daughter; tall, and light of form, and calm,
with eyes of wondrous brightness, she was looking at her fatherʼs face
to say the last good–bye. Then she flung both arms around his neck, and
fondly, sadly, kissed him. Meanwhile the ship–captain turned away, and
thought of Susy Roberts. Suddenly he espied a life–belt washed into the
scuppers. He ran for it in a moment, came behind the maid, and, without
asking her consent, threw it over her, and fastened it. There was
little chance of it helping her, but that little chance she should have.
“Sheʼll take the ground next biller,” cried the oracular Jacob; “stand
by there with the ropes, boys.”
On the back of a huge wave rose for the last time the unfortunate
_Aliwal_. Stem on, as if with strong men steering, she rushed
through the foam and the white whirl, like a hearse run away with
in snow–drifts. Then she crashed on the stones, and the raging sea
swept her from taffrail to bowsprit, rolled her over, pitched her
across, and broke her back in two moments. The shock rang through the
roar of billows, as if a nerve of the earth were thrilling. Another
mountain–wave came marching to the roll of the tempest–drum. It curled
disdainfully over the side, like a fog sweeping over a hedgerow;
swoop—it broke the timbers away, as a giant tosses a fir–cone.
“I canʼt look any longer,” cried Pell; “give me something to feel,
men. Quick, there! I see something!”
He seized the bight of a rope, and rushed anyhow into the waters. But
John Rosedew and the life–boatmen held hard upon the coil of it, and
drew him with all their might back again. They hauled Octavius Pell
up in the manner of a cod–fish, and he was so bruised and stupefied,
that he could not tell what he had gone for. They only saw floating
timber and gear, and wreck of every sort drifting, till just for one
sight–flash a hoary head, whiter than driven waters, leaped out of the
comb of the billow. A naval man, or a military—who knows, and to whom
does it matter?
Brave men ashore, all waiting ready, dashed down the steep of death to
save him, if the great wave should toss up its plaything. All Rushford
strained at the cables that held them from the savage recoil. Worse
than useless; the only chance of it was to make more widows. The sea
leaped at those gallant strong men; there were five on either cable;
it leaped at them as the fiery furnace leaped on the plain of Dura. It
struck the two ropes into one with a buffet, as a lionʼs paw shatters
a cobweb; it dashed the menʼs heads together, and flung them all in a
pile on a ballast–heap. Lucky for them that it fought with itself, and
clashed there, and made no recoil. The white–haired corpse was seen no
more; and all Rushford shrunk back in terror.
The storm was now at its height; and of more than a hundred people
gathered on the crown of the shore, and above the reach of the billows,
not one durst stand upright. Nearer the water the wind had less power,
for the wall of waves broke the full brunt of it. But there no man,
unless he were most quick of eye and foot, might stand without great
peril. For scarcely a single billow broke, but what, in the first
rebound and toss, two churning hummocks of surf met, and flashed up
the strand like a mad white horse, far in advance of the rest. Then a
hissing ensued, and a roll of shingle, and the water poured huddling
and lappeting back from the chine itself had crannied.
As brave men fled from a rush of this sort, and cowards on the bank
were laughing at them, something white was seen in the curl of the wave
which was breaking behind it. The ebb of that inrush met the wave and
partly took the crash of it, then the white thing was shot on the shore
like a pellet, and lay one instant motionless. There was no rope there,
and the men hung back; John Rosedew cried “Shame!” and ran for it; but
they joined hands across and stopped him. Before they could look round
again, some one had raised the body. ‘Twas young Bob Garnet, and in his
arms lay the maiden senseless. She had looked at him once, and then
swooned away from the whirl, and the blows, and the terror. No rope
round his body, no cork, no pad; he had rushed full into the raging
waves, as he woke from his sleep of heaviness. He lifted the girl, and
a bending giant hung thirty feet above them.
Then a shriek, like a womanʼs, rang out on the wind, and two great arms
were tossed to heaven. Bull Garnet stood there, and strove to rush on,
strove with every muscle, but every nerve strove against it. He was
balanced and hung on the wind for a moment, as the wave hung over his
heartʼs love. Crash came the wave—what shriek should stop it, after
three hundred miles of rolling?—a crash that rang in the souls of all
whom youth could move or nobleness. Nothing was seen in the depth of
water, the swirling, hurling whiteness, until the billow had spent its
onset, and the curdle of the change was. Then Bob, swept many a fathom
in–shore, but griping still that senseless thing, that should either
live or die with him—Bob, who could swim as well or better than he
could climb a tree, but felt that he and his load were only dolls for
the wave to dandle—down he went, after showing his heels, and fought
the deadly outrush. None but Natureʼs pet would have thought of, none
but the favoured of God could have done, it. He felt the back–wave
tugging at him, he felt that he was going; if another billow broke on
him, it was all up with his work upon wire–worm. Holding his breath,
he flung his right leg over the waist of the maiden, dug his two hands
deep into the gravel, and clapped his feet together. Scarcely knowing
what was up, he held on like grim death for life, and felt a barrowload
of pebbles rolling down the small of his back. Presently he saw light
again, and sputtered out salt water, and heard a hundred people
screaming out “Hurrah!” and felt a strong arm thrown round him—not his
fatherʼs, but John Rosedewʼs. Three senseless bodies were borne to the
village—Bull Garnetʼs, and Bobʼs and the maidenʼs.
CHAPTER V.
Meanwhile that keen engineering firm, wind, wave, and tide, had
established another little business on the coast hard by. This was
the general wreck and crack–up of the stout Pell–castle, a proceeding
unnoticed by any one except good mother Jacob, whose attention was
drawn to it forcibly, as the head of the bed fell in upon her.
Thereupon the stout dame made a rush for it, taking only her cat
and spectacles, and the little teapot of money. As she started at
a furious pace, and presented to the elements a large superficial
area, the wind could not resist the temptation, but wafted her to the
top of the bunney, without her feet so much as once a–touching the
blessed earth—she goes mad if any one doubts it—and planted her in a
white–thorn tree, and brought an “elam” of thatch to shelter her from
her own beloved roof. There, when the wind subsided, she was happily
discovered by some enterprising children; the cat was sitting at her
side; in one blue hand she held her specs, and in the other a teapot.
Poor Pellʼs easy–chair was thrown up, three miles to the westward, in
the course of the next spring–tides, and, being well known all over
the neighbourhood (from his lending it to sick people), was brought to
him, with a round of cheers, by half a dozen fishermen. They refused
the half–crown he offered them, and displayed the greatest anxiety
lest his honour should believe it was them as had taken the shine off.
The workmanship not being modern, the chair was little the worse for
its voyage; only it took six months to dry, and had a fine smell of
brine ever afterwards. Then, having been lent to an old saltʼs widow,
it won such a reputation, all across the New Forest, as a specific for
“rheumatics in the small of the back,” that old women, having _no_
small to their backs, walked all the way from Lyndhurst, “just to sot
themselves down in it, and how much was to pay, please, for a quarter
of an hour?” “A shilling,” said Octave Pell, “a shilling for the new
lifeboat that lives under Christchurch Head.” Then they pulled out
mighty silver watches, and paid the shilling at the fifteen minutes.
The walk, and the thought of the miracle, and the fear of making fools
of themselves, did such a deal of good, that a man got up a ‘bus for
it; but Pell said, “No; none who come by ‘bus shall sit in my chair of
ease.”
The greedy sea returned brave Pell no other part of his property.
His red tobacco–jar, indeed, was found by some of the dredgemen three
or four years afterwards, but they did not know it was his, and sold
it—crusted as it was with testacea, and ribboned with sea–weed—to
the zealous secretary of—I wonʼt say what museum. “Roman, or perhaps
Samian, or possibly Phœnician ware,” cried the secretary, lit
with fine—though, it may be, loose—ideas; and he catalogued it:
“Phœnician in the opinion of an F.A.S. There is every reason to
believe it a vase for Thuricremation.” “Hollo!” cried Pell, when he
went there to lecture upon cricket as played by Ulysses, “why, Iʼm
blessed if you havenʼt got——” “The most undoubted Phœnician relic
contained in any museum!” So he laughed with other peopleʼs cheeks,
like a man of sense.
All the folk of Rushford, and many too of Nowelhurst, contributed to a
secret fund for refurnishing Octavius Pell. So great were the mystery
and speed, and so clever the management of the dissenting parson, that
two great vans were down upon Pell before he had heard a word of it. He
stood at the door of the cobblerʼs shop, and tried to make a speech;
but the hurrahs were too many for him, and he turned away and cried.
Tell me that any man in England need be anything but popular who has a
heart of his own, and is not ashamed of having it!
