The Idol of the Blind: A Novel
by Tom Gallon · English · Gutenberg #47211 · 810,297 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Idol of the Blind: A Novel
Author: Tom Gallon
Release date: October 27, 2014 [eBook #47211]
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE IDOL OF THE BLIND: A NOVEL ***
THE IDOL OF THE BLIND
BOOKS BY T. GALLON.
Each, 12mo, cloth, $1.00; paper, 50 cents.
The Idol of the Blind.
"No person well posted in current fiction lets a story by Mr. Gallon
pass unnoticed."--_Buffalo Commercial._
The Kingdom of Hate.
"The whole story is told with an appearance of honest, straightforward
sincerity that is very clever and well sustained, and the suspicion of
satire will only dawn on the reader when the story is well advanced,
and he is thoroughly interested in the tumultuous swing."--_Chicago
Chronicle._
Dicky Monteith. A Love Story.
"A good story, told in an engaging style."--_Philadelphia Press._
"A refreshing example of everything that a love story ought to
be."--_San Francisco Call._
A Prince of Mischance.
"The story is a powerful one, and holds the reader from the
start."--_Boston Budget._
"An admirable story."--_London Telegraph._
Tatterly.
"A charming love story runs through the book, which is written in a
bright and lively style.... The book is worth reading."--_New York Sun._
"We believe in 'Tatterly' through thick and thin. We could not
recommend a better story."--_London Academy._
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK.
THE IDOL
OF THE BLIND
_A NOVEL_
BY
TOM GALLON
AUTHOR OF
TATTERLY, A PRINCE OF MISCHANCE,
DICKY MONTEITH, ETC.
"When pious frauds and holy shifts
Are dispensations and gifts."
HUDIBRAS
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1899
COPYRIGHT, 1899,
BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
_All rights reserved._
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I.--COMETHUP ENTERS LIFE DISASTROUSLY 1
II.--AND MAKES DISCOVERIES 10
III.--THE GHOST OF A LITTLE CHILD 20
IV.--THE CAPTAIN PLAYS THE KNIGHT-ERRANT 40
V.--TELLS OF AN ERRING WOMAN 55
VI.--THE CAPTAIN IN STRANGE COMPANY 62
VII.--IN WHICH SEPARATIONS ARE SUGGESTED 79
VIII.--COMETHUP SUFFERS A LOSS 88
IX.--THE COMING OF AUNT CHARLOTTE 100
X.--COMETHUP LEAVES THE OLD LIFE 115
XI.--AND BECOMES A PERSONAGE 131
XII.--THE CAPTAIN SPEAKS HIS MIND 141
XIII.--A RETROSPECT--AND A FLUTTERING OF HEARTS 158
XIV.--AN INCUBUS, AND THE DEMON OF JEALOUSY 175
XV.--COMETHUP PRACTISES DECEPTION 183
XVI.--COMETHUP IS SHADOWED 199
XVII.--THE BEGINNINGS OF A GENIUS 214
XVIII.--AUNT CHARLOTTE IS SYMPATHETIC 231
XIX.--GENIUS ASSERTS ITSELF 247
XX.--THE DESERTION OF A PARENT 262
XXI.--GENIUS AND THE DOMESTIC VIRTUES 276
XXII.--A SECOND DESERTION 286
XXIII.--COMETHUP DRIVES A BARGAIN 301
XXIV.--UNCLE ROBERT HAS AN INSPIRATION 311
XXV.--THE FALL OF PRINCE CHARMING 327
XXVI.--BRIAN PAYS HIS DEBTS 332
XXVII.--THE PLEADING OF THE CAPTAIN 351
XXVIII.--MEDMER MELTS A SILVER SPOON 361
XXIX.--COMETHUP LEARNS THE TRUTH 369
XXX.--AUNT CHARLOTTE ATTENDS A CELEBRATION 374
THE IDOL OF THE BLIND.
CHAPTER I.
COMETHUP ENTERS LIFE DISASTROUSLY.
"My dear" had looked her last upon a troublesome world. She had taken
life sighingly, in little frightened gasps, as it were, with the fear
upon her, even from childhood, that unknown horrors lurked for her
in each day to which she was awakened. It can scarcely be said that
she had clung to life with any tenacity--rather with the instinct of
living; and she had fluttered out of it resignedly enough, a little
sorry, perhaps, that she had left any one behind to grieve for her. And
yet, with the inconsistency which had marked her life, she had died at
the very moment when life had actually begun to be worth living for her.
"My dear" was one of those who wait long for the happiness, if any,
that is to come to them, and find it a little tasteless when it is
at last given to them. She had been the younger child of a stern and
unbending man, who bent or broke to his code of rules those who were
weak enough to be bent or broken, and thrust sternly aside those whose
strength opposed itself to his. He had found in his little daughter
one who smilingly and timidly obeyed in everything, and worshipped him
without question--up to a certain point. That point was determined by
the arrival of David Willis.
It was an old and a very ordinary story; such stories are played out
to their bitter end day after day around us. David Willis was poor,
and had absolutely no expectations; so far as old Robert Carlaw was
concerned he simply did not exist--except as many other people existed,
as a part of the world with which he had nothing to do. David, for
his part, was as patient and long-suffering as the girl who loved
him; and so they solemnly and pitifully plighted their troth, and
agreed to wait. Boldness or resource of action was not in either of
them; the girl, despite her love for the man, and the sort of humble,
patient faithfulness with which she was endowed, would not have risked
her father's anger on any account. So, in a poor, half-ridiculous,
half-heroic fashion, they parted and waited.
They waited, strange as it may seem, for nearly twenty years; until
the man had entered the forties and the woman was nearing them. She
was still a pretty woman, soft-eyed and gentle of voice, with a great
mine of tenderness hidden away in her which no one had been able to
discover. When, on her father's death, she married David Willis, there
seemed a prospect that the mine would be discovered, but the time had
gone past; life had been so long a flat and stale and unprofitable
thing that the old fierce heart-beats at the thought of her lover, the
old hunger of love for him, had died away into a mere tremulous wonder
as to whether he would be good to her, or whether he might have moments
of harshness and sternness, like her father. She had hung too long
expectant on hope to believe that the world was going to be very good
to her now; she was only a little glad, for her lover's sake, that his
time of waiting was ended.
David Willis was a musician and a dreamer; not a very great musician,
and certainly a dreamer whose dreams brought him no profit. He had
filled the place of organist in one or two minor churches, living
simply and contentedly. By the very irony of things, when the woman
he loved was able to come to him and put her hands in his, and tell
him that there was no further bar to their happiness, he was out of
an engagement, and had scarcely a penny in the world. But, with a
childlike faith which, even at their years, came near to the sublime,
they married first and tried to be worldly afterward. Fortunately
for them, her brother was a man of property in a small, old-fashioned
town near the coast of Kent; and, having considerable influence in the
place, he offered, through the clergyman of the parish, the vacant post
of organist in the parish church to David Willis, after first roundly
abusing his sister for having married a pauper.
It was a quaint old town, a place of red roofs and winding streets and
strange old buildings; a very paradise to the dreamer and the woman who
had waited so long for him. Her brother's house stood at the far end
of the town, in the newer part of it; but they saw little of him, and
had, indeed, no particular desire to do so. They had their own quiet
dwelling-place, a little house nestling under the frowning shadows of
the church wherein he worked; a strange old place, with low ceilings
and black beams, with a garden of roses stretching right along under
the gray old church wall. Her life, for a few months at least, was a
sweet and shadowed thing; people said afterward--people who had never
known her--that they had seen her sitting often in the old church,
with her mild eyes looking upward at a great rose window over the
porch, while her husband practised for the services on the wheezy old
organ; had seen her wandering in her garden among the roses, singing to
herself in a subdued voice--the voice of one who has long been forced
to be silent, or to subdue any natural mirth that might be in her.
The summer went by, while David Willis played on his organ, and his
wife sang among her roses; and with the autumn came a new light in the
eyes of the woman--a light as of one who waits and hopes for something.
Poor, trembling, wistful creature, what dreams were hers then! What
dreams when she sat by her husband's side in the twilight, looking out
over the town where the lights were beginning to twinkle one by one
like sleepy eyes! What dreams of a little life that was to recompense
her for all she had missed, and all she never could find in any other
way! Childish hands were to draw all that mine of tenderness out of
her, as no other hands could have done; childish words were to wake
echoing words in her dull heart, and stir it to life again. She dreamed
tremblingly of all she would do; of all she would teach the child; saw
it walking by her side among the roses; fluttered into church proudly,
braving the eyes of younger women with the mite beside her.
Those were dreams which never came true. She had waited, through dull
and spiritless years, for her chance of life; it was written, in that
book which no man shall read, that her life in that fuller sense was
to be but a short one. She gave birth to her child--a boy--and knew
her fate even before they told her. She sank slowly, drifting out of
life with as little effort to retain it as she had shown throughout her
days. Almost the last thing she did was to take her husband's hand, as
he sat speechless with grief beside her, and put it to her lips, and
draw it up against her cheek.
"We waited--a long time--Davie," she whispered. "I wish--I
might--have--stayed." She did not speak again; she held his hand in
that position until the last breath fluttered out of her lips.
David Willis was utterly incapable of appreciating anything except
the magnitude of his loss. He wandered desolately from room to room,
picking up things that had belonged to her and putting his lips to
them, and weeping, in a hopeless, despairing fashion, like a child.
Fortunately for that other child who had been the direct cause of the
disaster, there were kindly people about the place who cared for it,
and found a nurse for it--a young and healthy woman who had but just
lost a child of her own, and who was installed in the house of David
Willis at once. From that big house in the newer part of the town came
Mr. Robert Carlaw, the brother of the dead woman, hushing his loud and
blustering voice a little as he crossed the threshold of the place of
mourning.
He had an air with him, this Robert Carlaw; a sense of saying, when he
entered a room, that it was something poorer and meaner than before he
came; a magnificent air of proprietorship in every one he honoured by
a nod or a handshake; the very town through which he walked became,
not a sweet and beautiful old place which seemed to have been dropped
clean out of the middle ages, but an awkward, badly built little place
in which Robert Carlaw was good enough to live. The swing of him was so
fine that the skirts of his coat brushed the houses as he went down the
street; other passengers humbly took the roadway.
He was very kind and sympathetic with David Willis, with the kindness
and sympathy of a patron to a dependent who has suffered a loss; he had
scarcely seen his sister since she was a child, and knew absolutely
nothing of her. He seated himself in an armchair--the chair which had
been hers--opposite to where David Willis sat with his head bowed in
his hands; he coughed, with a little shade of annoyance in the cough,
as of one who is not receiving proper attention. David Willis looked up
without speaking.
"Bad business, this," said Mr. Carlaw, with a jerk of the head which
was meant to convey that he referred to what was lying upstairs. "A man
feels these things; I know _I_ did. Cut me up dreadfully."
"Yes," said David, in a low voice.
"She was never strong, you know," went on the brother; "not like the
others, I mean. And then she married late, which tries a woman, I'm
told."
"Yes," replied the other again in the same tone.
"She was just the sort that would give in without making what I call a
kick for it. Hadn't half enough of the devil in her. Not a bit like her
brother in that respect. Why, I assure you, they've positively _tried_
to kill me, half a dozen times; given me over for dead. But they didn't
know Bob Carlaw; he's always proved one too many for 'em. There's a lot
of life in Bob."
David Willis got up slowly. "Would you like to see her?" he asked.
"No, no; I don't think so. It wouldn't--wouldn't do any good, and the
sight of any one dead always upsets me. No, I don't think I'll see
her; I only--only called in case I could do anything. A man needs
sympathy at such a time." He got up and took his hat, and swung toward
the door. Turning there, he said abruptly, "What about the kid?"
"The----" said David, looking at him blankly.
"The child; is it alive?"
"Yes," replied David; "doing well, they tell me."
"Ah--that's bad--for you, I mean." He paused a moment, coughed
uncomfortably, and stuck his hat sideways on his head; then remembered
himself, and took it off and frowned at it. Finally he got out of the
door awkwardly, and swung himself out through the garden of the roses
and went up the street, trying hard not to whistle.
It was on the day of the funeral that David Willis first seemed to
grasp the idea of his responsibility in regard to his infant son. He
had had no thought of that before; had listened to the sympathizing
remarks of the few friends he had with indifference, and had scarcely
appeared to realize that there was a new element in his life at all. He
grasped things slowly at all times, and required time to digest them;
he had room for nothing else in his mind then but the thought of his
loss. The day that saw her committed to the earth in the old churchyard
within sight of the garden where she had walked was a day which passed
for him like a troubled dream; he had a vague remembrance that people
were very kind to him, and helped him, and told him what to do and
where to stand. It was while he stood beside the grave that some words
from the burial service broke upon his ears as though nothing had been
said before; he saw in them something new and fresh and hopeful.
"Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full
of misery. He cometh up and----"
He lost all that followed; with those final words came a new thought
into his mind. The woman he had loved, for whom he had waited and
hungered so patiently, was to sleep her last sleep in that quiet place,
to sleep as calmly and as gently as she had lived. But there was
something more than this, something to comfort him. God had, after all,
been very merciful; so, in his simple mind, he told himself. The poor,
frail woman was gone; in her place had come a little child. The words
were true; he applied them at once to the baby. "He cometh up--like a
flower." Surely that was true; his eyes brightened as he thought of it;
the bitterness fell away from his heart; he almost longed to leave her
sleeping there and to get back to the child. He scarcely seemed to have
seen the child yet--to know what it was like.
As he crossed the churchyard to his house the thing was forced more
clearly and strongly upon him; he saw, with the fine instinct of love,
that this was what she would have wished, that the child must grow up
to think well of her, and to take her place. A man of rare singleness
of life and purpose, he had been capable only of single emotions; and
those emotions must, of necessity, be great. His dogged patience in
waiting for one woman through all the best years of his life had had in
it much of heroism; that was ended, and he turned now to something else
to fill his days. The child should do it; the child had been sent for
that very purpose. Over and over again the words came back to him, "He
cometh up--like a flower." That was very beautiful; it seemed strange
that he had not thought of that before. He dreamed a dream, even as the
woman had done, of all that the child was to be to him.
He went into the room where the scrap of humanity lay sleeping against
the strange woman's breast; the woman glanced up at him almost
resentfully as he bent over the child; just such another child had lain
warm against her, and this one filled the void in her heart a little.
She was a humble creature, of no subtle emotions whatever; her sense of
motherhood, so recently awakened, was the strongest feeling in her.
The man touched the baby's cheek with a hesitating forefinger, and
then turned away and walked out of the room. He saw quite clearly how
the child would grow up, knowing only him, desiring no one else to
fill its world. Before another hour had passed, the solitary man had
mapped out the seat the child should take in the house and in church;
had wandered in fancy over the fields through which the child should
accompany him. There was no disloyalty to the dead woman in all this;
the child had sprung out of the woman, in every sense, and took her
place quite naturally in the deep heart of the man.
That evening David Willis received an unexpected visitor. The visitor
came slowly and timidly, and yet with a certain forced air of defiance
upon him, up the garden path, and knocked at the door of the little
house. The one servant the house boasted, and who did not sleep there,
had gone to her own home at the other end of the town; David Willis
opened the door, and stared out into the twilight at the visitor.
The caller was a little man--very alert and very upright, with a
tightly buttoned frock coat, and an old-fashioned silk hat with a
curly brim. He carried something in one hand behind him. David Willis
remembered to have seen him once or twice in the streets, walking very
erect, and swinging a cane with a tassel attached to it; and always in
church on Sundays, where he occupied a little odd pew in one corner,
and gave the responses in a very loud and sonorous voice not at all
fitting to his stature. David held the door in one hand, and looked out
wonderingly at the little man.
"My name is Garraway-Kyle--Captain Garraway-Kyle--late of her Majesty's
service. You are in trouble, sir, your wife"--he stopped abruptly and
coughed and frowned, and tugged at one end of his white mustache with
his disengaged hand--"your wife, sir, was good enough to admire my
flowers; used to stop sometimes to look at them. I thought perhaps----"
His sunburned face took on a deeper tinge, and he brought his hand from
behind him and showed a carefully arranged bunch of flowers.
David Willis came out into the little path, and closed the door behind
him; his voice was rather unsteady when he spoke. "Thank you, sir," he
said. "Would you like me to go with you and point out the--the grave?"
"I know it. I was there this afternoon," replied the captain, shortly.
"But I should like you to come with me." So the two men went in silence
out of the garden, and by the little gate into the churchyard, David
Willis having no hat, and the captain carrying his in his hand.
At the grave the captain knelt stiffly, as though it were an effort
for him to do so, and put the flowers at the head of the new mound. He
remained for nearly half a minute kneeling, and then drew himself up
and faced the other. "She was a sweet and gentle woman, sir; I have
seen her often; I have ventured to peep over the wall when she was in
her own garden. She was very fond of flowers."
"Yes," replied David, "very."
"I wished sometimes that I might have offered her some of mine, the
finest garden in the town, sir. But, of course, I did not know her. I
am sorry to have had to give them to her like this."
"You are very good," said David, softly.
Captain Garraway-Kyle turned away and looked up for a moment at the
sombre church which rose above them. "You had not been married long, I
think, Mr. Willis?"
"Not quite a year," replied David.
"Ah! The child lives, I think?"
"Yes."
They walked back together to the gate which led to the cottage; and
there the captain held out his hand. "Thank you," he said, stiffly; and
then, "I am very sorry. By the way--boy or girl?"
"Oh, it's a boy," replied David.
The captain had gone a few paces down the street when he turned on his
heel and came back again. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Willis, but what will
you call him?"
It was almost an idle question, prompted in the captain's mind for
want of something better to say; but it set the old train of thought
running in David Willis's mind as it had run all that afternoon. The
words he had heard at the grave-side seemed to sound in his ears again;
the sudden thought struck him to give the boy some name that should
keep in memory his mother, and the purpose for which he came into
the world, and all that he meant to his father. He faced about, and
looked at his visitor with a new light in his eyes. "I shall call him
'Comethup,'" he said, slowly.
"I beg your pardon----" The captain looked a little startled.
"'Comethup,'" said David again, half to himself. "Yes, that's the name."
"Oh, I see; family name, I presume?" said the other.
"Yes," replied David Willis, "a family name. Good-night." And he went
inside, and sat down in the darkness to think about it.
CHAPTER II.
AND MAKES DISCOVERIES.
David Willis stuck to his determination, so suddenly made on that night
of the captain's visit, and the child was duly baptized under the name
of Comethup Willis. Simple David Willis chuckled to himself a little
over his ingenuity; he grew to like the quaintness of the name, and it
was a constant reminder--if such were necessary--of the tragedy which
belonged to the boy's birth. He always spoke the name rapidly when
addressing the child or when referring to it to any one else, slurring
the cumbrous name that he might hide the secret of it; only to himself
did he ever speak it slowly with the added words, "as a flower." It was
a never-ceasing source of joy to him to think how cleverly the name
had been conceived; he dwelt upon it lovingly, with the pride of the
inventor; and it became on his tongue a caress whenever it was uttered.
Apart from the mere name, the child filled his life and his thoughts to
a greater extent than he had ever even dared to hope. He grew rapidly,
and shook off the childish ailments which came with his years with
greater ease than most children; he had about him, even as a little
fellow, the grave, shy tenderness of his mother. Captain Garraway-Kyle
murmured once, as he held him at arms'-length and looked critically at
him, that he had his mother's eyes.
