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Wilfrid Cumbermede

by George MacDonald · English · Gutenberg #9183 · 922,049 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Wilfrid Cumbermede

Author: George MacDonald


        
Release date: October 1, 2005 [eBook #9183]
                Most recently updated: October 10, 2016

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WILFRID CUMBERMEDE ***




Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Charlie Kirschner and Online Proofreaders







WILFRID CUMBERMEDE


By George Macdonald


_With 14 Full Page Black-And-White
Illustrations By F.A. Fraser._



[Illustration: One Day, As We Were Walking Over The Fields, I Told Him
The Whole Story Of The Loss Of The Weapon At Moldwarp Hall.]




CONTENTS.


CHAP.

    INTRODUCTION.

      I. WHERE I FIND MYSELF.
     II. MY UNCLE AND AUNT.
    III. AT THE TOP OF THE CHIMNEY-STAIR.
     IV. THE PENDULUM.
      V. I HAVE LESSONS.
     VI. I COBBLE.
    VII. THE SWORD ON THE WALL.
   VIII. I GO TO SCHOOL, AND GRANNIE LEAVES IT.
     IX. I SIN AND REPENT.
      X. I BUILD CASTLES.
     XI. A TALK WITH MY UNCLE.
    XII. THE HOUSE-STEWARD.
   XIII. THE LEADS.
    XIV. THE GHOST.
     XV. AWAY.
    XVI. THE ICE-CAVE.
   XVII. AMONG THE MOUNTAINS.
  XVIII. AGAIN THE ICE-CAVE.
    XIX. CHARLEY NURSES ME.
     XX. A DREAM.
    XXI. THE FROZEN STREAM.
   XXII. AN EXPLOSION
  XXIII. ONLY A LINK
   XXIV. CHARLEY AT OXFORD
    XXV. MY WHITE MARE
   XXVI. A RIDING LESSON
  XXVII. A DISAPPOINTMENT
 XXVIII. IN LONDON
   XXIX. CHANGES
    XXX. PROPOSALS
   XXXI. ARRANGEMENTS
  XXXII. PREPARATIONS
 XXXIII. ASSISTANCE
  XXXIV. AN EXPOSTULATION
   XXXV. A TALK WITH CHARLEY
  XXXVI. TAPESTRY
 XXXVII. THE OLD CHEST
XXXVIII. MARY OSBORNE
  XXXIX. A STORM
     XL. A DREAM
    XLI. A WAKING
   XLII. A TALK ABOUT SUICIDE
  XLIII. THE SWORD IN THE SCALE
   XLIV. I PART WITH MY SWORD
    XLV. UMBERDEN CHURCH
   XLVI. MY FOLIO
  XLVII. THE LETTERS AND THEIR STORY
 XLVIII. ONLY A LINK
   XLIX. A DISCLOSURE
      L. THE DATES
     LI. CHARLEY AND CLARA
    LII. LILITH MEETS WITH A MISFORTUNE
   LIII. TOO LATE
    LIV. ISOLATION
     LV. ATTEMPTS AND COINCIDENCES
    LVI. THE LAST VISION
   LVII. ANOTHER DREAM
  LVIII. THE DARKEST HOUR
    LIX. THE DAWN
     LX. MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER
    LXI. THE PARISH REGISTER
   LXII. A FOOLISH TRIUMPH
  LXIII. A COLLISION
   LXIV. YET ONCE
    LXV. CONCLUSION




WILFRID CUMBERMEDE.




INTRODUCTION.


I am--I will not say how old, but well past middle age. This much I
feel compelled to mention, because it has long been my opinion that no
man should attempt a history of himself until he has set foot upon the
border land where the past and the future begin to blend in a
consciousness somewhat independent of both, and hence interpreting
both. Looking westward, from this vantage-ground, the setting sun is
not the less lovely to him that he recalls a merrier time when the
shadows fell the other way. Then they sped westward before him, as if
to vanish, chased by his advancing footsteps, over the verge of the
world. Now they come creeping towards him, lengthening as they come.
And they are welcome. Can it be that he would ever have chosen a world
without shadows? Was not the trouble of the shadowless noon the
dreariest of all? Did he not then long for the curtained queen--the
all-shadowy night? And shall he now regard with dismay the setting sun
of his earthly life? When he looks back, he sees the farthest cloud of
the sun-deserted east alive with a rosy hue. It is the prophecy of the
sunset concerning the dawn. For the sun itself is ever a rising sun,
and the morning will come though the night should be dark.

In this ‘season of calm weather,’ when the past has receded so far that
he can behold it as in a picture, and his share in it as the history of
a man who had lived and would soon die; when he can confess his faults
without the bitterness of shame, both because he is humble, and because
the faults themselves have dropped from him; when his good deeds look
poverty-stricken in his eyes, and he would no more claim consideration
for them than expect knighthood because he was no thief; when he cares
little for his reputation, but much for his character--little for what
has gone beyond his control, but endlessly much for what yet remains in
his will to determine; then, I think, a man may do well to write his
own life.

‘So,’ I imagine my reader interposing, ‘you profess to have arrived at
this high degree of perfection yourself?’

I reply that the man who has attained this kind of indifference to the
past, this kind of hope in the future, will be far enough from
considering it a high degree of perfection. The very idea is to such a
man ludicrous. One may eat bread without claiming the honours of an
athlete; one may desire to be honest and not count himself a saint. My
object in thus shadowing out what seems to me my present condition of
mind, is merely to render it intelligible to my reader how an
autobiography might come to be written without rendering the writer
justly liable to the charge of that overweening, or self-conceit, which
might be involved in the mere conception of the idea.

In listening to similar recitals from the mouths of elderly people, I
have observed that many things which seemed to the persons principally
concerned ordinary enough, had to me a wonder and a significance they
did not perceive. Let me hope that some of the things I am about to
relate may fare similarly, although, to be honest, I must confess I
could not have undertaken the task, for a task it is, upon this chance
alone: I do think some of my history worthy of being told, just for the
facts’ sake. God knows I have had small share of that worthiness. The
weakness of my life has been that I would ever do some great thing; the
saving of my life has been my utter failure. I have never done a great
deed. If I had, I know that one of my temperament could not have
escaped serious consequences. I have had more pleasure when a grown man
in a certain discovery concerning the ownership of an apple of which I
had taken the ancestral bite when a boy, than I can remember to have
resulted from any action of my own during my whole existence. But I
detest the notion of puzzling my reader in order to enjoy her fancied
surprise, or her possible praise of a worthless ingenuity of
concealment. If I ever appear to behave thus, it is merely that I
follow the course of my own knowledge of myself and my affairs, without
any desire to give either the pain or the pleasure of suspense, if
indeed I may flatter myself with the hope of interesting her to such a
degree that suspense should become possible.

When I look over what I have written, I find the tone so sombre--let me
see: what sort of an evening is it on which I commence this book? Ah! I
thought so: a sombre evening. The sun is going down behind a low bank
of grey cloud, the upper edge of which he tinges with a faded yellow.
There will be rain before morning. It is late Autumn, and most of the
crops are gathered in. A bluish fog is rising from the lower meadows.
As I look I grow cold. It is not, somehow, an interesting evening. Yet
if I found just this evening well described in a novel, I should enjoy
it heartily. The poorest, weakest drizzle upon the window-panes of a
dreary roadside inn in a country of slate-quarries, possesses an
interest to him who enters it by the door of a book, hardly less than
the pouring rain which threatens to swell every brook to a torrent. How
is this? I think it is because your troubles do not enter into the book
and its troubles do not enter into you, and therefore nature operates
upon you unthwarted by the personal conditions which so often
counteract her present influences. But I will rather shut out the
fading west, the gathering mists, and the troubled consciousness of
nature altogether, light my fire and my pipe, and then try whether in
my first chapter I cannot be a boy again in such fashion that my
companion, that is, my reader, will not be too impatient to linger a
little in the meadows of childhood ere we pass to the corn-fields of
riper years.




CHAPTER I.


WHERE I FIND MYSELF.

No wisest chicken, I presume, can recall the first moment when the
chalk-oval surrounding it gave way, and instead of the cavern of
limestone which its experience might have led it to expect, it found a
world of air and movement and freedom and blue sky--with kites in it.
For my own part, I often wished, when a child, that I had watched while
God was making me, so that I might have remembered how he did it. Now
my wonder is whether, when I creep forth into ‘that new world which is
the old,’ I shall be conscious of the birth, and enjoy the whole mighty
surprise, or whether I shall become gradually aware that things are
changed and stare about me like the new-born baby. What will be the
candle-flame that shall first attract my new-born sight? But I forget
that speculation about the new life is not writing the history of the
old.

I have often tried how far back my memory could go. I suspect there are
awfully ancient shadows mingling with our memories; but, as far as I
can judge, the earliest definite memory I have is the discovery of how
the wind is made; for I saw the process going on before my very eyes,
and there could be, and there was, no doubt of the relation of cause
and effect in the matter. There were the trees swaying themselves about
after the wildest fashion, and there was the wind in consequence
visiting my person somewhat too roughly. The trees were blowing in my
face. They made the wind, and threw it at me. I used my natural senses,
and this was what they told me. The discovery impressed me so deeply
that even now I cannot look upon trees without a certain indescribable
and, but for this remembrance, unaccountable awe. A grove was to me for
many years a fountain of winds, and, in the stillest day, to look into
a depth of gathered stems filled me with dismay; for the whole awful
assembly might, writhing together in earnest and effectual contortion,
at any moment begin their fearful task of churning the wind.

There were no trees in the neighbourhood of the house where I was born.
It stood in the midst of grass, and nothing but grass was to be seen
for a long way on every side of it. There was not a gravel path or a
road near it. Its walls, old and rusty, rose immediately from the
grass. Green blades and a few heads of daisies leaned trustingly
against the brown stone, all the sharpness of whose fractures had long
since vanished, worn away by the sun and the rain, or filled up by the
slow lichens, which I used to think were young stones growing out of
the wall. The ground was part of a very old dairy-farm, and my uncle,
to whom it belonged, would not have a path about the place. But then
the grass was well subdued by the cows, and, indeed, I think, would
never have grown very long, for it was of that delicate sort which we
see only on downs and in parks and on old grazing farms. All about the
house--as far, at least, as my lowly eyes could see--the ground was
perfectly level, and this lake of greenery, out of which it rose like a
solitary rock, was to me an unfailing mystery and delight. This will
sound strange in the ears of those who consider a mountainous, or at
least an undulating, surface essential to beauty; but nature is
altogether independent of what is called fine scenery. There are other
organs than the eyes, even if grass and water and sky were not of the
best and loveliest of nature’s shows.

The house, I have said, was of an ancient-looking stone, grey and green
and yellow and brown. It looked very hard; yet there were some attempts
at carving about the heads of the narrow windows. The carving had,
however, become so dull and shadowy that I could not distinguish a
single form or separable portion of design: still some ancient thought
seemed ever flickering across them. The house, which was two stories in
height, had a certain air of defence about it, ill to explain. It had
no eaves, for the walls rose above the edge of the roof; but the hints
at battlements were of the merest. The roof, covered with grey slates,
rose very steep, and had narrow, tall dormer windows in it. The edges
of the gables rose, not in a slope, but in a succession of notches,
like stairs. Altogether, the shell to which, considered as a
crustaceous animal, I belonged--for man is every animal according as
you choose to contemplate him--had an old-world look about it--a look
of the time when men had to fight in order to have peace, to kill in
order to live. Being, however, a crustaceous animal, I, the heir of all
the new impulses of the age, was born and reared in closest
neighbourhood with strange relics of a vanished time. Humanity so far
retains its chief characteristics that the new generations can always
flourish in the old shell.

The dairy was at some distance, so deep in a hollow that a careless
glance would not have discovered it. I well remember my astonishment
when my aunt first took me there; for I had not even observed the
depression of surface: all had been a level green to my eyes. Beyond
this hollow were fields divided by hedges, and lanes, and the various
goings to and fro of a not unpeopled although quiet neighbourhood.
Until I left home for school, however, I do not remember to have seen a
carriage of any kind approach our solitary dwelling. My uncle would
have regarded it as little short of an insult for any one to drive
wheels over the smooth lawny surface in which our house dwelt like a
solitary island in the sea.

Before the threshold lay a brown patch, worn bare of grass, and beaten
hard by the descending feet of many generations. The stone threshold
itself was worn almost to a level with it. A visitor’s first step was
into what would, in some parts, be called the house-place, a room which
served all the purposes of a kitchen, and yet partook of the character
of an old hall. It rose to a fair height, with smoke-stained beams
above; and was floored with a kind of cement, hard enough, and yet so
worn that it required a good deal of local knowledge to avoid certain
jars of the spine from sudden changes of level. All the furniture was
dark and shining, especially the round table, which, with its
bewildering, spider-like accumulation of legs, waited under the
mullioned, lozenged window until meal-times, when, like an animal
roused from its lair, it stretched out those legs, and assumed expanded
and symmetrical shape in front of the fire in Winter, and nearer the
door in Summer. It recalls the vision of my aunt, with a hand at each
end of it, searching empirically for the level--feeling for it, that
is, with the creature’s own legs--before lifting the hanging-leaves,
and drawing out the hitherto supernumerary legs to support them; after
which would come a fresh adjustment of level, another hustling to and
fro, that the new feet likewise might settle on elevations of equal
height; and then came the snowy cloth or the tea-tray, deposited
cautiously upon its shining surface.

The walls of this room were always whitewashed in the Spring,
occasioning ever a sharpened contrast with the dark-brown ceiling.
Whether that was even swept I do not know; I do not remember ever
seeing it done. At all events, its colour remained unimpaired by paint
or whitewash. On the walls hung various articles, some of them high
above my head, and attractive for that reason if for no other. I never
saw one of them moved from its place--not even the fishing-rod, which
required the whole length betwixt the two windows: three rusty hooks
hung from it, and waved about when a wind entered ruder than common.
Over the fishing-rod hung a piece of tapestry, about a yard in width,
and longer than that. It would have required a very capable
constructiveness indeed to supply the design from what remained, so
fragmentary were the forms, and so dim and faded were the once bright
colours. It was there as an ornament; for that which is a mere
complement of higher modes of life, becomes, when useless, the ornament
of lower conditions: what we call great virtues are little regarded by
the saints. It was long before I began to think how the tapestry could
have come there, or to what it owed the honour given it in the house.

On the opposite wall hung another object, which may well have been the
cause of my carelessness about the former--attracting to itself all my
interest. It was a sword, in a leather sheath. From the point, half way
to the hilt, the sheath was split all along the edge of the weapon. The
sides of the wound gaped, and the blade was visible to my prying eyes.
It was with rust almost as dark a brown as the scabbard that infolded
it. But the under parts of the hilt, where dust could not settle,
gleamed with a faint golden shine. That sword was to my childish eyes
the type of all mystery, a clouded glory, which for many long years I
never dreamed of attempting to unveil. Not the sword Excalibur, had it
been ‘stored in some treasure-house of mighty kings,’ could have
radiated more marvel into the hearts of young knights than that sword
radiated into mine. Night after night I would dream of danger drawing
nigh--crowds of men of evil purpose--enemies to me or to my country;
and ever in the beginning of my dream, I stood ready, foreknowing and
waiting; for I had climbed and had taken the ancient power from the
wall, and had girded it about my waist--always with a straw rope, the
sole band within my reach; but as it went on, the power departed from
the dream: I stood waiting for foes who would not come; or they drew
near in fury, and when I would have drawn my weapon, old blood and rust
held it fast in its sheath, and I tugged at it in helpless agony; and
fear invaded my heart, and I turned and fled, pursued by my foes until
I left the dream itself behind, whence the terror still pursued me.

There were many things more on those walls. A pair of spurs, of make
modern enough, hung between two pewter dish-covers. Hanging
book-shelves came next; for although most of my uncle’s books were in
his bed-room, some of the commoner were here on the wall, next to an
old fowling-piece, of which both lock and barrel were devoured with
rust. Then came a great pair of shears, though how they should have
been there I cannot yet think, for there was no garden to the house, no
hedges or trees to clip. I need not linger over these things. Their
proper place is in the picture with which I would save words and help
understanding if I could.

Of course there was a great chimney in the place; chiefly to be
mentioned from the singular fact that just round its corner was a
little door opening on a rude winding stair of stone. This appeared to
be constructed within the chimney; but on the outside of the wall, was
a half-rounded projection, revealing that the stair was not indebted to
it for the whole of its accommodation. Whither the stair led, I shall
have to disclose in my next chapter. From the opposite end of the
kitchen, an ordinary wooden staircase, with clumsy balustrade, led up
to the two bed-rooms occupied by my uncle and my aunt; to a large
lumber-room, whose desertion and almost emptiness was a source of
uneasiness in certain moods; and to a spare bed-room, which was better
furnished than any of ours, and indeed to my mind a very grand and
spacious apartment. This last was never occupied during my childhood;
consequently it smelt musty notwithstanding my aunt’s exemplary
housekeeping. Its bedsteads must have been hundreds of years old. Above
these rooms again were those to which the dormer windows belonged, and
in one of them I slept. It had a deep closet in which I kept my few
treasures, and into which I used to retire when out of temper or
troubled, conditions not occurring frequently, for nobody quarrelled
with me, and I had nobody with whom I might have quarrelled.

When I climbed upon a chair, I could seat myself on the broad sill of
the dormer window. This was the watch-tower whence I viewed the world.
Thence I could see trees in the distance--too far off for me to tell
whether they were churning wind or not. On that side those trees alone
were between me and the sky.

One day when my aunt took me with her into the lumber-room, I found
there, in a corner, a piece of strange mechanism. It had a kind of
pendulum; but I cannot describe it because I had lost sight of it long
before I was capable of discovering its use, and my recollection of it
is therefore very vague--far too vague to admit of even a conjecture
now as to what it could have been intended for. But I remember well
enough my fancy concerning it, though when or how that fancy awoke I
cannot tell either. It seems to me as old as the finding of the
instrument. The fancy was that if I could keep that pendulum wagging
long enough, it would set all those trees going too; and if I still
kept it swinging, we should have such a storm of wind as no living man
had ever felt or heard of. That I more than half believed it, will be
evident from the fact that, although I frequently carried the pendulum,
as I shall call it, to the window sill, and set it in motion by way of
experiment, I had not, up to the time of a certain incident which I
shall very soon have to relate, had the courage to keep up the
oscillation beyond ten or a dozen strokes; partly from fear of the
trees, partly from a dim dread of exercising power whose source and
extent were not within my knowledge. I kept the pendulum in the closet
I have mentioned, and never spoke to any one of it.




CHAPTER II.


MY UNCLE AND AUNT.

We were a curious household. I remembered neither father nor mother;
and the woman I had been taught to call _auntie_ was no such near
relation. My uncle was my father’s brother, and my aunt was his cousin,
by the mother’s side. She was a tall, gaunt woman, with a sharp nose
and eager eyes, yet sparing of speech. Indeed, there was very little
speech to be heard in the house. My aunt, however, looked as if she
could have spoken. I think it was the spirit of the place that kept her
silent, for there were those eager eyes. She might have been expected
also to show a bad temper, but I never saw a sign of such. To me she
was always kind; chiefly, I allow, in a negative way, leaving me to do
very much as I pleased. I doubt if she felt any great tenderness for
me, although I had been dependent upon her care from infancy. In
after-years I came to the conclusion that she was in love with my
uncle; and perhaps the sense that he was indifferent to her save after
a brotherly fashion, combined with the fear of betraying herself and
the consciousness of her unattractive appearance, to produce the
contradiction between her looks and her behaviour.

Every morning, after our early breakfast, my uncle walked away to the
farm, where he remained until dinner-time. Often, when busy at my own
invented games in the grass, I have caught sight of my aunt, standing
motionless with her hand over her eyes, watching for the first glimpse
of my uncle ascending from the hollow where the farm-buildings lay; and
occasionally, when something had led her thither as well, I would watch
them returning together over the grass, when she would keep glancing up
in his face at almost regular intervals, although it was evident they
were not talking, but he never turned his face or lifted his eyes from
the ground a few yards in front of him.

He was a tall man of nearly fifty, with grey hair, and quiet meditative
blue eyes. He always looked as if he were thinking. He had been
intended for the Church, but the means for the prosecution of his
studies failing, he had turned his knowledge of rustic affairs to
account, and taken a subordinate position on a nobleman’s estate, where
he rose to be bailiff. When my father was seized with his last illness,
he returned to take the management of the farm. It had been in the
family for many generations. Indeed that portion of it upon which the
house stood, was our own property. When my mother followed my father,
my uncle asked his cousin to keep house for him. Perhaps she had
expected a further request, but more had not come of it.

When he came in, my uncle always went straight to his room; and having
washed his hands and face, took a book and sat down in the window. If I
were sent to tell him that the meal was ready, I was sure to find him
reading. He would look up, smile, and look down at his book again; nor,
until I had formally delivered my message, would he take further notice
of me. Then he would rise, lay his book carefully aside, take my hand,
and lead me down-stairs.

To my childish eyes there was something very grand about my uncle. His
face was large-featured and handsome; he was tall, and stooped
meditatively. I think my respect for him was founded a good deal upon
the reverential way in which my aunt regarded him. And there was great
wisdom, I came to know, behind that countenance, a golden speech behind
that silence.