At the Crown, where the three sick people were, a very fine trade was
doing; but a finer one still upon the beach, as the sea went down
and the choice contents of the _Aliwal_ came up. For that terrible
storm began to abate about noon on the 26th. It had blown as hard
for twenty–four hours as it ever does blow in any land, except in
the gaps of the Andes and during cyclones of the tropics. Now the
core of the storm had no more cells in it; and the puffs that came
from the west and north–west, and so on till it got to the pole–star,
were violent indeed, but desultory, and seemed not to know where they
were going. Finally, about midnight, the wind owned that its turn
was over, and sunk (well satisfied with its work) into the arms of
slumber—“placidâque ibi demum morte quievit.” And its work had been
done right well. No English storm since the vast typhoon of 1703—which
I should like to write about some day if my little life–storm blows
long enough—had wrought such glorious havoc upon that swearing beaver,
man. It had routed his villages at the Landʼs End, and lifted like
footstools his breakwater blocks; it had scared of their lives his
Eddystone watchmen, and put out half his lighthouses; it had broken
upon his royalty, and swept down the oaks of the New Forest; it had
streaked with wrecks the Goodwin Sands, and washed ships out of
harbours of refuge; it had leaped upon London as on a drain–trap, and
jarred it as a man whistles upon his fingers; it had huddled pell–mell
all the coal–trade;—saddest vaunt (though not the last), it had strewn
with gashed and mangled bodies (like its own waves, countless) the
coasts of Anglesea and Caernarvon.
On the morning now of the 27th, with the long sullen swell
gold–beater–skinned by the recovering sun, the shingle–bank was full of
interest to an active trader. They had picked up several bodies with a
good bit of money upon them, and the beach was strewn with oranges none
the worse for a little tossing. For the stout East Indiaman _Aliwal_
had touched at the Western Islands, and taken on board a thousand boxes
of the early orange harvest. And not only oranges were rolling among
the wrack, the starfish, the sharkʼs teeth, and the cuttle–eggs, but
also many a pretty thing, once prized and petted by women. There were
little boxes with gilt and paint, sucked heartily by the salt water,
and porcupine–quills rasping up from panels of polished ebony, cracked
mirrors inside them, and mother–of–pearl, and beading of scented wood;
all the taste and the labour of man yawning like dead cockles, crimped
backward, sodden and shredded, as hopeless a wreck as a drunkard.
Then there were barrels, and heavy chests, planking already like
hemp in the prison–yard, bulkheads, and bulwarks, and cordage, and
reeve–blocks, and ten thousand other things, well appreciated by the
wreckers, who were hauling them up the bunneys; while the Admiralty
droitsmen made an accurate inventory of the bungs and the blacking
bottles. Some of the sailors, and most of the passengers, who had
escaped in the boats to Christchurch, came over to look for anything
that might turn up of their property. Hereupon several fights ensued,
and many poor fellows enjoyed opportunity for a closer inspection
of the Rushford stratum than the most sanguine of their number
anticipated; until the police came down in force, and extinguished at
once all other rights of salvage except their own.
Nevertheless there was yet one field upon which the police could not
interfere; although Jack wished for nothing better than to catch the
lubbers there. This was Jackʼs own domain, the sea, where an animated
search was going on for the body of Colonel Nowell. His servant had
hurried from Christchurch to Nowelhurst to report the almost certain
death of Sir Cradockʼs only brother. He did not go first to ascertain
it; for the road along the cliffs was impassable during the height of
the storm. Sir Cradock received the announcement with very few signs of
emotion. He had loved that Clayton in early youth, but now had almost
forgotten him; and Clayton had never kept his brother at all apprised
of his doings. Sir Cradock had gone into mourning for him, some three
years ago; and Colonel Nowell never took the trouble to vindicate his
vitality until Dr. Huttonʼs return. And, even though they had really
known and loved one another as brothers, the loss would have been but a
tap on the back to a man already stabbed through the heart. Therefore
Sir Cradockʼs sorrow exploded (as we love to make our griefs do, and as
we so often express them) in the moneyed form. “I will give 500_l._ to
the man who finds my poor brotherʼs body.”
That little speech launched fourteen boats. What wrecker could hope
for anything of a tenth part of the value? Men who had sworn that they
never would pull in the same boat again together—might the Great
Being, the Giver of life, strike them dead if they did!—forgot the
solemn perjuration, and cried, “Give us your flipper, Ben; after all,
there are worse fellows going than you, my lad:” and Ben responded,
“Jump into the starn–sheets; you are just the hand as we want, Harry.
Manyʼs the time Iʼve thought on you.” Even the dredging smacks hauled
in–shore from their stations, and began to dredge for the Colonel;
till the small boats resolved on united action, tossed oars, and held
solemn council. Several speeches were made, none of them very long,
but all embodying that fine sentiment, “fiat justitia, ruat cœlum,”
in the form of “fair play, and be d—d to you.” Then Sandy Mac, of the
practical mind, made a suggestion which was received with three wild
rounds of cheers.
“Give ‘em a little ballast, boys, as they be come in–shore to dredge
for it.”
With one consent the fourteen boats made for the shore, like the fleet
of canoes described by the great Defoe. Nor long before each shallopʼs
nose “grated on the golden sands.” The men in the dredging smacks
looked at the sky to see if a squall was coming. And soon they got it,
thick as hail, and as hot as pepper. The fourteen boats in battle array
advanced upon them slowly, only two men rowing in each, all the rest
standing up, and every man charged heavily. When they were at a nice
wicket distance, old Mac gave the signal, and a flight of stones began,
which, in the words of the ancient chroniclers, “well–nigh darkened the
noonday sun.” The bravest dredger durst not show his head above the
gunwale; for the Rushford stones are close of grain, and it is sweeter
to start than to stop them. As for south–westers and dreadnoughts, they
were no more use than vine–leaves in a storm of electric hail.
“Ah, little then those mellow grapes their vine–leaf shall avail,
So thickly rattles on _the tiles_ the pelting of the hail.”
_Georg._ i. 448.
The dredgers gave in, and hoisted a shirt as a signal for a parley.
The Rushford men refused to hear a syllable about “snacks.” What they
demanded was “unconditional surrender;” and the dredgers, having no
cement–stones on board, were compelled to accept it. So they took
up their bags, and walked the smacks off three miles away to their
station, with very faint hopes indeed that the obliging body might
follow them. The boatmen celebrated their victory with three loud
cheers for Sandy Mac, and a glass of grog all round. Then they
returned to the likeliest spot, and dragged hard all the afternoon.
“Tarnation ‘cute body,” cried Ben, “as ever I come across. Whoʼd a
thought as any perfessing Christian would have stuck to Davy Jonesʼs
locker, and refooged the parson and clerk so? Spit on your grapples, my
lads of wax, and better luck the cast after.”
“The Lord kens the best,” replied Sandy Mac, with a long–drawn sigh,
“us poor vessels canna do more than is the will of the Lord, boys.
Howsomever, I brought a bit of bait, a few lug–worms, and a soft crab
or two; and please the Lord Iʼll rig my line out, and see if the bass
be moving. And likely there may be a tumbling cod on the run speering
after the puir bodies. Ah, yes, the will of the Lord; we ates them, and
they ates us.”
The canny old Scotchman, without foregoing his share in the general
venture—for he helped to throw the grapnels, or took a spell at the
rudder—rigged out a hook on his own account, and fastened the line to
the rowlocks.
“Fair play, my son,” cried Ben, winking at his comrades; “us go snacks
in what you catch, mind. And the will of the Lord be done.”
“Dinna ye wish ye may get it?”—the old man glowered at him
indignantly—“Iʼll no fish at all on that onderstanding.”
“Fish away, old boy, and be blessed, then. I see he ainʼt been in
the purwentive sarvice for nothing. But Iʼm blowed if heʼll get much
supper, Harry, if itʼs all to come off that darned old hook.” They all
laughed at old Mac, who said nothing, but regarded his line attentively.
With many a joke and many an oath, they toiled away till the evening
fog came down upon the waters. Then, as they turned to go home, old Mac
felt a run upon his fishing–gear. Hand over hand he began to haul in,
coiling the line in the stern–sheets.
“Itʼs a wapping big fish, as ever I feel, mates; na, na, yeʼll no touch
it, or yeʼll be claiming to come and sup wi’ me. And deil a bit—the
Lord forgive me—will ye haʼ, for grinning at an auld mon the likes of
that, I tell ye. Lord ha’ mercy on me, a wake and sinful crater!”
They all fell back, except Macbride, as before them in the twilight
rose the ashy grey face and the long white hair of Colonel Clayton
Nowell.
Mac stuck to his haul like a Scotchman; to him the main chance was no
ghost. Many a time has he told that story, and turned his quid upon it,
cleverly raining between his teeth with fine art to prolong the crisis.
The line being his, and the hook being his, and the haul of his own
hands only, Sandy Mac could never see why he should not have all the
money. The question came close to litigation; but for that, except as
a word of menace, Mac was a deal too wide awake. He compounded at last
for 300_l._ and let the other four share the residue.
So poor Colonel Nowellʼs countenance, still looking grand and
dignified, was saved from the congers and lobsters; and he sleeps
close by his nephew and namesake in Nowelhurst churchyard. The body
of Captain Roberts was found a long way up the Solent. He had always
carried a weather helm, and shaped a good course for harbour. May they
rest in peace!
I have no doubt that Captain Roberts so rests, and am fain to believe,
in the mercy of God, the same of the brave old Colonel. At least,
we will hope that he is not gone to that eternal punishment, whose
existence our divines contend for in a manner so disinterested. He had
been a harum–scarum man; and now, having drowned and buried him, we may
enter upon his history with the charity due to both quick and dead, but
paid to the latter only.