It was a strange life for the child, alone with a dreamy man in that
old house under the shadow of the church; if he could have written down
his impressions of life and those about him at that time, they would
have made curious reading. He remembered when it was possible for him,
by a great effort, to get both hands up to the door knob, and to twist
it round and stagger backward, pulling the door with him; understood
fully what a steep and treacherous affair the stone step was which led
down to the garden; and what a proud and wonderful day it was when he
summoned courage to step straight down upon it, instead of manipulating
the descent with one small bare knee on the stone and the foot of the
other leg feeling for the earth below. He knew his mother's garden by
heart, and all the wondrous corners of it, where strange things hid
which no one saw but himself. He learned early that the roses which
grew there, and nodded in a friendly fashion to him as he passed, only
grew there for a small boyish nose to be poked up at them to get their
scent, and were not to be pulled except on rare occasions, when his
father went round the garden with a basket, and gathered the choicest,
and tied them into a rude kind of wreath. Comethup knew then that a
great expedition was on foot; that they would go out of the gate at the
farthest end of the garden, and that he would stumble--holding fast by
his father's hand--through a place where the grass was very soft and
very green, and where some of it was raised in long hillocks higher
than the rest; a place where large flat stones with curious marks
upon them, and little babies' heads with wings cut on some, cropped up
out of the earth. On one of these hillocks the little homely wreath
would be laid, and his father would kneel and seem to whisper something
behind his hand. He knew that his mother slept there, and that she
would never wake up again, and never walk with him, as his father
walked, in the garden of the roses. Child though he was, he always felt
a little sadness as he stumbled back over the hillocks to the garden
gate, because the mother he had never seen lay, an inscrutable mystery,
out of his sight under the grass.
There was one never-to-be-forgotten day when he first learned of
something outside his own small world. It was Sunday, and the heavy old
bells were swinging, and his father had gone out through the sunlight
with books under his arm to the church. It struck suddenly upon the
child that this day was different from all the rest; that the little
maid-servant had a cleaner face and a whiter apron, and that his own
tiny suit was one which was laid by in a tall old press all the rest of
the week. Most of our impressions, whatever age we may be, come to us
through the sense of smell, and Comethup's impression of the day came
to him through the scent of the clothes. They bore the same scent as
the big best bedroom upstairs--a room in which no one ever slept and
into which he had peeped one day when the door was open; just such a
scent as that which hung about it had been wafted out to his nostrils
then. He began to see that there must be something "best" about this
day also, as there was about everything connected with it.
When David Willis came back from church, the child had got his
questions ready, and knew exactly what answers he required, as a child
always unerringly does. He asked why all the shops along the other side
of the street were closed, and why the bells rang on that day, and why
the people sang in the big church which loomed above them. And then
he heard for the first time of that other world into which we try so
hard to peer; of that dread Presence--dread to a child--beyond the
skies that shuts in our vision. He was puzzled to understand how his
mother could be right above him, watching to see if he were a good
boy or a bad; and why, in that case, those flowers were put upon that
grass-covered bed of hers out in the churchyard. He pondered the matter
deeply, and was much disconcerted to think that the God of whom every
one seemed so much afraid was all round him and could see everything he
did.
He went one day into the church with his father--an experience indeed!
It was quite empty, save for themselves, and the first thought
that occurred to him was to wonder where the roof was; and why his
voice rumbled and rattled and sprang at him from far above when he
incautiously spoke in his usual shrill treble. The phrase which his
father used--"the house of God"--awed him; he understood why the roof
was so much higher than that of their own house. A lovely pattern of
many colours on the stone pavement at his feet arrested his attention.
He followed the shafts of light upward to the great rose window high
up in the wall over the porch. His heart went a little quicker, and he
gripped his father's hand with his baby fingers. That surely must be
the eye of God looking down at him.
He went home tremblingly to think the matter over; saw in the childish
wonder of discovery something that no one had found before; screwed his
courage to make further inquiries of his father concerning this dread
Being. It was a terror to him to learn that the Being was everywhere,
not alone in the great place where people went in their best clothes to
worship him. He crept up to his tiny bedroom under the roof that night,
and hurriedly closed the door and drew the curtains, and lay in bed
quakingly triumphant at the thought that he had shut It out, only to
wake up with a start in a little while at the remembrance that It must
have been in the room before his precautions were taken. He climbed out
of bed, and pattered across to the window; pulled back the curtains,
and pushed open the casement. All the benign influence of a summer
starlight night was about him; the lights were twinkling sleepily and
safely down in the town; and he could hear calm, slow country voices in
the street beyond the garden. Life--great and wonderful to his childish
mind, although bounded by so narrow a horizon--seemed beautiful and
good and secure; he smiled, and dropped his sleepy head on his arms on
the window ledge, and slept there calmly till the morning came.
The world is always a place of giants to us when we are very little;
therein lies the tragedy and the terror of it. We are always told that
childhood is such a happy time; we cry always how gladly we would
return to it. But we know well that we would not return to it with the
ignorance with which we left it; that we should go back to its delights
and its irresponsibilities with the magician's wand of Experience in
our hands to make it a fairyland. To a lonely child the world in which
he lives is a place of terrors, with no one who understands his needs
to explain to him all he craves so desperately to know.
Comethup was left pretty much to his own devices in those early days.
David Willis liked to have the boy near him, liked to see him moving
about the house. But, in his dreamy fashion, he took but scant notice
of the child as a child; he painted to himself glowing pictures
of what the boy would be when he had grown older and was ripe for
companionship; for the present, he waited a little impatiently for that
time to come. So it happened that Comethup explored his world alone.
The seasons seemed always to come suddenly. He would wake up, bright
and alert, on a glorious morning of sunshine, with an endless prospect
of sunny days before him; fires were things of the past, and the
garden was no more a sealed place, wherein he must not run for fear of
splashing his little white legs with mud. In just the same way there
seemed no intermediate time between the summer, with its glorious
abundance of roses and its long, hot afternoons, and the time when the
roses were gone, and he was curled up like a little comfortable animal
on the hearthrug before the parlour fire. That was the time, too, for
going to bed in the dark, when the dreadful hour crept inexorably on;
when he must leave the warmth and brightness of the lower room and
climb with reluctant feet into a colder atmosphere, where grim shadows
lurked on the landing, and the pale moon grinned in at him through an
uncurtained window, like a queer face all on one side.
The church grew, quite naturally, from its mystic qualities, to be
his chief delight. Everything about it was wonderful, from the long
flight of stone steps which led up to the organ-loft where his father
played, to the great brown wooden bird, with its beak open, and
with outstretched wings, which stood on a carved pillar before the
altar. Its seats were a never-failing source of delight to the shy
child--places in which one could hide, secure from every one, and look
up at the great roof, and at the sunlight slanting in through the
windows. But perhaps it was best of all to sit up in the organ-loft,
as he sometimes did with his father; to draw a huge hassock close up
against the old-fashioned wooden partition, and sit there and look
down, unseen and unsuspected, at the people below. Comethup always
stood up at the proper places on those occasions, and sat down when the
people rustled into their seats; he tried, too, to murmur something
which sounded a little like the responses which rumbled up from below.
His world widened out a little as the placid years flowed on. The
garden of the roses no longer bounded his horizon; the gate ceased to
be a barrier which must not be passed. The spirit of adventure was
strong in Comethup one summer afternoon, when his father was sleeping
peacefully on the hard horsehair sofa in the parlour, and the little
maid who waited upon them was busied in the kitchen. The garden had
been all explored; on such a day as this, when the air was heavy and
still, the very scent of the roses hung heavily. Poor Comethup was a
little tired of roses--a little tired even of that wonderful garden,
every corner of which, every stick and stone, he knew by heart. And
then, just as he clung to the iron railings of the gate, and looked
out disconsolately into the quiet street, there came a playmate.
It was a dog; a mere boisterous, happy-go-lucky, tumbling, joyous puppy
of a few months; a thing of comical crinkled mouth and serious eyes,
a delightful romping rascal that loved the world and hailed every
creature friend. It stopped opposite the gate where Comethup stood, and
backed itself upon its ridiculous little haunches and inch of tail, and
barked deliriously; then dashed off a foot or two in excited chase of
something which didn't exist; and then, suddenly remembering Comethup,
returned madly to the assault, thrusting its little black nose under
the gate in a frantic endeavour to bite Comethup's little white socks.
It was irresistible. Comethup cautiously pulled open the gate,
trembling at his daring as he did so, and went down on the gravel on
his knees, clapping his hands, and doing all in his power to induce the
puppy to come to him.
But that wary animal knew better than that. He backed away, moving
his stump of tail convulsively, and, as Comethup followed on hands
and knees, backed away farther still out of reach. Finally the puppy
scrambled off sideways, going through the most extraordinary gyrations
and looking back at the child with one ear cocked up, and then dashing
off again sideways, tripping himself up occasionally in his haste.
Comethup got to his feet and set off down the pavement after the puppy,
leaving the garden gate wide open.
The sternness of the chase awoke in Comethup's blood; he determined to
have that puppy at all costs--to feel the soft, warm, live, struggling
thing in his arms. Twice he was certain he had it; had dropped all over
it, so to speak, in a frantic endeavour to clasp it. But the thing slid
from under his arms and impudently snapped at his very nose, and was
off again. At last, however, he ran it to earth in a corner, where it
promptly rolled over on its back, with its four legs in the air, and
surrendered.
By that time Comethup had lost his way; but that fact was of the
smallest possible moment. He was in a glorious city he had not seen
before; a place of curious old houses bending their upper windows
toward each other as though to whisper; of long, quaint gardens thick
with Old-World flowers--stocks and hollyhocks, and others beloved of
our grandmothers; with another church, not so magnificent or so large
as the one he knew, but older and quainter, with a great brass dial up
on one wall from which a brass finger projected to show the shadow of
the afternoon sun. The puppy was struggling in his arms, jerking itself
frantically upward to lick his round, baby face, and to softly bite his
chin. That of course was disconcerting; but Comethup managed to take in
a great deal with his eyes nevertheless.
He managed, among other things, to take in the figure of an upright old
gentleman with a heavy gray mustache, who was clipping and trimming
with a pair of scissors in one of the gardens. Comethup had just
stopped, out of the politest curiosity, to watch him, when the old
gentleman swung round and marched toward the gate, and cried violently,
pointing a finger at the child, "What the devil are you doing with my
dog, boy?"
Poor Comethup had never been spoken to in that fashion before; he
began to see in the old gentleman retributive justice sweeping down
upon him for having left his father's garden--above all, for having
left the gate open, an unpardonable thing. He would have liked to
drop the puppy, but remembered in time that he might hurt it; so he
lowered it gently to the ground, where it at once commenced tugging at
his shoestrings. With as much dignity as he could command under the
circumstances, Comethup tremblingly began to explain that he had found
it.
Before he had finished a half-dozen words, however, the little old
gentleman, with an exclamation, had pulled the gate open, and had come
out upon the pavement. Comethup began to tremble very much indeed,
but the old gentleman took him--not unkindly--by the chin, and turned
his face up so that he might look at it. Comethup must have looked
very appealing indeed, for the old gentleman suddenly smiled, and
exclaimed, "Why, it's little Comethup!"
"Yes," said Comethup humbly.
The captain, without a word, picked up the puppy with one hand and
offered the other to the child. They went up the garden path together,
into a quaint little room, where everything was very bright and
very straight and very orderly; very poor, too, if Comethup had but
known. There the old gentleman lifted him into a chair, and rang the
bell. Then he turned round, in his abrupt fashion, and held out the
struggling puppy with one hand toward Comethup. "You like this dog?" he
asked.
Comethup faintly admitted that he did.
The old gentleman thrust it into his arms. "Take it," he said. "Be good
to it, and feed it well."
Comethup tried to thank him, but at that moment the puppy had taken
him at a mean disadvantage, and was dancing about frantically in his
arms, and dabbing a tongue much too large for it against his face, so
that speech was difficult. And just then a man came in, taller than the
old gentleman, and much more erect; and put the back of his hand quite
suddenly up to his forehead, and held it there for a moment, and then
brought the hand down smartly with a smack against the side of his leg.
Comethup became vastly interested in a moment; he almost dropped the
puppy in his excitement. He knew that only one class of people did that
kind of thing; the little maid at home, whose sweetheart was a soldier
from Canterbury, had told him all about it. He began to speculate on
what wonderful house this could be, where this sort of thing went on
quite as a matter of course, and no one seemed to think anything of it.
In a vague way he wondered if he could persuade his father to let the
little maid move her hand and arm like that whenever she came into the
parlour at home; it would be something to look forward to--something to
ring the bell for.
The old gentleman ordered tea, and the man who had stood stiffly by
the doorway went through the same wonderful performance again and
disappeared. Comethup's curiosity swept away every other consideration.
"Sir," he said, in an awed voice, "he's a soldier."
"He _was_," returned the old gentleman, shortly. Then stooping near to
the boy, with both hands resting on the table, he asked, with a curious
tenderness in his voice, "Where did you get those eyes, boy?"
Comethup did not remember the other occasion on which Captain
Garraway-Kyle had said that he had the eyes of his dead mother; he did
not even know that this old gentleman was Captain Garraway-Kyle. He
looked up innocently, and smiled, and said he didn't know.
"You got 'em from your mother, boy," said the captain, almost in a
whisper, still looking at him earnestly.
"My mother's in heaven," said Comethup.
"True, boy, true," said the old gentleman, patting him gently on the
shoulder and turning away. "That's very true. Your mother was a saint."
Comethup had not the least idea what a saint was, but he knew it must
be something very good, because the old gentleman looked so serious.
The arrival of tea put an end to further conversation, and Comethup
looked out eagerly for the man to go through his performance, which he
did, to the child's great delight, as he was leaving the room.
The abrupt old captain was as gentle as a woman with the child; busied
himself to mix milk and water for him, and to spread jam on bread. It
was only toward the end of the meal that Comethup suddenly remembered
the chief adventure of the afternoon; that he had left the safe line
which bounded his daily life, and was with strangers in an altogether
different world. Even the possession of the puppy could not wholly
console him; his lips began to quiver, and it was with some difficulty
that he made the captain understand. The captain assured him, with
much earnestness, that he knew the garden where the roses were, and
that he knew Comethup's father, and the little maid, and the church,
and everything. Comethup was comforted, and the strange spectacle
was presented to the town, about half an hour later, of Captain
Garraway-Kyle, as closely buttoned as ever, and with his hat a little
more fiercely tilted than usual, holding Comethup by the hand, on the
way to David Willis's house; Comethup, for his part, clutching the
puppy with difficulty but with determination.
CHAPTER III.
THE GHOST OF A LITTLE CHILD.
That was but the first of many walks and talks with Captain
Garraway-Kyle. Comethup grew to look upon him as something very fine
and very splendid; learned from him, too, a very fine and very splendid
morality, which his dreamy father, for all the beauty of his character,
could scarcely have taught him. In those early days everything had, of
necessity, to pass the strong test of the captain's frown or approving
nod; each action was court-martialled, as it were, and approved or
utterly rejected, as the case might be. There was no dividing line with
the captain; he had lived by stern rules all his life, and a thing was
either perfectly right or it was perfectly wrong. Comethup's friendship
with the captain was probably the best thing that ever happened for
him; he grew up, under the old man's guidance, a pure and sweet and
wholesome little fellow, with a soul as clear as crystal.
From the captain's standpoint, also, the friendship was a good
thing. The old man bore himself as erectly as he had ever done; only
to Comethup he relaxed somewhat the hard and unbending set of laws
which hitherto had governed his days. The stern old face broke up
into something of tenderness at the sight of the child; he prepared,
out of his scanty means, little treats and relishes for the boy's
entertainment. David Willis he never quite understood; saw in him
something out of the normal--a creature sent into the world, he
sincerely trusted, for some good purpose; only the captain had not been
able to make up his mind what that purpose was. The captain liked him,
even pitied him a little, as he had pitied him on the first night of
their meeting; but the man was beyond his range of vision. When, in
church sometimes, he heard the organ pealing out above him, he would
glance round at the child (for Comethup came in time to occupy a seat
in the captain's pew), and a little curious look of anxiety would
gather on his brow and settle there--anxiety as to what the boy would
do in the years that were coming to him, and how his father would help
to equip him for the world. But, for the most part, the captain was
willing to let the happy present time go on, grateful that, in the last
of his years, this little child should have come to sweeten them.
Great excursions were planned in those early days of Comethup's life.
It was a wonderful thing to see Comethup do what no other living
creature in the town dared do so boldly--open the gate of the captain's
garden, and march straight up the trim little path which led to the
front door of the house. He had been taught, when an expedition was
afoot, to be punctual to the minute; and he always found the captain
coming out of the cottage as he reached it, glancing generally at his
watch with a quick nod of approval. Then would the captain, with hat
a-tilt and cane swinging, and with pride in his heart, sally forth
with Comethup to make new discoveries on a prearranged plan. For the
old town, which had once been a mere resting-place for the captain's
declining years, took on a new aspect, when viewed through the eyes of
this child.
It was an old town--a beautiful old town; the captain read up a
complete history of it, and proved--to Comethup's entire satisfaction
as well as to his own--that something extraordinary had happened in
nearly every house it contained. It had been a town of great deeds;
had once touched the sea, and had helped to defend that part of the
coast line during some of the country's stormiest times. The sea had
long since retreated, and left the little place lying high and dry, to
sleep in peace, and dream about its deeds.
It had been a walled town, too; indeed, the old wall still remained,
only that, in the very place and beauty of less stirring times, the
wall had become a mere grass-grown bank, with flowers and shrubs
growing all about it. But here the captain was in his element; he could
point out how the town would be attacked from this direction, or how an
invading force would come from there; would draw sketches in the gravel
with the point of his cane to illustrate exactly how _he_ would have
defended it, had he been alive in those times, and how he would have
made it absolutely impregnable. Comethup, gazing at him with delighted
eyes, came to believe that he was absolutely the greatest general and
master of the art of war that had ever existed, instead of a poor
little half-pay captain whose name had never been heard of.
There was a quiet and sleepy little river, too, which ran just outside
the town under a stone bridge; and the captain used to lean over the
parapet of the bridge, on sunny afternoons, while Comethup sat on the
stonework beside him, and they used to fish for the bright, gleaming,
darting little creatures in the river below. They very rarely caught
anything: it was a great event when they did; but the captain used to
explain exactly how various kinds of fishing could be accomplished with
the minimum of ease and the maximum of success. The captain always
seemed to know how to tell one the best way of doing a variety of
clever things, but he never seemed to have accomplished very much in
a practical sense; Comethup used to think sadly, in after years, that
if the captain had only been able to do half the things he could tell
other people how to do, he might have been a general at the very least,
with his breast ablaze of medals and orders. But Comethup loved him
devotedly, just as he was, and would not have had him changed for the
wide world.
A great wide expanse of sandy, marshy land lay between the little
town and the sea, and this was their playground. It was a wonderful
place--a place they seemed never to be able fully to explore. The
captain never quite lost his dignity; but away from the town and
under the influence of Comethup he relaxed considerably. It is always
possible that he comforted himself with the reflection that, whatever
species of amusement they sought, it was of an educational character,
and would assist the boy's future. But the Captain Garraway-Kyle
who marched out of the little town, holding the child by the hand
and swinging his cane, was a very different person indeed from the
light-hearted old gentleman who imperilled the knees of his tight
trousers in stooping over sand forts and anxiously superintending the
erection of fortifications. The puppy--grown a little older and wiser
and more staid now--usually accompanied them on these expeditions,
and was not always to be trusted when a delicate matter of building
was on hand, having a propensity for playing the enemy and levelling
earthworks and forts and everything else in one indiscriminate heap. So
pleasant days went by, each filled full to the last sleepy hour with
new experiences for Comethup; and the captain seemed to grow younger as
Comethup inevitably grew older.
It has been said that Comethup often occupied a seat in the captain's
pew in church; it became quite a regular thing for him to do so after
a time. The child had drawn two lonely men together, and, although the
captain did not understand David Willis, while David, for his part,
stood a little in awe of the captain's brusqueness, the two men often
met, and it became quite an ordinary thing for them to sit chatting in
David Willis's modest parlour long after Comethup was tucked up in his
little bed at the top of the house. They were both inordinately fond
of the child; probably the captain excelled in that particular. They
never had very much to say to each other, and when they spoke at all
it was generally about that one subject of their thoughts. The captain
would recount some bright speech of the boy's that he had caught during
the day, and David Willis would nod in sympathy and smile. Then the
captain, after a puff or two at his pipe, would exclaim half sternly:
"Fine boy, fine boy, Willis. Make a man of him some day." And on Sunday
mornings the captain would come marching down the street, and his eyes
would gleam a little at sight of a tiny figure drawn up erect at the
salute inside the open gateway of David Willis's garden. The captain
would return the salute, to Comethup's intense delight, and the two
would go gravely round the corner and through the churchyard into the
church.