My reader must not imagine that the prevailing silence of the house
oppressed me. I had been brought up in it, and never felt it. My own
thoughts, if thoughts those conditions of mind could be called, which
were chiefly passive results of external influences--whatever they
were--thoughts or feelings, sensations, or dim, slow movements of
mind--they filled the great pauses of speech; and besides, I could read
the faces of both my uncle and aunt like the pages of a well-known
book. Every shade of alteration in them I was familiar with, for their
changes were not many.

Although my uncle’s habit was silence, however, he would now and then
take a fit of talking to me. I remember many such talks; the better,
perhaps, that they were divided by long intervals. I had perfect
confidence in his wisdom, and submission to his will. I did not much
mind my aunt. Perhaps her deference to my uncle made me feel as if she
and I were more on a level. She must have been really kind, for she
never resented any petulance or carelessness. Possibly she sacrificed
her own feeling to the love my uncle bore me; but I think it was rather
that, because he cared for me, she cared for me too.

Twice during every meal she would rise from the table with some dish in
her hand, open the door behind the chimney, and ascend the winding
stair.




CHAPTER III.


AT THE TOP OF THE CHIMNEY-STAIR.

I fear my reader may have thought me too long occupied with the
explanatory foundations of my structure: I shall at once proceed to
raise its walls of narrative. Whatever further explanations may be
necessary, can be applied as buttresses in lieu of a broader base.

One Sunday--it was his custom of a Sunday--I fancy I was then somewhere
about six years of age--my uncle rose from the table after our homely
dinner, took me by the hand, and led me to the dark door with the long
arrow-headed hinges, and up the winding stone stair which I never
ascended except with him or my aunt. At the top was another rugged
door, and within that, one covered with green baize. The last opened on
what had always seemed to me a very paradise of a room. It was
old-fashioned enough; but childhood is of any and every age, and it was
not old-fashioned to me--only intensely cosy and comfortable. The first
thing my eyes generally rested upon was an old bureau, with a book-case
on the top of it, the glass-doors of which were lined with faded red
silk. The next thing I would see was a small tent-bed, with the whitest
of curtains, and enchanting fringes of white ball-tassels. The bed was
covered with an equally charming counterpane of silk patchwork. The
next object was the genius of the place, in a high, close, easy-chair,
covered with some dark stuff, against which her face, surrounded with
its widow’s cap, of ancient form, but dazzling whiteness, was strongly
relieved. How shall I describe the shrunken, yet delicate, the
gracious, if not graceful form, and the face from which extreme old age
had not wasted half the loveliness? Yet I always beheld it with an
indescribable sensation, one of whose elements I can isolate and
identify as a faint fear. Perhaps this arose partly from the fact that,
in going up the stair, more than once my uncle had said to me, ‘You
must not mind what grannie says, Willie, for old people will often
speak strange things that young people cannot understand. But you must
love grannie, for she is a very good old lady.’

‘Well, grannie, how are you to-day?’ said my uncle, as we entered, this
particular Sunday.

I may as well mention at once that my uncle called her _grannie_ in his
own right and not in mine, for she was in truth my great-grandmother.

‘Pretty well, David, I thank you; but much too long out of my grave,’
answered grannie; in no sepulchral tones, however, for her voice,
although weak and uneven, had a sound in it like that of one of the
upper strings of a violin. The plaintiveness of it touched me, and I
crept near her--nearer than, I believe, I had ever yet gone of my own
will--and laid my hand upon hers. I withdrew it instantly, for there
was something in the touch that made me--not shudder, exactly--but
creep. Her hand was smooth and soft, and warm too, only somehow the
skin of it seemed dead. With a quicker movement than belonged to her
years, she caught hold of mine, which she kept in one of her hands,
while she stroked it with the other. My slight repugnance vanished for
the time, and I looked up in her face, grateful for a tenderness which
was altogether new to me.

‘What makes you so long out of your grave, grannie?’ I asked.

‘They won’t let me into it, my dear.’

‘Who won’t let you, grannie?’

‘My own grandson there, and the woman down the stair.’

‘But you don’t really want to go--do you, grannie?’

‘I do want to go, Willie. I ought to have been there long ago. I am
very old; so old that I’ve forgotten how old I am. How old am I?’ she
asked, looking up at my uncle.

‘Nearly ninety-five, grannie; and the older you get before you go the
better we shall be pleased, as you know very well.’

‘There! I told you,’ she said with a smile, not all of pleasure, as she
turned her head towards me. ‘They won’t let me go. I want to go to my
grave, and they won’t let me! Is that an age at which to keep a poor
woman from her grave?’

‘But it’s not a nice place, is it, grannie?’ I asked, with the vaguest
ideas of what _the grave_ meant. ‘I think somebody told me it was in
the churchyard.’

But neither did I know with any clearness what the church itself meant,
for we were a long way from church, and I had never been there yet.

‘Yes, it is in the churchyard, my dear.’

‘Is it a house?’ I asked.

‘Yes, a little house; just big enough for one.’

‘I shouldn’t like that.’

‘Oh yes, you would.’

‘Is it a nice place, then?’

‘Yes, the nicest place in the world, when you get to be so old as I am.
If they would only let me die!’

‘Die, grannie!’ I exclaimed. My notions of death as yet were derived
only from the fowls brought from the farm, with their necks hanging
down long and limp, and their heads wagging hither and thither.

‘Come, grannie, you mustn’t frighten our little man,’ interposed my
uncle, looking kindly at us both.

‘David!’ said grannie, with a reproachful dignity, ‘_you_ know what I
mean well enough. You know that until I have done what I have to do,
the grave that is waiting for me will not open its mouth to receive me.
If you will only allow me to do what I have to do, I shall not trouble
you long. Oh dear! oh dear!’ she broke out, moaning and rocking herself
to and fro, ‘I am too old to weep, and they will not let me to my bed.
I want to go to bed. I want to go to sleep.’

She moaned and complained like a child. My uncle went near and took her
hand.

‘Come, come, dear grannie!’ he said, ‘you must not behave like this.
You know all things are for the best.’

‘To keep a corpse out of its grave!’ retorted the old lady, almost
fiercely, only she was too old and weak to be fierce. ‘Why should you
keep a soul that’s longing to depart and go to its own people,
lingering on in the coffin? What better than a coffin is this withered
body? The child is old enough to understand me. Leave him with me for
half an hour, and I shall trouble you no longer. I shall at least wait
my end in peace. But I think I should die before the morning.’

Ere grannie had finished this sentence, I had shrunk from her again and
retreated behind my uncle.

‘There!’ she went on, ‘you make my own child fear me. Don’t be
frightened, Willie dear; your old mother is not a wild beast; she loves
you dearly. Only my grand-children are so undutiful! They will not let
my own son come near me.’

How I recall this I do not know, for I could not have understood it at
the time. The fact is that during the last few years I have found
pictures of the past returning upon me in the most vivid and
unaccountable manner, so much so as almost to alarm me. Things I had
utterly forgotten--or so far at least that when they return, they must
appear only as vivid imaginations, were it not for a certain conviction
of fact which accompanies them--are constantly dawning out of the past.
Can it be that the decay of the observant faculties allows the memory
to revive and gather force? But I must refrain, for my business is to
narrate, not to speculate.

My uncle took me by the hand, and turned to leave the room. I cast one
look at grannie as he led me away. She had thrown her head back on her
chair, and her eyes were closed; but her face looked offended, almost
angry. She looked to my fancy as if she were trying but unable to lie
down. My uncle closed the doors very gently. In the middle of the stair
he stopped, and said in a low voice,

‘Willie, do you know that when people grow very old they are not quite
like other people?’

‘Yes. They want to go to the churchyard,’ I answered.

‘They fancy things,’ said my uncle. ‘Grannie thinks you are her own
son.’

‘And ain’t I?’ I asked innocently.

‘Not exactly,’ he answered. ‘Your father was her son’s son. She forgets
that, and wants to talk to you as if you were your grandfather. Poor
old grannie! I don’t wish you to go and see her without your aunt or
me: mind that.’

Whether I made any promise I do not remember; but I know that a new
something was mingled with my life from that moment. An air as it were
of the tomb mingled henceforth with the homely delights of my life.
Grannie wanted to die, and uncle would not let her. She longed for her
grave, and they would keep her above-ground. And from the feeling that
grannie ought to be buried, grew an awful sense that she was not
alive--not alive, that is, as other people are alive, and a gulf was
fixed between her and me which for a long time I never attempted to
pass, avoiding as much as I could all communication with her, even when
my uncle or aunt wished to take me to her room. They did not seem
displeased, however, when I objected, and not always insisted on
obedience. Thus affairs went on in our quiet household for what seemed
to me a very long time.




CHAPTER IV.


THE PENDULUM.

It may have been a year after this, it may have been two, I cannot
tell, when the next great event in my life occurred. I think it was
towards the close of an Autumn, but there was not so much about our
house as elsewhere to mark the changes of the seasons, for the grass
was always green. I remember it was a sultry afternoon. I had been out
almost the whole day, wandering hither and thither over the grass, and
I felt hot and oppressed. Not an air was stirring. I longed for a
breath of wind, for I was not afraid of the wind itself, only of the
trees that made it. Indeed, I delighted in the wind, and would run
against it with exuberant pleasure, even rejoicing in the fancy that I,
as well as the trees, could make the wind by shaking my hair about as I
ran. I must run, however; whereas the trees, whose prime business it
was, could do it without stirring from the spot. But this was much too
hot an afternoon for me, whose mood was always more inclined to the
passive than the active, to run about and toss my hair, even for the
sake of the breeze that would result therefrom. I bethought myself. I
was nearly a man now; I would be afraid of things no more; I would get
out my pendulum, and see whether that would not help me. Not this time
would I flinch from what consequences might follow. Let them be what
they might, the pendulum should wag, and have a fair chance of doing
its best.

[Illustration: “I SAT AND WATCHED IT WITH GROWING AWE.”]

I went up to my room, a sense of high emprise filling my little heart.
Composedly, yea solemnly, I set to work, even as some enchanter of old
might have drawn his circle, and chosen his spell out of his
iron-clasped volume. I strode to the closet in which the awful
instrument dwelt. It stood in the furthest corner. As I lifted it,
something like a groan invaded my ear. My notions of locality were not
then sufficiently developed to let me know that grannie’s room was on
the other side of that closet. I almost let the creature, for as such I
regarded it, drop. I was not to be deterred, however. I bore it
carefully to the light, and set it gently on the window sill, full in
view of the distant trees towards the west. I left it then for a
moment, as if that it might gather its strength for its unwonted
labours, while I closed the door, and, with what fancy I can scarcely
imagine now, the curtains of my bed as well. Possibly it was with some
notion of having one place to which, if the worst came to the worst, I
might retreat for safety. Again I approached the window, and after
standing for some time in contemplation of the pendulum, I set it in
motion, and stood watching it.

It swung slower and slower. It wanted to stop. It should not stop. I
gave it another swing. On it went, at first somewhat distractedly, next
more regularly, then with slowly retarding movement. But it should not
stop.

I turned in haste and got from the side of my bed the only chair in the
room, placed it in the window, sat down before the reluctant
instrument, and gave it a third swing. Then, my elbows on the sill, I
sat and watched it with growing awe, but growing determination as well.
Once more it showed signs of refusal; once more the forefinger of my
right hand administered impulse.

Something gave a crack inside the creature: away went the pendulum,
swinging with a will. I sat and gazed, almost horror-stricken. Ere many
moments had passed, the feeling of terror had risen to such a height
that, but for the very terror, I would have seized the pendulum in a
frantic grasp. I did not. On it went, and I sat looking. My dismay was
gradually subsiding.

I have learned since that a certain ancestor--or was he only a
great-uncle?--I forget--had a taste for mechanics, even to the craze of
the perpetual motion, and could work well in brass and iron. The
creature was probably some invention of his. It was a real marvel how,
after so many years of idleness, it could now go as it did. I confess,
as I contemplate the thing, I am in a puzzle, and almost fancy the
whole a dream. But let it pass. At worst, something of which this is
the sole representative residuum, wrought an effect on me which
embodies its cause thus, as I search for it in the past. And why should
not the individual life have its misty legends as well as that of
nations? From them, as from the golden and rosy clouds of morning,
dawns at last the true sun of its unquestionable history. Every boy has
his own fables, just as the Romes and the Englands of the world have
their Romuli and their Arthurs, their suckling wolves and their
granite-sheathed swords. Do they not reflect each other? I tell the
tale as ‘tis left in me.

How long I sat thus gazing at the now self-impelled instrument, I
cannot say. The next point in the progress of the legend, is a gust of
wind rattling the window in whose recess I was seated. I jumped from my
chair in terror. While I had been absorbed in the pendulum, the evening
had closed in; clouds had gathered over the sky, and all was gloomy
about the house. It was much too dark to see the distant trees, but
there could be no doubt they were at work. The pendulum had roused
them. Another, a third, and a fourth gust rattled and shook the rickety
frame. I had done it at last! The trees were busy away there in the
darkness. I and my pendulum could make the wind.

The gusts came faster and faster, and grew into blasts which settled
into a steady gale. The pendulum went on swinging to and fro, and the
gale went on increasing in violence. I sat half in terror, half in
delight, at the awful success of my experiment. I would have opened the
window to let in the coveted air, but that was beyond my knowledge and
strength. I could make the wind blow, but, like other magicians, I
could not share in its benefits. I would go out and meet it on the open
plain. I crept down the stair like a thief--not that I feared
detention, but that I felt such a sense of the important, even the
dread, about myself and my instrument, that I was not in harmony with
souls reflecting only the common affairs of life. In a moment I was in
the middle of a storm--for storm it very nearly was and soon became. I
rushed to and fro in the midst of it, lay down and rolled in it, and
laughed and shouted as I looked up to the window where the pendulum was
swinging, and thought of the trees at work away in the dark. The wind
grew stronger and stronger. What if the pendulum should not stop at
all, and the wind went on and on, growing louder and fiercer, till it
grew mad and blew away the house? Ah, then, poor grannie would have a
chance of being buried at last! Seriously, the affair might grow
serious.

Such thoughts were passing in my mind, when all at once the wind gave a
roar which made me spring to my feet and rush for the house. I must
stop the pendulum. There was a strange sound in that blast. The trees
themselves had had enough of it, and were protesting against the
creature’s tyranny. Their master was working them too hard. I ran up
the stair on all fours: it was my way when I was in a hurry. Swinging
went the pendulum in the window, and the wind roared in the chimney. I
seized hold of the oscillating thing, and stopped it; but to my amaze
and consternation, the moment I released it, on it went again. I must
sit and hold it. But the voice of my aunt called me from below, and as
I dared not explain why I would rather not appear, I was forced to
obey. I lingered on the stair, half minded to return.

‘What a rough night it is!’ I heard my aunt say, with rare remark.

‘It gets worse and worse,’ responded my uncle. ‘I hope it won’t disturb
grannie; but the wind must roar fearfully in her chimney.’

I stood like a culprit. What if they should find out that I was at the
root of the mischief, at the heart of the storm!

‘If I could believe all that I have been reading to-night about the
Prince of the Power of the Air, I should not like this storm at all,’
continued my uncle, with a smile. ‘But books are not always to be
trusted because they are old,’ he added with another smile. ‘From the
glass, I expected rain and not wind.’

‘Whatever wind there is, we get it all,’ said my aunt. ‘I wonder what
Willie is about. I thought I heard him coming down. Isn’t it time,
David, we did something about his schooling? It won’t do to have him
idling about this way all day long.’

‘He’s a mere child,’ returned my uncle. ‘I’m not forgetting him. But I
can’t send him away yet.’

‘You know best,’ returned my aunt.

_Send me away!_ What could it mean? Why should I--where should I go?
Was not the old place a part of me, just like my own clothes on my own
body? This was the kind of feeling that woke in me at the words. But
hearing my aunt push back her chair, evidently with the purpose of
finding me, I descended into the room.

‘Come along, Willie,’ said my uncle. ‘Hear the wind how it roars!’

‘Yes, uncle; it does roar,’ I said, feeling a hypocrite for the first
time in my life. Knowing far more about the roaring than he did, I yet
spoke like an innocent!

‘Do you know who makes the wind, Willie?’

‘Yes. The trees,’ I answered.

My uncle opened his blue eyes very wide, and looked at my aunt. He had
had no idea what a little heathen I was. The more a man has wrought out
his own mental condition, the readier he is to suppose that children
must be able to work out theirs, and to forget that he did not work out
his information, but only his conclusions. My uncle began to think it
was time to take me in hand.

‘No, Willie,’ he said. ‘I must teach you better than that.’

I expected him to begin by telling me that God made the wind; but,
whether it was that what the old book said about the Prince of the
Power of the Air returned upon him, or that he thought it an unfitting
occasion for such a lesson when the wind was roaring so as might render
its divine origin questionable, he said no more. Bewildered, I fancy,
with my ignorance, he turned, after a pause, to my aunt.

‘Don’t you think it’s time for him to go to bed, Jane?’ he suggested.

My aunt replied by getting from the cupboard my usual supper--a basin
of milk and a slice of bread; which I ate with less circumspection than
usual, for I was eager to return to my room. As soon as I had finished,
Nannie was called, and I bade them good-night.

‘Make haste, Nannie,’ I said. ‘Don’t you hear how the wind is roaring?’

It was roaring louder than ever, and there was the pendulum swinging
away in the window. Nannie took no notice of it, and, I presume, only
thought I wanted to get my head under the bed-clothes, and so escape
the sound of it. Anyhow, she did make haste, and in a very few minutes
I was, as she supposed, snugly settled for the night. But the moment
she shut the door I was out of bed, and at the window. The instant I
reached it, a great dash of rain swept against the panes, and the wind
howled more fiercely than ever. Believing I had the key of the
position, inasmuch as, if I pleased, I could take the pendulum to bed
with me, and stifle its motions with the bed-clothes--for this happy
idea had dawned upon me while Nannie was undressing me--I was composed
enough now to press my face to a pane, and look out. There was a small
space amidst the storm dimly illuminated from the windows below, and
the moment I looked--out of the darkness into this dim space, as if
blown thither by the wind, rushed a figure on horseback, his large
cloak flying out before him, and the mane of the animal he rode
streaming out over his ears in the fierceness of the blast. He pulled
up right under my window, and I thought he looked up, and made
threatening gestures at me; but I believe now that horse and man pulled
up in sudden danger of dashing against the wall of the house. I shrank
back, and when I peeped out again he was gone. The same moment the
pendulum gave a click and stopped; one more rattle of rain against the
windows, and then the wind stopped also. I crept back to my bed in a
new terror, for might not this be the Prince of the Power of the Air,
come to see who was meddling with his affairs? Had he not come right
out of the storm, and straight from the trees? He must have something
to do with it all! Before I had settled the probabilities of the
question, however, I was fast asleep.

I awoke--how long after, I cannot tell--with the sound of voices in my
ears. It was still dark. The voices came from below. I had been
dreaming of the strange horseman, who had turned out to be the awful
being concerning whom Nannie had enlightened me as going about at night
to buy little children from their nurses, and make bagpipes of their
skins. Awaked from such a dream, it was impossible to lie still without
knowing what those voices down below were talking about. The strange
one must belong to the being, whatever he was, whom I had seen come out
of the storm; and of whom could they be talking but me? I was right in
both conclusions.

With a fearful resolution I slipped out of bed, opened the door as
noiselessly as I might, and crept on my bare, silent feet down the
creaking stair, which led, with open balustrade, right into the
kitchen, at the end furthest from the chimney. The one candle at the
other end could not illuminate its darkness, and I sat unseen, a few
steps from the bottom of the stair, listening with all my ears, and
staring with all my eyes. The stranger’s huge cloak hung drying before
the fire, and he was drinking something out of a tumbler. The light
fell full upon his face. It was a curious, and certainly not to me an
attractive face. The forehead was very projecting, and the eyes were
very small, deep set, and sparkling. The mouth--I had almost said
muzzle--was very projecting likewise, and the lower jaw shot in front
of the upper. When the man smiled the light was reflected from what
seemed to my eyes an inordinate multitude of white teeth. His ears were
narrow and long, and set very high upon his head. The hand which he
every now and then displayed in the exigencies of his persuasion, was
white, but very large, and the thumb was exceedingly long. I had
weighty reasons for both suspecting and fearing the man; and, leaving
my prejudices out of the question, there was in the conversation itself
enough besides to make me take note of dangerous points in his
appearance. I never could lay much claim to physical courage, and I
attribute my behaviour on this occasion rather to the fascination of
terror than to any impulse of self-preservation: I sat there in utter
silence, listening like an ear-trumpet. The first words I could
distinguish were to this effect:--

‘You do not mean,’ said the enemy, ‘to tell me, Mr Cumbermede, that you
intend to bring up the young fellow in absolute ignorance of the
decrees of fate?’

‘I pledge myself to nothing in the matter,’ returned my uncle, calmly,
but with something in his tone which was new to me.

‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed the other. ‘Excuse me, sir, but what right
can you have to interfere after such a serious fashion with the young
gentleman’s future?’