A soldier is, in many things, by virtue of his calling, a generous,
careless man. We have always credited the sailor with these popular
qualities; hornpipes, national drama, and naval novels imbuing us. I
doubt if the sailor be, on the whole, so careless a man as the soldier.
Jack is obliged, by force of circumstance, to bottle up his money, his
rollicksomeness and sentimentality, and therefore has more to get rid
of, when he comes ashore once in a twelvemonth. But spread the outburst
over the year, strike the average of it, and the rainfall at Aldershot
will equal that at Portsmouth.
Only by watching the Army List—which at length he was tired of
doing—could the English brother tell if the Indian brother were
living. Even the most careful of us begin to feel that care is too much
for the nine lives of a cat, when Fahrenheit scores 110° in the very
coolest corner, and the punkah is too hot to move. So, after one or
two Griffin letters, full of marvels which the writer pretended not to
marvel at, a silence, as of the jungle, ensued, and Sir Cradock thought
of tigers. Then the slides of his own life began to move upon him; and
less and less every year he thought of the boy who had laughed and
cried with him.
Lieutenant Nowell was ordered suddenly to the borders of the Punjaub,
and for twenty years his brother Cradock drank his health at Christmas,
and wondered how about the Article against praying for the dead. The
next thing he heard, though it proved his own orthodoxy, disproved
it by making him swear hard. Clayton Nowell had married; married an
Affghan woman, to the great disgust of his brother officers, and the
furious disdain of her kinsmen. A very fine family of Affghan chiefs
immediately loaded their fusils, and swore to shoot both that English
dog and their own Bright Eyes of the Morning.
“To think,” cried Sir Cradock Nowell, “that a brother of mine should
disgrace himself, and (what matters far more) his family, by marrying a
wretched low Affghan woman!”
“To think,” cried Mohammed Khans, “that a sister of ours should
disgrace herself, and (what matters far more) her family, by marrying
a cursed low English dog!”
Which party was in the right, judge ye who understand the matter. The
officers’ wives got over their prejudice against Bright Eyes of the
Morning, and matronised, and petted, and tried to make a Christian of
her. Captain Nowell adored her; she was so elegant in every motion, so
loving, and so simple. She quite reformed him for the time from his too
benevolent anthropology, from the love of dice, and the vinous doings
which the Prophet does not encourage.
But the poor thing died in her first confinement, while following her
husbandʼs regiment at the foot of the Himalayah, leaving her new–born
babe to the care of a faithful Affghan nurse, who had kept at her dear
ladyʼs side, even among the infidels. This good nurse, being great of
soul, and therefore strong of faith, could not bear that the child of
her mistress, the highest blood of the Affghans, should become a low
Frank idolater. So she set off with it, in the dark night, crouching
past the sentinels, thieves, and other camp followers, and trusted
herself to the boundless jungle, with only the stars to guide her. She
put the wailing child to her breast, for her own dear babe was dead,
and hushed it from the vigilant ears of the man–eating tiger. Then off
again for Affghanistan, six hundred miles in the distance.
How this wonderful woman, soothing and coaxing the little stranger
(obtrusively remarkable for the power of her squalls), how she got on
through the thorns, the fire, the famine, the jaws of the tiger, and,
worse than all, the pestilent fever, bred from the rich stagnation of
that alluvial soil, is more than I, or any other unversed in womanʼs
unity, may pretend to show. Enough that with her eyes upon the grand
religious heights—heathen high places, we should call them—she
struggled along through nearly three–quarters of her pilgrimage, and
then she fell among robbers. A villanous hill–tribe, of mixed origin,
always shifting, never working, never even fighting when they could
run away, hated and despised by the nobler mountain races, the pariahs
of the Himalayah, ignorant of any good, debased as any Africans—in
a single word, Rakshas, or worshippers of the devil. A nice school
of education for a young lady of tender years—or rather months—to
commence in.
The nurse was allotted to one of their chiefs, and the babe was about
to be knocked on the head, when it struck an enlightened priest that in
two years’ time she would make a savoury oblation to the devil; so the
Affghan woman was allowed to keep her, until she began to crawl about
among the dogs and babes of the station. Here she so distinguished
herself by precocious skill in thieving, that her delighted owner
conferred upon her the title of “Never–spot–the–dust,” and even
instructed her how to steal the high priestʼs knife of sacrifice. That
last exploit saved her life. Such a genius had never appeared in any
tribe of the Rakshas until this great manifestation.
So “Never–spot–the–dust” was well treated, and made much of by her
owner, to whom she was quite a fortune; and soon all the band looked up
to her as the future priestess of the devil. For ten years she wandered
about with them, becoming every year more important, proud that none
could approach her skill in stealing, lying, and perjury, utterly void
of all religion, except the few snatches of Moslemism which her nurse
had contrived to impart, and the vague terror of the evil spirit to
whom the wild men paid their vows. But, when she was ten years old, a
tall and wonderfully active child, and just about to be consecrated
by the blood of inferior children, a British force drew suddenly all
around the nest of robbers. Of late the scoundrels had done things
that made John Bullʼs hair stand on end; and, when his hair is in that
condition, sparks are apt to come out of it.
Seeing no chance of escape, and having very faint hopes of quarter,
the robbers fought with a bravery which quite astonished themselves;
but the evil spirit was against them—a rare inconsistence on his
part. Their rascally camp was burnt, which they who had burned some
hundreds of villages looked upon as the grossest cruelty, and more
than half of their number were sent home to their patron and guardian.
Then the Affghan nurse, so faithful and so unfortunate, fled from the
burning camp with her charge, fell before the British colonel, and
poured forth all her troubles. The Englishman knew Major Nowell, and
had heard some parts of his history; so he took “Never–spot–the–dust”
to her father, who was amazed at once and amused with her. She could
run up the punkah, and stand on the top, and twirl around on one
foot; she could cross the compound in three bounds; she could jump
upon her fatherʼs shoulder, and stay there with the spring of her
sole; she could glide along over the floor like a serpent, and hold
on with one hand to anything. And then her most wonderful lightness
of touch; she had fully earned her name, she could brush the dust
without marking it. She could come behind her fatherʼs back, crawling
over the table, and fasten his sword–hilt to his whiskers, without his
knowing a thing of it. She could pick all his pockets, of course; but
that was too rude an operation for her to take any delight in it. What
she delighted to do, and what even she found difficult, was to take
off his shoes and stockings without his being aware of it. It was a
beautiful thing to see her: consummate skill is beautiful, in whatever
way it is exercised. The shoe she could get off easily enough, but
the difficulty was with the stocking; and there the chief difficulty
was through the sensitiveness of the skin, unaccustomed to exposure.
Though she had never heard of temperature, evaporation, or anything
long, her genius told her the very first time where the tug was and how
to meet it. Keeping her little cornelian lips—lips which you could
see through—just at the proper distance, she would breathe so softly
upon the skin that the breath could not be felt, as inch by inch she
lowered down the thin elastic covering. Then she would jump up out of
the ground, and shout into his ears, with a voice of argute silver—
“Faddery, will ‘oo have ‘oor shoe? Fear to go wiyout him?”
She began to talk English, after a bit; and the weather beaten
Colonel—for now he had got that far—who had never looked upon any
child, except as one rupee per month—thinking of his beloved Bright
Eyes of the Morning, who might, with the will of God, have made a
first–rate man of him, only she was too good for him,—thinking of her,
and seeing the gleam of her glorious eyes in her child, he loved that
child beyond all reason, and christened her “Eoa.”
He never took to bad things again. He had something now in pledge with
God; a part of himself that still would live, and love him when he
was skeleton. And that, his better part, should learn how lying and
stealing do not lead to the right half of the other world.
His ideas about that other world were as dormant as Eoaʼs; but now
he began to think about it, because he wanted to see her there. So,
with lots of tears, not only feminine, Eoa Nowell was sent to the best
school in Calcutta, where she taught the other young ladies some very
odd things indeed.
Wherever she went, she must be foremost; “second to none” was her
motto. Therefore she learned with amazing quickness; but it was not so
easy to unlearn.
Then arose that awful mutiny, and the Colonel at Mhow was shot through
the neck, and let lie, by his own soldiers. His daughter heard of it,
and screamed, and no walls ever built would hold her. All the way from
Calcutta, up the dreary Ganges, she forced her passage, sometimes by
boat, sometimes on her weariless feet.
She had never cared much for civilization, and loved every blade of the
jungle. The old life revived within her, as she looked upon the broad
waters, and the boundless yellow tangle, wherein glided no swifter
thing, nothing more elegant, than herself.
She found her darling father in some rude cantonment, prostrate,
helpless, clinging faintly to the verge of death. Dead long ago he
must have been but for Rufus Hutton; and dead even now he would have
been but for his daughterʼs presence. His dreamy eyes went round the
hut to follow her graceful movements; she alone could tend the wounds
as if with the fall of gossamer, she alone could soothe and fan the
intolerable aching. They looked into each otherʼs eyes and cried
without thinking about it.