Sitting beside the captain, Comethup would have leisure, in the dim
light of the place, to examine the old man's hands as they were folded
calmly over his prayer-book on his lap. The child often wondered how
they could ever have held a sword, and how many people the captain,
in his days of war, had killed; the hands were so soft and white, and
their touch on his own small fingers or on his shoulder had always been
so light and gentle, that it seemed impossible that they could have
been made for any stronger deeds. Comethup was always more desperately
fond of the captain on Sundays than on any other days; partly because
the captain, in his best black coat, and with his hat off, looked so
very small and old and gray and lonely in the big pew, and partly
because Comethup was so passionately grateful to him--perfect old
gentleman that he was--for his kindly patronage of so very small and
insignificant a person as himself. He was quite proud to be seen
walking with the captain out of church, and holding his hand; he
reflected with pardonable vanity more than once that there were very
few people in the world, at least as far as he knew it, who were
privileged to go to church every Sunday with so great a warrior.
The pew behind that in which the captain and Comethup sat was usually
unoccupied; but on one particular Sunday a little commotion was caused
in the quiet old church by the entry of two people into it. They
came late, after the service had commenced, and they made some noise
in getting into their seats. Comethup saw heads turned, and people
whisper among themselves. He would greatly have liked to look round,
as others were doing; he was consumed with curiosity. But the captain
was looking straight in front of him, and even frowning a little, and
Comethup had to do the same.
Comethup came to the conclusion, before the service was ended, that the
newcomers behind them, whoever they might be, had not been taught how
to behave properly in church. One of them, who seemed to be a man, gave
the responses in a very loud key, and sometimes very carelessly quite
in the wrong places; he breathed very heavily--Comethup was almost
persuaded, but that it seemed so terrible, that he snored--during the
sermon; and some one else in the pew moved about a great deal, and
dropped books, and kicked and shuffled with his feet. The captain
grew more and more stern and frowning as the service went on, so that
Comethup was quite afraid at last to look at him.
As they were passing out of church, the people from the pew behind
walked in front--a very tall and portly gentleman, whose coat tails
seemed to swing very much as he walked, and a boy a year or two older
than Comethup. In the porch the gentleman swung on his hat, almost
before he had passed through the door, with a flourish; glancing behind
him as he went out, he caught sight of the captain, and nodded and
spoke: "Aha! captain, delightful day; had no idea you belonged to the
good folk. Who's our young friend?" He indicated Comethup, who was
watching him with something of admiration.
The captain did not seem well pleased; he clipped his words very short,
in a fashion he had when angry, as he replied, "Don't you know?"
"Of course not; how should I?"
"Then let me present you," said the captain, keeping fast hold of
Comethup's hand, and making an ironically elaborate business of the
introduction. "Master Comethup Willis--Mr. Robert Carlaw.--Comethup,"
he added, his tone changing as he addressed the child, "this is your
Uncle Bob."
The portly gentleman seemed surprised, but passed the thing off easily.
"Most extraordinary," he exclaimed, "though why the devil Willis
ever called the unfortunate creature by that outlandish name passes
my comprehension.--How do you do, nephew? I suppose I ought to have
remembered your existence long since; but I'm such a careless rascal
that I leave undone those things which I ought to have done--if you're
a good churchman you'll know the rest, without my troubling to repeat
it. Here's your cousin Brian; if you're half as much trouble to your
poor old dad as he is to me, I pity that worthy fellow."
The captain was obviously anxious to get away, but Comethup had been
looking at the boy to whom he was now introduced, and had, in a
childish, worshipping fashion, been quite fascinated by him. He was
rather taller than Comethup, and very well dressed, and was, moreover,
an extremely handsome boy. He had a rather high forehead for a child,
and very thick, curling brown hair brushed loosely back from it. His
eyes were keen and bold and dark, and gave Comethup the odd impression
of being able to see a great deal more than the eyes of other people.
He held himself very upright, with his legs rather apart, and his hands
thrust in his pockets; and he swaggered a little as he walked, like his
father. He put out his hand to Comethup, and smiled so beautifully with
a smile which made his face glow and change, that Comethup was quite
glad to think that he was his cousin; he almost felt that he loved him
from that moment.
David Willis came at that moment from the church, with his books under
his arm; he gazed in an absent-minded fashion at the little group, and
obviously did not quite know what to make of it all. Uncle Bob came
blusteringly to the rescue; shook David heartily by the hand and walked
off with him, with a hand clapped confidentially upon his shoulder and
his head bent down sideways from his greater height to talk to him. The
boy Brian walked along on the other side of his father, glancing back
over his shoulder now and then with an engaging smile at Comethup, who
followed behind with the captain. The captain was ill at ease and in a
bad temper; he puffed out his chest as he walked and breathed heavily
under his mustache, and made savage little cuts at the air with his
cane, as though it had been a sword.
At the gate leading to the garden Mr. Robert Carlaw parted jovially,
shaking David heartily by the hand again, and patting Comethup on the
top of his best Sunday cap. In the captain he apparently scented an
enemy; they bowed to each other stiffly, and the frown did not leave
the captain's face.
"He must come and see us," said Mr. Carlaw, with a jerk of the head
toward Comethup. "They'll be company for each other; besides, they're
cousins. You're such quiet folks; I declare I'd forgotten your
existence--absolutely forgotten it." He went swinging away down the
street, with the boy swinging beside him, a curious, almost pathetic
imitation of the father.
It had become the captain's habit to dine with David Willis every
Sunday--quite a simple, homely dinner of a joint and vegetables and a
pudding to follow. The captain walked into the cottage now, sat himself
stiffly down in a chair near the window, and drew Comethup against his
knee and put his arm about him. David Willis was wandering about the
room, softly humming to himself a fragment of the voluntary he had
played that morning, while the servant-maid laid the table. It was a
hot and breathless summer morning; the window of the little parlour
was wide open, and Comethup could hear people passing and repassing
in the street beyond the garden; could hear the murmur of their talk.
There was a high, old-fashioned mahogany bureau on the other side of
the room, with curved brass handles to the drawers, and with three
leather-bound books, growing gradually smaller in size upward, like a
pyramid, on the top of it. Comethup had never seen either the books or
the bureau opened; it was curious, therefore, to see his father, with a
smile on his face, stroll across there presently and lift the topmost
book and open it. "You didn't know our friend Carlaw was something of
a poet, did you?" he asked, addressing the captain.
Disgust sprang suddenly into the captain's eyes, and into the lines
about his mouth. "A poet? Yes, I could have believed even _that_ of
him." The captain chuckled a little grimly at his own humour.
David Willis laughed, and brought the book over toward the window,
turning the leaves slowly and looking into it. "Yes," he said, "he
wrote these when he was quite a young man; they were published by
subscription. He was a mere youth at the time, and he gave this copy
to his sister, my wife. It's very queer reading, very mad reading some
of it. He's a queer fellow, and a mad fellow." David Willis laughed
good-humouredly and closed the book and carried it back to the bureau.
"Yes, he's mad enough," said the captain shortly. "I know the sort of
man--met dozens of his kidney. They flash through the world, spreading
their feathers in the sun and making such a flutter that no one sees
what shame and misery they leave in their track; or, if any one does
see it, it's all excused with the phrase, 'Oh, he couldn't help it--he
was such a good fellow.' Bah!" The captain was quite indignant, and the
arm that held Comethup shook a little.
"You're a little hard on our friend," said David, easily. "He's really
rather a clever sort of fellow; there are lots of things he does quite
well, only not quite well enough to make anything of them. He paints a
little, writes a little, plays and sings remarkably well. But he never
gives his mind to anything. I remember he said to me once: 'It's not
my fault; they shouldn't have given me such a name. Think of it! Bob!
What can a fellow do with such a name as that, except go to the devil
with it? And I've tried consistently to go to the devil with it.' And I
really believe he has."
"Yes, I dare say he has," replied the captain, a little wearily. "And
there you have the whole man in a nutshell."
Comethup was destined very soon to see more of that fascinating boy,
and of his father. But a few days had gone by when the shadow of Robert
Carlaw loomed large in the open doorway of the cottage, and he came
in, followed by Brian. He seemed to take up an immense amount of room,
and to block out the light a great deal, in whatever part of the room
he stood. It was immediately after breakfast--David Willis always
breakfasted late, a habit he had acquired when living in town--and
David was smoking a pipe before setting about those small duties which
occupied his day. David Willis had on a very shabby coat and slippers
on his feet; Robert Carlaw's coat was of the finest, his boots shone
magnificently, and he smoked a cigar. He announced airily that he had
come to carry off his little friend with the extraordinary name; the
name, he declared, was too much to pronounce in such weather as that,
but he didn't love him any the less on account of it, and meant to
carry him off, for the day at least. So Comethup was duly made ready
and went away with a fluttering heart on the other side of Uncle Bob,
peeping round his portly person, as he trotted along, to catch a
glimpse of that fascinating boy who walked on the farther side of him.
It had been a whim on the part of Mr. Robert Carlaw; he had suddenly
made up his mind that he ought to see the child--had suddenly
remembered that it was the child of his dead sister, and, in a fashion
quite characteristic of him, he had dashed off, hot with the purpose,
at the very moment the thought occurred to him.
He even devised schemes as he went along between them for their
entertainment. They would do this, they would do that; they would have
tea in the garden, or a pony chaise should be hired, and he would
take them for a drive. A hundred alluring schemes were in his mind;
he seemed to enter joyously and childishly into their world, and to
understand exactly what would suit them best. But, by the time he
reached his own house with them, the keenness of the business was done,
the edge of it had worn off. He rambled with them, in a perfunctory
fashion, round the garden, but he was obviously tiring. Quite
suddenly, on an excuse, he left them and shut himself up in a room he
called his workroom, and they saw no more of him.
Brian did not seem in the least surprised; his lip curled a little
disdainfully when Comethup politely inquired whether his father was
unwell. Comethup had a curious impression that this boy, although he
obviously admired his father very much, and even imitated him, yet saw
through him in some way and knew him to be not quite so nice as other
people imagined. There was a careless, curt fashion of dismissing his
father's name which Comethup could not have employed in the case of
_his_ father for the world, and which made him a little afraid of his
cousin in consequence.
The house must have been a very beautiful one at some time; it was
filled even now with many beautiful articles of furniture, articles
such as Comethup had never seen, and many of which he did not know the
use of. But everything was in hopeless confusion and disorder; valuable
articles broken and thrust aside, and something equally valuable put in
its place to serve its purpose. Books lay about in every room of the
house--some of them flung, with wide-open leaves, by impatient hands
into corners; fine engravings were stood in their frames against the
wall, because no one had ever troubled to hang them up; many of them
had their glasses broken, and most of them were smothered in dust, or
torn, or otherwise maltreated. Some stood in rolls in the corners of
the rooms. It seemed, in every way, the house of a man who meant many
things--even meant to live beautifully; but of a man who had never, in
anything, got far beyond the mere fluttering resolutions.
But it was nevertheless a house of delights to the child--a place of
never-ending wonder. Only, in the midst of their exploration, Comethup
suddenly remembered that he had that afternoon made an appointment with
Captain Garraway-Kyle, and that that appointment must be kept. There
was a sort of tremor at his heart when he remembered how the captain
would be standing, just within the door of his cottage, with his watch
on his palm, waiting for him at the hour named. He informed Brian that
he must really go.
The boy looked at him in astonishment; a shade of annoyance crossed his
face. "Oh, put him off!" he said.
Comethup shook his head very decidedly; he was troubled, like the
gentle little creature he was, at the thought that he would have to
show any discourtesy to his cousin; but it was quite imperative that he
should meet the captain, and the thing had to be managed somehow. "No,
I couldn't possibly do that. The captain and I are very great friends."
Brian looked at the sober young face for a moment, and then burst into
a roar of laughter. "But he's so old!" he said, when he had recovered
his gravity.
Comethup shook his head again, and smiled. "Not when you know him," he
replied. "Sometimes he seems almost as young as I am, only ever so much
wiser."
The other boy stared at him curiously. "Why, how old are you?" he asked.
"Seven next week," replied Comethup.
"And I'm nine." Giving the other time to digest his superiority, he
presently added: "Must you really go and see this old chap? You can
easily explain afterward."
Comethup did not waver, but he decided to effect a compromise. "Why
don't you come too?" he said. "He would be very glad to see you."
Brian looked a little ruefully round the untidy room in which they
stood, and decided rapidly that it would be better to do that than to
remain in the house alone. "Yes, I'll come," he said, and darted out
into the hall for his cap.
Comethup ventured a suggestion. "Won't you--won't you ask your father?"
Brian laughed, and tossed Comethup's cap to him. "Not I," he cried.
"Dad never knows where I am. All I have to do is to keep out of the way
when I'm not wanted, and be right at his elbow when he thinks he'd like
to see me. Come along."
"We'll have to run," said Comethup. "We're late."
They arrived breathless at the captain's cottage, and found the
captain, as Comethup had expected, standing with his watch in his hand.
He raised his eyebrows at the sight of a second visitor, and Comethup
breathlessly explained the situation and tried to make a polite
little speech, apologizing for having introduced a visitor without an
invitation. But the captain interrupted him by saying stiffly that
his cousin was very welcome, and the three set out for the usual walk
together.
Somehow or other that afternoon the expedition was not quite a success.
In the first place, Comethup and the captain were not quite at their
ease; had, in fact, a ridiculous feeling of being on their best
behaviour before a stranger. Then, too, the old innocent games--the
building of forts, and the pleasant little make-believe world they had
created--were things they did not care to venture upon before this
boy, whose scornful laughter seemed to come so easily. They sat on a
wooden seat on the top of the grass-grown wall of the town, and found
themselves talking nicely, as Comethup would have put it, and being
very stiff and unnatural and dull in consequence. The captain did not
talk about his battles; was quite reserved, in fact, and difficult
to lure into any expression of opinion. Comethup, proud of his old
friend and of his old friend's achievements, tried to draw him on
to descriptions of happenings with which he himself was beautifully
familiar, but which he felt would be interesting to Brian, and give
that young gentleman a finer idea of the captain. But the captain was
not to be drawn; seemed, indeed, purposely to forget things which had
rattled glibly off his tongue but yesterday.
They saw Comethup safely to the gate of his father's garden, and the
captain gravely shook hands with him; knowing his mood, Comethup was
positively afraid to salute, and, indeed, the stern eye of the captain
forbade it. Brian's road home lay for some distance in the same
direction as the old man's, and Comethup stood at the gate for some
moments, watching them going on together. But the captain walked on
one side of the pavement and Brian swung along on the other, as far
apart as possible, and they did not appear to have anything to say to
each other.
After that, Brian Carlaw entered somewhat largely into Comethup's
existence, to the exclusion, at times, of the captain. Comethup meant
no disloyalty to his first friend, and went to bed many a night
troubled at the thought that there was a breach growing between them;
but Brian, child though he was, had a fine air of appropriating
Comethup and planning excursions with him, and arranging boyish
expeditions from which the younger child found it difficult to escape.
He would dash in, in the morning, with his eyes sparkling and his gay
laugh waking up the house, and drag Comethup off, waving aside every
remonstrance, and refusing to wait an instant for anything. He had
a splendid, reckless fashion, so Comethup thought, of scorning mere
ordinary doors and paths, such as were used by mere ordinary boys, and
of leaping and rushing across flower-beds or turf, and climbing in at a
window, in a most unexpected and daring way. One never knew quite where
to have him, or what to expect of him; one never knew quite in what
mood he would appear. And each mood was something different from the
last, and, whether grave or gay, wholly captivating. If he came with
some childish tale of tribulation on his lips, it was a tribulation
apparently so great and so real that all one's heart went out to him
and one could not do enough to show how deep was one's sympathy; at
least that was what Comethup felt. If he dashed in, with laughter on
his lips and devilry in his eyes, the thing was so infectious, so
maddening, that even grave little Comethup was bitten by it and felt
the devil leaping in his veins as well, and was ready for anything.
When it happened that the captain and Comethup met at all, they met,
curiously enough, although neither confessed it to the other, by
stealth. Brian monopolized the younger boy so much that there were no
more arranged meetings, unless the one met the other by accident a
day before, and was able to suggest that a meeting should be held. On
most occasions, if Brian had not appeared by a certain hour, Comethup
would steal off to the captain's cottage. Never a word would be said,
but each fully and completely understood the situation; and the
captain welcomed Comethup, and Comethup received the welcome, with as
much grave courtesy as though they had been in the habit of meeting
daily, and there were no outside circumstances in their simple lives
to separate them. It was clearly understood on either hand that Brian
was elsewhere, or had failed to keep some engagement he had made; and
the captain very happily, and Comethup very happily too, but feeling a
little bit like a traitor to both sides, would start off, hand in hand,
to enjoy one of the old days.
Yet, even on those occasions, so great was the influence of the other
boy upon them that they would keep a wary eye open--still without a
word to each other--for his possible appearance on the scene. The
building of the forts was not the splendid, sole-absorbing thing it
used to be, because they did it stealthily. Some one else had entered
into their paradise, and had turned the fruit of it a little sour.
Comethup tried hard, on those occasions, to be very, very good to the
captain; and the captain, for his part, tried hard to appear as though
there could be nothing different between them, and as though these
stolen days were just as nice and just as spontaneous as the former
days had been. But things were different, somehow; their world went
differently, and was not the world they had known before. Comethup
found his mind wandering, even during the recital of a thrilling battle
episode, to that boy with the splendid eyes and the charming manner,
and found himself wondering what the boy was doing, and if he carried
little Comethup in his mind.
The expeditions with Brian were not of the innocent and sober character
which marked those with Captain Garraway-Kyle; Brian was the leader,
and was ready at all times for something new; the very soul of the boy
seemed to cry out for that; a new discovery, fascinating to-day, was
old and tiresome to-morrow; the day was a hopeless and fretful one
that saw nothing new or fantastic accomplished. His enterprise knew no
bounds, and fear, in the ordinary mortal sense, was not in him. The
captain's expeditions had been wonderful, and each had furnished a new
delight for Comethup; but they paled into insignificance beside the
inventions of Brian.
David Willis was a man of many dreamy occupations, a man who never
hurried, and whose life may be said to have been filled with odds and
ends of employment. So it happened that Comethup came and went as he
would, and his father saw but little of him; he knew that the child was
happy, and he heard his voice frequently about the house. But beyond
that he cared nothing; he was simply content to know that the child
was there, and that all was well with him. Thus Comethup had plenty of
scope for his adventures, and plenty of time for any expedition that
might present itself.
There was an old and half-ruined house which stood on the extreme
outskirts of the town and was surrounded by an old, dark, neglected
wilderness of a garden. The two children had peeped in through the
rusty iron gates occasionally, with their small faces pressed close
between the bars, and had speculated upon what the garden contained
and who lived in the house. Brian stoutly asserted that the house was
empty, and then that it was haunted; he had probably heard his father
or the servants say that. It remained, and had remained for some
time, the one possible place which they had not explored; Brian would
not have confessed it for the world, but he had a deadly fear of it,
probably the only fear he knew concerning anything at that time. It
frightened him, even while it fascinated him; he would choose that way
to walk, even when it meant that to pass the house they would have to
go a long way out of the direction they had arranged.
At last one day he came in, with his eyes curiously bright, and
announced his intention of exploring the place. They would get in
somehow, he said--through a window if necessary. Comethup was
doubtful, but Brian's stronger will conquered, as usual, and they set
off. Near the place, however, the elder boy hesitated, and drew back a
little.
"I don't think we'll go," he said. "There won't be any fun in it." And
he began to walk away.
Comethup felt relieved; he had not liked the expedition from the first.
He said nothing, but set out to follow Brian.
But Brian chafed under a sense of degradation all day. He watched
Comethup sharply, to be sure that the younger boy was not actually
laughing at him; saw scorn in his eyes, when there was no scorn in
Comethup's heart. They had parted for their midday meal, and had been
out again in the afternoon, still under that sense of constraint, and
Comethup was diligently studying the pictures in an old book alone in
the parlour of his father's house, when Brian came leaping across the
flower-beds and cried to him from outside the window:
"Come along; don't wait for anything. I'm going to that house."