‘It seems to me,’ said my uncle, ‘that you wish to interfere with it
after a much more serious fashion. There are things in which ignorance
may be preferable to knowledge.’

‘But what harm could the knowledge of such a fact do him?’

‘Upset all his notions, render him incapable of thinking about anything
of importance, occasion an utter--’

But _can_ anything be more important?’ interrupted the visitor.

My uncle went on without heeding him.

‘Plunge him over head and ears in--’

‘Hot water, I grant you,’ again interrupted the enemy, to my horror;
‘but it wouldn’t be for long. Only give me your sanction, and I promise
you to have the case as tight as a drum before I ask you to move a step
in it.’

‘But why should you take so much interest in what is purely our
affair?’ asked my uncle.

‘Why, of course you would have to pay the piper,’ said the man.

This was too much! _Pay_ the man that played upon me after I was made
into bagpipes! The idea was too frightful.

‘I must look out for business, you know; and, by Jove! I shall never
have such a chance, if I live to the age of Methuselah.’

‘Well, you shall not have it from me.’

‘Then,’ said the man, rising, ‘you are more of a fool than I took you
for.’

‘Sir!’ said my uncle.

‘No offence; no offence, I assure you. But it is provoking to find
people so blind--so wilfully blind--to their own interest. You may say
I have nothing to lose. Give me the boy, and I’ll bring him up like my
own son; send him to school and college, too--all on the chance of
being repaid twice over by--’

I knew this was all a trick to get hold of my skin. The man said it on
his way to the door, his ape-face shining dim as he turned it a little
back in the direction of my uncle, who followed with the candle. I lost
the last part of the sentence in the terror which sent me bounding up
the stair in my usual four-footed fashion. I leaped into my bed,
shaking with cold and agony combined. But I had the satisfaction
presently of hearing the _thud_ of the horse’s hoofs upon the sward,
dying away in the direction whence they had come. After that I soon
fell asleep.

I need hardly say that I never set the pendulum swinging again. Many
years after, I came upon it when searching for a key, and the thrill
which vibrated through my whole frame announced a strange and unwelcome
presence long before my memory could recall its origin.

It must not be supposed that I pretend to remember all the conversation
I have just set down. The words are but the forms in which, enlightened
by facts which have since come to my knowledge, I clothe certain vague
memories and impressions of such an interview as certainly took place.

In the morning, at breakfast, my aunt asked my uncle who it was that
paid such an untimely visit the preceding night.

‘A fellow from Minstercombe’ (the county town), ‘an attorney--what did
he say his name was? Yes, I remember. It was the same as the steward’s
over the way. Coningham, it was.’

‘Mr Coningham has a son there--an attorney too, I think,’ said my aunt.

My uncle seemed struck by the reminder, and became meditative.

‘That explains his choosing such a night to come in. His father is
getting an old man now. Yes, it must be the same.’

‘He’s a sharp one, folk say,’ said my aunt, with a pointedness in the
remark which showed some anxiety.

‘That he cannot conceal, sharp as he is,’ said my uncle, and there the
conversation stopped.

The very next evening my uncle began to teach me. I had a vague notion
that this had something to do with my protection against the
machinations of the man Coningham, the idea of whom was inextricably
associated in my mind with that of the Prince of the Power of the Air,
darting from the midst of the churning trees, on a horse whose
streaming mane and flashing eyes indicated no true equine origin. I
gave myself with diligence to the work my uncle set me.




CHAPTER V.


I HAVE LESSONS.

It is a simple fact that up to this time I did not know my letters. It
was, I believe, part of my uncle’s theory of education that as little
pain as possible should be associated with merely intellectual effort:
he would not allow me, therefore, to commence my studies until the task
of learning should be an easy one. Henceforth, every evening, after
tea, he took me to his own room, the walls of which were nearly covered
with books, and there taught me.

One peculiar instance of his mode I will give, and let it stand rather
as a pledge for the rest of his system than an index to it. It was only
the other day it came back to me. Like Jean Paul, he would utter the
name of God to a child only at grand moments; but there was a great
difference in the moments the two men would have chosen. Jean Paul
would choose a thunder-storm, for instance; the following will show the
kind of my uncle’s choice. One Sunday evening he took me for a longer
walk than usual. We had climbed a little hill: I believe it was the
first time I ever had a wide view of the earth. The horses were all
loose in the fields; the cattle were gathering their supper as the sun
went down; there was an indescribable hush in the air, as if Nature
herself knew the seventh day; there was no sound even of water, for
here the water crept slowly to the far-off sea, and the slant sunlight
shone back from just one bend of a canal-like river; the hay-stacks and
ricks of the last year gleamed golden in the farmyards; great fields of
wheat stood up stately around us, the glow in their yellow brought out
by the red poppies that sheltered in the forest of their stems; the
odour of the grass and clover came in pulses; and the soft blue sky was
flecked with white clouds tinged with pink, which deepened until it
gathered into a flaming rose in the west, where the sun was welling out
oceans of liquid red.

I looked up in my uncle’s face. It shone in a calm glow, like an
answering rosy moon. The eyes of my mind were opened: I saw that he
felt something, and then I felt it too, His soul, with the glory for an
interpreter, kindled mine.

He, in turn, caught the sight of my face, and his soul broke forth in
one word:--

God! Willie; God!’ was all he said; and surely it was enough.

It was only then in moments of strong repose that my uncle spoke to me
of God.

Although he never petted me, that is, never showed me any animal
affection, my uncle was like a father to me in this, that he was about
and above me, a pure benevolence. It is no wonder that I should learn
rapidly under his teaching, for I was quick enough, and possessed the
more energy that it had not been wasted on unpleasant tasks.

Whether from indifference or intent I cannot tell, but he never forbade
me to touch any of his books. Upon more occasions than one he found me
on the floor with a folio between my knees; but he only smiled and
said--

‘Ah, Willie! mind you don’t crumple the leaves.’

About this time also I had a new experience of another kind, which
impressed me almost with the force of a revelation.

I had not yet explored the boundaries of the prairie-like level on
which I found myself. As soon as I got about a certain distance from
home, I always turned and ran back. Fear is sometimes the first
recognition of freedom. Delighting in liberty, I yet shrunk from the
unknown spaces around me, and rushed back to the shelter of the
home-walls. But as I grew older I became more adventurous; and one
evening, although the shadows were beginning to lengthen, I went on and
on until I made a discovery. I found a half-spherical hollow in the
grassy surface. I rushed into its depth as if it had been a mine of
marvels, threw myself on the ground, and gazed into the sky as if I had
now for the first time discovered its true relation to the earth. The
earth was a cup, and the sky its cover.

There were lovely daisies in this hollow--not too many to spoil the
grass--and they were red-tipped daisies. There was besides, in the very
heart of it, one plant of the finest pimpernels I have ever seen, and
this was my introduction to the flower. Nor were these all the
treasures of the spot. A late primrose, a tiny child, born out of due
time, opened its timid petals in the same hollow. Here then we
regathered red-tipped daisies, large pimpernels, and one tiny primrose.
I lay and looked at them in delight--not at all inclined to pull them,
for they were where I loved to see them. I never had much inclination
to gather flowers. I see them as a part of a whole, and rejoice in them
in their own place without any desire to appropriate them. I lay and
looked at these for a long time. Perhaps I fell asleep. I do not know.
I have often waked in the open air. All at once I looked up and saw a
vision.

My reader will please to remember that up to this hour I had never seen
a lady. I cannot by any stretch call my worthy aunt a lady; and my
grandmother was too old, and too much an object of mysterious anxiety,
to produce the impression, of a lady upon me. Suddenly I became aware
that a lady was looking down on me. Over the edge of my horizon, the
circle of the hollow that touched the sky, her face shone like a rising
moon. Sweet eyes looked on me, and a sweet mouth was tremulous with a
smile. I will not attempt to describe her. To my childish eyes she was
much what a descended angel must have been to eyes of old, in the days
when angels did descend, and there were Arabs or Jews on the earth who
could see them. A new knowledge dawned in me. I lay motionless, looking
up with worship in my heart. As suddenly she vanished. I lay far into
the twilight, and then rose and went home, half bewildered, with a
sense of heaven about me which settled into the fancy that my mother
had come to see me. I wondered afterwards that I had not followed her;
but I never forgot her, and, morning, midday, or evening, whenever the
fit seized me, I would wander away and lie down in the hollow, gazing
at the spot where the lovely face had arisen, in the fancy, hardly in
the hope, that my moon might once more arise and bless me with her
vision.

Hence I suppose came another habit of mine, that of watching in the
same hollow, and in the same posture, now for the sun, now for the
moon, but generally for the sun. You might have taken me for a
fire-worshipper, so eagerly would I rise when the desire came upon me,
so hastily in the clear grey of the morning would I dress myself, lest
the sun should be up before me, and I fail to catch his first
lance-like rays dazzling through the forest of grass on the edge of my
hollow world. Bare-footed I would scud like a hare through the dew,
heedless of the sweet air of the morning, heedless of the few
bird-songs about me, heedless even of the east, whose saffron might
just be burning into gold, as I ran to gain the green hollow whence
alone I would greet the morning. Arrived there, I shot into its
shelter, and threw myself panting on the grass, to gaze on the spot at
which I expected the rising glory to appear. Ever when I recall the
custom, that one lark is wildly praising over my head, for he sees the
sun for which I am waiting. He has his nest in the hollow beside me. I
would sooner have turned my back on the sun than disturbed the home of
his high-priest, the lark. And now the edge of my horizon begins to
burn; the green blades glow in their tops; they are melted through with
light; the flashes invade my eyes; they gather; they grow, until I hide
my face in my hands. The sun is up. But on my hands and my knees I rush
after the retreating shadow, and, like a child at play with its nurse,
hide in its curtain. Up and up comes the peering sun; he will find me;
I cannot hide from him; there is in the wide field no shelter from his
gaze. No matter then. Let him shine into the deepest corners of my
heart, and shake the cowardice and the meanness out of it.

I thus made friends with Nature. I had no great variety even in her,
but the better did I understand what I had. The next Summer I began to
hunt for glow-worms, and carry them carefully to my hollow, that in the
warm, soft, moonless nights they might illumine it with a strange
light. When I had been very successful, I would call my uncle and aunt
to see. My aunt tried me by always having something to do first. My
uncle, on the other hand, would lay down his book at once, and follow
me submissively. He could not generate amusement for me, but he
sympathized with what I could find for myself.

‘Come and see my cows,’ I would say to him.

I well remember the first time I took him to see them. When we reached
the hollow, he stood for a moment silent. Then he said, laying his hand
on my shoulder,

‘Very pretty, Willie! But why do you call them cows?’

‘You told me last night,’ I answered, ‘that the road the angels go
across the sky is called the milky way--didn’t you, uncle?’

‘I never told you the angels went that way, my boy.’

‘Oh! didn’t you? I thought you did.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Oh! I remember now: I thought if it was a way, and nobody but the
angels could go in it, that must be the way the angels did go.’

‘Yes, yes, I see! But what has that to do with the glow-worms?’

‘Don’t you see, uncle? If it be the milky way, the stars must be the
cows. Look at my cows, uncle. Their milk is very pretty milk, isn’t
it?’

‘Very pretty, indeed, my dear--rather green.’

‘Then I suppose if you could put it in auntie’s pan, you might make
another moon of it?’

‘That’s being silly now,’ said my uncle; and I ceased, abashed.

‘Look, look, uncle!’ I exclaimed, a moment after; ‘they don’t like
being talked about, my cows.’

For as if a cold gust of wind had passed over them, they all dwindled
and paled. I thought they were going out.

‘Oh dear, oh dear!’ I cried, and began dancing about with dismay. The
next instant the glow returned, and the hollow was radiant.

‘Oh, the dear light!’ I cried again. ‘Look at it, uncle! Isn’t it
lovely?’

He took me by the hand. His actions were always so much more tender
than his words!

‘Do you know who is the light of the world, Willie?’

‘Yes, well enough. I saw him get out of bed this morning.’

My uncle led me home without a word more. But next night he began to
teach me about the light of the world, and about walking in the light.
I do not care to repeat much of what he taught me in this kind, for
like my glow-worms it does not like to be talked about. Somehow it
loses colour and shine when one talks.

I have now shown sufficiently how my uncle would seize opportunities
for beginning things. He thought more of the beginning than of any
other part of a process.

‘All’s well that begins well,’ he would say. I did not know what his
smile meant as he said so.

I sometimes wonder how I managed to get through the days without being
weary. No one ever thought of giving me toys. I had a turn for using my
hands; but I was too young to be trusted with a knife. I had never seen
a kite, except far away in the sky: I took it for a bird. There were no
rushes to make water-wheels of, and no brooks to set them turning in. I
had neither top nor marbles. I had no dog to play with. And yet I do
not remember once feeling weary. I knew all the creatures that went
creeping about in the grass, and although I did not know the proper
name for one of them, I had names of my own for them all, and was so
familiar with their looks and their habits, that I am confident I could
in some degree interpret some of the people I met afterwards by their
resemblances to these insects. I have a man in my mind now who has
exactly the head and face, if face it can be called, of an ant. It is
not a head, but a helmet. I knew all the butterflies--they were mostly
small ones, but of lovely varieties. A stray dragon-fly would now and
then delight me; and there were hunting-spiders and wood-lice, and
queerer creatures of which I do not yet know the names. Then there were
grasshoppers, which for some time I took to be made of green leaves,
and I thought they grew like fruit on the trees till they were ripe,
when they jumped down, and jumped for ever after. Another child might
have caught and caged them; for me, I followed them about, and watched
their ways.

In the Winter, things had not hitherto gone quite so well with me. Then
I had been a good deal dependent upon Nannie and her stories, which
were neither very varied nor very well told. But now that I had begun
to read, things went better. To be sure, there were not in my uncle’s
library many books such as children have now-a-days; but there were old
histories, and some voyages and travels, and in them I revelled. I am
perplexed sometimes when I look into one of these books--for I have
them all about me now--to find how dry they are. The shine seems to
have gone out of them. Or is it that the shine has gone out of the eyes
that used to read them? If so, it will come again some day. I do not
find that the shine has gone out of a beetle’s back; and I can read
_The Pilgrim’s Progress_ still.




CHAPTER VI.


I COBBLE.

All this has led me, after a roundabout fashion, to what became for
some time the chief delight of my Winters--an employment, moreover,
which I have taken up afresh at odd times during my life. It came about
thus. My uncle had made me a present of an old book with pictures in
it. It was called _The Preceptor_--one of Dodsley’s publications. There
were wonderful folding plates of all sorts in it. Those which
represented animals were of course my favourites. But these especially
were in a very dilapidated condition, for there had been children
before me somewhere; and I proceeded, at my uncle’s suggestion, to try
to mend them by pasting them on another piece of paper. I made bad work
of it at first, and was so dissatisfied with the results, that I set
myself in earnest to find out by what laws of paste and paper success
might be secured. Before the Winter was over, my uncle found me grown
so skilful in this manipulation of broken leaves--for as yet I had not
ventured further in any of the branches of repair--that he gave me
plenty of little jobs of the sort, for amongst his books there were
many old ones. This was a source of great pleasure. Before the
following Winter was over, I came to try my hand at repairing bindings,
and my uncle was again so much pleased with my success that one day he
brought me from the county town some sheets of parchment with which to
attempt the fortification of certain vellum-bound volumes which were
considerably the worse for age and use. I well remember how troublesome
the parchment was for a long time; but at last I conquered it, and
succeeded very fairly in my endeavours to restore to tidiness the
garments of ancient thought.

But there was another consequence of this pursuit which may be
considered of weight in my history. This was the discovery of a copy of
the Countess of Pembroke’s _Arcadia_--much in want of skilful patching,
from the title-page, with its boar smelling at the rose-bush, to the
graduated lines and the _Finis_. This book I read through from boar to
finis--no small undertaking, and partly, no doubt, under its
influences, I became about this time conscious of a desire after
honour, as yet a notion of the vaguest. I hardly know how I escaped the
taking for granted that there were yet knights riding about on
war-horses, with couched lances and fierce spurs, everywhere as in days
of old. They might have been roaming the world in all directions,
without my seeing one of them. But somehow I did not fall into the
mistake. Only with the thought of my future career, when I should be a
man and go out into the world, came always the thought of the sword
which hung on the wall. A longing to handle it began to possess me, and
my old dream returned. I dared not, however, say a word to my uncle on
the subject. I felt certain that he would slight the desire, and
perhaps tell me I should hurt myself with the weapon; and one whose
heart glowed at the story of the battle between him on the white horse
with carnation mane and tail, in his armour of blue radiated with gold,
and him on the black-spotted brown, in his dusky armour of despair,
could not expose himself to such an indignity.




CHAPTER VII.


THE SWORD ON THE WALL.

Where possession was impossible, knowledge might yet be reached: could
I not learn the story of the ancient weapon? How came that which had
more fitly hung in the hall of a great castle, here upon the wall of a
kitchen? My uncle, however, I felt, was not the source whence I might
hope for help. No better was my aunt. Indeed I had the conviction that
she neither knew nor cared anything about the useless thing. It was her
tea-table that must be kept bright for honour’s sake. But there was
grannie!

My relations with her had continued much the same. The old fear of her
lingered, and as yet I had had no inclination to visit her room by
myself. I saw that my uncle and aunt always behaved to her with the
greatest kindness and much deference, but could not help observing also
that she cherished some secret offence, receiving their ministrations
with a certain condescension which clearly enough manifested its origin
as hidden cause of complaint and not pride. I wondered that my uncle
and aunt took no notice of it, always addressing her as if they were on
the best possible terms; and I knew that my uncle never went to his
work without visiting her, and never went to bed without reading a
prayer by her bedside first. I think Nannie told me this.

She could still read a little, for her sight had been short, and had
held out better even than usual with such. But she cared nothing for
the news of the hour. My uncle had a weekly newspaper, though not by
any means regularly, from a friend in London, but I never saw it in my
grandmother’s hands. Her reading was mostly in the _Spectator_, or in
one of De Foe’s works. I have seen her reading Pope.

The sword was in my bones, and as I judged that only from grannie could
I get any information respecting it, I found myself beginning to
inquire why I was afraid to go to her. I was unable to account for it,
still less to justify it. As I reflected, the kindness of her words and
expressions dawned upon me, and I even got so far as to believe that I
had been guilty of neglect in not visiting her oftener and doing
something for her. True, I recalled likewise that my uncle had desired
me not to visit her except with him or my aunt, but that was ages ago,
when I was a very little boy and might have been troublesome. I could
even read to her now if she wished it. In short, I felt myself
perfectly capable of entering into social relations with her generally.
But if there was any flow of affection towards her, it was the sword
that had broken the seal of its fountain.

One morning at breakfast I had been sitting gazing at the sword on the
wall opposite me. My aunt had observed the steadiness of my look.

‘What are you staring at, Willie?’ she said. ‘Your eyes are fixed in
your head. Are you choking?’

The words offended me. I got up and walked out of the room. As I went
round the table I saw that my uncle and aunt were staring at each other
very much as I had been staring at the sword. I soon felt ashamed of
myself, and returned, hoping that my behaviour might be attributed to
some passing indisposition. Mechanically I raised my eyes to the wall.
Could I believe them? The sword was gone--absolutely gone! My heart
seemed to swell up into my throat; I felt my cheeks burning. The
passion grew within me, and might have broken out in some form or
other, had I not felt that would at once betray my secret. I sat still
with a fierce effort, consoling and strengthening myself with the
resolution that I would hesitate no longer, but take the first chance
of a private interview with grannie. I tried hard to look as if nothing
had happened, and when breakfast was over, went to my own room. It was
there I carried on my pasting operations. There also at this time I
drank deep in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress;’ there were swords, and armour,
and giants, and demons there: but I had no inclination for either
employment now.

My uncle left for the farm as usual, and to my delight I soon
discovered that my aunt had gone with him. The ways of the house were
as regular as those of a bee-hive. Sitting in my own room I knew
precisely where any one must be at any given moment; for although the
only clock we had was oftener standing than going, a perfect instinct
of time was common to the household, Nannie included. At that moment
she was sweeping up the hearth and putting on the kettle. In half an
hour she would have tidied up the kitchen, and would have gone to
prepare the vegetables for cooking: I must wait. But the sudden fear
struck me that my aunt might have taken the sword with her--might be
going to make away with it altogether. I started up, and rushed about
the room in an agony. What could I do? At length I heard Nannie’s
pattens clatter out of the kitchen to a small outhouse where she pared
the potatoes. I instantly descended, crossed the kitchen, and went up
the winding stone stair. I opened grannie’s door, and went in.

She was seated in her usual place. Never till now had I felt how old
she was. She looked up when I entered, for although she had grown very
deaf, she could feel the floor shake. I saw by her eyes, which looked
higher than my head, that she had expected a taller figure to follow
me. When I turned from shutting the door, I saw her arms extended with
an eager look, and could see her hands trembling ere she folded them
about me, and pressed my head to her bosom.

‘O Lord!’ she said, ‘I thank thee. I will try to be good now. O Lord, I
have waited, and thou hast heard me. I will believe in thee again!’