Then, as he gradually got better, and the surge of trouble passed them,
Eoa showed for his amusement all her strange accomplishments. She had
not forgotten one of them in the grand school at Calcutta. They had
even grown with her growth, and strengthened with her strength.
She would leap over Rufus Huttonʼs head like a flash of light, and
stand facing him, without a muscle moving, and on his back would
be a land–crab; she would put his up–country hat on the floor, and
walk on one foot round the crown of it; she would steal his case of
instruments, and toss them in the air all open, and catch them all at
once.
By her nursing and her loving, her stealing and her mockery, she won
Dr. Huttonʼs heart so entirely that he would have proposed to her, had
she only been of marriageable age, or had come to think about anything.
Then they had all to cut and run, with barely three hours’ notice, for
the ebb of the rebellion swept through that district mightily. Eoa went
to school again, and her father came to see her daily, until he was
appointed to a regiment having something more than name and shadow.
Now Eoa, having learned everything that they can teach in Calcutta, the
Himalayah, or the jungle, was coming to England to receive the down and
crown of accomplishments. Who could tell but what they might even teach
her affectation? Youth is plastic and imitative; and she was sure to
find plenty of models.
Not that the honest Colonel wished to make a sickly humbug of her.
His own views were wide and grand, only too philoprogenitive. Still,
like most men of that class, who, upon sudden reformation, love Truth
so much that they roll upon her, having no firm rules of his own, and
being ashamed to profess anything, with the bad life fresh in memory,
he took the opinion of old fogeys who had been every bit as unblest as
himself, but had sown with a drill their wild oats. The verdict of all
was one—“Miss Nowell must go to England.”
Finding his wound still troublesome, he resolved to retire from
service; he had not saved half a lac of rupees, and his pension would
not be a mighty one; but, between the two, there would be enough for
an old man to live upon decently, and go wherever he was told that his
daughter ought to go.
He had seen enough of life, and found that it only meant repentance;
all that remained of it should be for the pleasure and love of his
daughter. And he knew that there was a sum in England, which must have
been long accumulating—a sum left on trust for him and his children,
under a very old settlement. He would never touch a farthing of it;
every farthing should go to Eoa. Bless her dear eyes; they had the true
light of his own Bright Eyes of the Morning.
CHAPTER VI.
Eoa was now sixteen years old, tall, and lithe, and graceful as the
creepers of tropic woodlands. Her face was of the clearest oval, a
quick concise terse oval, such as we find in the eggs of wild birds
rather than of tame ones. Her eyes were of bewildering brightness,
always flashing, always in motion, rarely allowing the gazer a chance
of guessing what their colour was. Very likely they were of no positive
colour, but a pure dark lustre, such as a clear swift river has, when
overhung by palm–trees. Her complexion, beautifully soft and even, was
toned with a delicate eastern tinge, like that fawn–coloured light
which sometimes flushes a cloudless sky before the midsummer sunrise.
And her warm oriental blood suffused it, at the slightest emotion, as
the leaping sun pervades that sky with a flood of limpid rubies.
She had never been flattened by education: all her qualities and
feelings, like her beauty, were in excess. You could see it in
the quick rise and fall of her breath, in the sudden grace of her
movements, in the infinite variety of her attitudes and aspects.
Whatever she thought, she said at once; yet none ever called her a
bold girl. Her modes of thought were as widely different from those of
an English maiden, as a wild honeysuckle differs in form, habit, and
scent, from a rose. She cared for no oneʼs opinion of her, any more
than the wind cares how a tree swings; unless indeed it were one whom
she loved, and then she would crawl to please him. For she loved with
all her heart and soul, and hated with no less; and she always took
care in either case to apprise the object of it. And yet, with all her
depth of passion, Eoa was pure of heart and mind,—ay, as pure as our
own Amy.
She soon recovered from her bruises, being perfectly healthy, and
elastic as india–rubber. Nevertheless, she would not have been saved
from that terrible sea but for the generosity of poor Captain Roberts,
and the gallantry of Bob Garnet.
Now Bob was hurt rather seriously, and, being (as we are well aware)
an uncommonly shy young fellow, he was greatly astonished, and shocked
a little, when on the Friday morning a beautiful girl, very strangely
dressed, ran to the side of his sofa, threw her arms round him, and
kissed him till he was out of breath, and his face was wet with the
dew of her tears.
“Oh, please donʼt,” said Bob; “I am sure I donʼt deserve it.”
“Yes, you do; and I will marry you when I am old enough. I donʼt know
what you are like, and I donʼt care two straws, directly they told me
what you had done. Only I must have papaʼs leave. Kiss me again, I like
it. Now where is my darling papa?”
“What, donʼt you know? Havenʼt they told you? Oh, poor thing!”
At the tone of his voice she leaped back, like a bird at the gun–flash,
and stood with her little hands clasped on her head, her eyes with
their deep light quivering, and the whole of her form swinging to and
fro, from the wild push of sudden terror. Then she spoke with a hollow
depth, which frightened Bob more than the kissing.
“They told me that he was well, gone to his brother somewhere, and I
thought it wasnʼt like him to leave me so, and—tell me the truth, or
Iʼll shake you to pieces.”
“No, donʼt,” said Bob, as she leaped at him; “I have had shaking
enough.”
“Yes, you poor boy, and for my sake. I am a brute, I know. Tell me the
truth, if you love me.”
“Your dear father is dead. But they have found his body.”
“Do you mean to say that God has been so wicked as to kill my father?”
“God knows best,” said Bob; he could think of nothing else to say.
“No, He doesnʼt. No, He doesnʼt. No, He never knows anything. He
couldnʼt have known who he was, and how terribly I loved him, or He
wouldnʼt have the heart to do it. Oh, you wicked boy; oh, you wicked
boy! I will never forgive you for saving me. Hya, hya, hya!”
Bob never saw such a thing before, and never will again. And he wonʼt
be much the loser; although the sight was magnificent. The screams and
shrieks of the clearest voice that ever puzzled echo brought up the
landlord and landlady, and our good friend Rufus Hutton, who had set
forth full speed from home on hearing about the _Aliwal_. He caught Eoa
in his arms, carried her back to her room, and dosed her. He gave her
some Indian specific, some powder of a narcotic fungus, which he had
brought on purpose.
It stupefied her for nearly three days, and even then she awoke into
the dreamy state of Nirwana, that bliss of semi–consciousness, like
mild annihilation, into which the Buddha is absorbed, and to which all
pious Buddhists look as their eternal happiness. Then she opened her
delicate tapering arms, where you could see the grand muscles moving,
but never once protruding, and she called for her darling father to
come. Finding that he did not come, she was satisfied with some
trifling answer, and then wanted to have Bob instead; but neither was
Bob forthcoming.
On the very day when Dr. Hutton came to look for Eoa, Mr. Garnet found
himself getting better from that wretched low nervous fever into which
his fright had thrown him. Then he asked Dr. Hutton whether there
would be any danger in moving Robert, and, finding that there would
be none whatever, if it were carefully managed, he ordered a carriage
immediately, and with some of his ancient spirit. The Crown, which had
the cross–bar of its N set up the wrong way (as is done, by–the–by,
on the roof of Hampton Court chapel, and in many other places), made
public claim to be regarded as a “commercial hotel and posting–house.”
No Rushford folk having yet been known to post anything, except a
letter at rare intervals, and a bill at rarer, this claim of the
Crown had never been challenged, and strangers entertained a languid
theoretical faith in it. But Mr. Brown looked very blue when Bull
Garnet in reviving accents ordered “a chaise and pair at the door in
half an hourʼs time; a roomy chaise, if you please, because my son must
keep his feet up.”
“Yes, sir; yes, to be sure, sir; I quite understand, sir. It shall be
attended to, sir.”
“Then why donʼt you go and order it?”
“To be sure, sir; I forgot. I will speak to Mrs. Brown, sir.”
Mrs. Brown, being a woman of resource, mounted the boy on her donkey,
the only quadruped she possessed, but a “wonner to go,” as the boy
said, “when you knows the right place to prog him in,” and sent him
post–haste to Lymington, whence the required conveyance arrived in
about an hour and a half.
Rufus Hutton, having promised to be at home that evening, left Eoa to
sleep off her heavy soporific, and followed the carriage on horseback;
neither did he leave its track where the Ringwood Road turns off, for
he had undertaken to tell Sir Cradock how his niece was getting on.
He started nearly half an hour after the Lymington chaise, for Polly
would never demean herself by trotting behind the “posters.” During
that half–hour he drank hot brown brandy–and–water, although he could
not bear it, to ingratiate him with Mrs. Brown for the sake of the poor
Eoa. For Mrs. Brown had no other hot method of crowning the flowing
bowl. And now, while I think of it, let me warn all gentle and simple
people who deign on this tale of the New Forest, never to ask for
pale brandy within the perambulations. How do you think they make it?
By mixing brown brandy with villanous gin. Rufus was up to this, of
course; and, as he must take something for the good of the house, and
to get at the kindly kernel of the heavy–browed hostess, he took that
which he thought would be least for his own evil. Then, leaving Mrs.