Comethup knew perfectly well which house was meant, but he affected
ignorance, and said weakly, "Which house?"
"Oh, you know; the haunted one; the one we didn't go to to-day. Come
along."
Comethup closed the book, but kept a finger between the leaves. "It's
very late," he urged, "and it'll soon be getting dark."
Brian stood with his hands on the window sill, impatiently kicking at
the house wall. "You're afraid," he said, looking up at Comethup.
Comethup shook his head, but his drawn brows showed anxiety. "No, I'm
not afraid," he said, slowly. "But I'd rather wait until to-morrow, if
you want to see the house."
"No one ever goes to a house that's haunted in the daytime," said
Brian. "I'm going now."
"It's nicer in the daytime," urged Comethup, getting one leg down from
the window seat and dangling it irresolutely. "But I'll come if you
like."
"Come along then," cried the other. "You're so slow; you can't make up
your mind quickly, as I do."
Comethup knew that the reproach was justified, and felt humbled
accordingly. He was not altogether so happy in this adventure as he had
been in all those which had preceded it. In the first place, he had
to steal out of the house into the mysterious summer evening, being
careful that no one saw him. His father was in church practising; he
could hear the slow droning of the organ, like the hum of a gigantic
tired insect going to sleep with the rest of the world. Comethup wished
that he had gone into the church with his father, and sat there, out of
the way of temptation such as this.
The evening was warm and heavy, and a hundred sweet odours came from
the gardens which fringed the road. Brian talked valiantly and loudly
as they went along of how foolish it was to be afraid of anything, just
because it happened to be dark, and of a hundred other matters tending
to keep up his ebbing courage. Comethup was silent, doggedly determined
to go through with the business, now that he had embarked upon it, and
with a plaintive hope in his heart that it might not be so dreadful,
after all.
Curiously enough, that part of the outskirts of the town in which the
house lay seemed always to be darker and more sombre-looking than any
other. All the houses about there were very old, with high walls and
tall, rustling old trees; with paths in their gardens which seemed
always full of dead leaves and weeds at all times of the year. And that
particular house was the most sombre and dismal-looking of them all.
It had originally been a very fine house; there were the remains of
carvings on the stone pillars which supported the gates. But everything
was in decay; one of the great gates hung merely by one hinge, and
swayed perilously when it was touched; the other stood permanently ajar.
Their young hearts were beating very heavily when they reached the
gates. A wind had risen, and was coming from the distant sea across
the flat marshland; it stirred the trees and bent their long limbs, so
that they seemed to point down at the two small, trembling figures, and
to ask who they were, and to plot and whisper against them. Comethup
and Brian gripped hands tightly as they slipped through the aperture
between the gates. The wind seemed specially to haunt that place; it
sent a dusty, whirling eddy of last year's leaves charging at them and
fluttering about them as they went hesitatingly up the long drive.
Brian stopped halfway to the house and pushed his cap back on his
clustering hair with well-assumed carelessness, and said: "There's
nothing to be seen; I don't think we'll go any farther. Besides, we
ought to be home."
Comethup kept steadily on up the drive. "I'm going up to the house," he
said.
There was nothing left for Brian but to follow him, which he did,
keeping a wary eye behind him. They gained confidence as they went on,
and even raised their voices a little above the whisper in which they
had spoken previously. They ploughed their way through the neglected
grounds where the paths were scarcely to be distinguished for the mass
of tangled weeds which overgrew them, and came up to the house. Not a
light showed anywhere; the windows were all shuttered, and the doors
apparently fastened.
"I don't believe any one lives here," said Brian, sinking his voice
again to a whisper. "But I don't think we'll go in to-night; we've seen
a good deal, haven't we?"
Comethup evidently thought that he had done sufficient to clear
him from that accusation of cowardice; but, for the keeping up of
appearances, he spoke with apparent reluctance: "Oh, if you like;
perhaps we had better go home."
The house behind them, standing up gray and stark and sombre in the
twilight, was a far more terrible thing than it had been when they
faced it. By common consent they hurried a little as they trotted along
among the dead leaves. The wind, too, was at their back now, and flung
fluttering things about their legs and against their ears; they were
afraid to look round, and yet afraid to go on without glancing behind
them. Halfway down the drive, too, they heard a rustling among the
trees, a louder rustling than that caused by the wind. Brian stopped
still, and Comethup wondered why his heart kept jumping up into his
throat and nearly choking him. Then, from among the shadows of the
trees, came a little figure all in white--a figure smaller even than
Comethup, but very terrible coming in that fashion, and in that hour
and in that place. At any other time they might have said it was a
little child, a girl; but now their nerves were too unstrung for
practical things. There could be no mistake about its identity. With
a sort of simultaneous gasp they set off at headlong speed down the
drive, straight for the gate.
And the figure came running after them, crying something piteously
to them. But that was worse than anything else; they almost tumbled
over each other in their eagerness to get out through the gates; in
fact, they never stopped running till they were far down the road, and
breathless. Then Brian leaned against a wall and surveyed Comethup with
horror-struck eyes. "It was the ghost!" he said; "and it ran after us!"
"Yes," said Comethup, slowly, and a little doubtfully, "it was the
ghost."
"And it was pretty big, too," said Brian, fanning himself with his cap.
"They don't look so large in the dark."
Comethup lay awake a long time that night in his little room under
the roof. He was not frightened; he was quite calm as he looked out
through the uncurtained window at the blinking stars. He seemed to set
everything else aside, and to hear only the piteous, pleading voice
crying to him in the garden; he was quite sorry now that he had run
away; and very, very sorry, in his childish mind, for the ghost.
"It was a very little ghost," he murmured to himself as he fell asleep.
CHAPTER IV.
THE CAPTAIN PLAYS THE KNIGHT-ERRANT.
Comethup saw nothing of Brian for two days after that, and, although he
seized the opportunity of making amends to the captain, he said nothing
of the adventure to that gentleman. Indeed, Comethup had been haunted
by the ghost he had seen, in quite a different sense from that which
might have been expected, and the captain seemed altogether unequal
to the occasion. He could think of nothing else; was, indeed, so
desperately sorry for that lonely little ghost that it lost the terrors
it might otherwise have had for him, and melted his heart with pity for
its dreadful fate. He lay awake at night, thinking of it in that garden
of shadows and decay, wandering alone among the trees, and always
with that appealing cry upon its lips. He tried, in a subtle fashion,
to put leading questions to the captain, in an endeavour to discover
something of the condition of ghosts in general, and little ones in
particular; but the captain, being of an eminently practical turn of
mind, dismissed the subject curtly enough. So Comethup was thrown on
his own resources.
On the evening of the second day, after he had left the captain at
the gate, and had saluted him in the fashion they always adopted when
Brian was not present, Comethup felt that he could stand this state of
uncertainty no longer. He remembered that the captain had once told
him that a brave man never shrinks from anything that will help his
fellows--a wise and beautiful thing, which Comethup had not forgotten;
and surely a ghost, and such a little one, was one of his fellows.
Comethup was not quite certain what a ghost was, or what position
in the scheme of things it really occupied; but, with that dogged
determination which lay behind all the gentleness of his character,
he determined, in his simple way, that he could not sleep in his warm
and sweet-smelling bed another night while the ghost wandered crying
about that desolate garden. With a horrible fear tugging at his heart,
and yet with a childish courage urging him on which was greater and
stronger than the fear, he took his cap and stole out of the house, and
ran as fast as his legs would carry him to the house he had visited
with Brian.
It was terrible work getting through that gate; and in the long drive
where the shadows were it was more terrible still. But he went on
slowly, with his hands spread out as if to feel his way, and with
his eyes, very bright and very wide open, peering into the darkness.
He coughed, and hummed a tune, but dared not look behind him; the
desperate business had been begun, and Comethup Willis, trembling in
every limb, had yet fully made up his mind to see the ghost before he
passed again out of the gate, if it were to be seen.
He saw it at last, much nearer the house than it had been before. It
came toward him, more and more slowly as the distance between them
lessened. Comethup backed away a little; but it suddenly stretched out
hands to him, and came forward at a run, so that there was no chance
of escape. And then the horror of the thing, the tense fear that had
been knocking at his heart, fell away from him in a moment. For he
touched warm hands of flesh, and saw that it was a child of about his
own age, looking wonderingly at him. Poor Comethup almost laughed with
the sudden relief, and they remained for a moment after their hands had
dropped away from each other's, looking into each other's faces shyly,
as children do at a first meeting.
"I'm so glad!" said Comethup at last. "I thought you were a ghost.
Where do you come from?"
The child stretched out an arm, and pointed to the house. "There," she
said, "with father." She spoke in a whisper--the whisper of a person
long subdued, and used to the sound only of her own voice. She was very
pretty, with big, dark eyes, and a very white skin; but there was an
elfish, frightened manner about her that had nothing of childhood in
it.
"But the house is all shut up," urged Comethup. "Why doesn't your
father open the shutters?"
"All those rooms are empty," said the child; "they frighten you to go
in them, because you make such a noise, and the eyes in the shutters
stare at you. We live right round the other side."
"But it's such a dreadful place," said Comethup, compassionately,
looking from the bright, eager face of the child to the desolate
garden. "Aren't you very lonely?"
The child nodded and looked about her, and drew instinctively a little
nearer to the boy.
"Doesn't any one come to see you?" asked Comethup.
"Only Mrs. Blissett, in the morning. Mrs. Blissett makes the beds, and
gives me my breakfast and my dinner; then she comes again when it's
dark, and puts me to bed. And she grumbles all the time, and keeps on
asking what the Lord made brats for. That's me, you know," she added,
innocently.
Comethup looked properly sympathetic, and asked, "What is your name?"
"'Linda. I think it's a longer name than that, but father calls me
'Linda. What is your name?"
Comethup got it out trippingly; it was always a difficult matter, in
those early years, to get the uncouth thing off his tongue. The girl
looked puzzled, and begged him to repeat it; he did so, with a flush
upon his face. He was already beginning to understand, by the surprise
with which the name was always received, that there was something
remarkable and even ridiculous about it. But this girl apparently
liked it; laughed softly and turned it over on her tongue, and said
"Comethup," with a little break in the middle of it; "yes, it's a
pretty name."
Comethup was gratified, and had a sudden wish that he had paid her the
same compliment. They stood awkwardly and shyly looking at each other,
until the slow, heavy steps of some one trudging through the dead
leaves bestirred them to a recollection of time and place.
"That's Mrs. Blissett," said the child with a sigh, "and I shall have
go to bed. Come back here where she won't see you. Can't you hear
her coming, and grumbling to herself all the way?" The question ended
with a little ripple of laughter, and Comethup, glancing at the child,
saw all her white teeth showing in a smile, and her eyes dancing
with it. She drew him back among the shadows of the trees while the
heavy-footed, murmuring Mrs. Blissett pounded solemnly along toward
the house. They stood quite still, until the footsteps had died away,
and then, to Comethup's great surprise and consternation, this small
girl-child caught him by his jacket, kissed him swiftly, and cried in
a breath: "Good-night, Comethup; come and see me to-morrow," and sped
away from him through the trees.
Comethup stood, in a dazed condition, looking after her for some
moments, and softly rubbing his cheek with one hand where her lips had
touched him; and then, with very mixed emotions, set off for home.
But though the garden was the same, and though the wind whispered
through the trees, and the dead leaves drove at him, it had no further
terrors for him; had, indeed, become a place of wonder and delight, as
everything else seemed to become in his small world. His father, his
little room at home, his mother's sleeping place among the green mounds
in the churchyard, the captain and the building of the forts, Brian
and his reckless expeditions--all these were things of delight to the
boy. And now, in the midst of them, had sprung up a new wonder, growing
beautifully in the midst of the terrors which had seemed to be about
her. He went home with a fast-beating heart, full of his new discovery,
and anxious to unbosom himself regarding it to some one of sympathy.
He was never quite sure of his father; he loved him very dearly, and
thought his soft voice and the quiet, caressing words he used better
than all the music he played in the church. But his father had a dreamy
way of looking over him, or right through him, when some question of
moment was being discussed; of losing himself suddenly in the maze of
his thoughts, and wandering off somewhere where Comethup could not
follow him. So that Comethup often hesitated about giving a confidence
to him, because he feared, in his sensitive little soul, that his
father might not follow it out--whatever it might be--patiently to the
end, as it should be followed; might forget what the all-important
subject was before the tale had half been told. He hesitated now, and
was obliged to confess, sitting up in bed in the moonlight, with his
hands clasped round his linen-covered knees, that his father might not
understand, and might--worst thought of all--look dreamily at him, and
stroke his hair, and say, with a maddening smile: "Yes, yes, my boy.
Of course; just so," and begin to hum an air from some of his beloved
music and straightway forget all else. It was quite certain that it was
impossible for him to tell his father.
Brian, perhaps, had a right to know; Brian had been in the garden with
him, and still believed that the garden held a ghost. But Comethup
shrank more strongly still from the idea of telling his cousin; shook
his head very decidedly in the moonlight when he thought of it. It
may have been purely a matter of instinct, probably was; but in his
childish mind that garden, with its dim shadows and its quaint little
figure whose kiss still seemed hot upon his cheek, was a fairyland into
which he jealously desired to go alone, and in which Brian, in the
imagination, seemed an uncouth figure.
The list of possible sympathizers was narrowing down; there remained
only the captain; and slowly there grew in Comethup's mind the idea
that the captain was, after all, the right person. The boy acted
over to himself a little interview, in which he seemed to know, with
exactitude, what the captain would say and what the captain would do;
was sure of him, so to speak, from the outset. For, in Comethup's mind,
the captain might be abrupt and might be severe; but his rules of
conduct were such that, if followed, a small boy would sleep soundly
in his bed at night, and would not fear the darkness. So he decided to
tell the captain, and, comforted with the thought, fell asleep.
The opportunity occurred the very next day. Comethup went to tea with
the captain, firmly resolved to unbosom himself about the whole matter.
But he let the precious moments slip by, and talked of everything else
under the sun, and tried to appear interested in all that the captain
said, while his mind was leaping back to that desolate garden and to
the little figure wandering alone in it. He remembered, too, with a
sudden hot sensation of shame, that the child had cried, "Come again
to-morrow!" and here was to-morrow. Yet he sat there, saying never a
word of what filled his mind, until the moment arrived when it was
necessary for him to return home. For the captain was punctual in all
things, and Comethup arrived at the house at an exact hour, and left it
at another equally rigidly defined.
Comethup got as far as the doorstep before he made up his mind to say
anything; and then, as he brought his hand down from the salute, he
said hurriedly, "I--I wanted to speak to you--about something--sir."
The captain looked down at the small figure gravely. "Important?" he
asked.
Comethup felt his courage oozing. "Not--not very," he replied.
"Keep it till to-morrow," said the captain, nodding at him. "No time
now, you know. Good-bye."
Comethup saluted again, and went miserably away. He returned home, and
sat for a long time at the window, thinking about the child. He had not
promised that he would go again to see her; but it had seemed like a
promise, and he could not bear the thought that she might be waiting
there, with her great, dark, eager eyes straining toward the gate,
looking for him. It was the first time that any real or definite sorrow
had touched his life--the first time that any living thing had seemed
dependent on him for happiness. With the captain it was different;
it was impossible for Comethup's mind to grasp the idea that he was
all-important in the captain's bare existence; that the captain watched
for him, day after day, and felt his old heart jump a little as the
boy swung up the garden path, as he might have felt it jump, in years
gone by, at the coming of a woman. Comethup did not understand that;
he saw only in the captain's kindness and patronage of himself a very
great and sweet graciousness, a something that the captain went out of
his way to do, because he was very kind and very great. Comethup adored
the captain, but he did not know that the captain would have willingly
consented to be pierced through and through with his own old sword
hanging over the dim little looking-glass in his cottage parlour, if he
could thereby have served Comethup.
The hunger at Comethup's heart grew stronger as the evening wore on. A
wind had sprung up, bringing with it some gusts of rain, and flinging
little splashes on to Comethup's face as he sat with his chin in his
hands at the open window. At last, heedless of wind or rain, he caught
up his cap, and set off at a run for the captain's house.
The captain was pacing up and down the little parlour, turning abruptly
on his heel when he reached the edge of the hearthrug, and again when
he almost breasted the old oak bureau at the other side of the room.
Seeing the boy standing panting and white-faced in the doorway with his
cap in his hand, the captain stopped dead, and faced him. Comethup was
trembling so much that he even forgot to salute.
"Oh, sir!" he burst out, almost on the verge of tears. "The little
girl--I thought she was a ghost--in the garden--and it's raining--and I
promised to go and see her--and I haven't been--and Mrs. Blissett says
she's a brat, and--oh, sir--what am I to do?" And poor Comethup burst
into tears and hid his face in the lining of his cap.
It may naturally be supposed that the captain was startled. The first
idea he grasped, however, was that the boy was in distress, and that
was sufficient to stir him to action; he put his arm tenderly round
Comethup's shoulders, stooping a little and trying to draw the cap away
from his face, and led him over to a chair. There, seating himself,
he drew the boy against his knee, saying nothing, but gripping him
tightly with his arm, so that the very presence of that comforting,
encircling thing should make itself felt without the necessity for
words. In a few moments Comethup was calmer, and could give an
intelligent account of what he wanted.
The captain questioned him closely, and Comethup knew whether or not
he was pleased, at each point of the recital, by the tightening or
loosening of the arm about him. When he had finished, and had expressed
his determination to go to the house and see the child, the arm held
him very closely indeed.
For some moments the captain sat perfectly still; then he got up,
walked across to the window, and looked out. Darkness had already
fallen, and the wind and rain were making havoc among the captain's
roses. It was characteristic of the captain that he took the whole
matter from the boy's standpoint; never appeared to consider for an
instant that he might be interfering in some one else's business. He
saw only, as Comethup had done, the child alone in the garden, haunted
by fears of the echoing, half-empty house, and of Mrs. Blissett.
Finally, with a grunt, he turned sharply away from the window, walked
across the room to a long cupboard, and pulled open its double doors
with a jerk; then he pulled out from it a long, old-fashioned military
cloak, very rusty and faded, and swung it round his shoulders with a
single movement of his arm. "We'll go and find her, boy," he said, and
Comethup followed him obediently from the room.
The captain took down his hat from the peg in the hall and rammed it on
his head a little more tightly than usual, and opened the cottage door.
A drifting spray of rain drove in at them, and the captain threw out a
fold of his cloak, like a huge wing, and drew it round the boy. Then
they passed out of the cottage together.
Comethup had only a dim remembrance afterward of that walk; of
passing people in the streets, and seeing only their feet and ankles;
of hearing everything muffled and blurred through the heavy cloak;
of catching glimpses of a storm-twisted sky through certain tiny
moth-holes and thinnesses of the cloak as it touched his face.
Presently the captain threw back an edge of it, and Comethup saw that
they were standing before the iron gates.
"Go first," said the captain, in a low voice, "and call to her. Don't
frighten her if she is there."
So Comethup stepped softly into the garden, treading cautiously over
the wet leaves, and feeling the heavy rain drops from the branches
above him tumbling on his hair and shoulders. He called "'Linda!
'Linda!" as he went.
Out of the darkness near the house came the little figure at last,
as he had hoped; not joyfully, or with laughter on its lips, but
bedraggled, and wet, and trembling, and piteous. She ran to him and
caught him eagerly, whispering his name brokenly between her sobs, and
hiding her tear-stained face against his childish shoulder. She did not
see the captain, who stood with his arms folded beneath his military
cloak, looking down at them.
"'Linda, dear," said the boy, "you are all wet. Don't shake so; nothing
can hurt you. And here's my friend the captain; he's a soldier, you
know, and fights people." This last as a reassurance to the child that
she had powerful friends indeed.