From that moment I loved my grannie, and felt I owed her something as
well as my uncle. I had never had this feeling about my aunt.

‘Grannie!’ I said, trembling from a conflict of emotions; but before I
could utter my complaint, I had burst out crying.

‘What have they been doing to you, child?’ she asked, almost fiercely,
and sat up straight in her chair. Her voice, although feeble and
quavering, was determined in tone. She pushed me back from her and
sought the face I was ashamed to show. ‘What have they done to you, my
boy?’ she repeated, ere I could conquer my sobs sufficiently to speak.

‘They have taken away the sword that--’

‘What sword?’ she asked quickly. ‘Not the sword that your
great-grandfather wore when he followed Sir Marmaduke?’

‘I don’t know, grannie.’

‘Don’t know, boy? The only thing your father took when he--. Not the
sword with the broken sheath? Never! They daren’t do it! I will go down
myself. I must see about it at once.’

‘Oh, grannie, don’t!’ I cried in terror, as she rose from her chair.
‘They’ll not let me ever come near you again, if you do.’

She sat down again. After seeming to ponder for a while in silence, she
said:--

‘Well, Willie, my dear, you’re more to me than the old sword. But I
wouldn’t have had it handled with disrespect for all that the place is
worth. However, I don’t suppose they can--. What made them do it,
child? They’ve not taken it down from the wall?’

‘Yes, grannie. I think it was because I was staring at it too much,
grannie. Perhaps they were afraid I would take it down and hurt myself
with it. But I was only going to ask you about it. Tell me a story
about it, grannie.’

All my notion was some story, I did not think whether true or false,
like one of Nannie’s stories.

‘That I will, my child--all about it--all about it. Let me see.’

Her eyes went wandering a little, and she looked perplexed.

‘And they took it from you, did they? Poor child! Poor child!’

‘They didn’t take it from me, grannie. I never had it in my hands.’

‘Wouldn’t give it you then? Oh dear! Oh dear!’

I began to feel uncomfortable--grannie looked so strange and lost. The
old feeling that she ought to be buried because she was dead returned
upon me; but I overcame it so far as to be able to say:

‘Won’t you tell me about it then, grannie? I want so much to hear about
the battle.’

‘What battle, child? Oh yes! I’ll tell you all about it some day, but
I’ve forgot now, I’ve forgot it all now.’

She pressed her hand to her forehead, and sat thus for some time, while
I grew very frightened. I would gladly have left the room and crept
down-stairs, but I stood fascinated, gazing at the withered face
half-hidden by the withered hand. I longed to be anywhere else, but my
will had deserted me, and there I must remain. At length grannie took
her hand from her eyes, and seeing me, started.

‘Ah, my dear!’ she said,’ I had forgotten you. You wanted me to do
something for you: what was it?’

‘I wanted you to tell me about the sword, grannie.’

‘Oh yes, the sword!’ she returned, putting her hand again to her
forehead. ‘They took it away from you, did they? Well, never mind. I
will give you something else--though I don’t say it’s as good as the
sword.’

She rose, and taking an ivory-headed stick which leaned against the
side of the chimney-piece, walked with tottering steps towards the
bureau. There she took from her pocket a small bunch of keys, and
having, with some difficulty from the trembling of her hands, chosen
one and unlocked the sloping cover, she opened a little drawer inside,
and took out a gold watch with a bunch of seals hanging from it. Never
shall I forget the thrill that went through my frame. Did she mean to
let me hold it in my own hand? Might I have it as often as I came to
see her? Imagine my ecstasy when she put it carefully in the two hands
I held up to receive it, and said:

‘There, my dear! You must take good care of it, and never give it away
for love or money. Don’t you open it--there’s a good boy, till you’re a
man like your father. He _was_ a man! He gave it to me the day we were
married, for he had nothing else, he said, to offer me. But I would not
take it, my dear. I liked better to see him with it than have it
myself. And when he left me, I kept it for you. But you must take care
of it, you know.’

‘Oh, thank you, grannie!’ I cried, in an agony of pleasure. ‘I _will_
take care of it--indeed I will. Is it a real watch, grannie--as real as
uncle’s?’

‘It’s worth ten of your uncle’s, my dear. Don’t you show it him,
though. He might take that away too. Your uncle’s a very good man, my
dear, but you mustn’t mind everything he says to you. He forgets
things. I never forget anything. I have plenty of time to think about
things. I never forget.’

‘Will it go, grannie?’ I asked, for my uncle was a much less
interesting subject than the watch.

‘It won’t go without being wound up; but you might break it. Besides,
it may want cleaning. It’s several years since it was cleaned last.
Where will you put it now?’

‘Oh! I know where to hide it safe enough, grannie,’ I exclaimed. ‘I’ll
take care of it. You needn’t be afraid, grannie.’

The old lady turned, and with difficulty tottered to her seat. I
remained where I was, fixed in contemplation of my treasure. She called
me. I went and stood by her knee.

‘My child, there is something I want very much to tell you, but you
know old people forget things--’

‘But you said just now that you never forgot anything, grannie.’

‘No more I do, my dear; only I can’t always lay my hands upon a thing
when I want it.’

‘It was about the sword, grannie,’ I said, thinking to refresh her
memory.

‘No, my dear; I don’t think it was about the sword exactly--though that
had something to do with it. I shall remember it all by-and-by. It will
come again. And so must you, my dear. Don’t leave your old mother so
long alone. It’s weary, weary work, waiting.’

‘Indeed I won’t, grannie,’ I said. ‘I will come the very first time I
can. Only I mustn’t let auntie see me, you know.--You don’t want to be
buried now, do you, grannie?’ I added; for I had begun to love her, and
the love had cast out the fear, and I did not want her to wish to be
buried.

‘I am very, very old; much too old to live, my dear. But I must do you
justice before I can go to my grave. _Now_ I know what I wanted to say.
It’s gone again. Oh dear! Oh dear! If I had you in the middle of the
night, when everything comes back as if it had been only yesterday, I
could tell you all about it from beginning to end, with all the ins and
outs of it. But I can’t now--I can’t now.’

She moaned and rocked herself to and fro.

‘Never mind, grannie,’ I said cheerfully, for I was happy enough for
all eternity with my gold watch; ‘I will come and see you again as soon
as ever I can.’ And I kissed her on the white cheek.

‘Thank you, my dear. I think you had better go now. They may miss you,
and then I should never see you again--to talk to, I mean.’

‘Why won’t they let me come, and see you, grannie?’ I asked.

‘That’s what I wanted to tell you, if I could only see a little
better,’ she answered, once more putting her hand to her forehead.
‘Perhaps I shall be able to tell you next time. Go now, my dear.’

I left the room, nothing loth, for I longed to be alone with my
treasure. I could not get enough of it in grannie’s presence even.
Noiseless as a bat I crept down the stair. When I reached the door at
the foot I stood and listened. The kitchen was quite silent. I stepped
out. There was no one there. I scudded across and up the other stair to
my own room, carefully shutting the door behind me. Then I sat down on
the floor on the other side of the bed, so that it was between me and
the door, and I could run into the closet with my treasure before any
one entering should see me.

The watch was a very thick round one. The back of it was crowded with
raised figures in the kind of work called _repoussée_. I pored over
these for a long time, and then turned to the face. It was set all
round with shining stones--diamonds, though I knew nothing of diamonds
then. The enamel was cracked, and I followed every crack as well as
every figure of the hours. Then I began to wonder what I could do with
it next. I was not satisfied. Possession I found was not bliss: it had
not rendered me content. But it was as yet imperfect: I had not seen
the inside. Grannie had told me not to open it: I began to think it
hard that I should be denied thorough possession of what had been given
to me, I believed I should be quite satisfied if I once saw what made
it go. I turned it over and over, thinking I might at least find how it
was opened. I have little doubt if I had discovered the secret of it,
my virtue would have failed me. All I did find, however, was the head
of a curious animal engraved on the handle. This was something. I
examined it as carefully as the rest, and then finding I had for the
time exhausted the pleasures of the watch, I turned to the seals. On
one of them was engraved what looked like letters, but I could not read
them. I did not know that they were turned the wrong way. One of them
was like a W. On the other seal--there were but two and a
curiously-contrived key--I found the same head as was engraved on the
handle--turned the other way of course. Wearied at length, I took the
precious thing into the dark closet, and laid it in a little box which
formed one of my few possessions. I then wandered out into the field,
and went straying about until dinner-time, during which I believe I
never once lifted my eyes to the place where the sword had hung, lest
even that action should betray the watch.

From that day my head, and as much of my heart as might be, were filled
with the watch. And, alas! I soon found that my bookmending had grown
distasteful to me, and for the satisfaction of employment, possession
was a poor substitute. As often as I made the attempt to resume it, I
got weary, and wandered almost involuntarily to the closet to feel for
my treasure in the dark, handle it once more, and bring it out into the
light. Already I began to dree the doom of riches, in the vain attempt
to live by that which was not bread. Nor was this all. A certain weight
began to gather over my spirit--a sense almost of wrong. For although
the watch had been given me by my grandmother, and I never doubted
either her right to dispose of it or my right to possess it, I could
not look my uncle in the face, partly from a vague fear lest he should
read my secret in my eyes, partly from a sense of something out of
joint between him and me. I began to fancy, and I believe I was right,
that he looked at me sometimes with a wistfulness I had never seen in
his face before. This made me so uncomfortable that I began to avoid
his presence as much as possible. And although I tried to please him
with my lessons, I could not learn them as hitherto.

One day he asked me to bring him the book I had been repairing.

‘It’s not finished yet, uncle,’ I said.

‘Will you bring it me just as it is. I want to look for something in
it.’

I went and brought it with shame. He took it, and having found the
passage he wanted, turned the volume once over in his hands, and gave
it me back without a word.

Next day I restored it to him finished and tidy. He thanked me, looked
it over again, and put it in its place. But I fairly encountered an
inquiring and somewhat anxious gaze. I believe he had a talk with my
aunt about me that night.

The next morning, I was seated by the bedside, with my secret in my
hand, when I thought I heard the sound of the door-handle, and glided
at once into the closet. When I came out in a flutter of anxiety, there
was no one there. But I had been too much startled to return to what I
had grown to feel almost a guilty pleasure.

The next morning after breakfast, I crept into the closet, put my hand
unerringly into the one corner of the box, found no watch, and after an
unavailing search, sat down in the dark on a bundle of rags, with the
sensations of a ruined man. My world was withered up and gone. How the
day passed, I cannot tell. How I got through my meals, I cannot even
imagine. When I look back and attempt to recall the time, I see but a
cloudy waste of misery crossed by the lightning-streaks of a sense of
injury. All that was left me now was a cat-like watching for the chance
of going to my grandmother. Into her ear I would pour the tale of my
wrong. She who had been as a haunting discomfort to me, had grown to be
my one consolation.

My lessons went on as usual. A certain pride enabled me to learn them
tolerably for a day or two; but when that faded, my whole being began
to flag. For some time my existence was a kind of life in death. At
length one evening my uncle said to me, as we finished my lessons far
from satisfactorily--

‘Willie, your aunt and I think it better you should go to school. We
shall be very sorry to part with you, but it will be better. You will
then have companions of your own age. You have not enough to amuse you
at home.’

He did not allude by a single word to the affair of the watch. Could my
aunt have taken it, and never told him? It was not likely.

I was delighted at the idea of any change, for my life had grown
irksome to me.

‘Oh, thank you, uncle!’ I cried, with genuine expression.

I think he looked a little sad; but he uttered no reproach.

My aunt and he had already arranged everything. The next day but one, I
saw, for the first time, a carriage drive up to the door of the house.
I was waiting for it impatiently. My new clothes had all been packed in
a little box. I had not put in a single toy: I cared for nothing I had
now. The box was put up beside the driver. My aunt came to the door
where I was waiting for my uncle.

‘Mayn’t I go and say good-bye to grannie?’ I asked.

‘She’s not very well to-day,’ said my aunt. ‘I think you had better
not. You will be back at Christmas, you know.’

I was not so much grieved as I ought to have been. The loss of my watch
had made the thought of grannie painful again.

‘Your uncle will meet you at the road,’ continued my aunt, seeing me
still hesitate. ‘Good-bye.’

I received her cold embrace without emotion, clambered into the chaise,
and looking out as the driver shut the door, wondered what my aunt was
holding her apron to her eyes for, as she turned away into the house.
My uncle met us and got in, and away the chaise rattled, bearing me
towards an utterly new experience; for hardly could the strangest
region in foreign lands be more unknown to the wandering mariner than
the faces and ways of even my own kind were to me. I had never played
for one half-hour with boy or girl. I knew nothing of their play-things
or their games. I hardly knew what boys were like, except, outwardly,
from the dim reflex of myself in the broken mirror in my bed-room,
whose lustre was more of the ice than the pool, and, inwardly, from the
partly exceptional experiences of my own nature, with which even I was
poorly enough acquainted.




CHAPTER VIII.


I GO TO SCHOOL, AND GRANNIE LEAVES IT.

It is an evil thing to break up a family before the natural period of
its dissolution. In the course of things, marriage, the necessities of
maintenance, or the energies of labour guiding ‘to fresh woods and
pastures new,’ are the ordered causes of separation.

Where the home is happy, much injury is done the children in sending
them to school, except it be a day-school, whither they go in the
morning as to the labours of the world, but whence they return at night
as to the heaven of repose. Conflict through the day, rest at night, is
the ideal. A day-school will suffice for the cultivation of the
necessary public or national spirit, without which the love of the
family may degenerate into a merely extended selfishness, but which is
itself founded upon those family affections. At the same time, it must
be confessed that boarding-schools are, in many cases, an antidote to
some of the evil conditions which exist at home.

To children whose home is a happy one, the exile to a school must be
bitter. Mine, however, was an unusual experience. Leaving aside the
specially troubled state in which I was when thus carried to the
village of Aldwick, I had few of the finer elements of the ideal home
in mine. The love of my childish heart had never been drawn out. My
grandmother had begun to do so, but her influence had been speedily
arrested. I was, as they say of cats, more attached to the place than
the people, and no regrets whatever interfered to quell the excitement
of expectation, wonder, and curiosity which filled me on the journey.
The motion of the vehicle, the sound of the horses’ hoofs, the
travellers we passed on the road--all seemed to partake of the
exuberant life which swelled and overflowed in me. Everything was as
happy, as excited, as I was.

When we entered the village, behold it was a region of glad tumult!
Were there not three dogs, two carts, a maid carrying pails of water,
and several groups of frolicking children in the street--not to mention
live ducks, and a glimpse of grazing geese on the common? There were
also two mothers at their cottage-doors, each with a baby in her arms.
I knew they were babies, although I had never seen a baby before. And
when we drove through the big wooden gate, and stopped at the door of
what had been the manor-house but was now Mr Elder’s school, the aspect
of the building, half-covered with ivy, bore to me a most friendly
look. Still more friendly was the face of the master’s wife, who
received us in a low dark parlour, with a thick soft carpet and rich
red curtains. It was a perfect paradise to my imagination. Nor did the
appearance of Mr Elder at all jar with the vision of coming happiness.
His round, rosy, spectacled face bore in it no premonitory suggestion
of birch or rod, and although I continued at his school for six years,
I never saw him use either. If a boy required that kind of treatment,
he sent him home. When my uncle left me, it was in more than
contentment with my lot. Nor did anything occur to alter my feeling
with regard to it. I soon became much attached to Mrs Elder. She was
just the woman for a schoolmaster’s wife--as full of maternity as she
could hold, but childless. By the end of the first day I thought I
loved her far more than my aunt. My aunt had done her duty towards me;
but how was a child to weigh that? She had taken no trouble to make me
love her; she had shown me none of the signs of affection, and I could
not appreciate the proofs of it yet.

I soon perceived a great difference between my uncle’s way of teaching
and that of Mr Elder. My uncle always appeared aware of something
behind which pressed upon, perhaps hurried, the fact he was making me
understand. He made me feel, perhaps too much, that it was a mere step
towards something beyond. Mr Elder, on the other hand, placed every
point in such a strong light that it seemed in itself of primary
consequence. Both were, if my judgment after so many years be correct,
admirable teachers--my uncle the greater, my school-master the more
immediately efficient. As I was a manageable boy to the very verge of
weakness, the relations between us were entirely pleasant.

There were only six more pupils, all of them sufficiently older than
myself to be ready to pet and indulge me. No one who saw me mounted on
the back of the eldest, a lad of fifteen, and driving four of them in
hand, while the sixth ran alongside as an outrider--could have wondered
that I should find school better than home. Before the first day was
over, the sorrows of the lost watch and sword had vanished utterly. For
what was possession to being possessed? What was a watch, even had it
been going, to the movements of life? To peep from the wicket in the
great gate out upon the village street, with the well in the middle of
it, and a girl in the sunshine winding up the green dripping bucket
from the unknown depths of coolness, was more than a thousand watches.
But this was by no means the extent of my new survey of things. One of
the causes of Mr Elder’s keeping no boy who required chastisement was
his own love of freedom, and his consequent desire to give the boys as
much liberty out of school hours as possible. He believed in freedom.
‘The great end of training,’ he said to me many years after, when he
was quite an old man, ‘is liberty; and the sooner you can get a boy to
be a law to himself, the sooner you make a man of him. This end is
impossible without freedom. Let those who have no choice, or who have
not the same end in view, do the best they can with such boys as they
find: I chose only such as could bear liberty. I never set up as a
reformer--only as an educator. For that kind of work others were more
fit than I. It was not my calling.’ Hence Mr Elder no more allowed
labour to intrude upon play, than play to intrude upon labour. As soon
as lessons were over, we were free to go where we would and do what we
would, under certain general restrictions, which had more to do with
social proprieties than with school regulations. We roamed the country
from tea-time till sun-down; sometimes in the Summer long after that.
Sometimes also on moonlit nights in Winter, occasionally even when the
stars and the snow gave the only light, we were allowed the same
liberty until nearly bedtime. Before Christmas came, variety, exercise,
and social blessedness had wrought upon me so that when I returned
home, my uncle and aunt were astonished at the change in me. I had
grown half a head, and the paleness, which they had considered a
peculiar accident of my appearance, had given place to a rosy glow. My
flitting step too had vanished: I soon became aware that I made more
noise than my aunt liked, for in the old house silence was in its very
temple. My uncle, however, would only smile and say--

‘Don’t bring the place about our ears, Willie, my boy. I should like it
to last my time.’

‘I’m afraid,’ my aunt would interpose, ‘Mr Elder doesn’t keep very good
order in his school.’

Then I would fire up in defence of the master, and my uncle would sit
and listen, looking both pleased and amused.

I had not been many moments in the house before I said--

‘Mayn’t I run up and see grannie, uncle?’

‘I will go and see how she is,’ my aunt said, rising.

She went, and presently returning, said

‘Grannie seems a little better. You may come. She wants to see you.’

I followed her. When I entered the room and looked expectantly towards
her usual place, I found her chair empty. I turned to the bed. There
she was, and I thought she looked much the same; but when I came
nearer, I perceived a change in her countenance. She welcomed me
feebly, stroked my hair and my cheeks, smiled sweetly, and closed her
eyes. My aunt led me away.

When bedtime came, I went to my own room, and was soon fast asleep.
What roused me I do not know, but I awoke in the midst of the darkness,
and the next moment I heard a groan. It thrilled me with horror. I sat
up in bed and listened, but heard no more. As I sat listening, heedless
of the cold, the explanation dawned upon me, for my powers of
reflection and combination had been developed by my enlarged experience
of life. In our many wanderings, I had learned to choose between roads
and to make conjectures from the _lie_ of the country. I had likewise
lived in a far larger house than my home. Hence it now dawned upon me,
for the first time, that grannie’s room must be next to mine, although
approached from the other side, and that the groan must have been hers.
She might be in need of help. I remembered at the same time how she had
wished to have me by her in the middle of the night, that she might be
able to tell me what she could not recall in the day. I got up at once,
dressed myself, and stole down the one stair, across the kitchen, and
up the other. I gently opened grannie’s door and peeped in. A fire was
burning in the room. I entered and approached the bed. I wondered how I
had the courage; but children more than grown people are moved by
unlikely impulses. Grannie lay breathing heavily. I stood for a moment.
The faint light flickered over her white face. It was the middle of the
night, and the tide of fear inseparable from the night began to rise.
My old fear of her began to return with it. But she lifted her lids,
and the terror ebbed away. She looked at me, but did not seem to know
me. I went nearer.

‘Grannie,’ I said, close to her ear, and speaking low; ‘you wanted to
see me at night--that was before I went to school. I’m here, grannie.’

The sheet was folded back so smooth that she could hardly have turned
over since it had been arranged for the night. Her hand was lying upon
it. She lifted it feebly and stroked my cheek once more. Her lips
murmured something which I could not hear, and then came a deep sigh,
almost a groan. The terror returned when I found she could not speak to
me.

‘Shall I go and fetch auntie?’ I whispered.

She shook her head feebly, and looked wistfully at me. Her lips moved
again. I guessed that she wanted me to sit beside her. I got a chair,
placed it by the bedside, and sat down. She put out her hand, as if
searching for something. I laid mine in it. She closed her fingers upon
it and seemed satisfied. When I looked again, she was asleep and
breathing quietly. I was afraid to take my hand from hers lest I should
wake her. I laid my head on the side of the bed, and was soon fast
asleep also.