Brown (who, of course, had taken her own glass at his sole charge and
largesse, after fifty times “Oh no, sir, never! Oh Lord, how my Brown
would be shocked!”), having imbued that good Mrs. Brown, who really was
not a bad woman—which means that she was a good one, for women have
no medium—with a strong aromatic impression that he was a pleasant
gentleman, and no pride, not a bit of it, in him, no more than you nor
me might,—off he trotted at a furious pace, smoking two cheroots at
once.
I believe that there was and is—for I am happy to say that he still
inhales the breeze of life down his cigar, and looks browner and redder
than ever—I believe that, in spite of all his troubles in connexion
with this story, which took a good deal out of him, there was and is no
happier man in our merry England than the worthy Rufus Hutton. And, as
all happiness is negative, and goes without our knowing it, and only
becomes a positive past for us to look back upon, so his went before it
came, and goes or eʼer it comes. And yet he enjoys it none the less; he
multiplies it by three for the past and by nine for the future, and he
never finds it necessary to deduct for the present moment.
Happy man who never thinks beyond salutary average, who can accept,
in perfect faith, the traditions of his forbears, and yet is shrewd
enough to hope that his grandsons will discard at least a portion of
them,—who looks upon the passing life as a thing he need not move in,
a world which must improve itself, and every day is doing it. And all
the while he sympathises with his fellow–men, enjoys a bit of human
nature, laughs at the cross–purposes of native truth and training,
loves whatever he finds to be true, and does his best to foster it, is
pleased with his after–dinner story, and feels universally charitable;
then smiles at his wife, and kisses his children; and goes to bed with
the firm conviction that they are worth all the rest put together.
Yet this manʼs happiness is not sound, because it is built upon
selfishness.
In Nowelhurst village Dr. Hutton met Mark Stote, the gamekeeper, who
begged him to stop for a moment, just to hear a word or two. Rufus,
after hearing his news, resolved to take the upper road to the Hall,
past Mr. Garnetʼs house; it was not so very far out of his way, and
perhaps he might be of service there, and—ah, yes, Dr. Hutton, this
last was the real motive, though you may not have thought so—what
a fine opportunity to discover something which plagued him! Perhaps
I ought to say rather, the want of which was plaguing him. Rufus
took so kind an interest in his neighbours’ affairs, that anything
not thoroughly luculent in their dealings, mode of life or speech,
or management of their households, was to him the subject–matter of
continual mental scratchings. Ah, how genteel a periphrase, worthy of
Bailey Kettledrum; how happily we have shown our horror of that English
monosyllable, beginning with the third vowel, which must be (according
to Dr. Aldrich) the correlative of scratch! Score two, and go on after
Dr. Hutton.
He overtook the Garnets twain just at their front gate, whence the
house could not be seen, on account of a bank of evergreens. The maid
came out with her cap flying off, and all her mind perturbed. Rufus
Hutton, checking his mare, for the road was very narrow, heard the
entire dialogue.
“Oh, sir! oh, master! have you heard of it? Such a thing, to be sure!”
“Heard of what, Sarah? Of course I have heard of the great disaster at
Rushford.”
“No, no. Here, sir, here! The two big trees is down on the house. Itʼs
a mussy as Nanny and me wasnʼt killed. And poor Miss Pearl have been
in hysterics ever since, without no dinner. There, you can hear her
screeching now, worse than the mangle, ever so much.”
Mr. Garnet did not say a word, but set off for the house full speed,
even forgetting that Bob wanted help to get from the gate to the
doorway.
Rufus Hutton jumped down from his mare, and called to the driver to
come and hold her, just for a minute or two; no fear of _his_ horses
bolting. Then, helping Bob to limp along, he followed through the
shrubbery. When they came within full view of the house, he was quite
amazed at the mischief. The two oaks interlocked had fallen upon it,
and, crashing as they did from the height above, the breaches they
made were hideous. They had cloven the house into three ragged pieces,
from the roof–ridge down to the first floor, where the solid joists
had stopped them. It had happened in the afternoon of the second day
of the tempest; when the heart of the storm was broken, but tremendous
squalls came now and then from the bright north–west. Mr. Garnetʼs own
bed was occupied by the tree which he detested. Pearl had screamed
“Judgment, judgment!” and danced among the ruins; so the maid was
telling Mr. Garnet, as he feared to enter his own door.
“Judgment for what?” asked Rufus Hutton, and Mr. Garnet seemed not to
hear him.
“I am sure I donʼt know, sir,” answered the maid, “for none of us done
any harm, sir; unless it was the bottle of pickled onions, when master
were away, and there was very few of them left, sir, very few, I do
declare to you, and we thought they was on the turn, sir, and it seemed
such a pity to waste them. And please, sir, weʼve all been working like
horses, though frightened out of our lives ‘most; and we fetched down
all the things from your room, where the cupboards was broken open, for
‘fraid it should come on to rain, sir; and weʼve taken all our meals
standing, sir; and made up a bed in the meat–screen, and another upon
the dresser; and Miss Pearl, what turns she have given us—— Here she
comes, I do declare.”
“Dr. Hutton,” said Bull Garnet, hastily, “good–bye; I am much obliged
to you. I shall see you, I hope, next week. Good–bye, good–bye. Excuse
me.”
But, before he could get him out of the way—for Rufus lingered
strangely—Pearl Garnet came into the little hall, with her eyes
distended fearfully. “There, there it is,” she cried, “there it is, I
tell you! No wonder the tree came down upon it. No wonder the house was
crushed for it.” And she pointed to a shattered box, tilted up endwise,
among a heap of account–books, clothes, and furniture.
“Oh yes, you may look at it. To be sure you may look at it. God would
not have it hidden longer. I have done my best, God knows, and my heart
knows, and my—I mean that man there knows. Is there anything more I
can do for you, anything more, _dear father_? You have done so much for
me, you know. And I will only ask you one little thing—put me in his
coffin.”
“The girl is raving,” cried Mr. Garnet. “Poor thing, it comes from her
mother.”
“No, it comes from her father,” said Pearl, going boldly up to him, and
fixing her large bright eyes upon his. “Do as you like with me; I donʼt
care; but donʼt put it on any one else. Oh, father, father, father!”
Moaning, she turned away from him; and then sprang into his arms with
shrieks. He lifted her tenderly, and forgot all about his own safety.
His great tears fell on her wan, sick face; and his heavy heart
throbbed for his daughter only, as he felt hers bounding perilously. He
carried her off to an inner room, and left them to their own devices.
“I should like uncommonly,” said Rufus Hutton, rubbing his chin,
“to know what is in that box. Indeed, I feel it my duty at once to
ascertain.”
“No, you shanʼt,” cried Bob, limping across in front of it; “I know no
more than you do, sir. But I wonʼt have fatherʼs things pryed into.”
“You are very polite,” replied the Doctor; “a chip of the old block,
I perceive. But, perhaps, you will believe me, my boy, when I tell
you that, if ever there was a gentleman totally devoid of improper
curiosity, it is Dr. Rufus Hutton, sir.”
“Oh, I am so glad,” said Bob; “because you wonʼt be disappointed, then.”
Rufus grinned, in spite of his wrath; but he was not to be baffled
so easily. He could not push poor Bob aside, in his present disabled
state, without being guilty of cowardice. So he called in an auxiliary.
“Betsy, my dear, your young mistress wished me just to examine that
box. Be kind enough to bring it to the light here, unless it is too
heavy for your little hands.”
Oh, if he had only said “Miss Sarah,” what a difference it might have
made!
“Betsy, indeed!” cried Sarah, who had followed her mistress, but,
being locked out, had come back to see the end of it; “my name, sir,
is nothing so low as that. My name is Sarah Mackarness, sir, very
much at your service; and my mother keeps a potato–shop, the largest
business in Lyndhurst, sir. Betsy, indeed! and from a stranger, not
to say a strange gentleman, for fear of making a mistake. And as
for my hands”—she thought he had been ironical, for her hands were
above regulation size—“my hands are such as pleased God to make them,
and honest hands, anyhow, and doesnʼt want to interfere with other
peopleʼs business. Oh, what will poor Nanny say, to think of me, Sarah
Mackarness, be permiscuous called Betsy?”
At this moment, when Sarah Mackarness, having recovered breath, was
starting into another native discourse on prænomina, and Rufus was
calling upon his resources for some constitutional measure, Bull Garnet
came back, treading heavily, defiant of all that the world could do.
His quick eyes, never glimpsing that way, but taking in all the room at
once, espied the box unmeddled with, and Bob upon guard in front of it.
He was his own man now again. What did he care for anybody, so long as
he had his children?
“Dr. Hutton, I thought that you were gone.”
“You see I am not,” said Rufus, squaring his elbows, and looking big,
for he was a plucky little fellow, “and, whatʼs more, I donʼt mean to
go till I know what is in that box.”
“Box, box!” cried Bull Garnet, striking his enormous forehead, as if to
recall something; “have we a box of yours, Dr. Hutton?”
“No, no; that box of _yours_. Your daughter told us to examine it. And,
from her manner, I believe that I am bound to do so.”