The girl looked up at the captain, looked at him for a long moment in
silence. Comethup, turning about, saw that the captain had thrown back
his cloak and had dropped on one knee, and was holding out his long,
thin old arms toward the child; the cloak fell all about him like a
tent. She scarcely seemed to hesitate a moment, but went within the
shelter of the tent, and was drawn close there, with the captain's head
bent above her. Comethup was so surprised that he did not even think
how the captain would be spoiling the knee of his trousers in the wet
grass.
"Little maid, little maid," said the captain, "what brings you out here
in this dreadful place alone? Is there no one to care for you, poor
baby?"
"I came out to see--Comethup," said the child, getting over the name
with difficulty, "and Mrs. Blissett saw me and said I should stop here
in the dark, and banged the door and went in. I 'spects she's forgotten
me."
The captain murmured something concerning Mrs. Blissett behind his
heavy mustache, and suddenly gathered the child up in his arms and rose
to his feet. And when he spoke, although his voice was very gentle, it
was very determined.
"Where's your father, baby?"
"He's writing, and talking to himself," replied the child.
"I'll talk to him," said the captain. "Which way do I go--round here?"
The child told him the way, and he marched steadily through the wet
leaves and the long grass, with Comethup following him, until he came
to a door. Still holding the child in his arms, he began vigorously to
kick at the door, flinging his foot at it at regular intervals like
musket-shots. A sharp and querulous voice replied suddenly from the
other side:
"Stay where ye be, ye brat! I bean't goin' to 'ave ye runnin' in and
out just as ye likes. And stop a-kickin' that door."
"Open the door!" cried the captain, in a very loud voice.
There was a shuffling of feet on the other side, and the door was
pulled open. A candle had been set down on some bare, uncarpeted stairs
near at hand, and was flaring in the wind; a heavy, surprised-looking
country-woman stood in the doorway, looking out at the little group.
"Are you Mrs. Blissett?" asked the captain, rapping out the words
fiercely.
"Yes, sir, I be," said the woman, hurriedly bending herself at the
knees, in a sort of staggering courtesy.
"Then what the devil do you mean by putting this baby out in the
rain?" exclaimed the captain. "Stand aside, and let me in. Where's your
master!"
The woman was at first too startled to reply; she backed against the
wall, and waved one hand feebly toward the stairs. The captain nodded
at the candle, and the woman, with her eyes blinking nervously, groped
for it, picked it up, and backed away with it.
"Go first," said the captain, "and tell your master that a gentleman
wishes to see him.--Comethup, follow me."
The woman hesitated for a moment, and then went before them heavily up
the stairs with the candle. The door leading into the garden remained
open, and Comethup felt the wet wind blowing about his legs as he
followed the captain, who marched steadily close behind the woman. The
child had stolen an arm up round the captain's neck, under his cloak;
and he was holding her against his breast with one arm, while his tall
old silk hat, dripping with rain, swung in his disengaged hand.
At the top of the first flight of stairs the woman stopped at a door
and bent her head as though listening, and then rapped with her
knuckles. After a moment or two, receiving no answer, she turned the
handle and went hesitatingly in, the captain following her closely, and
Comethup hard on the heels of the captain.
The room in which they found themselves was so very dark that for
a moment those unused to it would not have noticed that it had any
light in it at all, or any occupant. But, far away in one corner of
it, Comethup saw a little round gleam of light, which reminded him
of the gleam of lanterns he had seen men carry on country roads on
winter nights, and, close beside the gleam, watching them intently and
frowningly, a face. Even before the lips parted, and the harsh voice
spoke, Comethup had that face indelibly impressed upon his mind, to
haunt him long afterward, in its curious detached circle of light,
while he lay in his bed under his father's roof.
It was a stern, strong, forbidding face--a face of hard lines and
straight firmnesses, without a single tender curve or hollow about
it, to proclaim that there was any softness in the man to whom it
belonged. The patch of light showed a great, high forehead, from which
the hair had long been pushed back and pushed off by impatient hands;
beneath this, straight black eyebrows almost meeting, and, under them,
eyes as cold and piercing as steel in moonlight. The man, as he sat,
was literally hemmed in by books; as the light of the candle carried
by Mrs. Blissett penetrated farther through the shadows, Comethup saw
that there were piles of books all about his feet, and about the legs
of the desk at which he sat; the desk itself was loaded with them, and
staggering heaps of them leaned against the wall and perched perilously
on chairs and other articles of furniture. In the silence which
followed their entry, while the man looked at them from beside his
little shaded reading-lamp, Comethup could distinctly hear the heavy,
agitated breathing of Mrs. Blissett.
"Well, what's this, what's this? What has happened? What do you all
want? Can't you speak? Is the house on fire?" All these questions were
rapidly jerked out in harsh, impatient tones, with a little querulous
note at the end of each, like the fretful tones of a child.
Mrs. Blissett was eagerly commencing a voluble reply which should
excuse her own delinquencies, when the captain stepped forward, with
the child still easily resting on his arm, bent his head stiffly and
spoke.
"Sir, I ask your pardon for intruding at such an hour, but I am a blunt
man, trained all my life to prompt action. I found this mite--this
baby--wandering in the grounds outside this house, drenched to the
skin, and crying as it hurts a man to hear a child cry. I understood
that she lived here, and had been shut out in the rain by this woman"
(the captain indicated the trembling Mrs. Blissett with a jerk of his
head). "So I brought her in." The captain stepped forward a little, and
uncovered the face of the child; she was sleeping peacefully, with her
head against his breast.
The man did not reply; he got up abruptly from his desk, kicking
over some of the piles of books about his feet as he moved, and began
striding up and down that end of the room, with something of the
appearance of a hunted animal, turning his face furtively toward them
as he turned in his walk, yet keeping always at the greatest possible
distance away. As he came to the desk once or twice, and fumbled
nervously among the papers and books upon it, Comethup was able to see
that his dress was very unkempt and shabby, and stained as a man might
stain it who read during hurriedly snatched meals, and was careless how
he ate. He spoke at last, in the same querulous voice; he spoke like a
man labouring under the lash of some secret trouble, and yet desirous
of putting himself right with the world. These people might have been
sternly arrayed against him, so strongly and petulantly did he offer
his excuses.
"I don't know you, sir; I have no desire to know you. There is an old
adage which says something about fools stepping in where angels fear
to tread. What if the child was in the rain? What if every living
creature that bears the brand of her sex wandered homeless and outcast
to-night? Would the world be the poorer? Would any single thing that
affects its progress, or its virtue, or its beauty, if you will have it
so, be changed or stand still? This woman"--he fiercely indicated Mrs.
Blissett--"was given a certain duty, and, like all of her class, having
received payment for it, she neglects to perform it. Don't you know
enough of the world yet, or where have you been living all your days,
that you don't know that?" Then, with a certain sudden jealousy, he
made a movement toward the captain, and asked, "What do you want with
the child? How does she concern you?"
The captain's arm tightened a little round the sleeping child. "I do
you the justice to suppose, sir, that, in spite of what you have said,
even you would not leave a baby out of doors on such a night as this,"
he said.
"Well, well, who said I should? But there are more important things in
the world than children; I have work to do here, and have no time to
give to the guardianship of babies."
"She is your child?" said the captain. "I have already heard how the
mite wanders round this place at night, lonely and neglected. Is there
no one to care for her?"
The man laughed, in a curious, hard fashion, and looked straight at the
captain. "No, no one," he said. "Really, sir, you take a great deal
upon yourself. You trespass on my property, and you interfere with my
domestic affairs. Is there anything else about which you would care to
make an inquiry?"
The sarcastic note was lost on the captain; he answered bluntly and
simply, as was his habit:
"I am an old and a very lonely man, sir, and, although I was brought
up to the profession of a soldier, I have thought sometimes that I am
not altogether fitted for it. I have some tenderness of heart still
left in me, and I could not have slept in my bed to-night with the
knowledge that this child was neglected and unhappy. I have no desire
to interfere in any business which does not concern me; but it must
occur to you that it is a strange life for a child to be----"
"Well, the fault of that is not mine,", said the man, swinging about
suddenly and facing the captain. "She--she has no mother, and I am
occupied with--with other things. You--you should not trouble; what can
_I_ do?" He spoke like a fretful child, walked to his desk, and began
turning over the leaves of a book.
The captain was puzzled; saw no prospect, with such a creature as this,
of making him understand the responsibilities of a parent. He turned
to Mrs. Blissett and put the child in her arms, and said with some
sternness: "Take her away, and warm and dry her, and put her to bed.
And be tender with her."
Mrs. Blissett vanished hurriedly with ejaculations of "My precious! The
dear lamb!" and the like, and the captain faced the father once more.
That gentleman, now that the chief object of the disturbance was gone,
seemed only anxious to be rid of his visitor; he seated himself at his
desk, and appeared to be busied with his books.
"Perhaps," said the captain stiffly, "after this intrusion I ought to
give you my name. I am Captain Garraway-Kyle, at present living in this
town, and I beg you to believe that my intrusion here to-night was with
the best possible motives. I assure you----"
"Yes, yes, I quite understand," exclaimed the petulant voice of the
other. "And my name is Vernier--Doctor Vernier; you may have heard of
me."
"No," replied the captain, "I regret that I have not."
"Ah! Good-night!" Dr. Vernier's head was down among his books, so that,
by the glow of the lamp, they could only see the top of it. But the
captain had not finished yet.
"I am sorry for the little child, and for her loneliness," he said,
"and if I might be permitted----"
The hard face glanced up for a moment and the brows were drawn together
in a straight dark line. "Thank you; I desire no one to assist me in
the management of my house. Once more--good-night."
The captain bowed stiffly, turned on his heel, and walked out of the
room, followed by Comethup, whose presence the doctor had not even
appeared to notice. They found their way out of the dark house, and
through the garden into the road. There the captain stood upright for a
moment, thinking deeply, and then looked down at Comethup. "Comethup,"
he said, "we won't be put off like this, eh?"
"No," said Comethup.
"We must go and see her again, and--and look after her, eh?"
"I think so," said Comethup.
They solemnly shook hands on that decision, the captain bending a
little to perform the operation, and then walked away homeward.
CHAPTER V.
TELLS OF AN ERRING WOMAN.
While the captain and Comethup were trudging steadily homeward through
the rain, the man in the dull upstairs room sat within his circle of
light, trying to fix his mind upon the work before him. He held his
broad forehead between his palms, and set his lips, and bent his eyes
steadily upon the printed page, tapping out a little impatient measure
with his foot, in anger with himself that he could not concentrate his
attention. Finally, he got up impatiently, kicking the books out of
his path, and began to stride up and down that end of the room, having
something again of the appearance of a hunted, animal trotting to and
fro within the measure of its cage.
"Am I such a brute?" he asked at last; "are there no days behind
these--far away in the background--when things were better and fairer,
and when I dreamed a dream, as other men have dreamed, of something
greater even than books? It was all lies, lies, lies! The man who hugs
a woman to his breast can only hold her safely if he pays the price,
and knits her to him with chains of gold, forged tightly. His fleshly
arms are never strong enough; she will slip out of them; all the tales
of woman's constancy and woman's virtue have no word of truth in
them; the women were virtuous because their lack of virtue was never
discovered."
He began to pace up and down again, locking his hands behind him, and
alternately clasping them behind his head.
"Why should I care?" he began again, restlessly. "There is a fate in
all these things, and if the fate means that this child shall grow up,
and live, and cheat another man, why, then the fate must do its work,
and nothing that I can say will change it. I have had it in my mind
sometimes to pray--if any prayers could avail--that the child might
die; that's one of the mysteries of this strange creation of ours, that
so fair and sweet a thing should grow up, to foul men's ways, and spoil
their work. I wonder if I----"
He was interrupted by the abrupt entry of Mrs. Blissett. That worthy
woman appeared altogether demoralized, shaken to her prosaic depths;
she came in panting, with one hand pressed to her ample bosom. The man
stopped in his walk and turned savagely upon her, although without
speaking.
"Please, sir, there's a lady, sir, as do be come to see ye; and she----"
Dr. Vernier, with an angry exclamation, took a stride toward her, but
stopped suddenly. There was a shadow behind the woman--the shadow of
some one else, creeping into the room with a hand against the wall as
though groping blindly. The man had seen it, and stood, like one turned
to stone, watching it. Mrs. Blissett, following the direction of his
eyes, turned swiftly, and backed away from it. The figure, still with
a hand against the wall, came slowly along the side of the room, with
her eyes fixed only on him. He seemed to recover himself at last with a
start, drew a deep breath, and waved Mrs. Blissett from the room with
an impatient arm. "You need not stay--you need not stay. I will see the
lady."
Mrs. Blissett evidently had a vague idea that this was a night when
anything might happen; she had performed her small duties about the
place for many months, and had never seen a living creature come to the
house, and on this night the place had already been twice invaded. She
backed out of the room with a sigh of resignation and closed the door.
The stranger had put an arm across her eyes, as though to shield
herself from the doctor's gaze, and was leaning against the wall; she
seemed, from the shaking of her slight body, to be weeping. There was
silence between them for some moments--a silence which the man broke;
his voice sounded strained and unnatural.
"Where have you come from?"
"A long way--a very long way," replied the woman without uncovering her
face.
"Why have you come back here?" His voice was dull and level and hard,
and his face might have been cut out of stone, for any changing
expression it wore. "You chose your own path; why have you abandoned
it?"
She was weeping so bitterly that for a time she could not answer his
question. At last she turned her face fully to him, a young and rather
pretty face, but haggard and wild with weeping and with sorrow; he
looked at it unmoved.
"I have been seeking for you a long time," she said at last, in a voice
scarcely above a whisper. "There has been a hunger here"--she struck
herself relentlessly on the breast--"greater than I could bear. I could
not sleep; I have even prayed to die. I want to see--to see the child!"
The man raised his arm fiercely, as though to ward off her approach,
and took a step backward. "No!" he cried, almost in a shout.
"I ask nothing else," she pleaded. "If anything could have held me
true to the old life--if anything could have bent me to your will, and
starved the soul out of me, it would have been the child. I tell you
something has gone out of me here"--she struck herself again--"and I
shall die if I can not hold her in my arms again. You are a man; you do
not understand. You can find it in your heart to laugh at me, because I
was able to leave her; but she is flesh of my flesh, and I can not tear
her from me. Let me see her; let me know that she is well; let me see
her smile into my eyes again; let me kiss her! Man, hear the rain and
the wind; I have come through them these many weary miles, and I will
go through them again. Let me see her, if only for a few minutes, and I
swear to you, by the God that gave her to me, that I will go away, and
trouble you no more! Only let me ease my hunger." She was down on her
knees at his feet, stretching out her hands to clasp them; he backed
away to avoid her.
"You did not think of all this before," he said, slowly. "Where is the
man?"
"Dead!" she said, in a low voice.
"Ah! I thought so; I should scarcely have seen you here again had he
been alive. And what do you think is to become of you now?" He asked
the question with the bitter savagery of one who sees something that
has wronged him in the dust at his feet, helpless, and is gladdened by
the sight.
"I do not care," she said. "It does not matter; can't you understand
that nothing matters? But my child, my baby; that has been the bitter
thing through all. Do you think that I would plead to you as I do now
for anything else? Do you think that I would kneel at your feet in any
other cause?"
The man began to pace up and down the room again, grasping his strong,
square chin by one hand, and bending his brows in thought. The woman
drew herself slowly to her feet and watched him intently. After a
moment the man faced about, leaned his back against the wall, folded
his arms, and looked down at her.
"Hysterics, or appeals, or tears are useless in a matter of this kind,"
he said; "let us look at it clearly and dispassionately, as though it
lay outside ourselves. You have no right here; your part in my life and
in the child's is played out and done with--do you understand that?
You cut yourself off from it all long ago; I have set myself to forget
your very name, and I do not suppose that the child can remember you.
From the standpoint of justice and morality, you have simply ceased
to exist; you're outside the pale--a lost, abandoned woman. Do you
understand _that_?"
The woman did not answer; she stood rocking herself to and fro, like a
creature in pain, with her hands pressed tightly to her eyes.
"When I married you," the man went on, "I gave you everything that a
woman could desire--money, culture, a home. No thinking woman wants
more than that. You chose to tell me that the life you led was dull
and spiritless; that I was always with my books; that my friends did
not interest you, and that you found their conversation tedious. I
think once--it's an old forgotten thing, and I'm not quite sure about
it--but I think once you told me that you had hoped for something else;
I believe you said some foolish schoolgirl nonsense about love. Well, I
gave you all I had to offer, and I fail to see how any reasonable woman
could ask for more."
"No, you never would understand that," she murmured behind her hands.
"Then you made the acquaintance of this other man, a ne'er-do-weel,
a child laughing in the sunshine, with no purpose in his life and
no character in his face. But," he went on, sneeringly, "he was the
pretty, empty-headed fool you wanted; he could quote rhymes to you, and
fill your ears with things that had no substance in them--things such
as every man has whispered to the woman he craves since the world first
began. Well, you believed him; you caught at the shadow, and lost the
substance. Now he's dead, you think you can come back here, as though
nothing had happened."
"I do not; I only want to see my baby. Give me but an hour with her;
let me assure myself that she is well; let me see her only in her sleep
if you will. I must see her; this hunger at my heart will drive me mad."
"It has not driven you mad before," he said, with a laugh.
"No, I tried to forget; _he_ made me forget. Oh, don't you understand
that a woman may be righteous even in her sin; that she may cling to a
man sinfully sometimes, just because she has promised? It is too late
in the day now for us to blame each other, or for me to attempt to
justify myself. Only believe that I have left all that old unhappiness
behind. John, you will let me see her?"
"How did you find out where I was?" asked the man, after a pause.
"I went to the old home and found that you had left. I made fruitless
inquiries for a long time, and at last, quite by accident, happened
upon some one who had seen you in this town. I came here yesterday and
got a quiet lodging, and set about to look for you. Indeed"--as the
man made an impatient gesture--"indeed, I have not come to trouble you
again; I will go away, and you shall not see me any more."
The man appeared to be thinking deeply. After a long pause, during
which she looked at him appealingly, with her hands tightly clasped, he
spoke, going first to the door, and assuring himself that it was shut.
"When I left the home you dishonoured and abandoned," he began, "I
dismissed the servants and brought the child with me, and came here
secretly. I had some pride, more perhaps than you imagined, and I
did not want the stupid story bandied about on every one's lips. I
determined to set aside that mistake and begin over again. So I chose
this old house, in a town where no one knew me; I got a woman to come
in, day by day, to do what little work there was to be done, and to
look after the child. It's a dreary place," he said, looking round the
darkened room with a sigh, "but the child has to suffer, I suppose, for
the sins of the mother; that's an inevitable law. It's an inevitable
law also that punishment follows sin--not in the next world only, if
there be one, but here. I should be wanting in something, failing to
carry out what I have so often preached and written, if I did not
recognise that punishment must follow your sin, and that you--poor
frail mortal that you are--have inevitably and unconsciously rushed
upon your own punishment. It shall be a fine and a bitter one, I
promise you. Listen to me."
She looked up at him tremblingly, striving to read in his inscrutable
face the meaning of his words.
"You shall not only see the child for an hour; you shall live here, in
the same house with it, as long as you like." Then, as she would have
cried out, he put up one hand to stop her, and laughed, and went on
mercilessly: "But on one condition. I have told you that no one here
knows anything of my story; they believe, I think, that the mother of
the child is dead. Let them still think so. The condition I impose is
that you shall remain in this house, under the name by which I first
knew you; that you shall occupy the position of housekeeper; that you
shall see the child, and attend to her wants in every way, and at any
time you like. I have discovered to-night that she has been somewhat
neglected by the person I paid to look after her; you will have a
deeper interest in her than that, and may be trusted, I think, to look
after her well." He laughed again, then suddenly stepped across to
her and took her fiercely by the arms and looked into her eyes. "But
understand this: She is to know nothing of the relationship that exists
between you; she will know you only as a paid dependent. The instant
that, from any endearment you give her, or any word you let slip, she
learns that you are her mother, you leave this place, and see her no
more! Do you understand that?"
She shrank away from him and covered her face with her hands. "Oh, I
can not, I can not!" she cried.