I was awaked by a noise in the room. It was Nannie laying the fire.
When she saw me she gave a cry of terror.

‘Hush, Nannie!’ I said; ‘you will wake grannie:’ and as I spoke I rose,
for I found my hand was free.

‘Oh, Master Willie!’ said Nannie, in a low voice; ‘how did you come
here? You sent my heart into my mouth.’

‘Swallow it again, Nannie,’ I answered, ‘and don’t tell auntie. I came
to see grannie, and fell asleep. I’m rather cold. I’ll go to bed now.
Auntie’s not up, is she?

‘No. It’s not time for anybody to be up yet.’

Nannie ought to have spent the night in grannie’s room, for it was her
turn to watch; but finding her nicely asleep as she thought, she had
slipped away for just an hour of comfort in bed. The hour had grown to
three. When she returned the fire was out.

When I came down to breakfast the solemn look upon my uncle’s face
caused me a foreboding of change.

‘God has taken grannie away in the night, Willie,’ said he, holding the
hand I had placed in his.

‘Is she dead?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he answered.

‘Oh, then, you will let her go to her grave now, won’t you?’ I
said--the recollection of her old grievance coming first in association
with her death, and occasioning a more childish speech than belonged to
my years.

‘Yes. She’ll get to her grave now,’ said my aunt, with a trembling in
her voice I had never heard before.

‘No,’ objected my uncle. ‘Her body will go to the grave, but her soul
will go to heaven.’

‘Her soul!’ I said. ‘What’s that?’

‘Dear me, Willie! don’t you know that?’ said my aunt. ‘Don’t you know
you’ve got a soul as well as a body?’

‘I’m sure _I_ haven’t,’ I returned. ‘What was grannie’s like?’

‘That I can’t tell you,’ she answered.

‘Have you got one, auntie?’

‘Yes.’

‘What is yours like then?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But,’ I said, turning to my uncle, ‘if her body goes to the grave, and
her soul to heaven, what’s to become of poor grannie--without either of
them, you see?’

My uncle had been thinking while we talked.

‘That can’t be the way to represent the thing, Jane; it puzzles the
child. No, Willie; grannie’s body goes to the grave, but grannie
herself is gone to heaven. What people call her soul is just grannie
herself.’

‘Why don’t they say so, then?’

My uncle fell a-thinking again. He did not, however, answer this last
question, for I suspect he found that it would not be good for me to
know the real cause--namely, that people hardly believed it, and
therefore did not say it. Most people believe far more in their bodies
than in their souls. What my uncle did say was--

‘I hardly know. But grannie’s gone to heaven anyhow.’

‘I’m so glad!’ I said. ‘She will be more comfortable there. She was too
old, you know, uncle.’

He made no reply. My aunt’s apron was covering her face, and when she
took it away, I observed that those eager almost angry eyes were red
with weeping. I began to feel a movement at my heart, the first
fluttering physical sign of a waking love towards her. ‘Don’t cry,
auntie,’ I said. ‘I don’t see anything to cry about. Grannie has got
what she wanted.’

She made me no answer, and I sat down to my breakfast. I don’t know how
it was, but I could not eat it. I rose and took my way to the hollow in
the field. I felt a strange excitement, not sorrow. Grannie was
actually dead at last. I did not quite know what it meant. I had never
seen a dead body. Neither did I know that she had died while I slept
with my hand in hers. Nannie, seeing something peculiar, had gone to
her the moment I left the room, and had found her quite cold. Had we
been a talking family, I might have been uneasy until I had told the
story of my last interview with her; but I never thought of saying a
word about it. I cannot help thinking now that I was waked up and sent
to the old woman, my great-grandmother, in the middle of the night, to
help her to die in comfort. Who knows? What we can neither prove nor
comprehend forms, I suspect, the infinitely larger part of our being.

When I was taken to see what remained of grannie, I experienced nothing
of the dismay which some children feel at the sight of death. It was as
if she had seen something just in time to leave the look of it behind
her there, and so the final expression was a revelation. For a while
there seems to remain this one link between some dead bodies and their
living spirits. But my aunt, with a common superstition, would have me
touch the face. That, I confess, made me shudder: the cold of death is
so unlike any other cold! I seemed to feel it in my hand all the rest
of the day.

I saw what seemed grannie--I am too near death myself to consent to
call a dead body the man or the woman--laid in the grave for which she
had longed, and returned home with a sense that somehow there was a
barrier broken down between me and my uncle and aunt. I felt as near my
uncle now as I had ever been. That evening he did not go to his own
room, but sat with my aunt and me in the kitchen-hall. We pulled the
great high-backed oaken settle before the fire, and my aunt made a
great blaze, for it was very cold. They sat one in each corner, and I
sat between them, and told them many things concerning the school. They
asked me questions and encouraged my prattle, seeming well pleased that
the old silence should be broken. I fancy I brought them a little
nearer to each other that night. It was after a funeral, and yet they
both looked happier than I had ever seen them before.




CHAPTER IX.


I SIN AND REPENT.

The Christmas holidays went by more rapidly than I had expected. I
betook myself with enlarged faculty to my book-mending, and more than
ever enjoyed making my uncle’s old volumes tidy. When I returned to
school, it was with real sorrow at parting from my uncle; and even
towards my aunt I now felt a growing attraction.

I shall not dwell upon my school history. That would be to spin out my
narrative unnecessarily. I shall only relate such occurrences as are
guide-posts in the direction of those main events which properly
constitute my history.

I had been about two years with Mr Elder. The usual holidays had
intervened, upon which occasions I found the pleasures of home so
multiplied by increase of liberty and the enlarged confidence of my
uncle, who took me about with him everywhere, that they were now almost
capable of rivalling those of school. But before I relate an incident
which occurred in the second Autumn, I must say a few words about my
character at this time.

My reader will please to remember that I had never been driven, or
oppressed in any way. The affair of the watch was quite an isolated
instance, and so immediately followed by the change and fresh life of
school that it had not left a mark behind. Nothing had yet occurred to
generate in me any fear before the face of man. I had been vaguely
uneasy in relation to my grandmother, but that uneasiness had almost
vanished before her death. Hence the faith natural to childhood had
received no check. My aunt was at worst cold; she had never been harsh;
while over Nannie I was absolute ruler. The only time that evil had
threatened me, I had been faithfully defended by my guardian uncle. At
school, while I found myself more under law, I yet found myself
possessed of greater freedom. Every one was friendly and more than
kind. From all this the result was that my nature was unusually
trusting.

We had a whole holiday, and, all seven, set out to enjoy ourselves. It
was a delicious morning in Autumn, clear and cool, with a great light
in the east, and the west nowhere. Neither the autumnal tints nor the
sharpening wind had any sadness in those young years which we call the
old years afterwards. How strange it seems to have--all of us--to say
with the Jewish poet: I have been young, and now am old! A wood in the
distance, rising up the slope of a hill, was our goal, for we were
after hazel-nuts. Frolicking, scampering, leaping over stiles, we felt
the road vanish under our feet. When we gained the wood, although we
failed in our quest we found plenty of amusement; that grew everywhere.
At length it was time to return, and we resolved on going home by
another road--one we did not know.

After walking a good distance, we arrived at a gate and lodge, where we
stopped to inquire the way. A kind-faced woman informed us that we
should shorten it much by going through the park, which, as we seemed
respectable boys, she would allow us to do. We thanked her, entered,
and went walking along a smooth road, through open sward, clumps of
trees and an occasional piece of artful neglect in the shape of rough
hillocks covered with wild shrubs, such as brier and broom. It was very
delightful, and we walked along merrily. I can yet recall the
individual shapes of certain hawthorn trees we passed, whose extreme
age had found expression in a wild grotesqueness which would have been
ridiculous but for a dim, painful resemblance to the distortion of old
age in the human family.

After walking some distance, we began to doubt whether we might not
have missed the way to the gate of which the woman had spoken. For a
wall appeared, which, to judge from the tree-tops visible over it, must
surround a kitchen garden or orchard; and from this we feared we had
come too nigh the house. We had not gone much further before a branch,
projecting over the wall, from whose tip, as if the tempter had gone
back to his old tricks, hung a rosy-cheeked apple, drew our eyes and
arrested our steps. There are grown people who cannot, without an
effort of the imagination, figure to themselves the attraction between
a boy and an apple; but I suspect there are others the memories of
whose boyish freaks will render it yet more difficult for them to
understand a single moment’s contemplation of such an object without
the endeavour to appropriate it. To them the boy seems made for the
apple, and the apple for the boy. Rosy, round-faced, spectacled Mr
Elder, however, had such a fine sense of honour in himself that he had
been to a rare degree successful in developing a similar sense in his
boys, and I do believe that not one of us would, under any
circumstances, except possibly those of terrifying compulsion, have
pulled that apple. We stood in rapt contemplation for a few moments,
and then walked away. But although there are no degrees in Virtue, who
will still demand her uttermost farthing, there are degrees in the
virtuousness of human beings.

As we walked away, I was the last, and was just passing from under the
branch when something struck the ground at my heel. I turned. An apple
must fall some time, and for this apple that some time was then. It lay
at my feet. I lifted it and stood gazing at it--I need not say with
admiration. My mind fell a-working. The adversary was there, and the
angel too. The apple had dropped at my feet; I had not pulled it. There
it would lie wasting, if some one with less right than I--said the
prince of special pleaders--was not the second to find it. Besides,
what fell in the road was public property. Only this was not a public
road, the angel reminded me. My will fluttered from side to side, now
turning its ear to my conscience, now turning away and hearkening to my
impulse. At last, weary of the strife, I determined to settle it by a
just contempt of trifles--and, half in desperation, bit into the ruddy
cheek.

The moment I saw the wound my teeth had made, I knew what I had done,
and my heart died within me. I was self-condemned. It was a new and an
awful sensation--a sensation that could not be for a moment endured.
The misery was too intense to leave room for repentance even. With a
sudden resolve born of despair, I shoved the type of the broken law
into my pocket and followed my companions. But I kept at some distance
behind them, for as yet I dared not hold further communication with
respectable people. I did not, and do not now, believe that there was
one amongst them who would have done as I had done. Probably also not
one of them would have thought of my way of deliverance from
unendurable self-contempt. The curse had passed upon me, but I saw a
way of escape.

A few yards further, they found the road we thought we had missed. It
struck off into a hollow, the sides of which were covered with trees.
As they turned into it they looked back and called me to come on. I ran
as if I wanted to overtake them, but the moment they were out of sight,
left the road for the grass, and set off at full speed in the same
direction as before. I had not gone far before I was in the midst of
trees, overflowing the hollow in which my companions had disappeared,
and spreading themselves over the level above. As I entered their
shadow, my old awe of the trees returned upon me--an awe I had nearly
forgotten, but revived by my crime. I pressed along, however, for to
turn back would have been more dreadful than any fear. At length, with
a sudden turn, the road left the trees behind, and what a scene opened
before me! I stood on the verge of a large space of greensward, smooth
and well-kept as a lawn, but somewhat irregular in surface. From all
sides it rose towards the centre. There a broad, low rock seemed to
grow out of it, and upon the rock stood the lordliest house my childish
eyes had ever beheld. Take situation and all, and I have scarcely yet
beheld one to equal it. Half castle, half old English country seat, it
covered the rock with a huge square of building, from various parts of
which rose towers, mostly square also, of different heights. I stood
for one brief moment entranced with awful delight. A building which has
grown for ages, the outcome of the life of powerful generations, has
about it a majesty which, in certain moods, is overpowering. For one
brief moment I forgot my sin and its sorrow. But memory awoke with a
fresh pang. To this lordly place I, poor miserable sinner, was a debtor
by wrong and shame. Let no one laugh at me because my sin was small: it
was enough for me, being that of one who had stolen for the first time,
and that without previous declension, and searing of the conscience. I
hurried towards the building, anxiously looking for some entrance.

I had approached so near that, seated on its rock, it seemed to shoot
its towers into the zenith, when, rounding a corner, I came to a part
where the height sank from the foundation of the house to the level by
a grassy slope, and at the foot of the slope espied an elderly
gentleman, in a white hat, who stood with his hands in his
breeches-pockets, looking about him. He was tall and stout, and carried
himself in what seemed to me a stately manner. As I drew near him I
felt somewhat encouraged by a glimpse of his face, which was rubicund
and, I thought, good-natured; but, approaching him rather from behind,
I could not see it well. When I addressed him he started,

‘Please, sir,’ I said, ‘is this your house?’

‘Yes, my man; it is my house,’ he answered, looking down on me with
bent neck, his hands still in his pockets.

‘Please, sir,’ I said, but here my voice began to tremble, and he grew
dim and large through the veil of my gathering tears. I hesitated.

‘Well, what do you want?’ he asked, in a tone half jocular, half kind.

I made a great effort and recovered my self-possession.

‘Please, sir,’ I repeated, ‘I want you to box my ears.’

‘Well, you are a funny fellow! What should I box your ears for, pray?’

‘Because I’ve been very wicked,’ I answered; and, putting my hand into
my pocket, I extracted the bitten apple, and held it up to him.

‘Ho! ho!’ he said, beginning to guess what I must mean, but hardly the
less bewildered for that; ‘is that one of my apples?’

‘Yes, sir. It fell down from a branch that hung over the wall. I took
it up, and--and--I took a bite of it, and--and--I’m so sorry!’

Here I burst into a fit of crying which I choked as much as I could. I
remember quite well how, as I stood holding out the apple, my arm would
shake with the violence of my sobs.

‘I’m not fond of bitten apples,’ he said. ‘You had better eat it up
now.’

This brought me to myself. If he had shown me sympathy, I should have
gone on crying.

‘I would rather not. Please box my ears.’

‘I don’t want to box your ears. You’re welcome to the apple. Only don’t
take what’s not your own another time.’ ‘But, please, sir, I’m so
miserable!’

‘Home with you! and eat your apple as you go,’ was his unconsoling
response.

‘I can’t eat it; I’m so ashamed of myself.’

‘When people do wrong, I suppose they must be ashamed of themselves.
That’s all right, isn’t it?’

‘Why won’t you box my ears, then?’ I persisted.

 [Illustration: “HERE IS A YOUNG GENTLEMAN, MRS. WILSON, WHO SEEMS TO
HAVE LOST HIS WAY.”]

It was my sole but unavailing prayer. He turned away towards the house.
My trouble rose to agony. I made some wild motion of despair, and threw
myself on the grass. He turned, looked at me for a moment in silence,
and then said in a changed tone--

‘My boy, I am sorry for you. I beg you will not trouble yourself any
more. The affair is not worth it. Such a trifle! What can I do for
you?’

I got up. A new thought of possible relief had crossed my mind.

‘Please, sir, if you won’t box my ears, will you shake hands with me?’

‘To be sure I will,’ he answered, holding out his hand, and giving mine
a very kindly shake. ‘Where do you live?’

‘I am at school at Aldwick, at Mr Elder’s.’

‘You’re a long way from home!’

‘Am I, sir? Will you tell me how to go? But it’s of no consequence. I
don’t mind anything now you’ve forgiven me. I shall soon run home.’

‘Come with me first. You must have something to eat.’

I wanted nothing to eat, but how could I oppose anything he said? I
followed him at once, drying my eyes as I went. He led me to a great
gate which I had passed before, and opening a wicket, took me across a
court, and through another building where I saw many servants going
about; then across a second court, which was paved with large flags,
and so to a door which he opened, calling--

‘Mrs Wilson! Mrs Wilson! I want you a moment.’

‘Yes, Sir Giles,’ answered a tall, stiff-looking elderly woman who
presently appeared descending, with upright spine, a corkscrew
staircase of stone.

‘Here is a young gentleman, Mrs Wilson, who seems to have lost his way.
He is one of Mr Elder’s pupils at Aldwick. Will you get him something
to eat and drink, and then send him home?’

‘I will, Sir Giles.’

‘Good-bye, my man,’ said Sir Giles, again shaking hands with me. Then
turning anew to the housekeeper, for such I found she was, he added:

‘Couldn’t you find a bag for him, and fill it with some of those brown
pippins? They’re good eating, ain’t they?’

‘With pleasure, Sir Giles.’

Thereupon Sir Giles withdrew, closing the door behind him, and leaving
me with the sense of life from the dead.

‘What’s your name, young gentleman?’ asked Mrs Wilson, with, I thought,
some degree of sternness.

‘Wilfrid Cumbermede,’ I answered.

She stared at me a little, with a stare which would have been a start
in most women. I was by this time calm enough to take a quiet look at
her. She was dressed in black silk, with a white neckerchief crossing
in front, and black mittens on her hands. After gazing at me fixedly
for a moment or two, she turned away and ascended the stair, which went
up straight from the door, saying--

‘Come with me, Master Cumbermede. You must have some tea before you
go.’

I obeyed, and followed her into a long, low-ceiled room, wainscotted
all over in panels, with a square moulding at the top, which served for
a cornice. The ceiling was ornamented with plaster reliefs. The windows
looked out, on one side into the court, on the other upon the park. The
floor was black and polished like a mirror, with bits of carpet here
and there, and a rug before the curious, old-fashioned grate, where a
little fire was burning and a small kettle boiling fiercely on the top
of it. The tea-tray was already on the table. She got another cup and
saucer, added a pot of jam to the preparations, and said:

‘Sit down and have some bread and butter, while I make the tea.’

She cut me a great piece of bread, and then a great piece of butter,
and I lost no time in discovering that the quality was worthy of the
quantity. Mrs Wilson kept a grave silence for a good while. At last, as
she was pouring out the second cup, she looked at me over the teapot,
and said--

‘You don’t remember your mother, I suppose, Master Cumbermede?’

‘No, ma’am. I never saw my mother.’

‘Within your recollection, you mean. But you must have seen her, for
you were two years old when she died.’

‘Did you know my mother, then, ma’am?’ I asked, but without any great
surprise, for the events of the day had been so much out of the
ordinary that I had for the time almost lost the faculty of wonder.

She compressed her thin lips, and a perpendicular wrinkle appeared in
the middle of her forehead, as she answered--

‘Yes; I knew your mother.’

‘She was very good, wasn’t she, ma’am?’ I said, with my mouth full of
bread and butter.

‘Yes. Who told you that?’

‘I was sure of it. Nobody ever told me.’

‘Did they never talk to you about her?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘So you are at Mr Elder’s, are you?’ she said, after another long
pause, during which I was not idle, for my trouble being gone I could
now be hungry.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘How did you come here, then?’

‘I walked with the rest of the boys; but they are gone home without
me.’

Thanks to the kindness of Sir Giles, my fault had already withdrawn so
far into the past, that I wished to turn my back upon it altogether. I
saw no need for confessing it to Mrs Wilson; and there was none.

‘Did you lose your way?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘What brought you here, then? I suppose you wanted to see the place.’

‘The woman at the lodge told us the nearest way was through the park.’

I quite expected she would go on cross-questioning me, and then all the
truth would have had to come out. But to my great relief, she went no
further, only kept eyeing me in a manner so oppressive as to compel me
to eat bread and butter and strawberry jam with self-defensive
eagerness. I presume she trusted to find out the truth by-and-by. She
contented herself in the mean time with asking questions about my uncle
and aunt, the farm, the school, and Mr and Mrs Elder, all in a cold,
stately, refraining manner, with two spots of red in her face--one on
each cheek-bone, and a thin rather peevish nose dividing them. But her
forehead was good, and when she smiled, which was not often, her eyes
shone. Still, even I, with my small knowledge of womankind, was dimly
aware that she was feeling her way with me, and I did not like her
much.

‘Have you nearly done?’ she asked at length.

‘Yes, quite, thank you,’ I answered.

‘Are you going back to school to-night?’

‘Yes, ma’am; of course.’

‘How are you going?’

‘If you will tell me the way--’

‘Do you know how far you are from Aldwick?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Eight miles,’ she answered; ‘and it’s getting rather late.’

I was seated opposite the windows to the park, and, looking up, saw
with some dismay that the air was getting dusky. I rose at once,
saying--

‘I must make haste. They will think I am lost.’

‘But you can never walk so far, Master Cumbermede.’

‘Oh, but I must! I can’t help it. I must get back as fast as possible.’

‘You never can walk such a distance. Take another bit of cake while I
go and see what can be done.’

Another piece of cake being within the bounds of possibility, I might
at least wait and see what Mrs Wilson’s design was. She left the room,
and I turned to the cake. In a little while she came back, sat down,
and went on talking. I was beginning to get quite uneasy, when a maid
put her head in at the door, and said--

‘Please, Mrs Wilson, the dog-cart’s ready, ma’am.’

‘Very well,’ replied Mrs Wilson, and turning to me, said--more kindly
than she had yet spoken--

‘Now, Master Cumbermede, you must come and see me again. I’m too busy
to spare much time when the family is at home; but they are all going
away the week after next, and if you will come and see me then, I shall
be glad to show you over the house.’

As she spoke she rose and led the way from the room, and out of the
court by another gate from that by which I had entered. At the bottom
of a steep descent, a groom was waiting with the dog-cart.