“Bound to examine one of my boxes!” Bull Garnet never looked once that
way, and Rufus took note of the strange avoidance; “my boxes are full
of confidential papers; surely, sir, you have caught my daughterʼs—I
mean to say, you are labouring under some hallucination.”
“There are no papers in that box. The contents of it are metal. I
have seen one article already through the broken cover, and shall not
forget its shape. Beware; there have been strange things done in this
neighbourhood. If you refuse to allay my suspicions, you confirm them.”
The only answer he received was a powerful hand at the back of his
neck, a sensation of being lifted with no increase of facilities for
placid respiration; finally, a lateral movement of great rapidity
through the air, and a loud sound as of a bang. Recovering reasonʼs
prerogative, he found himself in a dahlia, whose blossoms, turned into
heel–balls by the recent frost, were flapping round his countenance,
and whose stake had gone through his waistcoat back, and grazed his
coxendix, or something; he knows best what it was, as a medical man
deeply interested.
He had also a very unpleasant reminiscence of some such words as these,
to which he had no responsive power—“You wonʼt take a hint like a
gentleman; so take a hit like a blackguard.”
Dr. Rufus Hutton was not the man to sit down quietly under an insult of
any sort. At the moment he felt that brute force was irresistibly in
the ascendant, and he was wonderfully calm about it. He shook himself,
and smoothed his waistcoat, and tried the stretch of his garters;
then never once looked toward the house, never shook his fist, nor
frowned even. He walked off to his darling Polly as if nothing at all
had happened; gave the man a shilling for holding her, after looking
long for a sixpence; then mounted, and rode towards Nowelhurst Hall,
showing no emotion whatever. Only Polly knew that burning tears of a
brave manʼs sense of ignominy fell upon her glossy shoulder, and were
fiercely wiped way.
At the Hall he said nothing about it; never even mentioned that he had
called at Garnetʼs cottage; but told Sir Cradock, like a true man,
of Eoaʼs troubles, of her poor forlorn condition, and power of heart
to feel it. He even contrived to interest the bereaved man, now so
listless, in the young life thrown upon his care, as if by the breath
of heaven. We are never so eloquent for another as when our own hearts
are moved deeply by the feeling of wrong to ourselves; unless, indeed,
we are very small, and that subject excludes all others.
So it came to pass that the grand new carriage was ordered to the door,
and Sir Cradock would himself have gone—only Rufus Hutton had left
him, and the eloquence was oozing. The old man, therefore, turned back
on the threshold, saying to himself that it would be hardly decent
to appear in public yet; and Mrs. OʼGaghan was sent instead, sitting
inside, and half afraid to breathe for fear of the crystal. As for her
clothes, they were good enough, she knew, for the Lord Mayorʼs coach.
“Five–and–sixpence a yard, maʼam, lave alone trimming and binding.”
But, knowing what she did of herbs, she could not answer for the
peppermint.
Of course, they did not intend to fetch poor Eoa home yet; but Biddy
had orders to stay there until the young lady was moveable. Biddy took
to her at once, in her heavy, long–drawn sleep, with the soft black
lashes now and then lifting from the rich brown cheek.
“An’ if she isnʼt illigant, then,” said Biddy to Mrs. Brown, “ate me
wiʼout a purratie. Arl coom ov’ the blude, missus. Sazins, then, if me
and Pat had oonly got a child this day! Belikes, maʼam, for the matter
o’ that, a drap o’ whisky disagrays with you.”
Biddy, feeling strongly moved, and burning to drink her new childʼs
health, showed a bottle of brown potheen.
“To tell you the truth, mem,” said Mrs. Brown, “I know nothing about
them subjects. Spirituous liquors is a thing as has always been beyond
me.”
“Thin Iʼll clap it away again,” said Biddy, “and the divvil only the
wiser. I never takes it alone, marm.”
“It would ill become me, mem,” replied Mrs. Brown, “to be churlish in
my own house, mem. I have heard of you very often, mem. Yes, I assure
you I have, from the people as comes to bathe here, as a lady of great
experience in diseases of the chest. If you recommend any cordial, mem,
on the strength of your experience, for a female of weak witality, I
should take it as a dooty, mem, strictly as a dooty to my husband and
two darters.”
“Arrah, then, Iʼm your femmale. Me witality goes crossways, like, till
I has a drap o’ the crather.” And so they made a night of it, and Mr.
Brown had some.
CHAPTER VII.
Leave we now, with story pending, Biddy and Eoa, Pearl, and even Amy;
thee, too, rare Bull, and thee, O Rufus, overcast with anger. It is
time to track the steps of him whom Fortune, blithe at her cruel trade,
shall track as far as Gades, Cantaber, and wild Syrtes, where the
Moorish billow is for ever heaving. Will he exclaim with the poet, who
certainly was a jolly mortal,—“I praise her while she is my guest. If
she flap her nimble wings, I renounce her charities; and wrap me in my
manhood robe, and woo the upright poverty, the bride without a dower.”
“A very fine sentiment, Master Horace; but were you not a little too
fond even of Sabine and Lesbian—when the Massic juice was beyond your
credit—to do anything more than _feel_ it?”
As Cradock Nowell trudged that night towards the Brockenhurst Station,
before he got very far from Amy, and while her tears were still on his
cheek, he felt a little timid lick, a weak offering of sympathy.
Hereby black Wena made known to him that she was melted by his
misfortunes, and saw that the right and most feeling course, and
the one most pleasing to her dead master, was the transfer of her
allegiance, and the swearing of fealty to the brother. To which
conclusion the tender mode in which she was being carried conduced,
perhaps, considerably; for she was wrapped in Claytonʼs woolly jacket,
enthroned on Cradockʼs broad right arm, and with only her black nose
exposed to the moon. So she jogged along very comfortably, until she
had made up her mind, and given Cradock the kiss of seisin.
“Dear little thing,” he cried, for he looked on her now as Amyʼs
keepsake, “you shall go with me wherever I go. You are faithful enough
to starve with me; but you shall not starve until after me.”
Then he put her down, for he thought that a little run would do her
good, and, in spite of all her misery, Amy had kept her pretty plump,
plumper than she herself was; and it became no joke to carry her, with
a travelling–bag, &c., after the first half mile.
Then Wena capered about, and barked, and came and licked his shoe, and
offered to carry the coat for him. As he would not let her do this,
she occupied her mind with the rabbits, which were out upon the feed
largely, and were the last she would see for a long while, except the
fat Ostenders.
When he got to London, and took small lodgings at a Mrs.
Ducksacreʼs, “greengrocer and general fruiterer, Mortimer–street,
Cavendish–square,”—I quote from the ladyʼs bags: confound it, there! I
am always saying improper things; _honi soit_—I mean, of course, her
paper bags—it was not long before he made two important discoveries,
valuable rather than gratifying.
The first of these discoveries was, that our university portals are
a mere side–postern, and not the great _janua mundi_. He found his
classical scholarship, his early fame at Oxford, his love of elegant
literature, rather a disadvantage than a recommendation for business.
“Prigs, sir, prigs,” said a member of an eminent City firm; “of course,
I donʼt mean to be personal; but I have always found you Oxford men
prigs, quite unfit for desk–work. You fancy you know so much; you are
always discovering mareʼs–nests, and you wonʼt bear to be spoken to,
even if you stick to your work; which, I assure you, is quite the
exception. Then you hold yourself aloof, with your stupid etiquette,
from the other young men, who are quite as good as you are. I assure
you, the place was too hot to hold us with the last Oxford man we
took in the counting–house; he gave himself such airs, the donkey! I
vowed never to do it again: and I never will, sir. Good morning, sir;
Gregson, show this gentleman the way out.”
Gregson did so with a grin, for Cradockʼs face proved that the
principal had not been altogether wrong.
Is this prejudice, or, rather, perhaps, I should say, this aversion,
disappearing now–a–days, or is it upon the increase? At any rate, one
cause of it is being removed most rapidly; for the buckram etiquette of
Oxford will soon become a tradition. We will only hope she may not run
too far into the free and easy.
Cradockʼs other discovery was that 50_l._ is no large capital to
commence in life with, especially when the owner does not find his
start prepared for him; fails to prepare it for himself; and has
never been used to economy. He would not apply to any of his fatherʼs
friends, or of the people whom he had known in London, to help him in
this emergency. He would rather starve than do that; for he had dropped
all name and claim of Nowell, and cut his life in twain at manhood;
and the parts should never join again. Only one feeling should be
common to the two existences, to the happy and the wretched life; that
one feeling was the love of Amy, and, what now seemed part of it, his
gratitude to her father.
John Rosedew had given him a letter to a clergyman in London, a man of
high standing and extensive influence, whom John had known at college.
But the youth had not undertaken to deliver that credential, and he
never did so. It would have kept him to his identity, which (so far as
the world was concerned) he wished to change entirely, immediately, and
irrevocably. So he called himself “Nowell” no longer—although the name
is common enough in one form or another: the Nowells of Nowelhurst,
however, are proud of the double _l_, and think a good deal of the
_w_—and Cradock Nowell became “Charles Newman,” without license of Her
Majesty.