He pointed to the door. "Go as you came; you have no right here; I have
been a fool to permit you to stay even so long as this. Go at once, or
I will have you turned from the doors!"
"No, no, stop!" she cried. "If there is no other way, I accept your
condition."
"Good. But you must clearly understand that you have absolutely no
interest in the child's life; she goes or comes as I bid or as I
permit; you have no voice in anything which concerns her. But you may
see her, provided always that you respect that condition, and that she
does not learn of the relationship between you. The instant I discover
that she even guesses what it is, you leave this house, and you never
return. Is that clear?"
"Yes, yes, I accept. Indeed, if there is no other way--and I know I
deserve not even so much as this--if there is no other way, then I am
grateful."
"You have need to be. For the future you take your old name, and we
will prefix something respectable to it, for propriety's sake and
for the child's. You will be known as Mrs. Dawson, and there is no
necessity for you to tell anything concerning yourself that you do not
care to have known."
"I understand; I understand perfectly. May I--may I see the child--now?"
"She is asleep, I suspect," replied the man, coldly.
"Indeed--indeed I will not wake her," cried the eager woman.
"Very well. You will find her room at the top of the house, the door on
the left." Then, as she was moving rapidly across the room, he called
to her. "You will find a spare bed in that room; it was used by the
woman Blissett, who attends on her, when 'Linda was very ill some time
since. You may sleep there to-night; I will have another room prepared
for you to-morrow."
She reached the door, and then turned to look back at him, with some
words of thanks on her lips. But he was at his desk, with his head
buried among his books and papers; and she stole quietly out and closed
the door. Then, with a light and rapid step she flew up the stairs,
calling softly as she went, in a whisper, "'Linda, 'Linda, my baby!"
CHAPTER VI.
THE CAPTAIN IN STRANGE COMPANY.
For the first time in his remarkably short existence Comethup Willis
began to lead a double life. He had already done so, to a very small
extent, in regard to his meetings with Brian and with the captain; but
now he began systematically to divide his life into two parts. His
reason for this was purely an instinctive one, and he would have been
puzzled, under any circumstances, to explain even to himself why he saw
in his childish mind that such a course of action was necessary. But,
although he admired and almost worshipped his cousin Brian, as a being
superior in every way to his very humble self and of more brilliant
parts, he yet felt that, in a delicate matter like that on which he had
embarked with the captain, Brian must be set aside.
It caused him many heart-pangs to arrive at this conclusion, but to his
childish understanding it was the only thing possible; having once made
up his mind, he kept stiffly to it. He had entered into a compact of
the emotional order with the captain, and he consoled himself for any
disloyalty to Brian with the thought that he was only concerned with
the captain in the matter, and that the secret was not really his own.
This species of deception, while it added a new element of excitement
to his life, made him also frantically desirous of falling in with
every plot and plan arranged or invented by his cousin on the few
occasions on which they met. Those occasions were few indeed, for the
captain had shown, in some curious, curt fashion, that he did not like
the boy Brian; and Brian, for his part, was laughingly contemptuous of
the captain. So that poor Comethup, in order to keep all his friends,
and in the deep desire he had not to wound the feelings of any of them,
had a very difficult task to perform. A child of blunter character or
perception would have got through with the matter very easily, and
would not have troubled about it at all; but Comethup took everything,
even in those days, in deadly earnest, and lay awake many nights in
the dark, sore at heart with the thought that some light word of his
to the captain, or some half-promise broken to Brian, might have
given either of them pain. Comethup had that strange and--for the
possessor--terrible quality of being able to feel, with the utmost
acuteness, any pain borne by those with whom he came in contact; the
quality of feeling it so instantly that it was often more real in its
intensity to him than to them.
It is possible that the captain understood the desire in Comethup's
mind that Brian should not be included in their compact to befriend
'Linda; indeed, it was a matter so completely between Comethup and the
captain that probably neither of them would have thought of including
any one else in their confidence. Moreover, the matter, begun in secret
and at night, had, in all appropriateness, to be carried on in the same
fashion. Even the captain was not too old, and Comethup certainly not
too young, to have a mutually romantic feeling that that was the proper
course to adopt. They talked it over together in all seriousness.
"You see, Comethup," said the captain, "we were not received with
that--that cordiality which could lead us, with any delicacy, to
approach Dr. Vernier again. I'm not quite sure that we wish to do so;
but, in any case, it will be wiser to leave him out of the question."
Comethup nodded, feeling that that argument was unanswerable.
"The question then resolves itself into this," said the captain,
sitting stiffly upright, with a hand on each knee, and looking down
at Comethup, who was imitating his attitude as far as possible, on a
stool before him, "how are we to save fair ladies who are wandering
about in dreary woods, and getting wet, unless we do it by force of
arms, and bid defiance to the enemy?" The captain had, in his many
conversations with the boy, got the true poetic, romantic ring; it was
a never-ceasing delight to Comethup that his wonderful friend was able
to bring that glamour into the commonest circumstance of life.
"We might go and walk round the house, and--and hide among the trees
until she comes out," said Comethup.
The captain shook his head. "Scarcely dignified, I'm afraid, Comethup,"
he said. "Of course," he added with a fine air of carelessness, "we
might happen to stroll past the place, and we might just look in at the
gates, and----"
Comethup understood perfectly, and nodded with much vigour. So complete
indeed was the understanding between them that, when the captain, on
parting with him, said with much ceremony, "You might call for me about
seven o'clock, Comethup, if you are not better employed," the boy felt
his heart leap, and was eager for the expedition.
But the captain was a man of bluntness, and totally unused to lurking
ways. They reached the gates in the semi-darkness, and looked in up the
dreary avenue, and then walked slowly on side by side. The captain even
waved his stick skyward, and predicted airily that it would be a fine
day on the morrow. Comethup agreed with him, with more eagerness than
befitted the occasion, even going out of his way to recall impressions
of yesterday's weather as compared with the present. Then, about a
hundred yards from the gate, the captain swung on his heel, and they
strolled back again. Still no sound about the deserted place, and no
little figure in the garden. The captain came from pretence to reality
at a bound, and faced sternly upon Comethup.
"Boy, this isn't right, and I'm not right to be teaching you to hide
and skulk here. I'm going up to the house."
"I think perhaps it would be better," admitted Comethup slowly.
They marched with much determination through the wind-swept garden and
among the drifting leaves. Both Comethup and the captain looked eagerly
all about, but saw nothing; they made the circuit of the house, and
then stopped at the door by which they had previously entered.
The captain raised his stick and struck sharply on the panel; waited
a little, but there was no response. Then he stepped back and glanced
up at the windows; but they were all closely shuttered, and no light
appeared anywhere. The captain stepped up to the door again and renewed
his attack on the panel. After another long period of waiting, there
was a sound of shuffling feet on the bare boards within, and the door
was opened so far as the length of a chain that held it would allow.
The captain pressed forward to the aperture and spoke:
"Is Dr. Vernier within?"
"The doctor say he can't see no one," came the reply.
"Oh, I'm much obliged," said the captain. "I wanted to know if the
child--the little girl--is well? You remember I----"
"Oh, yes, I knows all about you," replied the woman sharply. "And
there's folks as can look after her, and mind their business without
no interferin'." The door was slammed quickly, and they heard the
shuffling feet going down the hall.
The captain remained very upright for a moment, recovering himself;
and then turned to Comethup. "Let that be a warning to you, boy," he
said stiffly, "never to argue with your inferiors. The enemy is not
to be surprised, that's evident; we must try stratagem. As a soldier,
Comethup, I have learned that stratagem is very useful. I despise it,
but it's very useful."
But all the stratagem the captain could employ, and all the loyal aid
given by Comethup in a cause in which he was desperately interested,
failed to bring them any nearer the object of their search. They walked
past the garden many times after that, on many successive days, taking
it casually in their walks first, and afterward going there of set
purpose. But the garden was always empty, and the house apparently
deserted. They had almost given up in despair, when one night, rather
later than usual, when they passed the gates, Comethup, lingering for
a moment, saw the faint flutter of something white among the trees,
and ran to it, crying softly "'Linda!" The captain went in too, but
remained standing just within the gates. With a delicacy which belonged
to him, he let the children meet in their own impulsive, breathless
fashion alone.
'Linda was clinging to the boy, divided between laughter and tears,
when the captain, looking past them, observed a figure hurrying toward
them from the house--the figure of a woman certainly not portly
enough to be Mrs. Blissett. The captain took a few strides forward,
and reached the children at the same moment that the woman came up
with them; she stood, almost in an attitude of defiance, looking at
him. He noticed that she was tall and rather slight, and quite young.
Instinctively his hat came off, and he bowed in his stiff fashion. For
a moment there was silence between them; each seemed to be waiting for
the other to speak.
"What do you want, sir?" she asked at last, in a suppressed voice.
"I merely called--came here, I should say--in the hope of seeing the
child, and knowing that she was well," said the captain. "I found her
here the other night, and, though it is no business, of course, of
mine, I feared that she was lonely, and, forgive me, perhaps neglected.
I came here a few evenings ago, but was refused admittance."
"You are a friend of--of Dr. Vernier's?" she hazarded.
"No, not exactly a friend," replied the captain, diplomatically.
"We--we have met--that is all. Are you the child's nurse?"
The woman bent her head and stretched an arm out, and drew the child
close against her.
"I thought perhaps you might be a--a relative," ventured the captain,
replacing his hat.
"No," she replied, in a low voice, "I am not a relative. Dr. Vernier
has engaged me chiefly to look after the child."
"I am glad," said the captain, with awkward gallantry, "that she is in
such good hands." The situation was becoming embarrassing; the captain
knew that he had no earthly right there, and felt that he must withdraw
his forces without delay. He stooped, and held his hand out to the
child, who shyly took it; bade her "Good-night" with much gentleness,
and turned and left the garden, followed by Comethup, who glanced back
again and again at the little white figure walking with the woman in
the direction of the house.
Comethup was very serious indeed as they walked toward his father's
house. This new figure in the story could not be dealt with with the
ease with which a mere Blissett might be tackled. He saw a prospect
of losing forever that little figure which had so strongly interested
him. He expressed his fears tremblingly to the captain as he trotted
beside him.
"Shall we see her again, sir?"
"Don't know, Comethup," replied the captain, dejectedly. "Direct attack
has failed; stratagem has failed also. I'm afraid we can't do anything
else to assist your little damsel in distress, Comethup."
Comethup went to his bed, to dream that he went again to the garden,
and found the gates fastened strongly against him; that he beat his
hands against the bars of them, crying to the child to let him in, and
to the captain to come with his sword and break the gates down. He
awoke in the dark, with the tears still wet upon his cheeks, and cried
himself to sleep again.
Sick with the necessity for consolation, he went on the following
morning to see the captain. The captain had constituted himself, for
some time past, a sort of informal instructor to Comethup; had dragged
from an old box some very out-of-date lesson books, and was renewing
his own youth by plodding steadily over that first stony ground
of knowledge with the boy, taking infinite delight in his pupil's
progress. Comethup had learned many things at those lessons--scraps of
this and bits of that--and had had, interwoven with the more technical
subjects, a certain thread of hard and pure and very fine morality as
to straightness of living and one's duty to one's fellows, which had
formed the captain's creed throughout all his simple life.
On this particular morning, although neither mentioned his distress
to the other, the matter was very fully in the minds of both, and no
real attempt was made to take lessons seriously. Indeed, the captain,
with a very fine intuition, had guessed what would be the condition of
Comethup's mind, and had not even got out the books. Comethup found him
standing near the window, examining, with a somewhat troubled face, a
pair of boots, passing one finger delicately over places in the uppers
which seemed untrustworthy, and holding them from him at arm's length,
to get a more general effect in regard to their appearance. The soles
of the boots were very thin, and the heels rather high.
"I am going," said the captain, setting the boots down on the window
seat, and gravely returning Comethup's salute, "to pay a visit to
the shoemaker's." He regarded the boots with a thoughtful frown.
"They _might_ go a week or two longer, Comethup, but the result would
probably be disastrous. One gets used in time, when one is not rich, to
judge exactly the moment when delay, in a matter of this kind, is no
longer safe, and when the thing must be done, if it is to be done at
all. It's like fighting a battle, Comethup; either you must strike at a
given moment, or you'd better not strike at all. Will you come with me?"
The captain always addressed the boy with equal courtesy, and Comethup
had learned to reply with gravity. He expressed his willingness now to
accompany the captain, and they set out.
In a quaint little street, in the very heart of the town--a place which
Comethup had not before explored, and which was reached by diving under
an archway and then doubling sharply round a corner--they came upon the
shop which the captain sought. He had wrapped the boots neatly in brown
paper, and carried them tucked under his arm, probably with the desire
that no one should guess his errand; he even glanced about him to right
and left for a moment before stepping into the low doorway of the shop.
It was a very little shop, so low and small that it seemed half
underground; the captain, although by no means a tall man, had to duck
his head a little in entering. Comethup noticed at once that it was
not like an ordinary shop, in that it had no counter, and that only a
heavy bench ran along one side of it, on which an old man was seated,
hammering away with much fierceness on something fastened to his knee.
But Comethup had no time to take in more than the bare details of the
place, for his eyes were arrested by something else: a little figure
perched up on the rough bench beside the man and looking with wide,
astonished eyes at the captain and the boy. It was 'Linda.
The man who worked had looked up at them for a moment sharply out of
keen black eyes, and then had bent his head again over his leather. He
worked as one in a frantic hurry--a man who had no time for thought,
scarcely a moment even to breathe; the hammer rose and fell sharply,
rising up above the level of his head, so closely were his eyes bent on
the work. The child sat quite near to him, smiling at the visitors.
The captain's voice broke in across the hammering, and stopped it.
"Why, little one," he said, gently, "what are you doing here?"
The hammer rested on the leather, the man's knotted hand grasping it
firmly; his black eyes looked up sideways at the captain. "Why not?" he
asked in a quick, harsh voice. "What should harm her?" He did not speak
like a countryman. Comethup was a little afraid of him, and of his
black eyes, but the child beside him only smiled, and did not move.
"Nothing, nothing," said the captain, hastily. "I was merely surprised
to see the child here; she is a little friend of mine--we _are_
friends, are we not, 'Linda?"
The child nodded, and Comethup, emboldened by her smile, crossed to
where she sat and shyly held out his hand. She leaned forward and put
her arm about his neck and kissed him. The shoemaker glanced at them
sharply, and then, with a grunt, started hammering again at his leather.
"We have been looking for you, 'Linda," said Comethup, softly.
The old man caught the remark and paused in his hammering, in the same
fashion as before, and looked quickly round at them. "Yes, that's what
you do from the time they lift you first into your cradle till the hour
they slip a winding sheet round you; it's the old story, begun by baby
lips, and whispered by the dying. Looking for her?" He put out a hand
and touched Comethup on the breast and pushed him almost roughly away.
"Let be, let be; the little maid can bide here as long as she will." He
spoke with a certain stern sadness, and Comethup and the captain looked
at him in perplexity.
"Oh, they're very good friends, and he's a good boy," said the captain,
laughing. "You don't know the boy."
The old man glanced up at him sharply. "No, but they're all alike." He
leaned forward suddenly and took Comethup by the shoulder and drew him
toward himself, looking straight into his eyes. Comethup's heart beat a
little faster than usual, but he did not flinch.
"Well," said the captain, after the scrutiny had lasted for some
moments, "what do you make of him?"
The shoemaker, still keeping a grip of Comethup's shoulder, looked up
at the captain and spoke in a low voice. "A good face," he said, "and
the eyes of one who will dream dreams, and carry them with him always.
I've dreamed my dreams, but"--he passed his hand over his forehead in a
lost, dazed fashion--"I've lost them all." He sighed, and took up his
hammer and fell to work again, muttering to himself. Presently, coming
back to realities with a start, he put down the hammer and asked the
captain civilly if he could do anything for him.
The captain produced his parcel and began, with great care, to point
out exactly what he wanted done and what he desired left undone. The
shoemaker obviously saw here a work on which his finest arts could be
exercised, and listened with equal care to the minute directions. The
business being finished and the price arranged, the captain lingered in
the doorway of the little shop and carelessly put a question:
"Does she come often to see you?"
"When she will," replied the old man, softly hammering. "Sometimes a
week goes by and I see nothing of her; and then she'll slip in and
sit beside me for an hour, and be gone again--so lightly that I think
afterward it's a dream, and that she has not been here at all. It's all
dreams; nothing is real."
"Oh, I'm afraid some things are very real," said the captain gravely.
"No." He brought the hammer down sharply to emphasize the word. "If
they were real we could not bear them; we should go mad. It's because
they are dreams that we can laugh a little sometimes and say that it
doesn't matter, and pray for the hour when we shall wake. Nothing's
real, nothing's real; we should be glad of that." He fell to hammering
again, in the same hurried fashion as when they had first seen him.
Indeed, nothing would rouse him again; even when the captain asked that
he might take the girl with him, and she slipped down from the bench
and walked with Comethup to the door, the shoemaker merely raised his
eyes for a moment to look at her, and went on again with his work. They
heard the noise of the hammering long after they had passed through the
doorway and through the little street; it only seemed to die away when
they came out through the archway into the busier parts of the town.
The captain had a delightful new pupil that day. The three went out
to the marshes beyond the town, and there, at Comethup's modest
suggestion, the captain assisted in the building of the forts and
instructed 'Linda in the first principles of military tactics. She
proved an apt and eager pupil, overleaping obstacles which appeared
to present themselves to the slower mind of the captain, and showing
a delightful sense of the fine art of strategy and a quickness of
resource in a difficult situation, which elicited that gentleman's
warm approval. In the most natural and fearless fashion she walked
back with them to the captain's cottage and partook of the captain's
simple dinner, unconsciously and quickly taking a position in the small
household which no one had dared to occupy before. She showed unbounded
delight at the salute given by Homer, the captain's man, and actually
called him back into the room again and insisted on his repeating the
performance in order that she might see exactly how it was done, making
the blushing man do it very slowly indeed, that she might take in every
turn and twist of his arm.
Comethup trembled a little, lest the captain should take offence; but
the captain's heart had been taken by storm, and he allowed the mite
to rule him as completely as she appeared to rule others with whom she
came in contact outside her father's house. Finally, Comethup received
instructions to take her back home in safety; and the two children
set off hand in hand, the captain standing at the garden gate of his
cottage to watch their departure. She had completed her conquest of
that gallant warrior by seizing him by the lapels of his coat and
drawing his head down in the most unexpected fashion and kissing him
before she dashed out of the cottage with Comethup, whose salute to the
captain was a mere undignified flying wave of the arm, in consequence
of her haste.
At the big iron gates which led to her father's house they saw the
woman standing who had been in the garden on the previous day; she drew
the child swiftly within the gates, and went down on her knees and held
her close to her breast without a word. Comethup, embarrassed, stood
looking on, not knowing whether to go or to stay; he felt, however,
that the necessity of the situation compelled him to explain the
child's absence.
"We met 'Linda quite by accident," he said, "the captain and I, and she
has had dinner with the captain. I do assure you, ma'am"--he had got
that phrase from the captain--"that she has been perfectly safe."
"Oh, I am quite sure she has," replied the woman, looking round at him
with a smile. "And I am very grateful to the captain and to you.--Say
'Good-night,' 'Linda," she added to the child.
Comethup was getting quite used to that rapturous hug with which 'Linda
favoured her friends--was getting rather to like it. He lingered for
a moment outside the gate, until the two figures had disappeared, and
then sped away homeward, planning for to-morrow, and for many other
morrows, in which the captain and 'Linda explored again with him
the wonders of the old town and of the buried ramparts, and renewed
acquaintance, for 'Linda's sake, with all the strange things he had
learned under the captain's tuition.
It happened that night that the captain was restless and ill at ease. A
man of simple tastes and simple habits, he had lived for some years in
the old town, scarcely seeing any one but his man Homer before Comethup
came into his life. It had cost him not a little to shake himself free
from the stiff and rigid rules of life into which he had grown; but,
led by Comethup's persuasive hand, he had done so, and had, in a sense,
renewed his lost youth in the child's company. He was frightened a
little now sometimes when he thought of what it would mean to him if,
by any chance or change of circumstance, he lost the boy; he dared not
contemplate the barren life he had been content to live for so long,
nor think how empty it would be if he had to return to it.