‘Here, James,’ said Mrs Wilson, ‘take good care of the young gentleman,
and put him down safe at Mr Elder’s. Master Wilfrid, you’ll find a
hamper of apples underneath. You had better not eat them all yourself,
you know. Here are two or three for you to eat by the way.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Wilson. No; I’m not quite so greedy as that,’ I
answered gaily, for my spirits were high at the notion of a ride in the
dog-cart instead of a long and dreary walk.

When I was fairly in, she shook hands with me, reminding me that I was
to visit her soon, and away went the dog-cart behind a high-stepping
horse. I had never before been in an open vehicle of any higher
description than a cart, and the ride was a great delight. We went a
different road from that which my companions had taken. It lay through
trees all the way till we were out of the park.

‘That’s the land-steward’s house,’ said James.

‘Oh, is it?’ I returned, not much interested. ‘What great trees those
are all about it.’

‘Yes; they’re the finest elms in all the county those,’ he answered.
‘Old Coningham knew what he was about when he got the last baronet to
let him build his nest there. Here we are at the gate!’

We came out upon a country road, which ran between the wall of the park
and a wooden fence along a field of grass. I offered James one of my
apples, which he accepted.

‘There, now!’ he said, ‘there’s a field!--A right good bit o’ grass
that! Our people has wanted to throw it into the park for hundreds of
years. But they won’t part with it for love or money. It ought by
rights to be ours, you see, by the lie of the country. It’s all one
grass with the park. But I suppose them as owns it ain’t of the same
mind.--Cur’ous old box!’ he added, pointing with his whip a long way
off. ‘You can just see the roof of it.’

I looked in the direction he pointed. A rise in the ground hid all but
an ancient, high-peaked roof. What was my astonishment to discover in
it the roof of my own home! I was certain it could be no other. It
caused a strange sensation, to come upon it thus from the outside, as
it were, when I thought myself miles and miles away from it, I fell
a-pondering over the matter; and as I reflected, I became convinced
that the trees from which we had just emerged were the same which used
to churn the wind for my childish fancies. I did not feel inclined to
share my feelings with my new acquaintance; but presently he put his
whip in the socket and fell to eating his apple. There was nothing more
in the conversation he afterwards resumed deserving of record. He
pulled up at the gate of the school, where I bade him good-night and
rang the bell.

There was great rejoicing over me when I entered, for the boys had
arrived without me a little while before, having searched all about the
place where we had parted company, and come at length to the conclusion
that I had played them a trick in order to get home without them, there
having been some fun on the road concerning my local stupidity. Mr
Elder, however, took me to his own room, and read me a lecture on the
necessity of not abusing my privileges. I told him the whole affair
from beginning to end, and thought he behaved very oddly. He turned
away every now and then, blew his nose, took off his spectacles, wiped
them carefully, and replaced them before turning again to me.

‘Go on, go on, my boy. I’m listening,’ he would say.

I cannot tell whether he was laughing or crying. I suspect both. When I
had finished, he said, very solemnly--

‘Wilfrid, you have had a narrow escape. I need not tell you how wrong
you were about the apple, for you know that as well as I do. But you
did the right thing when your eyes were opened. I am greatly pleased
with you, and greatly obliged to Sir Giles. I will write and thank him
this very night.’

‘Please, sir, ought I to tell the boys? I would rather not.’

‘No. I do not think it necessary.’

He rose and rang the bell.

‘Ask Master Fox to step this way.’

Fox was the oldest boy, and was on the point of leaving.

‘Fox,’ said Mr Elder, ‘Cumbermede has quite satisfied me. Will you
oblige me by asking him no questions. I am quite aware such a request
must seem strange, but I have good reasons for making it,’

‘Very well, sir,’ said Fox, glancing at me.

‘Take him with you, then, and tell the rest. It is as a favour to
myself that I put it, Fox.’

‘That is quite enough, sir.’

Fox took me to Mrs Elder, and had a talk with the rest before I saw
them. Some twenty years after, Fox and I had it out. I gave him a full
explanation, for by that time I could smile over the affair. But what
does the object matter?--an apple, or a thousand pounds? It is but the
peg on which the act hangs. The act is everything.

To the honour of my school-fellows I record that not one of them ever
let fall a hint in the direction of the mystery. Neither did Mr or Mrs
Elder once allude to it. If possible they were kinder than before.




CHAPTER X.


I BUILD CASTLES.

My companions had soon found out, and I think the discovery had
something to do with the kindness they always showed me, that I was a
good hand at spinning a yarn: the nautical phrase had got naturalized
in the school. We had no chance, if we would have taken it, of spending
any part of school-hours in such a pastime; but it formed an unfailing
amusement when weather or humour interfered with bodily exercises. Nor
were we debarred from the pleasure after we had retired for the
night,--only, as we were parted in three rooms, I could not have a
large audience then. I well remember, however, one occasion on which it
was otherwise. The report of a super-excellent invention having gone
abroad, one by one they came creeping into my room, after I and my
companion were in bed, until we lay three in each bed, all being
present but Fox. At the very heart of the climax, when a spectre was
appearing and disappearing momently with the drawing in and sending out
of his breath, so that you could not tell the one moment where he might
show himself the next, Mr Elder walked into the room with his
chamber-candle in his hand, straightway illuminating six countenances
pale with terror--for I took my full share of whatever emotion I roused
in the rest. But instead of laying a general interdict on the custom,
he only said,

‘Come, come, boys! it’s time you were asleep. Go to your rooms
directly.’

‘Please, sir,’ faltered one--Moberly by name--the dullest and most
honourable boy, to my thinking, amongst us, ‘mayn’t I stay where I am?
Cumbermede has put me all in a shiver.’

Mr Elder laughed, and turning to me, asked with his usual good-humour,

‘How long will your story take, Cumbermede?’

‘As long as you please, sir,’ I answered.

‘I can’t let you keep them awake all night, you know.’

‘There’s no fear of that, sir,’ I replied. ‘Moberly would have been
asleep long ago if it hadn’t been a ghost. Nothing keeps him awake but
ghosts.’

‘Well, is the ghost nearly done with?’

‘Not quite, sir. The worst is to come yet.’

‘Please, sir,’ interposed Moberly, ‘if you’ll let me stay where I am,
I’ll turn round on my deaf ear, and won’t listen to a word more of it.
It’s awful, I do assure you, sir.’ Mr Elder laughed again.

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Make haste and finish your story, Cumbermede, and
let them go to sleep. You, Moberly, may stay where you are for the
night, but I can’t have this made a practice of.’

‘No, no, sir,’ said several at once.

‘But why don’t you tell your stories by daylight, Cumbermede? I’m sure
you have time enough for them then.’

‘Oh, but he’s got one going for the day and another for the night.’

‘Then do you often lie three in a bed?’ asked Mr Elder with some
concern.

‘Oh no, sir. Only this is an extra good one, you see.’

Mr Elder laughed again, bade us good-night, and left us. The horror,
however, was broken. I could not call up one ‘shiver more, and in a few
minutes Moberly, as well as his two companions, had slipped away to
roomier quarters.

The material of the tales I told my companions was in part supplied
from some of my uncle’s old books, for in his little library there were
more than the _Arcadia_ of the same sort. But these had not merely
afforded me the stuff to remodel and imitate; their spirit had wrought
upon my spirit, and armour and war-horses and mighty swords were only
the instruments with which faithful knights wrought honourable deeds.

I had a tolerably clear perception that such deeds could not be done in
our days; that there were no more dragons lying in the woods: and that
ladies did not now fall into the hands of giants. But I had the witness
of an eternal impulse in myself that noble deeds had yet to be done,
and therefore might be done, although I knew not how. Hence a feeling
of the dignity of ancient descent, as involving association with great
men and great actions of old, and therefore rendering such more
attainable in the future, took deep root in my mind. Aware of the
humbleness of my birth, and unrestrained by pride in my parents--I had
lost them so early--I would indulge in many a day-dream of what I would
gladly have been. I would ponder over the delights of having a history,
and how grand it would be to find I was descended from some far-away
knight who had done deeds of high emprise. In such moods the
recollection of the old sword that had vanished from the wall would
return: indeed the impression it had made upon me may have been at the
root of it all. How I longed to know the story of it! But it had gone
to the grave with grannie. If my uncle or aunt knew it, I had no hope
of getting it from either of them; for I was certain they had no
sympathy with any such fancies as mine. My favourite invention, one for
which my audience was sure to call when I professed incompetence, and
which I enlarged and varied every time I returned to it, was of a youth
in humble life who found at length he was of far other origin then he
had supposed. I did not know then, that the fancy, not uncommon with
boys, has its roots in the deepest instincts of our human nature. I
need not add that I had not yet read Jean Paul’s _Titan, or Hesperus,
or Comet_.

This tendency of thought-received a fresh impulse from my visit to
Moldwarp Hall, as I choose to name the great house whither my
repentance had led me. It was the first I had ever seen to wake the
sense of the mighty antique. My home was, no doubt, older than some
parts of the hall; but the house we are born in never looks older than
the last generation until we begin to compare it with others. By this
time, what I had learned of the history of my country, and the general
growth of the allied forces of my intellect, had rendered me capable of
feeling the hoary eld of the great Hall. Henceforth it had a part in
every invention of my boyish imagination.

I was therefore not undesirous of keeping the half-engagement I had
made with Mrs Wilson, but it was not she that drew me. With all her
kindness, she had not attracted me, for cupboard-love is not the sole,
or always the most powerful, operant on the childish mind: it is in
general stronger in men than in either children or women. I would
rather not see Mrs Wilson again--she had fed my body, she had not
warmed my heart. It was the grand old house that attracted me. True, it
was associated with shame, but rather with the recovery from it than
with the fall itself; and what memorials of ancient grandeur and
knightly ways must lie within those walls, to harmonize with my many
dreams!

On the next holiday, Mr Elder gave me a ready permission to revisit
Moldwarp Hall. I had made myself acquainted with the nearest way by
crossroads and footpaths, and full of expectation, set out with my
companions. They accompanied me the greater part of the distance, and
left me at a certain gate, the same by which they had come out of the
park on the day of my first visit. I was glad when they were gone, for
I could then indulge my excited fancy at will. I heard their voices
draw away into the distance. I was alone on a little footpath which led
through a wood. All about me were strangely tall and slender oaks; but
as I advanced into the wood, the trees grew more various, and in some
of the opener spaces great old oaks, short and big-headed, stretched
out their huge shadow-filled arms in true oak-fashion. The ground was
uneven, and the path led up and down over hollow and hillock, now
crossing a swampy bottom, now climbing the ridge of a rocky eminence.
It was a lovely forenoon, with grey-blue sky and white clouds. The sun
shone plentifully into the wood, for the leaves were thin. They hung
like clouds of gold and royal purple above my head, layer over layer,
with the blue sky and the snowy clouds shining through. On the ground
it was a world of shadows and sunny streaks, kept ever in interfluent
motion by such a wind as John Skelton describes:

     ‘There blew in that gardynge a soft piplyng cold
      Enbrethyng of Zepherus with his pleasant wynde.’


I went merrily along. The birds were not singing, but my heart did not
need them. It was Spring-time there, whatever it might be in the world.
The heaven of my childhood wanted no lark to make it gay. Had the trees
been bare, and the frost shining on the ground, it would have been all
the same. The sunlight was enough.

I was standing on the root of a great beech-tree, gazing up into the
gulf of its foliage, and watching the broken lights playing about in
the leaves and leaping from twig to branch, like birds yet more golden
than the leaves, when a voice startled me.

‘You’re not looking for apples in a beech-tree, hey? it said.

I turned instantly, with my heart in a flutter. To my great relief I
saw that the speaker was not Sir Giles, and that probably no allusion
was intended. But my first apprehension made way only for another pang,
for, although I did not know the man, a strange dismay shot through me
at sight of him. His countenance was associated with an undefined but
painful fact that lay crouching in a dusky hollow of my memory. I had
no time now to entice it into the light of recollection. I took heart
and spoke.

‘No,’ I answered; ‘I was only watching the sun on the leaves.’

‘Very pretty, ain’t it? Ah, it’s lovely! It’s quite beautiful--ain’t it
now? You like good timber, don’t you? Trees, I mean?’ he explained,
aware, I suppose, of some perplexity on my countenance.

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘I like big old ones best.’

‘Yes, yes,’ he returned, with an energy that sounded strange and
jarring to my mood; ‘big old ones, that have stood for ages--the
monarchs of the forest. Saplings ain’t bad things either, though. But
old ones are best. Just come here, and I’ll show you one worth looking
at. _It_ wasn’t planted yesterday, _I_ can tell you.’

I followed him along the path, until we came out of the wood. Beyond us
the ground rose steep and high, and was covered with trees; but here in
the hollow it was open. A stream ran along between us and the height.
On this side of the stream stood a mighty tree, towards which my
companion led me. It was an oak, with such a bushy head and such great
roots rising in serpent rolls and heaves above the ground, that the
stem looked stunted between them.

‘There!’ said my companion; ‘there’s a tree! there’s something like a
tree! How a man must feel to call a tree like that his own! That’s
Queen Elizabeth’s oak. It is indeed. England is dotted with would-be
Queen Elizabeth’s oaks; but there is the very oak which she admired so
much that she ordered luncheon to be served under it.... Ah! she knew
the value of timber--did good Queen Bess. _That’s_ now--now--let me
see--the year after the Armada--nine from fifteen--ah well, somewhere
about two hundred and thirty years ago.’

‘How lumpy and hard it looks!’ I remarked.

‘That’s the breed and the age of it,’ he returned. ‘The wonder to me is
they don’t turn to stone and last for ever, those trees. Ah! there’s
something to live for now!’

He had turned away to resume his walk, but as he finished the sentence,
he turned again towards the tree, and shook his finger at it, as if
reproaching it for belonging to somebody else than himself.

‘Where are you going now?’ he asked, wheeling round upon me sharply,
with a keen look in his magpie-eyes, as the French would call them,
which hardly corresponded with the bluntness of his address.

‘I’m going to the Hall,’ I answered, turning away.

‘You’ll never get there that way. How are you to cross the river?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never been this way before.’

‘You’ve been to the Hall before, then? Whom do you know there?’

‘Mrs Wilson,’ I answered.

‘H’m! Ah! You know Mrs Wilson, do you? Nice woman, Mrs Wilson!’

He said this as if he meant the opposite.

‘Here,’ he went on--‘come with me. I’ll show you the way.’

I obeyed, and followed him along the bank of the stream.

‘What a curious bridge!’ I exclaimed, as we came in sight of an ancient
structure lifted high in the middle on the point of a Gothic arch.

‘Yes, ain’t it? he said. ‘Curious? I should think so! And well it may
be! It’s as old as the oak there at least. There’s a bridge now for a
man like Sir Giles to call his own!’

‘He can’t keep it though,’ I said, moralizing; for, in carrying on the
threads of my stories, I had come to see that no climax could last for
ever.

‘Can’t keep it! He could carry off every stone of it if he liked.’

‘Then it wouldn’t be the bridge any longer.’

‘You’re a sharp one,’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ I answered, truly enough. I seemed to myself to be
talking sense, that was all.

‘Well, I do. What do you mean by saying he couldn’t keep it?’

‘It’s been a good many people’s already, and it’ll be somebody else’s
some day,’ I replied.

He did not seem to relish the suggestion, for he gave a kind of grunt,
which gradually broke into a laugh as he answered,

‘Likely enough! likely enough!’

We had now come round to the end of the bridge, and I saw that it was
far more curious than I had perceived before.

‘Why is it so narrow?’ I asked, wonderingly, for it was not three feet
wide, and had a parapet of stone about three feet high on each side of
it.

‘Ah!’ he replied, ‘that’s it, you see. As old as the hills. It was
built, _this_ bridge was, before ever a carriage was made--yes, before
ever a carrier’s cart went along a road. They carried everything then
upon horses’ backs. They call this the pack-horse bridge. You see
there’s room for the horses’ legs, and their loads could stick out over
the parapets. That’s the way they carried everything to the Hall then.
That was a few years before _you_ were born, young gentleman.’

‘But they couldn’t get their legs--the horses, I mean--couldn’t get
their legs through this narrow opening,’ I objected; for a flat stone
almost blocked up each end.

‘No; that’s true enough. But those stones have been up only a hundred
years or so. They didn’t want it for pack-horses any more then, and the
stones were put up to keep the cattle, with which at some time or other
I suppose some thrifty owner had stocked the park, from crossing to
this meadow. That would be before those trees were planted up there.’

When we had crossed the stream, he stopped at the other end of the
bridge and said,

‘Now, you go that way--up the hill. There’s a kind of path, if you can
find it, but it doesn’t much matter. Good morning.’

He walked away down the bank of the stream, while I struck into the
wood.

When I reached the top, and emerged from the trees that skirted the
ridge, there stood the lordly Hall before me, shining in autumnal
sunlight, with gilded vanes and diamond-paned windows, as if it were a
rock against which the gentle waves of the sea of light rippled and
broke in flashes. When you looked at its foundation, which seemed to
have torn its way up through the clinging sward, you could not tell
where the building began and the rock ended. In some parts indeed the
rock was wrought into the walls of the house; while in others it was
faced up with stone and mortar. My heart beat high with vague
rejoicing. Grand as the aged oak had looked, here was a grander
growth--a growth older too than the oak, and inclosing within it a
thousand histories.

I approached the gate by which Mrs Wilson had dismissed me. A flight of
rude steps cut in the rock led to the portcullis, which still hung, now
fixed in its place in front of the gate; for though the Hall had no
external defences, it had been well fitted for the half-sieges of
troublous times. A modern mansion stands, with its broad sweep up to
the wide door, like its hospitable owner in full dress and
broad-bosomed shirt on his own hearth-rug: this ancient house stood
with its back to the world, like one of its ancient owners, ready to
ride, in morion, breast-plate, and jack-boots--yet not armed
_cap-à-pie_, not like a walled castle, that is.

I ascended the steps, and stood before the arch--filled with a great
iron-studded oaken gate--which led through a square tower into the
court. I stood gazing for some minutes before I rang the bell. Two
things in particular I noticed. The first was--over the arch of the
doorway, amongst others--one device very like the animal’s head upon
the watch and the seal which my great-grandmother had given me. I could
not be sure it was the same, for the shape--both in the stone and in my
memory--was considerably worn. The other interested me far more. In
the great gate was a small wicket, so small that there was hardly room
for me to pass without stooping. A thick stone threshold lay before it.
The spot where the right foot must fall in stepping out of the wicket
was worn into the shape of a shoe, to the depth of between three and
four inches I should judge, vertically into the stone. The deep
foot-mould conveyed to me a sense of the coming and going of
generations, such as I could not gather from the age-worn walls of the
building.

A great bell-handle at the end of a jointed iron-rod hung down by the
side of the wicket. I rang. An old woman opened the wicket, and allowed
me to enter. I thought I remembered the way to Mrs Wilson’s door well
enough, but when I ascended the few broad steps, curved to the shape of
the corner in which the entrance stood, and found myself in the flagged
court, I was bewildered, and had to follow the retreating portress for
directions. A word set me right, and I was soon in Mrs Wilson’s
presence. She received me kindly, and expressed her satisfaction that I
had kept what she was pleased to consider my engagement.

After some refreshment and a little talk, Mrs Wilson said,

‘Now, Master Cumbermede, would you like to go and see the gardens, or
take a walk in the park and look at the deer?’

‘Please, Mrs Wilson,’ I returned, ‘you promised to show me the house.’

‘You would like that, would you?’

‘Yes,’ I answered,--‘better than anything.’

‘Come, then,’ she said, and took a bunch of keys from the wall. ‘Some
of the rooms I lock up when the family’s away.’

It was a vast place. Roughly it may be described as a large oblong
which the great hall, with the kitchen and its offices, divided into
two square courts--the one flagged, the other gravelled. A passage
dividing the hall from the kitchen led through from the one court to
the other. We entered this central portion through a small tower; and,
after a peep at the hall, ascended to a room above the entrance,
accessible from an open gallery which ran along two sides of the hall.
The room was square, occupying the area-space of the little entrance
tower. To my joyous amazement, its walls were crowded with swords,
daggers--weapons in endless variety, mingled with guns and pistols, for
which I cared less. Some which had hilts curiously carved and even
jewelled, seemed of foreign make. Their character was different from
that of the rest; but most were evidently of the same family with the
one sword I knew. Mrs Wilson could tell me nothing about them. All she
knew was that this was the armoury, and that Sir Giles had a book with
something written in it about every one of the weapons. They were no
chance collection: each had a history. I gazed in wonder and delight.
Above the weapons hung many pieces of armour--no entire suits, however;
of those there were several in the hall below. Finding that Mrs Wilson
did not object to my handling the weapons within my reach, I was soon
so much absorbed in the examination of them that I started when she
spoke.