Even before his vain attempts to enter the stronghold of commerce,
and before he had learned that Oxford men are not thought “_prima
virorum_,” he had lifted the latch of literature, but the door would
not swing back for him. The _mare magnum_—to mix metaphors, although
bars are added to the Lucrine—the _mare magnum_ of letters was more
like his native element; and, if he once could have gotten—bare–footed
as we must be—over the jagged rocks which hedge that sea, I believe he
might have swum there.
In one respect he was fortunate. The publishers upon whom he called
were gentlemen, and told him the truth.
“Oh, poetry!” exclaimed one and all, as their eyes fell upon his
manuscript, “we cannot take it on our own account; and, if we published
it at your expense, we should only be robbing you.”
“Indeed!” replied Cradock, in the first surprise; “is there no chance,
then, of a sale for it?”
“None whatever. Poetry, unless it be some oneʼs whose name is well
known, is a perfect drug in the market. In the course of ten or a dozen
years, by advertising continually, by influence among the reviewers,
by hitting some popular vein, or being taken up by some authority, you
might attain an audience. Are you ready to encounter all this? Even if
you are, we must decline, we are sorry to say, to have anything to do
with it.”
“Verse, eh? Better have cut your throat,” more tersely replied an
elderly gentleman, well known for his rudeness to authors. However,
even that last was a friend, when compared with some whom it might have
been his evil luck to consult. They advertise their patent methods
of putting a work before the public, without any risk to the author,
&c. &c. Disinterested gentlemen! They are to have no profit whatever,
except from the sale of the work, and they know they wonʼt sell five
copies.
However, there are not many of this sort in an honourable and most
important profession; and Cradock Nowell was lucky enough not to
fall in with any of them. So he accepted the verdict so unanimously
returned, and stored away with a heavy heart his laborious little
manuscript. It was only a translation in verse of the Halieutics, and a
few short original pieces—the former at any rate valuable, as having
been revised by John Rosedew.
There are courts and alleys in the neighbourhood of Mortimer–street
which, for misery and poverty, dirt and desperation, may vie with
almost any of the more famous shames of London.
Cradockʼs own great trouble, the sympathy he had met with, and the
comfort he received from it, had begun by this time to soften his
heart, and render it more sensitive to the distress of others. At
first, it had been far otherwise. The feeling of bitter injustice,
resentment at, and defiance of, a blow which seemed to him so
unmerited, and, worse than all, his own fatherʼs base and low mistrust
of him—who could have been surprised if these things, acting upon a
sad lone heart, and a bold mind beginning to think for itself, had made
the owner an infidel? And very likely they would have done so, when he
was removed from John Rosedewʼs influence, but for that scene with Amy.
He loved that girl so warmly, so devotedly, so purely, that, when he
found his love returned in equal quantity and quality, it renewed his
faith in justice. He saw that there is a measure and law, even where
all appears to be anarchy and anomaly; that the hand of God is not
stretched forth upon His children wantonly; that we cannot gauge His
circling survey by the three–inch space between human eyes, neither
does He rest His balance on His earthly footstool. So Cradock escaped
the deadly harm, which almost seems designed to poise that noblest
gift of Heaven—a free and glorious intellect—he escaped it through
the mercy which gave him true affection.
And now once more he looked with love upon his fellow–men, such love
as the frigid atheist school shall never form nor educate—which truth
alone to a great heart might be conclusive against that school—the
love which few religions except our own inculcate, and no other takes
for its essence.
As yet he was too young to know the blind and inhuman selfishness,
the formality and truckling, and the other paltry dishonesties, which
still exist and try to cheat us under the name of “Society.” The cant
is going by already. Every man who dares to think knows that its laws
are obsolete, because they have not for their basis either of these
three—truth, simplicity, charity.
Even that young man was astonished at the manner in which society
ignores its broader and only true meaning—fellowship among men—and
renounces all other duties, save that of shaking from its shoes
its fellow–dust. He could not look upon the scenes so nigh to him,
and to each other, parted often by nothing more than nine inches
of brick or two inches of deal; the wealth and the want, the feast
and the famine, the satiety and the ravening, the euphemy and the
blasphemy—though sometimes that last got inside the door, blew its
nose, and was infidelity; the prudery and the indecency, the whispered
lie and the yelled one, the sale of maidens by their mothers, or
of women by themselves—though here again the difference was never
very perceptible; all this impious contrast, spread as if for Godʼs
approval, for the Universal Fatherʼs blessing, in the land most chiefly
blessed by Him: which of His sons, not cast out for ever, could look on
it without weeping?
Cradock did something more than weep. He went with his little stock of
money, though he knew it could not do much; and he tried to help in
little ways, though as yet he had no experience. He bought meat, and
clothes, and took things out of pawn, and tried to make peace where
fights were.
At first he was grossly insulted, as a meddlesome swell; but, when he
had done two or three good things, and done them as a brother should,
he began to be owned among them. In one thing he was right, although he
had no experience; he confined his exertions to a very narrow compass.
Of course he got imposed upon—of course he helped the unworthy; but
after a while he began to know them, and even the unworthy—some two
hundred per cent.—began to have faint ideas of trying to deserve good
luck.
One man who attempted to pick Cradʼs pocket was knocked down by the
biggest thief there. “I wish I had a heap of money,” said Cradock,
every day; “I must keep some for myself, I suppose. Perhaps, after all,
I was wrong, in throwing up so hastily my chance of doing good.”
Then he remembered that, but for his trouble, he might never have
thought of the good to be done. And the good done to him was threefold
as much as he could do to others. Every day he grew less selfish, less
imperious, less exacting; every day he saw more clearly the good which
is in the worst of us.
There is a flint of peculiar character—I know not the local name
of it—which is found sometimes on the great Chissel Bank, and away
towards Lyme Regis. It is as hard, and sullen, and dull a flint (with
even the outside polish lost from the chafing of the waves)—a stone
as grey and foggy–looking;—as ever Deucalion took the trouble to
cast away over the left into an empty world. Yet it has, through the
heart of it, traversing it from pole to pole (for its shape is always
conical) a thread, a spindle, a siphuncle, of the richest golden hue.
None but those who are used to it can see the head of the golden
column, can even guess its existence. The stone is not hollow; it is
quite distinct from all pudding–stones and conglomerates.
Many such flints poor Crad came across, and sought in vain for the
beauty of them. He never tried to split them with a hammer, as too many
do of our Boanergæ; but he was too young to see or feel the chord of
the golden siphuncle. One, especially, one great fellow, was harder and
rougher than any flint, like the matrix of the concentric jasper.
“Confound that fellow,” said Cradock to himself; “I never shall get
at the heart of him. If my pluck were up a little more. Iʼd fight him;
though I know he would lick me. Heʼd be sorry for me afterwards.”
Issachar Jupp could lick any two men in the court. He was a bargee, of
good intentions—at least, when he took to the cuddy; but his horses
had pulled crosswise ever since; and the devil knew, better than the
angels, what his nature now was.
“None of your d—d Scripture–reading for me!” he cried, when Cradock
came near him; though the young man had never attempted anything of the
sort.
He knew that the Word of God is not bread to a blackguardʼs empty
belly. And another thing he knew—that he was not of the age and aspect
for John Bunyanʼs business. Moreover, Jupp was wonderfully jealous
of his wife, a gentle but grimy woman, forty–five years old, whom he
larruped every day; although he might be an infidel, he would ensure
his wifeʼs fidelity. Nevertheless, he had his pure vein, and Cradock at
last got at it.
Mrs. and Miss Ducksacre were very good–hearted women, but, like many
other women of that fibre, whose education has been neglected, of a hot
and hasty order. Not that we need suppose the pepper to be neutralized
by the refinement, only to be absorbed more equably, and transfused
more generally.
A little thing came feeling the way into the narrow, dingy shop, one
dark November evening, groping along by the sacks of potatoes (all of
them “seconds,” for the firm did not deal much in “Ware Regents”),
feeling its way along the sacks which towered above its head, like
bulky snow–giants embrowned with thaw; and then by the legs of the
“tatie–bin,” with the great scales hanging above it, and then by the
heap of lighting–wood, piled in halfpenny bundles, with the ends
against the wall; and so the little thing emerged between two mighty
hills of coleworts, and under the frugal gas–burner, and congratulated
itself, with a hug of the heart, upon safety.
“Take care, my dear,” cried Mrs. Ducksacre, looking large behind the
counter, “or youʼll tumble down the coal–trap, where the black bogeys
lives. Bless my heart, if it ainʼt little Loo! Why, Loo, I hardly knew
you. You ainʼt looking like yourself a bit, child. And who sent you out
at this time of night? What a shame, to be sure!”
Loo, the pride of Issachar Jupp, was rather a pretty little body,
about three and a half years old, “going on for four,” as she loved
to say, if anybody asked her; and her pale but clean face would have
been _very_ pretty, if her mother would have let her hair alone. But
it was all combed back, and tied tightly behind, like the tail of a
horse at a fair, or as affording a spout to pour the little girl out
by. She looked up at Mrs. Ducksacre, while her fingers played with the
coleworts, for her hands were hot, and this cooled them; and then,
with the instinct of nature, she stuck up for her father and mother.