And now, in the strangest fashion, this child had led him to
another--had brought even a softer element into his life, and increased
his responsibilities. The captain, in a gentle, foolish fashion, was
proud of those responsibilities, and would not willingly have let them
go. He might have argued with himself that the children had natural
guardians who could look after them, and whose rights were greater than
any he possessed; but he plumed himself with the idea that the children
had turned to him, and relied upon him more completely than on any one
else. As he paced about his little room in the dark, he seemed to feel
again that baby's arm round his neck and her soft, rounded face pressed
to his hollow one; he thought of her sitting in the strange company of
the old shoemaker; remembered, with a pang, the forlorn little figure
he had first seen in the garden.
It all ended in a determination to see the shoemaker and to learn
something more of him. He had visited him on one or two occasions when
a specially delicate matter of repairing had to be explained and when
the man Homer could scarcely have been intrusted with it, but beyond
that he knew nothing of the man. The captain weighed the _pros_ and
_cons_ of the matter carefully, and finally put on his hat and set out
for the shoemaker's house.
It was a fine moonlight night, and the captain, on turning into the
little street through the archway, saw that the door of the shoemaker's
shop was open, and that the man he sought was sitting on the step, with
his feet in the room and his back propped against the doorpost. The
captain walked on, carelessly swinging his cane, and trying to hum a
tune; stopped opposite the little shop, and remarked upon the beauty
of the night. The old man grunted some inaudible reply, and looked up
at him suspiciously; he was smoking a short, black pipe, pulling and
puffing at it as furiously and rapidly as he appeared to do everything.
"If you've come about those boots----" he began aloud, but the captain
checked him.
"No; of course I did not expect them yet," he replied. "I happened to
be strolling round this way, and thought I should like a chat with you."
The shoemaker took his pipe from between his teeth and stared at the
captain for a moment; then replaced the pipe and nodded. The captain
was a little disconcerted, but he had an obstinate feeling that he
would not go away with his purpose defeated, and so he leaned against
the other doorpost and smiled and nodded back at the shoemaker.
"Yes," he said airily, "I was interested in what you said
to-day--about--about what you call your dreams; and about--the child."
The shoemaker did a surprising thing: he got up suddenly, thrust his
face toward the captain, and looked at him in the moonlight steadily;
then turned abruptly, and stumbled down the two steps which led into
his shop, leaving the captain gasping and staring after him. In a few
moments the captain, looking in through the doorway, saw the glimmer
of a light; then saw the old man bending to light a candle which stood
on the bench while a gigantic shadow, grotesque and hideous, danced
and sprawled all over the wall behind him and the ceiling above. When
he had got the candle alight, and had carefully set his foot upon the
match, he went to the door again and beckoned. "Come in," he said; and
the captain went down the two steps a little doubtfully.
The shoemaker closed the door and dropped a wooden bar across it. The
door fitted above the two steps; the shoemaker seated himself upon the
topmost one and waved his hand toward the bench, on one end of which
the candle stood.
"Sit down," said the man.
The captain seated himself, and glanced somewhat apprehensively about
him. The window was shuttered, and the tools with which the man worked
had been piled neatly together on a little table with a raised edge
which stood against the wall. Boots in every stage of formation and
repair lay all bout the place--some mere gaping upper parts, and others
having but the faint suggestion of what they might ultimately become in
roughly cut leather sheets. The captain drew his coat-tails about his
knees and rested his hands on them, and waited for the other to speak.
The shoemaker waited for some moments, and then began in a low voice,
with his eyes bent on the ground:
"I wasn't born in these parts--it doesn't matter where I came from;
some might call me a rough and common man, working at a dirty trade.
Yet time was when I read and talked and held my own with men who'd been
to school and college. Many and many a night I've laid awake reading
and thinking and working--trying, as men say, to better myself. And
what has it all brought me?" He threw out his arms with a passionate
gesture and without raising his head, and let them fall at his sides
again.
The captain was silent, wondering what was coming, seeing in the man's
attitude and in his voice some long, pent-up story, and wondering, in
his simple fashion, why the man should have chosen him to hear the tale.
"My life was not all work and book-learning. I married. Looking at me
now, any man might say I am a hard and bitter creature; but I was the
happiest in the world then. We had a child--a baby girl--the fairest,
sweetest thing that ever came straight out of God's arms."
He sprang up with a cry and waved his arms fiercely above his head.
"Straight out of God's arms!" he cried, in a loud voice. "Let any man
deny that she has gone straight back into them!"
"She is dead, then?" said the captain softly.
The man dropped his arms and stared about him for a moment helplessly.
"Yes, but that happened long after. I can remember her now, as a tiny
child, coming into the room where I worked and climbing on the bench
beside me, and prattling to me in her baby fashion--music sweeter than
any other that a man hears. I wish"--he had begun to roam restlessly up
and down the place, swinging his arms as he went--"I wish it might have
been possible for her to remain like that forever. But, of course, that
wasn't to be. She grew up, and I was proud of her and proud to think
that she belonged to me and held me dearer than any one else. Then
into our paradise came the man--as the man always comes. I think he
must have loved her--at first, at least; she was so good and beautiful
and pure that no man could pass her by and look into her eyes without
loving her. And then--oh, ages ago; I've forgotten when it was--she
went away, and wrote me a letter saying that she had gone with him and
that she would never forget me, and that some day she would come back
with him, and that we were all to be happy together."
The captain's elbow was resting on his knee and his head was propped on
his hand, so that the hand shaded his eyes. The shoemaker went on, in a
dull, heavy voice. He had clearly forgotten that he had a listener.
"I tried to find him, tried everywhere. I watched for her, night after
night, until they said that want of sleep and care and sorrow had
driven me ill. It was then I first began to dream; I have dreamed ever
since. And when at last I was better, and was able to get again to my
work, her mother was gone; they did not tell me where at first, but
afterward I learned that she had died, and I was completely alone. I
came here then; it was a place where no one knew me, and none could
ask questions. And here, two years ago, a letter followed me, written
by the man, and saying that she was dead. That is the hardest thing of
all--that she died in some strange land, far over the seas; and I can
not even know where she lies buried, or where she sleeps, or whether
the sun shines on her grave. It doesn't matter--it doesn't matter."
The captain raised his head and looked at him. "Perhaps she was happy
in her new life; perhaps----"
The man broke in upon the words fiercely. "She died in shame and
want and misery. The man had tired of his plaything; in his cold and
brutal letter he told me that they had not agreed, and that he had
deemed it wiser to part from her. He begged of me to believe"--the
scorn in the old man's voice as he flung out his arm passionately was
terrible--"that he would have married her had it been possible; he was
sorry for her death."
He had drawn his arm, in an uncouth fashion, across his eyes, and his
voice shook as he finished. Presently he let his arm fall to his side
and looked about him in that curious, helpless way, with something of a
smile upon his face.
"And so you see," he went on, in a gentler tone, "I live on here from
day to day, and dream my dreams; and am happy to forget sometimes which
is truth and which is dream. And then quite suddenly one day, while I
sat at my work here, I lifted up my eyes and saw--O God, my heart leaps
now when I think of it!--saw _her_, as I thought, come back to me, a
baby again, standing in the doorway smiling. That was the best dream of
all; that is the best dream still." He raised his eyes, laughed aloud,
and clasped his hands.
"Does she come here often?" asked the captain, gently.
"Yes, often and often. We do not even speak to each other sometimes,
but I like to feel her close beside me, just as the other one sat, ages
and ages ago. Who knows"--he laid a hand upon the captain's arm and
sank his voice to a whisper--"who knows but that she is mine, come
back, like a fairy child, in purity and innocence, to comfort me, and
to tell me that all the rest has been a dream indeed? How else should
she come to me? Yes, I like to think that--it comforts me."
The captain would not have stripped away that dream from the man for
the world. He was so touched that he begged quite humbly that he might
be permitted to come again to see him; and finally went out into the
darkness and took his way homeward. But the captain was troubled in
spirit, and the shining heavens above him did not seem to have quite
the clear and fine message of peace that they had held so long for
his simple soul. He took a circuitous route, and came again to the
great dreary place where the child lived and looked in through the
dilapidated gates. He sighed a little as he turned away, and whispered
softly, "God keep you, baby--God keep you!"
CHAPTER VII.
IN WHICH SEPARATIONS ARE SUGGESTED.
In quite the strangest and yet the most natural way the old shoemaker
was drawn into that little circle which revolved round the captain. It
was a curious little band in most respects, formed of strange beings,
with nothing of the practical about them; the captain seemed sometimes
to be the youngest of them all.
Comethup's life, at that enchanting time, was very full indeed--so
full that he had sometimes to stop and gasp with wonder at all the
extraordinary things and the extraordinary people that filled it. The
captain had been something to be grateful about, and to hug one's self
over; the ghost in the garden had resolved itself into a very sweet and
tender personality. And now came this wonderful old man, who hammered
away half underground, and talked sometimes like a book and sometimes
like scraps out of twenty books, all disjointed; whose hair was wild
and whose eyes shone, and who was something to be a little afraid of
at first and to love desperately afterward, although, for that matter,
there were but few people who came into Comethup's life that he was not
able to give some part of his heart to. There was but one little hunger
in his heart, and that was that he could not bring Brian into what he
would have termed the chief glory of his life, for he had that keen and
unerring instinct which told him that Brian would be impatient of the
old shoemaker, and as scornful of him as he was of every one else who
did not exactly please him.
Comethup got quite into the habit of paying hurried visits to the
shoemaker's shop, and then lingering for a while, in the fascination
of the man and of the place. Very often he found 'Linda there, seated
silently beside the man on the bench. Very few customers ever seemed
to come there, and the few who did took no notice of the children. The
old man's moods varied greatly: sometimes he was in a savage humour and
worked fiercely, hammering away at the leather as if for dear life,
and taking no notice of the children; at other times he would sit,
with his hands clasped idly on his apron, staring dreamily out of the
window, and occasionally muttering to himself. On one such occasion he
called Comethup suddenly to him and put his arm about his shoulders and
stretched out the other hand toward the window. "Look, boy, look!" he
cried. "What do you see?"
Comethup gazed blankly through the window, the panes of which were of
old and common glass that distorted everything seen through them. He
shook his head, and looked round at the old man. "Nothing," he said,
"only the houses, and the church spire at the end of the street."
The shoemaker shook him gently but impatiently. "Look again," he
whispered; "move your head from side to side, as I move it--so. See the
houses leap and jump and tremble; see the spire of the church double
up like a reed, and seem as if it would plunge down into the street.
Again--move your head again--see how they leap and tremble and fall!"
Comethup, a little frightened, moved his head, and then laughed
faintly. "But it's only the glass," he said.
"Ah, but a man may sit here--a man poor and humble and with no
power--and yet dream that he has the power so to sweep away those who
have wronged him; to bring their fine houses tumbling about their ears,
like things built of cards. Boy, I tell you if a man can dream that, he
is stronger and greater than those who have the power to build--eh?"
Comethup obediently said, "Yes, I suppose so," and the old man laughed,
and took up his work and fell to hammering. Comethup, after he reached
home, tried the plan with other windows, and trembled a little when
he remembered the fierce whisper in which the old man had spoken; he
wondered, too, why he should carry in his breast the desire to injure
any one, or to wreck what he had built. Meanwhile, Brian had to be
reckoned with; it was impossible to ignore him completely, and the
hours which Comethup spent with him were growing fewer and fewer. But
one morning he sprang suddenly into the very midst of it all, as it
were, and quite accidentally.
He had been attending the grammar school on the outskirts of the town,
in a desultory fashion, staying away when it pleased him, throwing his
soul into the work for a day or two, and thinking of nothing else,
and then disappearing for the whole day for about a week, dashing
home, tired and hungry and dusty at the end of each day, and refusing
any account of his movements. Once or twice, when Comethup had been
away with the captain, he had heard on his return that his cousin had
called; but when he went himself to his uncle's house, to express his
contrition, Mr. Robert Carlaw airily informed him that he hadn't the
remotest notion where Brian was, or what he was doing.
"Takes after his father, the young rip. I was just the same when I was
a boy; began to go to the devil before I was breeched. It's in the
blood, and, damme, I'm the last man to try and stop him, the rascal!"
Comethup usually came away feeling desperately sorry for his cousin,
and trembling considerably at the thought of the path that unfortunate
youngster was treading, yet having, nevertheless, a sneaking admiration
both for him and his ways.
It happened, on the morning in question, that Comethup had arranged to
meet the captain; they would, in all probability, find 'Linda at the
old shoemaker's, and after that there was the glorious prospect of some
hours on the marshes in the captain's delightful company, with deeds
of daring to be recited and romantic possibilities to be discussed.
It had been firmly agreed upon between the captain and Comethup as to
what their duties were to be in a moment of emergency, should the old
town, for instance, be attacked by an alien foe, and 'Linda carried off
by the besiegers. Comethup almost wished, with a beating heart, that
it might happen, because, according to the captain's account--and the
captain was very serious when he mentioned it--it would mean midnight
rides, and shootings, and maimings, and slaughterings to an absolutely
delightful extent.
But this morning disappointment was in store for them. 'Linda was not
to be discovered at the shoemaker's, and the old man, being in a bad
humour, growlingly stated that he knew nothing about her, not even
pausing in his hammering to make the remark. Comethup and the captain
turned away sorrowfully. Former experience had taught them that it
would be useless to apply at her father's house; but they walked past
it, and Comethup even ran a little way into the garden, and softly
called her name. But there was no response, and, after waiting a few
moments, they were compelled to set out on their expedition without her.
She had taken so prominent a part in their lives of late, and
imagination so cruelly suggested her figure in every place they
visited, that the business of the day had no zest in it. The captain
presently seated himself on a bank out on the marshes, with his cane
lying across his knees, while Comethup sprawled at his feet and watched
the distant line of the sand hills beyond which the sea lay. Suddenly
the captain sat rigidly upright and stared away across the marshes
in an opposite direction to that in which Comethup was looking; an
ejaculation escaped his lips, and Comethup twisted round on one elbow
and followed the direction of the captain's gaze.
Two figures were running toward them, coming breathlessly over the
uneven ground, and waving to them as they ran. Comethup sat up with a
start. "Why, it's 'Linda!" he exclaimed; and then, in a more surprised
tone, "and Brian!"
The two came up pantingly, and the girl dropped down beside Comethup;
the boy Brian tossed his hair back from his face, and burst out with
his tale.
"We've been looking for you everywhere," he exclaimed. "You know
I couldn't find you at your house"--this to Comethup--"nor at the
captain's; and dad was in one of his frightful tempers, and had been
raving about the house, swearing he'd kill me. He often does that, you
know; I'm quite used to it. So you see I didn't know what to do, until
at last I thought of that house we went to see, Comethup, you know, the
one that was haunted. It wasn't half bad in the daylight, and it wasn't
haunted, after all."
"I know that," said Comethup. "And so does the captain."
"How did you find this--this child?" asked the captain, dropping one
hand lightly on the girl's head.
"I'm coming to that," replied Brian, briskly. "I went into the garden
and had a good look round, and there didn't seem to be anything to be
afraid of. So I walked round the house to see what there was to be
seen, and I----"
"And you saw me up at the window," broke in 'Linda, with a laugh.
The boy smiled back at her, and dropped down beside her on the sandy
ground. "Yes," he said, "and I asked you if you were the ghost,
and what you were doing up there; and you said you were waiting for
Comethup. And I said that I was looking for him, too, and we'd better
go and look together. Then I showed you how to get down from the window
by the ivy, and--and here we are." He rolled over on his back, crossed
his hands under his head, and laughed again.
It was all true. He had stormed the situation in a fashion which
neither Comethup nor the captain would have dreamed of; had flung
himself joyously, as it were, into the midst of a matter from
which they had innocently plotted to exclude him. 'Linda, too, had
entertained him with an account of all that had happened: of her
expeditions with Comethup and the captain, down to the minutest
details, proud of the fact that she had so much to tell to this new and
charming companion.
Comethup and the captain, with a quick mutual appreciation of the
matter born of their intimacy, glanced at each other rapidly; the
captain turned away his head, and sighed a little. 'Linda saw that, in
some strange fashion, she had offended her former friends; the keen
edge had been taken from the adventure, and she looked at Comethup with
a little sudden quivering of the lip. Brian, blissfully unconscious,
lay on his back on the ground, whistling softly to himself.
The situation was becoming embarrassing, and the captain had just
cleared his throat, with the idea of making some commonplace remark
which should set them all at their ease, when, looking up, he descried
another figure coming swinging toward them at a rapid rate. The swirl
of the coat-tails and the poise of the hat were not to be mistaken. He
exclaimed hurriedly, "Brian, here's your father!"
Brian Carlaw turned lazily over on one side and surveyed the
approaching figure; resumed his former attitude, and said with a laugh:
"I suppose he's come to kill me; I didn't think he'd find me here."
He appeared quite unconcerned about the matter, and Comethup could
not help looking at him with increasing admiration as he observed his
indifference to the approaching danger.
But it was obvious, as Mr. Robert Carlaw drew nearer, that he had no
hostile intention. He was apparently greatly agitated, and seemed to be
shouting something to them as he almost ran forward over the ground.
He waved in his right hand a sheet of paper. He came upon the waiting
group literally at a bound, and so out of breath that for a few moments
he could do nothing but alternately thump his chest and tap the sheet
of paper with a trembling forefinger and stretch it out appealingly
toward his son. His dignity was too great to permit him to sit down,
even on the bank beside the captain; he remained pacing about, and
gaspingly endeavouring to speak for some moments, before he could get
a word out, and when the words came they were, in view of what Brian
said, certainly surprising.
"My son, my beloved son!" He stretched out his arms toward the
recumbent boy, and something seemed to catch in his throat, as though
he swallowed with difficulty.
Brian raised himself on one elbow and looked at his father through
half-closed eyes. "I thought you were going to lick me," he said.
Mr. Robert Carlaw again agitatedly indicated the letter. "My boy,
forgive me, I beg. This is a moment when indiscretion, hastinesses
of temper, may be forgotten. This is a moment that comes but once
in every man's life. You are not--not too young to understand. My
boy, I have sought for you"--he swept his arm vaguely toward the
horizon--"everywhere. I have been cut--cut to the heart at the thought
that I--I had driven you from me. My son, thank Heaven I have found
you!" He took off his hat, breathed heavily, and mopped his face with a
delicate handkerchief. They looked at him in astonishment, not unmixed
with awe; he appeared to be so terribly in earnest.
"Is anything the matter?" asked the captain, breaking a silence which
began to be oppressive.
Robert Carlaw replaced his hat at a greater angle than usual, struck
himself on the breast, laughed, and shook the letter at the little
captain with ferocious playfulness. "Matter, sir? Matter enough! No
longer can it be said that Robert Carlaw and his son hide their heads
under a bushel--or under two bushels; this letter, sir, contains the
promise of fortune--fortune rightly bestowed. No longer shall my son
live obscurely, as his wretched parent has been compelled to do;
no longer shall he herd with the sons of tradesmen and commoners;
henceforth he takes that brilliant path which Fortune has mapped out
for him." He laughed again, and stretched out his arms again toward
Brian, who was sitting up, staring at him in amazement.
"I'm afraid we don't understand," said the captain mildly.
Robert Carlaw, feeling that he had to deal with inferior minds, came
down from the heights. "My dear sir, the matter, bluntly, is this. We
are friends here, and there is no reason why all the world should not
know such news as I have to tell. This, sir"--he indicated the paper he
held--"is a letter from an eccentric lady, of--er--excellent birth--in
point of fact, my sister; older than myself, a spinster, and childless.
She writes, in her dear eccentric fashion--sweet woman, but, like
myself, a spice of brimstone in her--to say that her loneliness tells
upon her with advancing years; that she seeks some one to whom she may
give what tenderness is in her, some one who shall become her heir. She
suggests--nay, in her eccentric fashion, demands--my son. He is to fill
the vacant place in her heart, and in her house; he is to become, when
it shall please the good Lord"--Mr. Carlaw raised his eyes piously, and
touched the brim of his hat with his fingers--"to call her from us, the
possessor of her wealth."