‘You shall come again, Master Cumbermede,’ she said. ‘We must go now.’
I replaced a Highland broadsword, and turned to follow her. She was
evidently pleased with the alacrity of my obedience, and for the first
time bestowed on me a smile as she led the way from the armoury by
another door. To my enhanced delight this door led into the library.
Gladly would I have lingered, but Mrs Wilson walked on, and I followed
through rooms and rooms, low-pitched, and hung with tapestry, some
carpeted, some floored with black polished oak, others with some kind
of cement or concrete, all filled with ancient furniture whose very
aspect was a speechless marvel. Out of one into another, along endless
passages, up and down winding stairs, now looking from the summit of a
lofty tower upon terraces and gardens below--now lost in gloomy arches,
again out upon acres of leads, and now bathed in the sweet gloom of the
ancient chapel with its stained windows of that old glass which seems
nothing at first, it is so modest and harmonious, but which for that
very reason grows into a poem in the brain: you see it last and love it
best--I followed with unabating delight.

When at length Mrs Wilson said I had seen the whole, I begged her to
let me go again into the library, for she had not given me a moment to
look at it. She consented.

It was a part of the house not best suited for the purpose, connected
with the armoury by a descent of a few steps. It lay over some of the
housekeeping department, was too near the great hall, and looked into
the flagged court. A library should be on the ground-floor in a quiet
wing, with an outlook on grass, and the possibility of gaining it at
once without going through long passages. Nor was the library itself,
architecturally considered, at all superior to its position. The
books had greatly outgrown the space allotted to them, and several of
the neighbouring rooms had been annexed as occasion required; hence it
consisted of half-a-dozen rooms, some of them merely closets intended
for dressing-rooms, and all very ill lighted. I entered it however in
no critical spirit, but with a feeling of reverential delight. My
uncle’s books had taught me to love books. I had been accustomed to
consider his five hundred volumes a wonderful library; but here were
thousands--as old, as musty, as neglected, as dilapidated, therefore
as certainly full of wonder and discovery, as man or boy could
wish.--Oh the treasures of a house that has been growing for ages! I
leave a whole roomful of lethal weapons, to descend three steps
into six roomfuls of books--each ‘the precious life-blood of a
master-spirit’--for as yet in my eyes all books were worthy! Which did
I love best? Old swords or old books? I could not tell! I had only the
grace to know which I _ought_ to love best.

As we passed from the first room into the second, up rose a white thing
from the corner of the window-seat, and came towards us. I started. Mrs
Wilson exclaimed:

‘La! Miss Clara! how ever--?

The rest was lost in the abyss of possibility.

‘They told me you were somewhere about, Mrs Wilson, and I thought I had
better wait here. How do you do?’

‘La, child, you’ve given me such a turn!’ said Mrs Wilson. ‘You might
have been a ghost if it had been in the middle of the night.’

[Illustration: SHE WAS A YEAR OR TWO OLDER THAN MYSELF, I THOUGHT, AND
THE LOVLIEST CREATURE I HAD EVER SEEN.]

‘I’m very sorry, Mrs Wilson,’ said the girl merrily. ‘Only you see if
it had been a ghost it couldn’t have been me.’

‘How’s your papa, Miss Clara?’

‘Oh! he’s always quite well.’

‘When did you see him?’

‘To-day. He’s at home with grandpapa now.’

‘And you ran away and left him?’

‘Not quite that. He and grandpapa went out about some business--to the
copse at Deadman’s Hollow, I think. They didn’t want my advice--they
never do; so I came to see you, Mrs Wilson.’

By this time I had been able to look at the girl. She was a year or two
older than myself, I thought, and the loveliest creature I had ever
seen. She had large blue eyes of the rare shade called violet, a little
round perhaps, but the long lashes did something to rectify that fault;
and a delicate nose--turned up a little of course, else at her age she
could not have been so pretty. Her mouth was well curved, expressing a
full share of Paley’s happiness; her chin was something large and
projecting, but the lines were fine. Her hair was a light brown, but
dark for her eyes, and her complexion would have been enchanting to any
one fond of the ‘sweet mixture, red and white.’ Her figure was that of
a girl of thirteen, undetermined--but therein I was not critical. ‘An
exceeding fair forehead,’ to quote Sir Philip Sidney, and plump, white,
dimple-knuckled hands complete the picture sufficiently for the
present. Indeed it would have been better to say only that I was taken
with her, and then the reader might fancy her such as he would have
been taken with himself. But I was not fascinated. It was only that I
was a boy and she was a girl, and there being no element of decided
repulsion, I felt kindly disposed towards her.

Mrs Wilson turned to me.

‘Well, Master Cumbermede, you see I am able to give you more than I
promised.’

‘Yes,’ I returned; ‘you promised to show me the old house--’

‘And here,’ she interposed, ‘I show you a young lady as well.’

‘Yes, thank you,’ I said simply. But I had a feeling that Mrs Wilson
was not absolutely well-pleased.

I was rather shy of Miss Clara--not that I was afraid of her, but that
I did not exactly know what was expected of me, and Mrs Wilson gave us
no further introduction to each other. I was not so shy, however, as
not to wish Mrs Wilson would leave us together, for then, I thought, we
should get on well enough; but such was not her intent. Desirous of
being agreeable, however--as far as I knew how, and remembering that
Mrs Wilson had given me the choice before, I said to her--

‘Mightn’t we go and look at the deer, Mrs Wilson?’

‘You had better not,’ she answered. ‘They are rather ill-tempered just
now. They might run at you. I heard them fighting last night, and
knocking their horns together dreadfully.’

‘Then we’d better not,’ said Clara. ‘They frightened me very much
yesterday.’

We were following Mrs Wilson from the room. As we passed the hall-door,
we peeped in.

‘Do you like such great high places?’ asked Clara.

‘Yes, I do,’ I answered. ‘I like great high places. It makes you gasp
somehow.’

‘Are you fond of gasping? Does it do you good?’ she asked, with a
mock-simplicity which might be humour or something not so pleasant.

‘Yes, I think it does,’ I answered. ‘It pleases me.’

‘I don’t like it. I like a quiet snug place like the library--not a
great wide place like this, that looks as if it had swallowed you and
didn’t know it.’

‘What a clever creature she is!’ I thought. We turned away and followed
Mrs Wilson again.

I had expected to spend the rest of the day with her, but the moment we
reached her apartment, she got out a bottle of her home-made wine and
some cake, saying it was time for me to go home. I was much
disappointed--the more that the pretty Clara remained behind; but what
could I do? I strolled back to Aldwick with my head fuller than ever of
fancies new and old. But Mrs Wilson had said nothing of going to see
her again, and without an invitation I could not venture to revisit the
Hall.

In pondering over the events of the day, I gave the man I had met in
the wood a full share in my meditations.




CHAPTER XI.


A TALK WITH MY UNCLE.

When I returned home for the Christmas holidays, I told my uncle,
amongst other things, all that I have just recorded; for although the
affair seemed far away from me now, I felt that he ought to know it. He
was greatly pleased with my behaviour in regard to the apple. He did
not identify the place, however, until he heard the name of the
housekeeper: then I saw a cloud pass over his face. It grew deeper when
I told him of my second visit, especially while I described the man I
had met in the wood.

‘I have a strange fancy about him, uncle,’ I said. ‘I think he must be
the same man that came here one very stormy night--long ago--and wanted
to take me away.’

‘Who told you of that?’ asked my uncle startled.

I explained that I had been a listener.

‘You ought not to have listened.’

‘I know that now; but I did not know then. I woke frightened, and heard
the voices.’

‘What makes you think he was the same man?’

‘I can’t be sure, you know. But as often as I think of the man I met in
the wood, the recollection of that night comes back to me.’

‘I dare say. What was he like?’

I described him as well as I could.

‘Yes,’ said my uncle, ‘I dare say. He is a dangerous man.’

‘What did he want with me?’

‘He wanted to have something to do with your education. He is an old
friend--acquaintance I ought to say--of your father’s. I should be
sorry you had any intercourse with him. He is a very worldly kind of
man. He believes in money and rank and getting on. He believes in
nothing else that, I know.’

‘Then I am sure I shouldn’t like him,’ I said.

‘I am pretty sure you wouldn’t,’ returned my uncle.

I had never before heard him speak so severely of any one. But from
this time he began to talk to me more as if I had been a grown man.
There was a simplicity in his way of looking at things, however, which
made him quite intelligible to a boy as yet uncorrupted by false aims
or judgments. He took me about with him constantly, and I began to see
him as he was, and to honour and love him more than ever.

Christmas-day this year fell on a Sunday. It was a model Christmas-day.
My uncle and I walked to church in the morning. When we started, the
grass was shining with frost, and the air was cold; a fog hung about
the horizon, and the sun shone through it with red rayless countenance.
But before we reached the church, which was some three miles from home,
the fog was gone, and the frost had taken shelter with the shadows; the
sun was dazzling without being clear, and the golden cock on the spire
was glittering keen in the moveless air.

‘What do they put a cock on the spire for, uncle?’ I asked.

‘To end off with an ornament, perhaps,’ he answered.

‘I thought it had been to show how the wind blew.’

‘Well, it wouldn’t be the first time great things--I mean the spire,
not the cock--had been put to little uses.’

‘But why should it be a cock,’ I asked, ‘more than any other bird?’

‘Some people--those to whom the church is chiefly historical--would
tell you it is the cock that rebuked St Peter. Whether it be so or not,
I think a better reason for putting it there would be that the cock is
the first creature to welcome the light, and tell people that it is
coming. Hence it is a symbol of the clergyman.’

‘But our clergyman doesn’t wake the people, uncle. I’ve seen him send
_you_ to sleep sometimes.’

My uncle laughed.

‘I dare say there are some dull cocks too,’ he answered.

‘There’s one at the farm,’ I said, ‘which goes on crowing every now and
then all night--in his sleep--Janet says. But it never wakes till all
the rest are out in the yard.’

My uncle laughed again. We had reached the churchyard, and by the time
we had visited grannie’s grave--that was the only one I thought of in
the group of family mounds--the bells had ceased, and we entered.

I at least did not sleep this morning; not however because of the
anti-somnolence of the clergyman--but that, in a pew not far off from
me, sat Clara. I could see her as often as I pleased to turn my head
half-way round. Church is a very favourable place for falling in love.
It is all very well for the older people to shake their heads and say
you ought to be minding the service--that does not affect the fact
stated--especially when the clergyman is of the half-awake order who
take to the church as a gentleman-like profession. Having to sit so
still, with the pretty face so near, with no obligation to pay it
attention, but with perfect liberty to look at it, a boy in the habit
of inventing stories could hardly help fancying himself in love with
it. Whether she saw me or not, I cannot tell. Although she passed me
close as we came out, she did not look my way, and I had not the
hardihood to address her.

As we were walking home, my uncle broke the silence.

‘You would like to be an honourable man, wouldn’t you, Willie?’ he
said.

‘Yes, that I should, uncle.’

‘Could you keep a secret now?’

‘Yes, uncle.’

‘But there are two ways of keeping a secret.’

‘I don’t know more than one.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Not to tell it.’

‘Never to show that you knew it, would be better still.’

‘Yes, it would--’

‘But, suppose a thing:--suppose you knew that there was a secret;
suppose you wanted very much to find it out, and yet would not try to
find it out: wouldn’t that be another way of keeping it?’

‘Yes, it would. If I knew there was a secret, I should like to find it
out.’

‘Well, I am going to try you. There is a secret. I know it; you do not.
You have a right to know it some day, but not yet. I mean to tell it
you, but I want you to learn a great deal first. I want to keep the
secret from hurting you. Just as you would keep things from a baby
which would hurt him, I have kept some things from you.’

‘Is the sword one of them, uncle?’ I asked.

‘You could not do anything with the secret if you did know it,’ my
uncle went on, without heeding my question; ‘but there may be designing
people who would make a tool of you for their own ends. It is far
better you should be ignorant. Now will you keep my secret?--or, in
other words, will you trust me?’ I felt a little frightened. My
imagination was at work on the formless thing. But I was chiefly afraid
of the promise--lest I should anyway break it.

‘I will try to keep the secret--keep it from myself, that is--ain’t it,
uncle?’

‘Yes. That is just what I mean.’

‘But how long will it be for, uncle?’

‘I am not quite sure. It will depend on how wise and sensible you grow.
Some boys are men at eighteen--some not at forty. The more reasonable
and well-behaved you are, the sooner shall I feel at liberty to tell it
you.’

He ceased, and I remained silent. I was not astonished. The vague news
fell in with all my fancies. The possibility of something pleasant, nay
even wonderful and romantic, of course suggested itself, and the hope
which thence gilded the delay tended to reconcile me to my ignorance.

‘I think it better you should not go back to Mr Elder’s, Willie,’ said
my uncle.

I was stunned at the words. Where could a place be found to compare for
blessedness with Mr Elder’s school? Not even the great Hall, with its
acres of rooms and its age-long history, could rival it.

Some moments passed before I could utter a faltering ‘Why?’

‘That is part of my secret, Willie,’ answered my uncle. ‘I know it will
be a disappointment to you, for you have been very happy with Mr
Elder.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ I answered. It was all I could say, for the tears were
rolling down my cheeks, and there was a great lump in my throat.

‘I am very sorry indeed to give you pain, Willie,’ he said kindly.

‘It’s not my blame, is it, uncle?’ I sobbed.

‘Not in the least, my boy.’

‘Oh! then, I don’t mind it so much.’

‘There’s a brave boy! Now the question is, what to do with you.’

‘Can’t I stop at home, then?’

‘No, that won’t do either, Willie. I must have you taught, and I
haven’t time to teach you myself. Neither am I scholar enough for it
now; my learning has got rusty. I know your father would have wished to
send you to college, and although I do not very well see how I can
manage it, I must do the best I can. I’m not a rich man, you see,
Willie, though I have a little laid by. I never could do much at making
money, and I must not leave your aunt unprovided for.’

‘No, uncle. Besides, I shall soon be able to work for myself and you
too.’

‘Not for a long time if you go to college, Willie. But we need not talk
about that yet.’

In the evening I went to my uncle’s room. He was sitting by his fire
reading the New Testament.

‘Please, uncle,’ I said, ‘will you tell me something about my father
and mother?’

‘With pleasure, my boy,’ he answered, and after a moment’s thought
began to give me a sketch of my father’s life, with as many touches of
the man himself as he could at the moment recall. I will not detain my
reader with the narrative. It is sufficient to say that my father was a
simple honourable man, without much education, but a great lover of
plain books. His health had always been delicate; and before he died he
had been so long an invalid that my mother’s health had given way in
nursing him, so that she very soon followed him. As his narrative
closed my uncle said: ‘Now, Willie, you see, with a good man like that
for your father, you are bound to be good and honourable! Never mind
whether people praise you or not; you do what you ought to do. And
don’t be always thinking of your rights. There are people who consider
themselves very grand because they can’t bear to be interfered with.
They think themselves lovers of justice, when it is only justice to
themselves they care about. The true lover of justice is one who would
rather die a slave than interfere with the rights of others. To wrong
any one is the most terrible thing in the world. Injustice _to_ you is
not an awful thing like injustice _in_ you. I should like to see you a
great man, Willie. Do you know what I mean by a great man?’

‘Something else than I know, I’m afraid, uncle,’ I answered.

‘A great man is one who will try to do right against the devil himself:
one who will not do wrong to please anybody or to save his life.’

I listened, but I thought with myself a man might do all that, and be
no great man. I would do something better--some fine deed or other--I
did not know what now, but I should find out by-and-by. My uncle was
too easily pleased: I should demand more of a great man. Not so did the
knights of old gain their renown. I was silent.

‘I don’t want you to take my opinions as yours, you know, Willie,’ my
uncle resumed. ‘But I want you to remember what my opinion is.’

As he spoke, he went to a drawer in the room, and brought out something
which he put in my hands. I could hardly believe my eyes. It was the
watch grannie had given me.

‘There,’ he said, ‘is your father’s watch. Let it keep you in mind that
to be good is to be great.’

‘Oh, thank you, uncle!’ I said, heeding only my recovered treasure.
‘But didn’t it belong to somebody before my father? Grannie gave it me
as if it had been hers.’

‘Your grandfather gave it to your father; but when he died, your
great-grandmother took it. Did she tell you anything about it?’

‘Nothing particular. She said it was her husband’s.’

‘So it was, I believe.’

‘She used to call him my father.’

‘Ah, you remember that!’

‘I’ve had so much time to think about things, uncle!’

‘Yes. Well--I hope you will think more about things yet.’

‘Yes, uncle. But there’s something else I should like to ask you
about.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The old sword.’

My uncle smiled, and rose again, saying, ‘Ah! I thought as much. Is
that anything like it?’ he added, bringing it from the bottom of a
cupboard.

I took it from his hands with awe. It was the same. If I could have
mistaken the hilt, I could not mistake the split sheath.

‘Oh, uncle!’ I exclaimed, breathless with delight.

‘That’s it--isn’t it?’ he said, enjoying my enjoyment.

‘Yes, that it is! Now tell me all about it, please.’

‘Indeed I can tell you very little. Some ancestor of ours fought with
it somewhere. There was a story about it, but I have forgot it. You may
have it if you like.’

‘No, uncle! May I? To take away with me?’

‘Yes. I think you are old enough now not to do any mischief with it.’

I do not believe there was a happier boy in England that night. I did
not mind where I went now. I thought I could even bear to bid Mrs Elder
farewell. Whether therefore possession had done me good, I leave my
reader to judge. But happily for our blessedness, the joy of possession
soon palls, and not many days had gone by before I found I had a heart
yet. Strange to say, it was my aunt who touched it.

I do not yet know all the reasons which brought my uncle to the
resolution of sending me abroad: it was certainly an unusual mode of
preparing one for the university; but the next day he disclosed the
plan to me. I was pleased with the notion. But my aunt’s apron went up
to her eyes. It was a very hard apron, and I pitied those eyes although
they were fierce.

‘Oh, auntie!’ I said, ‘what are you crying for? Don’t you like me to
go?’

‘It’s too far off, child. How am I to get to you if you should be taken
ill?’

Moved both by my own pleasure and her grief, I got up and threw my arms
round her neck. I had never done so before. She returned my embrace and
wept freely.

As it was not a fit season for travelling, and as my uncle had not yet
learned whither it would be well to send me, it was after all resolved
that I should return to Mr Elder’s for another half-year. This gave me
unspeakable pleasure; and I set out for school again in such a blissful
mood as must be rare in the experience of any life.




CHAPTER XII.


THE HOUSE-STEWARD.

My uncle had had the watch cleaned and repaired for me, so that,
notwithstanding its great age, it was yet capable of a doubtful sort of
service. Its caprices were almost human, but they never impaired the
credit of its possession in the eyes of my school-fellows; rather they
added to the interest of the little machine, inasmuch as no one could
foretell its behaviour under any circumstances. We were far oftener
late now, when we went out for a ramble. Heretofore we had used our
faculties and consulted the sky--now we trusted to the watch, and
indeed acted as if it could regulate the time to our convenience, and
carry us home afterwards. We regarded it, in respect Of time, very much
as some people regard the Bible in respect of eternity. And the
consequences were similar. We made an idol of it, and the idol played
us the usual idol-pranks.

But I think the possession of the sword, in my own eyes too a far
grander thing than the watch, raised me yet higher in the regard of my
companions. We could not be on such intimate terms with the sword, for
one thing, as with the watch. It was in more senses than one beyond our
sphere--a thing to be regarded with awe and reverence. Mr Elder had
most wisely made no objection to my having it in our bed-room; but he
drove two nails into the wall and hung it high above my reach, saying
the time had not come for my handling it. I believe the good man
respected the ancient weapon, and wished to preserve it from such usage
as it might have met with from boys. It was the more a constant
stimulus to my imagination, and I believe insensibly to my moral nature
as well, connecting me in a kind of dim consciousness with foregone
ancestors who had, I took it for granted, done well on the
battle-field. I had the sense of an inherited character to sustain in
the new order of things. But there was more in its influence which I
can hardly define--the inheritance of it even gave birth to a certain
sense of personal dignity.

Although I never thought of visiting Moldwarp Hall again without an
invitation, I took my companions more than once into the woods which
lay about it: thus far I used the right of my acquaintance with the
housekeeper. One day in Spring, I had gone with them to the old narrow
bridge. I was particularly fond of visiting it. We lingered a long time
about Queen Elizabeth’s oak; and by climbing up on each other’s
shoulders, and so gaining some stumps of vanished boughs, had succeeded
in clambering, one after another, into the wilderness of its branches,
where the young buds were now pushing away the withered leaves before
them, as the young generations of men push the older into the grave.
When my turn came, I climbed and climbed until I had reached a great
height in its top.