“Pease, maʼam, Loo not fray much,”—though her trembling frock belied
her, all over the throat and the heart of it—“and father don from
home, maʼam, on the Wasintote” [Basingstoke canal], “and mother dot
nobody, onʼy Loo, to do thins. And she send this, ‘cause Looʼs poor
troat be bad, maʼam.”
The little child, whose throat was tied up with worn flannel from the
char–bucket, with the grey edge still upon it, wriggled in and out of
her shape and self, in the way only children can do; and at length
drew, from some innermost shrine, a halfpenny and a farthing.
“And what am I to give you for it, Loo? Oh, you poor little thing, how
very hoarse you are!”
Loo, with a confidence in human nature purely non–Londinian, had placed
her cash upon the altar, upon the inside of which so many worship,
while on the outside so many are sacrificed; without circumlocution,
the counter. Her eyes were below the rim of it, till she stood upon
tiptoe with one foot, while the other was up in the colewort roots, and
then she could see the money, and she poked out her little lips at it,
as if she would fain suck it back again.
“Pease, maʼam, Looʼs troat so bad, mother are goin to make a ‘tew, tree
haʼporth of tipe and a haʼporth of ‘egents, and a fardy of inons!”
“What a splendid stew, Loo!” said Mrs. Ducksacre, seeming to smell
it; “and so you want a haʼporth of taties, and a farthingʼs worth
of onions. And you shall have them, my dear, and as good a three
farthings’ worth as ever was put up in London. Where are you going to
put them all?”
Loo opened her sore throat, and pointed down it. She had not yet lost
her appetite; and that child did love tripe so.
“No, no, I donʼt mean that, Loo. I know you have a nice room inside;
though some will be for mother, wonʼt it, now? I mean, how are you
going to carry it home?”
“In Looʼs pinney,” replied the child, delighted with her success; for
ever so many people had told her, that the Ducksacres now were getting
so high, they would soon leave off making farthings–worths; and any
tradesman who does that is above the sphere of the street–child.
“My dear, your pinney wonʼt hold them, potatoes are so cheap now”—she
had just sworn they were awfully dear to a person she disliked—“I
am sure you canʼt carry a haʼporth. Oh, Mr. Newman, you are so
good–natured”—Cradock was just coming in, rather glum from another
failure—“I really donʼt believe you would think you were bemeaning
yourself by going home with this poor little atom.”
“I should rather hope I would not,” replied Cradock, looking grand.
“Oh, I did not know. I beg your pardon, Iʼm sure. I would go myself,
only Sally is out, and the boy gone home ever so long ago. I beg your
pardon, Iʼm sure, Mr. Newman; I thought you were so good–natured.”
“Mrs. Ducksacre,” said Cradock, “you utterly misunderstand me. I
replied to the form of your sentence, perhaps, rather than to its
meaning. What I meant was, that I should rather hope I would not think
it below me to go home with this little dear. If I could suppose it any
disgrace to me, I should deserve to be kicked by your errand–boy all
round this shop, Mrs. Ducksacre; and I am surprised you misunderstand
me so. Why, I know this little girl well; and her name is Louisa Jupp.”
“Tiss Loo,” said the little child, standing up on tiptoe, and spreading
out her arms to Cradock. All the children loved him, as the little ones
at Nowelhurst would run after Mr. Rosedew. Children are even better
judges of character than dogs.
“Why, you poor little soul,” said Crad, as he seated her on his strong
right arm with her little cheek to his, and she drew a thousand straws
of light through her lashes from the gas–jet, which she had never yet
been so close to, “how hot and dry your lips are! I hope you are not
taking the—sickness”—he was going to say “fever,” but feared to
frighten Loo.
“Mother fray,” cried the small girl, proud of the importance accruing
to her, “Loo dot wever; Irishers dot bad wever on the foor below
mother. Loo det nice thins, and lay abed, if me dot the wever.”
“Put the poor childʼs things, whatever they are, in a basket, Mrs.
Ducksacre. How odd her little legs feel! And a shillingʼs worth of
grapes, if you please, in a bag by themselves. Hereʼs the money for
them. You know Iʼll bring back the basket. But the bags donʼt come
back, do they?”
“No, sir, of course not. Half–a–crown a gross for the small ones, with
the name and the cross–handle basket, and the cabbage and carrots, sir.
Sixpence more for cornopean–pattern with a pineapple, and grapes and
oranges. But lor, sir, the cornopean” [cornucopiæ] “would frighten half
our customers. The basket–pattern pays better for an advertisement than
to get them back again, even if parties would bring them, which I knows
well they never would, sir.”
Then Cradock set forth with the child on his arm, his coat thrown over
his shoulders, and the best shillingʼs worth of foreign grapes—Mrs.
Ducksacre never bought English ones—and the best three farthingʼs
worth of potatoes and onions that was made that day by any tradesman in
any part of London, not excluding “them low costers,” as the Ducksacre
firm expressed it.
Little Loo Juppʼs sore throat proved to be, as Cradock feared it
would, the first symptom of scarlet fever; and the young man had the
pleasure—one of the highest and purest pleasures which any man can
have—of saving a human life. He watched that trembling flame of
life, and fostered it, and sheltered it, as if “the hopes of a nation
hung”—as the penny–a–liners love to say of some babe not a whit more
valuable—upon its feeble flicker. He hired another room for her, where
the air was purer; he made the doctor attend to the case, which at
first that doctor cared little to do; he brought her many a trifling
comfort; in a word, he waited upon her so that the old women of the
court called him thenceforth “Nurse Newman.”
“What, you here again, you white–livered young sneak!” cried Issachar
Jupp, reeling in at the door, just as Cradock was coming out; “take
that, then——” and he lifted a great oak bludgeon, newly cut from the
towing–path of the Basingstoke Canal. If Cradock had not been as quick
as lightning, and caught the stick over the bargemanʼs shoulder, there
would have been weeping and wailing and a lifelong woe for Amy.
“Hush,” he said; “donʼt make such a noise, man. Your child is at the
point of death, in the room overhead.”
Poor Crad, naturally of a bright complexion, but pale from long
unhappiness, might now have retorted the compliment as to the “pallor
jecoris.” The bargee turned so pale, that he looked like a collierʼs
tablecloth. Then he planted his heavy stick on the ground; else he
would have lain flat on his threshold.
“My Loo, my Loo!” was all he could say; “oh my Loo! _Itʼs a lie, sir!_”
“I wish it was,” replied Cradock; “take my arm, Mr. Jupp. Donʼt be
over–frightened. We hope with all our hearts to save her, and to–night
we shall know. Already I think I perceive some change in her breathing,
though her tongue is like a furnace.”
He spoke with a tone and in a voice which no man ever has described,
nor shall, but which every born man feels to be genuine, long ere he
can think.
“[Condemn] me for a [sanguineous] fool,” cried Jupp, with two enormous
tears guttering down the coal–dust, and his great chest heaving and
wanting to sob, only it didnʼt know the way; “[condemn] my eyes for
swearing so, and making such a [female dog] of myself, but what the
[Hades] am I to do? Oh my Loo, my Loo! If you die, Iʼll go to [Hades]
after you.”
Excuse me for washing out this speech to regulation weakness; perhaps
it was entered in white on high, as the turn of a life of blackness.
Cradock turned away, and trembled. Who can see a rugged man split
to the bottom of his nature, and not himself be splintered? I donʼt
believe that any can: not even the cold iron scoundrels whom modern
plays delight in.
“Now come up with me, Mr. Jupp,” said Crad, taking care not to look at
him, “out at this door, in at the other. Poor little soul! she has
been so good. You canʼt think how good she has been. And she has taken
her medicine so nicely.”
“Pray God Almighty not to [condemn] me, for not [condemning] myself
enough,” said Issachar Jupp, below his breath, as he leaned on
Cradockʼs arm.
It was his form of prayer; and it meant more than most of ours do.
Though I may be discarded by turtle–dove quill–drivers for daring to
record it, will he ever be worse for uttering it? Of course, it was
very shocking; but far more so to men than to angels.
CHAPTER VIII.
Little Looʼs fever “took the turn” that night. Cradock went away, of
course, now her own father was come; and the savage bargee would have
gone on his knees, and crawled in that fashion—wherein all fashion
crawls—down the rough stairs, every one of them, if the young man
would only have let him. We are just beginning to scorn the serfdom of
one mind to another. We begin to desire that no man should, without
fair argument, accept our dicta as equal to his own in wisdom. And I
fully believe that if fate had thrown us across Shakespeare, Bacon, or
Newton, we should now refer to our own reason what they said, before
admiring it. For, after all, what are we? What are our most glorious
minds? Only one spark more of God.
And yet the servience, not of the mind, but of the heart to a larger
one, is a fealty most honourable to the giver and the receiver. In
a bold independent man, such as Issachar Jupp was, this fealty was
not to be won by any of that paltry sentiment about birth, clanship,
precedency, position, appearance, &c., which is our national method of
circumcising the New Testament—it was only to be won by proof that the
other heart was bigger than his. Prove t
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