"That's very fine for the boy," said the captain slowly.
"Yes," responded Mr. Carlaw, thoughtfully, "the boy is like his father;
he was not built for toil. There are those who are made--positively
made, sir--to cut a figure in the world, that duller eyes may look
on them, and admire. I am one of those; it is in the blood; Brian is
another." With a great show of hurry upon him, he thrust the precious
letter in his pocket, and stooped and caught Brian by the arm and
dragged him to his feet. The boy, with that unbelief in his father
which past experience had probably sown deep in his breast, resisted
a little, and did not enter quite so joyously into the spirit of the
matter as his parent wished.
"But what have I got to do?" he asked, petulantly, rising slowly to his
feet with his fathers assistance.
"Do?" exclaimed that gentleman. "My son, there is not a moment to be
lost. You do not know your Aunt Charlotte; I have but stated the case
mildly when I say that she is eccentric. She may change her mind at
any moment; may have forgotten the suggestion she makes in this letter
before we have time to reach London. Come; there is not a moment to be
lost; it is the opportunity of a lifetime."
"Oh, we're going to London, are we?" asked the boy, his face
brightening.
"Yes, my son," cried Mr. Carlaw, clapping him affectionately on the
shoulder, "to London! London the glorious, the wonderful! London, where
you shall take your place among the best of them, and be no more hidden
from sight here. Your poor father would have taken his place among
its notables years ago, but that the purse-strings had to be kept too
tightly. Come, my son, it wrings a father's heart to have to part with
you, but Fate has been good to you, my son, Fate has been very good to
you."
He had got his arm round the boy's shoulders, and was actually dragging
him away, without remembering the proprieties, when Brian turned and
looked back over his shoulder, compelling his father to halt for a
moment. The smile that Comethup thought always was like light played
about his face for a moment as they sat there watching him.
"Good-bye!" he called. "I don't want to go a bit, but if dad says
I must, there's no help for it. Good-bye; don't forget me. I won't
forget you, any of you, and I'll come back soon to see you. Good-bye,
Comethup."
The last they saw of him was his slight, boyish figure, still encircled
by his father's arm, going across the uneven ground toward the town.
Mr. Robert Carlaw was waving his disengaged hand enthusiastically in
that direction, as though he pointed to fortune and all desirable
things.
CHAPTER VIII.
COMETHUP SUFFERS A LOSS.
Comethup was glad to think, as he sat at the captain's feet, looking
after Brian and his father, that Brian had appeared to remember him
last and most of all; he was glad to recall it afterward when Brian was
gone. The suddenness of the boy's departure made the whole circumstance
more surprising and dramatic than it otherwise would have been; this
sudden whipping of him off into fortune and grandeur, at a few moments'
notice, quite took away Comethup's breath. Indeed, the emotional
meeting between father and son, acted out to the accompaniment of
sounding phrases on the part of Mr. Robert Carlaw before their very
eyes, had held them all breathless. It was only when the two figures
disappeared over a ridge that the three watching ones seemed to gasp in
concert, and to blink their eyelids, as though awaking from a dream.
"Dear me!" said the captain, pushing his hat back from his forehead and
looking down at Comethup, "it's very sudden, isn't it?" In his simple
heart, although he scarcely liked to acknowledge it to himself, he felt
a certain great relief come upon him with the departure of father and
son. It can not be actually said that he disliked Brian; but he was
puzzled by him--perhaps even a little afraid of him. With their going,
the peace of the day seemed to be restored, and the captain could find
it in his heart to hope that fortune might indeed be awaiting Brian in
London, and that the boy might remain there to enjoy it.
"I'm sorry he's gone," said Comethup, smothering a sigh.
"I expect you'll miss him?" said the captain. Comethup detected, with
quick sympathy, young though he was, a little note of jealousy in the
captain's tones, and did not reply.
"He didn't want to go," said 'Linda, slowly, with her eyes still turned
toward where the two figures had disappeared.
"No, but I'll warrant he'll want to stay," said the captain sagely,
with a laugh.
They fell to talking of him, and of the wonder of his sudden fortune;
and from that the captain drifted into telling them of London, and of
the width and length of its streets, and the glory of its buildings,
and the wonder and mystery that the monster held, a riddle never to
be read. He went on talking of the place, as he had known it years
before, almost forgetful of his audience, while the children listened
breathlessly. Presently, remembering where he was, and that time was
flying, he got up abruptly, and took a hand of each and marched them
off to his cottage to dinner.
Comethup felt his cousin's absence more than might have been supposed.
Now that there was no longer any necessity for fitting in his meetings
with the boy and with the captain so as to preserve with nicety the
balance between them, he blamed himself, in his sensitive little soul,
for possible past neglect, remembered that Brian had called to him last
of all before he disappeared, and wished many times that he could have
made some atonement. The charm of Brian's light-hearted, mad way of
taking life, his resource and daring, were full upon the gentler boy;
his disappearance to claim that mysterious fortune which awaited him
seemed but a fitting part of all he had done before. Comethup thought
of him at night when he lay awake; pictured him in those wondrous
streets and palaces and buildings, the glory of which the captain had
but faintly suggested; saw him petted and admired; looked forward to a
time when he would come back to the sleepy old town, richly dressed,
perhaps even with a carriage and prancing horses, to pay a flying visit
to his old friends.
Nearly a week went by, during which he paid his daily visit to the
captain, and saw 'Linda once or twice, and went through the old quiet
routine. He had almost settled in his own mind that Brian had gone out
of his life, and was beginning, with the carelessness of childhood, to
dismiss the matter from his mind, or at all events to cease to think
strongly about it, when one evening, as he sat at the window of his
father's house, conning over a lesson which the captain had set him, he
heard a shout, and, looking up, saw with astonishment the laughing face
of Brian on the other side of the glass, nodding at him. Comethup had
time to notice, even as he hurriedly pushed open the window, that there
was no new grandeur about Brian: that he wore the clothes he had been
accustomed to wear, and looked in every respect precisely as though he
had never set out with his father to discover his eccentric aunt and
her great wealth.
"Why, you've come back!" gasped Comethup.
Brian leaned his elbows easily on the window sill, and nodded and
laughed. "Yes," he said, "I've come back. But we had a lot of fun and
saw a lot of things. My word, you should see London!"
But Comethup was absolutely palpitating with questions. "But have you
come down to see us? And how long do you stay? And when are you going
back?"
Brian laughed, and shook his head. "I'm not going back," he said. "I
don't quite understand it; all I know is that my aunt didn't like me,
and she and dad almost had a fight about it, and called each other
names. You never saw such a rumpus. And now we've come back, and it's
all over." He laughed quite light-heartedly and good-naturedly, with no
appreciation of the disaster.
"And you won't have the fortune?" said Comethup, looking at him with
wide, distressful eyes.
"No, and I don't want it. I couldn't possibly have lived with her; you
never saw such a woman. Why, she's quite blind, and goes feeling her
way about with a stick. And if anything upsets her she swears, just as
dad does; I really don't know which of them got the best of it. But
I'm glad it's all over, although dad went on like a madman about it at
first. But he'll get over that in time."
"And you won't go to London again?" said Comethup.
"No. But we had fun while it lasted. I believe dad went back to her
house every day from the hotel to try and see her, and kept on ringing
the bell until he found it was no use, and then we came back here. Of
course I don't care a bit; I don't want her beastly money; but I'd
liked to have stopped in London a little longer; it was jolly--would
have been jollier if dad hadn't been in such a fury all the time.
Good-night; we've only just got back, you know, and so I ran round to
see you. Good-night!" He was off out of the garden and down the street
almost before Comethup could gasp out a reply.
The true story of that visit to London, and its failure as a commercial
speculation, only came out long afterward. Indeed, nothing in regard to
it would have been known had not Mr. Robert Carlaw remembered that, in
the first flush of his joy, he had unconsciously taken the captain into
his confidence; to return, apparently beaten and without his purpose
accomplished, would, he felt, discredit him in that gentleman's eyes;
and he therefore hastened to give him some explanation, from his own
point of view, at least. He paid a visit to the captain on the very
evening of his arrival from London.
The captain was, perhaps, as greatly surprised by the visit as Comethup
had been by the apparition of Brian. Mr. Robert Carlaw had lifted
the latch of the cottage door without ceremony, and stood in the dim
light of the evening, a heavy figure, gazing half defiantly at the
little captain, who had risen in haste from his chair. Mr. Carlaw, in
characteristic fashion, seized the situation at once, and plunged into
his explanation before the captain had had time to utter a word.
"My dear sir," he exclaimed, advancing into the room and stretching
out a hand with much cordiality, "you're surprised to see me? Confess
it; I am surprised to see myself, as our French neighbours would say.
I believe I told you when we went to London something of the object of
our visit, but"--he shrugged his shoulders and took off his hat with
a flourish and banged it down on the little table--"the situation was
absolutely impossible, not to be tolerated for an instant by a man of
spirit."
The captain did not commit himself to any expression of opinion. He
crossed the room, closed the door, and came slowly back again, waiting
for his visitor to continue.
"Imagine, my dear sir, what it would mean to be at the mere beck
and call of a petticoat--and such a petticoat! All women are
unreasonable--dear creatures, I admit, and they've played the devil
with Bob Carlaw--but there is reason in all things. To be confronted
with a shrieking harridan who doesn't know her own mind for five
minutes together, who insults her own flesh and blood." (Mr. Carlaw
struck himself frantically on the breast and wagged his head) "and
loads my cherished son with reproaches--no, sir, it was not to be
borne. Charlotte is a dear sister and a worthy woman, and I esteem her;
but--there are limits. I trust, whatever my faults may be, that I shall
never be accused of a lack of what I may term the gentler virtues.
Vices I have, but they are, thank God, the vices of a gentleman. In
short, sir, the situation was impossible. I am glad to think that I
controlled myself and--as a soldier might express it--retreated with
dignity. Frankly, I do not mind confessing that the loss, from a
monetary point of view, is great. My son will not set forth upon that
career for which I had destined him with such bright prospects as he
might have done. But, sir, you will agree with me that there are
limits--limits which may not be passed."
Mr. Robert Carlaw leaned back in his chair and gazed at the ceiling; he
breathed heavily, and tapped the fingers of one hand upon the table.
The captain began to think that he had misjudged Mr. Carlaw, and that
he might be, after all, rather a fine fellow.
"I am sorry," he said, slowly, "for the boy's sake."
"Yes; for myself I do not care; the world has handled me roughly, but
I have contrived, thank Heaven, to turn a smiling face to it, as a
gentleman should. I have hopes for my son; he is not--not of common
clay, and I think you will admit that his appearance is such that he
should be able to cut a figure in the world. My dear sir"--he leaned
forward and spoke confidentially--"I will not deceive you. There may
have been--nay, there was--a selfish thought in my breast in the
matter. I had a vision of my son taking his place, as he should take
it, with the aid of that wealth without which we can do nothing; and I
had a vision, too, of his old father, who would do him no discredit,
mind you, leaning upon the boy, perhaps even guiding him a little, amid
the many temptations which would beset him. I repeat, I may have had
such a thought, but it was not wholly selfish; it was for the boy's
sake, entirely for the boy's sake."
The captain began sadly to think that he had been a little hasty
in forming that better judgment of Mr. Carlaw; but he spoke
diplomatically. "No doubt," he said, "you would have been of great
assistance to him."
"My knowledge of the world and of its pitfalls would, of course, have
enabled me to support rather than to lean upon him," replied the
other. "But, there, it's useless talking of the matter; the thing is
done. You may not be aware of it, my dear sir," he added, moodily,
"but disastrous luck has followed me--dogged me--all my days. Think of
this: here is my son, who, it has been said, favours his father, and
is--again I am quoting others--decidedly a handsome boy. Yet what does
it avail him? Nothing; for the very woman whom it is necessary to
impress is stone blind."
"Blind?" ejaculated the captain.
"Exactly. Did you ever hear of such a piece of misfortune? I do not
refer to her, but to the boy's prospects. Had she been able but to look
at him--only once--the thing would have been different. But it happens
that she was born blind; she is the sturdiest and the strongest of the
family; but her very affliction caused my father to leave practically
the whole of his fortune to her. I was left to struggle along on a mere
pittance. My younger sister, since dead, got nothing. Yet that very
circumstance, which has given her every luxury which money can command,
is the undoing of my boy's fortunes. Think of it!"
"Then did she--did she object to the boy?" asked the captain.
"Would have nothing to do with him; didn't like his voice; didn't like
his manner of speech to her; didn't like anything. Then, again, she got
on troublesome family matters--matters on which we were never able to
agree; she rubbed me very much the wrong way; in short, the whole thing
was impossible. I shook the dust of her house from my feet and came
away. Mine is a nature, sir, that will not brook interference; that
bows to no man, certainly to no woman."
He got up, picked up his hat, and began to move toward the door. He
had something further, however, to say; the nervousness of his manner
proclaimed it. The captain rose politely to open the door for his
guest, and Mr. Carlaw swung round in the doorway, as he put on his hat,
and spoke in a less self-confident manner.
"I--I am bound to confess that--that the matter--has troubled me. I
had--well, perhaps I hoped great things for the boy, that Fortune might
smile on him more kindly than it has done on his wretched father."
He laughed, and shrugged his shoulders. "However, that's done with;
I desire to hear no more about it. After all, I suppose we all take
our throw with the dice at Fortune's table some time or other; if we
lose--well, we take our bad luck like gentlemen still."
"Certainly, certainly," murmured the captain.
"I--I believe that I've mentioned--something about the matter to you
before our departure for London. Of course, I regard you as--well, may
I say?--a friend; and it is hardly necessary for me to add that I have
no desire that this matter----"
He was stumbling so awkwardly among his words that the captain came a
little stiffly to his relief. "The matter is not one which concerns
me," he said, "and as I have been honoured with your confidence, I
shall, of course, regard it as a confidence."
Mr. Robert Carlaw's face cleared suddenly, and he darted out a hand and
caught that of the captain. "My dear sir, I knew it was unnecessary for
me to make such a request. You are very good. Good-night, good-night!"
He went swinging away through the garden and down the street, humming a
tune as he walked. The captain stood looking after him.
Within a few days matters had settled down to their usual routine. It
seemed impossible that Brian could ever have been away, or that it
could ever have been suggested that his absence was to be permanent.
Comethup was quite glad to have his small circle of friends complete
again, and, as Brian himself did not appear to regret the loss of that
visionary fortune, Comethup began to think that it could not matter so
very greatly after all. In those early days, on which the child looked
back so often afterward, there was nothing to mar his peace of mind,
now that Brian had been admitted, in a sense, into complete intimacy
with them all by his discovery of 'Linda, except one circumstance--a
circumstance small enough in itself, but one which troubled him
nevertheless.
Brian, eager at all times to be in the very thick of everything,
however slight, that was in progress around him, had paid a visit to
the shoemaker's shop, going there with Comethup one morning in search
of 'Linda. Before they entered, he had glanced up at the overhanging
shop front, and had read there the painted name of the proprietor,
"M. Theed." He appeared to carry the name in his remembrance after
he entered the place, and to be fitting it together in some way and
puzzling over it. Even as he saw 'Linda seated on the bench, and nodded
laughingly to her, he turned in his quick fashion to the old man, who
had ceased hammering and was looking curiously at him, and asked,
"What's your other name?"
The shoemaker looked at him for a moment in silence, and then replied
slowly, "Medmer."
"That's a queer name," said the boy--"Medmer Theed; and what a queer
place you've got here!" He glanced round, and then appeared to dismiss
the matter altogether from his mind. "We've come to find 'Linda," he
added.
The old man laid down his hammer and put an arm about the child, as
though to draw her to him. Comethup was a little surprised and a little
frightened, on glancing at him, to see the expression of his eyes.
"Let the little maid stay here," he said, almost in a growl; "she has
naught to do with you."
Brian stared at him and laughed, and looked with raised eyebrows toward
Comethup. Comethup came quickly to the rescue.
"Why, Brian is our great friend--my cousin, you know. He's known 'Linda
a long time."
The shoemaker did not reply for some minutes; he sat, with his arm
drawn round the child and his head bent, muttering to himself. Then
presently, with a sigh, he withdrew his arm and took up his work, and
began hammering again steadily, as though no one were near him. After
waiting for a few moments, Comethup drew nearer to the bench; and
'Linda scrambled down and put her hand in his, and prepared to go with
them. Comethup politely wished the shoemaker "Good-day"; but he kept on
steadily at his work, and did not appear to hear. The three children
went out together, and down the little narrow street. Comethup,
glancing back over his shoulder for a moment, saw that the shoemaker
had come to the door of his shop, and was standing there, with one
hand shading his eyes, looking after them.
Nor did his distrust of Brian appear to leave him. Absurd as it
may seem, when the object of that dislike was so young a boy, the
old man's feelings were not to be mistaken. He maintained a rigid
silence whenever Brian came near him, even watched him suspiciously;
and although the boy, conscious of it, tried every art and charm he
possessed to ingratiate himself with the shoemaker, he signally failed.
His boisterousness and high spirits were useless here. Medmer Theed,
like most distorted characters, was evidently as strong in his dislikes
as in his likes, however unreasonable the former might be.
Nearly a year had slipped by since the sudden journey of Brian and his
father to London--a year of uneventful things, during which Comethup
plodded steadily on with his elementary studies with the captain, and
made, according to that gentleman's glowing accounts to David Willis,
considerable progress. David Willis, in his talks with the captain, was
full of vague schemes for the boy's future--schools he should attend,
and the prizes he should gain, and the brilliant things he should
do generally. The two men nodded heads over him on winter evenings
long after he was asleep, the captain taking as much as, if not more,
personal pride in his achievements than the father. David Willis had,
of course, made up his mind that the boy must be a musician; it was the
one profession in the world, and there were great prizes in it--prizes
which David himself had never been able to clutch, but which would
lie easily within the reach of his son. The captain said nothing on
that point, but shook his head in secret as he walked home through the
frosty streets; there was but one profession in his mind for Comethup,
and he--the captain--had already sown the seeds which should make for
an abundant harvest in it. Comethup Willis should yet shine in the
annals of his country as a greater soldier than the captain had ever
been, and should be able to point with pride to the man who had first
given him a lesson in military tactics. The captain did not see quite
clearly how it was all to be managed; but Fate is good in the case of
such a wonderful boy as Comethup, and things could be done somehow. At
all events, there was plenty of time yet.
So another summer came round again, with its promise of a renewal of
all the old delights, and Comethup was eight years old. Not a great
age, certainly, save to the mind of a little child; but Comethup was
older than his years, and looked on life, perhaps, with graver eyes
than most. Nothing seemed to have changed in his small world; the
captain looked exactly the same as of old, and carried himself as
stiffly erect as ever. 'Linda had grown, but not to an extent to be
marked by one who saw her almost daily. Then suddenly into Comethup's
quiet life came a great and terrible change.
One summer Sunday morning he was waiting as usual for the captain at
the door of his father's cottage. The bells above him were ringing for
church, and he was expecting every moment that his father would pass
him, as usual, with his books under his arm, and a kindly word for
the child on his lips, on his way into the church. But this morning,
although he could see at the far end of the sunlit street the figure
of the captain marching toward him, he had seen nothing of his father;
and the bell above him had started that slow, dull tolling which gave
warning that it would stop in a few moments. Fearing that something
might have delayed his father, or that he might--although that seemed
impossible--have forgotten the time, he turned, and ran up the stairs
to his father's room. It was a small room near his own; the big best
bedroom in which he had been born and in which his mother had died, was
never used, and was always kept scrupulously clean and neat behind its
closed door.
But David Willis was not in his room, and Comethup, a little vaguely
frightened, was coming down again, when he saw that the door of the
unused room stood slightly open. He paused, and then drew near and
peeped in. In the semi-darkness--for the blinds were always drawn
there--he saw his father kneeling beside the great bed, with his arms
stretch
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