Then I sat down, holding by the branch over my head, and began to look
about me. Below was an entangled net, as it seemed--a labyrinth of
boughs, branches, twigs, and shoots. If I had fallen I could hardly
have reached the earth. Through this environing mass of lines, I caught
glimpses of the country around--green fields, swelling into hills,
where the fresh foliage was bursting from the trees; and below, the
little stream was pursuing its busy way by a devious but certain path
to its unknown future. Then my eyes turned to the tree-clad ascent on
the opposite side: through the topmost of its trees, shone a golden
spark, a glimmer of yellow fire. It was the vane on the highest tower
of the Hall. A great desire seized me to look on the lordly pile once
more. I descended in haste, and proposed to my companions that we
should climb through the woods, and have a peep at the house. The
eldest, who was in a measure in charge of us--his name was Bardsley,
for Fox was gone--proposed to consult my watch first. Had we known that
the faithless thing had stopped for an hour and a half, and then
resumed its onward course as if nothing had happened, we should not
have delayed our return. As it was, off we scampered for the pack-horse
bridge, which we left behind us only after many frog-leaps over the
obstructing stones at the ends. Then up through the wood we went like
wild creatures, abstaining however from all shouting and mischief,
aware that we were on sufferance only. At length we stood on the verge
of the descent, when to our surprise we saw the sun getting low in the
horizon. Clouds were gathering overhead, and a wailful wind made one
moaning sweep through the trees behind us in the hollow. The sun had
hidden his shape, but not his splendour, in the skirts of the white
clouds which were closing in around him. Spring as it was, I thought I
smelled snow in the air. But the vane which had drawn me shone
brilliant against a darkening cloud, like a golden bird in the sky. We
looked at each other, not in dismay exactly, but with a common feeling
that the elements were gathering against us. The wise way would of
course have been to turn at once and make for home; but the watch had
to be considered. Was the watch right, or was the watch wrong? Its
health and conduct were of the greatest interest to the commonweal.
That question must be answered. We looked from the watch to the sun,
and back from the sun to the watch. Steady to all appearance as the
descending sun itself, the hands were trotting and crawling along their
appointed way, with a look of unconscious innocence, in the midst of
their diamond coronet. I volunteered to settle the question: I would
run to the Hall, ring the bell, and ask leave to go as far into the
court as to see the clock on the central tower. The proposition was
applauded. I ran, rang, and being recognized by the portress, was at
once admitted. In a moment I had satisfied myself of the treachery of
my bosom-friend, and was turning to leave the court, when a lattice
opened, and I heard a voice calling my name. It was Mrs Wilson’s. She
beckoned me. I went up under the window.

‘Why don’t you come and see me, Master Cumbermede?’ she said.

‘You didn’t ask me, Mrs Wilson. I should have liked to come very much.’

‘Come in, then, and have tea with me now.’

‘No, thank you,’ I answered. ‘My schoolfellows are waiting for me, and
we are too late already. I only came to see the clock.’

‘Well, you must come soon, then.’

‘I will, Mrs Wilson. Good-night,’ I answered, and away I ran, opened
the wicket for myself, set my foot in the deep shoe-mould, then rushed
down the rough steps and across the grass to my companions.

When they heard what time it was, they turned without a word, and in
less than a minute we were at the bottom of the hill and over the
bridge. The wood followed us with a moan which was gathering to a roar.
Down in the meadow it was growing dark. Before we reached the lodge, it
had begun to rain, and the wind, when we got out upon the road, was
blowing a gale. We were seven miles from home. Happily the wind was in
our back, and, wet to the skin, but not so weary because of the aid of
the wind, we at length reached Aldwick. The sole punishment we had for
being so late--and that was more a precaution than a punishment--was
that we had to go to bed immediately after a hurried tea. To face and
fight the elements is, however, an invaluable lesson in childhood, and
I do not think those parents do well who are over-careful to preserve
all their children from all inclemencies of weather or season.

When the next holiday drew near, I once more requested and obtained
permission to visit Moldwarp Hall. I am now puzzled to understand why
my uncle had not interdicted it, but certainly he had laid no
injunctions upon me in regard thereto. Possibly he had communicated
with Mrs Wilson: I do not know. If he had requested Mr. Elder to
prevent me, I could not have gone. So far, however, must this have been
from being the case that, on the eve of the holiday, Mr Elder said to
me:

‘If Mrs Wilson should ask you to stay all night, you may.’

I suspect he knew more about some things than I did. The notion of
staying all night seemed to me, however, out of the question. Mrs
Wilson could not be expected to entertain me to that extent. I fancy,
though, that she had written to make the request. My schoolfellows
accompanied me as far as the bridge, and there left me. Mrs Wilson
received me with notable warmth, and did propose that I should stay all
night, to which I gladly agreed, more, it must be confessed, from the
attraction of the old house than the love I bore to Mrs Wilson.

‘But what is that you are carrying?’ she asked.

It was my sword. This requires a little explanation.

It was natural enough that on the eve of a second visit, as I hoped, to
the armoury, I should, on going up to bed, lift my eyes with longing
look to my own sword. The thought followed--what a pleasure it would
be to compare it with the other swords in the armoury. If I could only
get it down and smuggle it away with me! It was my own. I believed Mr
Elder would not approve of this, but at the same time he had never told
me not to take it down: he had only hung it too high for any of us to
reach it--almost close to the ceiling, in fact. But a want of
enterprise was not then a fault of mine, and the temptation was great.
So, when my chum was asleep, I rose, and by the remnant of a fading
moon got together the furniture--no easy undertaking when the least
noise would have betrayed me. Fortunately there was a chest of drawers
not far from under the object of my ambition, and I managed by half
inches to move it the few feet necessary. On the top of this I hoisted
the small dressing-table, which, being only of deal, was very light.
The chest of drawers was large enough to hold my small box beside the
table. I got on the drawers by means of a chair, then by means of the
box I got on the table, and so succeeded in getting down the sword.
Having replaced the furniture, I laid the weapon under my bolster, and
was soon fast asleep. The moment I woke I got up, and before the house
was stirring had deposited the sword in an outbuilding whence I could
easily get it off the premises. Of course my companions knew, and I
told them all my design. Moberly hinted that I ought to have asked Mr
Elder, but his was the sole remark in that direction.

‘It is my sword, Mrs Wilson,’ I answered.

‘How do you come to have a sword?’ she asked. ‘It is hardly a fit
plaything for you.’

I told her how it had been in the house since long before I was born,
and that I had brought it to compare with some of the swords in the
armoury.

‘Very well,’ she answered. ‘I dare say we can manage it; but when Mr
Close is at home it is not very easy to get into the armoury. He’s so
jealous of any one touching his swords and guns!’

‘Who is Mr Close, then?’

‘Mr Close is the house-steward.’

‘But they’re not his, then, are they?’

‘It’s quite enough that he thinks so. He has a fancy for that sort of
thing. I’m sure I don’t see anything so precious in the rusty old
rubbish.’

I suspected that, as the saying is, there was no love lost between Mrs
Wilson and Mr Close. I learned afterwards that he had been chaplain to
a regiment of foot, which, according to rumour, he had had to leave for
some misconduct. This was in the time of the previous owner of Moldwarp
Hall, and nobody now knew the circumstances under which he had become
house-steward--a position in which Sir Giles, when he came to the
property, had retained his services.

‘We are going to have company, and a dance, this evening,’ continued
Mrs Wilson. ‘I hardly know what to do with you, my hands are so full.’

This was not very consistent with her inviting me to stay all night,
and confirms my suspicion that she had made a request to that purport
of Mr. Elder, for otherwise, surely, she would have sent me home.

‘Oh! never mind me, Mrs Wilson,’ I said. ‘If you will let me wander
about the place, I shall be perfectly comfortable.’

‘Yes; but you might get in the way of the family, or the visitors,’ she
said.

‘I’ll take good care of that,’ I returned. ‘Surely there is room in
this huge place without running against any one.’

‘There ought to be,’ she answered.

After a few minutes’ silence, she resumed.

‘We shall have a good many of them staying all night’, but there will
be room for you, I dare say. What would you like to do with yourself
till they begin to come?’

‘I should like to go to the library,’ I answered, thinking, I confess,
of the adjacent armoury as well. ‘Should I be in the way there?’

‘No; I don’t think you would,’ she replied, thoughtfully. ‘It’s not
often any one goes there.’

‘Who takes charge of the books?’ I asked.

‘Oh! books don’t want much taking care of,’ she replied. ‘I have
thought of having them down and dusting the place out, but it would be
such a job! and the dust don’t signify upon old books. They ain’t of
much count in this house. Nobody heeds them.’

‘I wish Sir Giles would let me come and put them in order in the
holidays,’ I said, little knowing how altogether unfit I yet was for
such an undertaking.

‘Ah well! we’ll see. Who knows?’

‘You don’t think he would!’ I exclaimed.

‘I don’t know. Perhaps he might. But I thought you were going abroad
soon.’

I had not said anything to her on the subject. I had never had an
opportunity.

‘Who told you that, Mrs Wilson?’

‘Never you mind. A little bird. Now you had better go to the library. I
dare say you won’t hurt anything, for Sir Giles, although he never
looks at the books, would be dreadfully angry if he thought anything
were happening to them.’

‘I’ll take as good care of them as if they were my uncle’s. He used to
let me handle his as much as I liked. I used to mend them up for him.
I’m quite accustomed to books, I assure you, Mrs Wilson.’

‘Come, then; I will show you the way,’ she said.

‘I think I know the way,’ I answered. For I had pondered so much over
the place, and had, I presume, filled so many gaps of recollection with
creations of fancy, that I quite believed I knew my way all about the
house.

‘We shall see,’ she returned with a smile. ‘I will take you the nearest
way, and you shall tell me on your honour if you remember it.’

She led the way, and I followed. Passing down the stone stair and
through several rooms, mostly plain bedrooms, we arrived at a wooden
staircase, of which there were few in the place. We ascended a little
way, crossed one or two rooms more, came out on a small gallery open to
the air, a sort of covered bridge across a gulf in the building,
re-entered, and after crossing other rooms, tapestried, and to my eyes
richly furnished, arrived at the first of those occupied by the
library.

‘Now did you know the way, Wilfrid?’

‘Not in the least,’ I answered. ‘I cannot think how I could have
forgotten it so entirely. I am ashamed of myself.’

‘You have no occasion,’ she returned. ‘You never went that way at all.’

‘Oh, dear me!’ I said; ‘what a place it is! I might lose myself in it
for a week.’

‘You would come out somewhere, if you went on long enough, I dare say.
But you must not leave the library till I come and fetch you. You will
want some dinner before long.’

‘What time do you dine?’ I asked, putting my hand to my watch-pocket.

‘Ah! you’ve got a watch--have you? But indeed, on a day like this, I
dine when I can. You needn’t fear. I will take care of you.’

‘Mayn’t I go into the armoury?’

‘If you don’t mind the risk of meeting Mr Close. But he’s not likely to
be there to-day.’

She left me with fresh injunctions not to stir till she came for me.
But I now felt the place to be so like a rabbit-warren, that I dared
not leave the library, if not for the fear of being lost, then for the
fear of intruding upon some of the family. I soon nestled in a corner,
with books behind, books before, and books all around me. After trying
several spots, like a miner searching for live lodes, and finding
nothing auriferous to my limited capacities and tastes, I at length
struck upon a rich vein, instantly dropped on the floor, and, with my
back against the shelves, was now immersed in ‘The Seven Champions of
Christendom.’ As I read, a ray of light, which had been creeping along
the shelves behind me, leaped upon my page. I looked up. I had not yet
seen the room so light. Nor had I perceived before in what confusion
and with what disrespect the books were heaped upon the shelves. A dim
feeling awoke in me that to restore such a world to order would be like
a work of creation; but I sank again forthwith in the delights of a
feast provided for an imagination which had in general to feed itself.
I had here all the delight of invention without any of its effort.

At length I became aware of some weariness. The sunbeam had vanished,
not only from the page, but from the room. I began to stretch my arms.
As the tension of their muscles relaxed, my hand fell upon the sword
which I had carried with me and laid on the floor by my side. It awoke
another mental nerve. I would go and see the armoury.

I rose, and wandered slowly through room after room of the library,
dragging my sword after me. When I reached the last, there, in the
corner next the outer wall of the house, rose the three stone steps
leading to the little door that communicated with the treasury of
ancient strife. I stood at the foot of the steps irresolute for a
moment, fearful lest my black man, Mr Close, should be within,
polishing his weapons perhaps, and fearful in his wrath. I ascended the
steps, listened at the door, heard nothing, lifted the old,
quaintly-formed latch, peeped in, and entered. There was the whole
collection, abandoned to my eager gaze and eager hands! How long I
stood, taking down weapon after weapon, examining each like an old
book, speculating upon modes of use, and intention of varieties in
form, poring over adornment and mounting, I cannot tell. Historically
the whole was a sealed book; individually I made a thorough
acquaintance with not a few, noting the differences and resemblances
between them and my own, and instead of losing conceit of the latter,
finding more and more reasons for holding it dear and honourable. I was
poising in one hand, with the blade upright in the air--for otherwise I
could scarcely have held it in both--a huge two-handed, double-hilted
sword with serrated double edge, when I heard a step approaching, and
before I had well replaced the sword, a little door in a corner which-I
had scarcely noticed--the third door to the room--opened, and down the
last steps of the narrowest of winding stairs a little man in black
screwed himself into the armoury. I was startled, but not altogether
frightened. I felt myself grasping my own sword somewhat nervously in
my left hand, as I abandoned the great one, and let it fall back with a
clang into its corner.

‘By the powers!’ exclaimed Mr Close, revealing himself an Irishman at
once in the surprise of my presence, ‘and whom have we here?’

I felt my voice tremble a little as I replied,

‘Mrs Wilson allowed me to come, sir. I assure you I have not been
hurting anything.’

‘Who’s to tell that? Mrs Wilson has no business to let any one come
here. This is my quarters. There--you’ve got one in your hand now!
You’ve left finger-marks on the blade, I’ll be bound. Give it me.’

He stretched out his hand. I drew back.

‘This one is mine,’ I said.

‘Ho, ho, young gentleman! So you’re a collector--are you? Already too!
Nothing like beginning in time. Let me look at the thing, though.’

He was a little man, as I have said, dressed in black, with a frock
coat and a deep white neckcloth. His face would have been vulgar,
especially as his nose was a traitor to his mouth, revealing in its hue
the proclivities of its owner, but for a certain look of the
connoisseur which went far to redeem it. The hand which he stretched
out to take my weapon, was small and delicate--like a woman’s indeed.
His speech was that of a gentleman. I handed him the sword at once.

He had scarcely glanced at it when a strange look passed over his
countenance. He tried to draw it, failed, and looking all along the
sheath, saw its condition. Then his eyes flashed. He turned from me
abruptly, and went up the stair he had descended. I waited anxiously
for what seemed to me half an hour: I dare say it was not more than ten
minutes. At last I heard him revolving on his axis down the corkscrew
staircase. He entered and handed me my sword, saying--

‘There! I can’t get it out of the sheath. It’s in a horrid state of
rust. Where did you fall in with it?’

I told him all I knew about it. If he did not seem exactly interested,
he certainly behaved with some oddity. When I told him what my
grandmother had said about some battle in which an ancestor had worn
it, his arm rose with a jerk, and the motions of his face, especially
of his mouth, which appeared to be eating its own teeth, were for a
moment grotesque. When I had finished, he said, with indifferent tone,
but eager face--

‘Well, it’s a rusty old thing, but I like old weapons. I’ll give you a
bran new officer’s sword, as bright as a mirror, for it--I will. There
now! Is it a bargain?’

‘I could not part with it, sir--not for the best sword in the country,’
I answered. ‘You see it has been so long in our family.’

‘Hm! hm! you’re quite right, my boy. I wouldn’t if I were you. But as I
see you know how to set a right value on such a weapon, you may stay
and look at mine as long as you like. Only if you take any of them from
their sheaths, you must be very careful how you put them in again.
Don’t use any force. If there is any one you can’t manage easily, just
lay it on the window-sill, and I will attend to it. Mind you don’t
handle--I mean touch--the blades at all. There would be no end of
rust-spots before morning.’

I was full of gratitude for the confidence he placed in me.

‘I can’t stop now to tell you about them all, but I will--some day.’

So saying he disappeared once more up the little staircase, leaving me
like Aladdin in the jewel-forest. I had not been alone more than half
an hour or so, however, when he returned, and taking down a dagger,
said abruptly,

‘There, that is the dagger with which Lord Harry Rolleston’--I think
that was the name, but knowing nothing of the family or its history, I
could not keep the names separate--‘stabbed his brother Gilbert. And
there is--’

He took down one after another, and with every one he associated some
fact--or fancy perhaps, for I suspect now that he invented not a few of
his incidents.

‘They have always been fond of weapons in this house,’ he said. ‘There
now is one with the strangest story! It’s in print--I can show it you
in print in the library there. It had the reputation of being a magic
sword--’

‘Like King Arthur’s Excalibur?’ I asked, for I had read a good deal of
the history of Prince Arthur.

‘Just so,’ said Mr Close. ‘Well, that sword had been in the family for
many years--I may say centuries. One day it disappeared, and there was
a great outcry. A lackey had been discharged for some cause or other,
and it was believed he had taken it. But before they found him, the
sword was in its place upon the wall. Afterwards the man confessed that
he had taken it, out of revenge, for he knew how it was prized. But in
the middle of the next night, as he slept in a roadside inn, a figure
dressed in ancient armour had entered the room, taken up the sword, and
gone away with it. I dare say it was all nonsense. His heart had failed
him when he found he was followed, and he had contrived by the help of
some fellow-servant to restore it. But there are very queer stories
about old weapons--swords in particular. I must go now,’ he concluded,
‘for we have company to-night, and I have a good many things to see
to.’

So saying he left me. I remained a long time in the armoury, and then
returned to the library, where I seated myself in the same corner as
before, and went on with my reading--lost in pleasure.

All at once I became aware that the light was thickening, and that I
was very hungry. At the same moment I heard a slight rustle in the
room, and looked round, expecting to see Mrs Wilson come to fetch me.
But there stood Miss Clara--not now in white, however, but in a black
silk frock. She had grown since I saw her last, and was prettier than
ever. She started when she saw me.

‘You here!’ she exclaimed, as if we had known each other all our lives.
‘What are you doing here?’

‘Reading,’ I answered, and rose from the floor, replacing the book as I
rose. ‘I thought you were Mrs Wilson come to fetch me.’

‘Is she coming here?’

‘Yes. She told me not to leave the library till she came for me.’

‘Then I must get out of the way.’

‘Why so, Miss Clara?’ I asked.

‘I don’t mean her to know I am here. If you tell, I shall think you the
meanest--’

‘Don’t trouble yourself to find your punishment before you’ve found
your crime,’ I said, thinking of my own processes of invention. What a
little prig I must have been!

‘Very well, I will trust you,’ she returned, holding out her hand.--‘I
didn’t give it you to keep, though,’ she added, finding that, with more
of country manners than tenderness, I fear, I retained it in my boyish
grasp.

I felt awkward at once, and let it go.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Now, when do you expect Mrs. Wilson?’

‘I don’t know at all. She said she would fetch me for dinner. There she
comes, I do believe.’

Clara turned her head like a startled forest creature that wants to
listen, but does not know in what direction, and moved her feet as if
she were about to fly.

‘Come back after dinner,’ she said: ‘you had better!’ and darting to
the other side of the room, lifted a piece of hanging tapestry, and
vanished just in time, for Mrs Wilson’s first words crossed her last.

‘My dear boy--Master Cumbermede, I should say, I am sorry I have not
been able to get to you sooner. One thing after another has kept me on
my legs till I’m ready to drop. The cook is as tiresome as cooks only
can be. But come along; I’ve got a mouthful of dinner for you at last,
and a few minutes to eat my share of it with you, I hope.’

I followed without a word, feeling a little guilty, but only towards
Mrs Wilson, not towards myself, if my reader will acknowledge the
difference--for I did not feel that I ought to betray Miss Clara. We
returned as we came; and certainly whatever temper the cook might be
in, there was nothing amiss with the dinner. Had there been, however, I
was far too hungry to find fault with it.

‘Well, how have you enjoyed yourself, Master Wilfrid? Not very much, I
am afraid. But really I could not help it,’ said Mrs Wilson.

‘I couldn’t have enjoyed myself more,’ I answered. ‘If you will allow
me, I’ll go back to the library as soon as I’ve done my dinner.’

‘But it’s almost dark there now.’

‘You wouldn’t mind letting me have a candle, Mrs Wilson?’

‘A candle, child! It would be of no use. The place wouldn’t light up
with twenty candles.’

‘But I don’t want it lighted up. I could read by one candle as well as
by twenty.’

‘Very well. You shall do as you like. Only be careful, for the old
house is as dry as tinder, and if you were to set fire to anything, we
should be all in a blaze in a moment.’

‘I will be careful, Mrs Wilson. You may trust me. Indeed you may.’

She hurried me a little over my dinner. The bell in the court rang
loudly.

‘There’s some of them already! That must be the Simmonses. They’re
always early, and they always come to that gate--I suppose because they
haven’t a carriage of their own, and don’t like to drive into the high
court in a chaise from the George and Pudding.’

‘I’ve quite done, ma’am: may I go now?’

‘Wait till I get you a candle.’

She took one from a press in the room, lighted it, led me once more to
the library, and there left me with a fresh injunction not to be
peeping out and getting in the way of the visitors.




CHAPTER XIII.


THE LEADS.

The moment Mrs Wilson was gone, I expected to see Clara peep out from
behind the tapestry in the corner; but as she did not appear, I lifted
it, and looked in. There was nothing behind but a closet almost filled
with books, not upon shelves, but heaped up from floor to ceiling.
There had been just room, and no more, for Clara to stand between the
tapestry and the books. It was of no use attempting to look for her--at
least I said so to myself, for as yet the attraction of an old book 

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