OUR FRIENDS
After our guests had departed, to college or school or home, the house
was left almost deserted. We did not shut it up, however. Fires were
bright on all hearths, and lamps were kept burning. We did not mean to
lose the cheeriness of the house, though much of the family had
departed. For a wonder, the days did not seem lonesome. After the fist
break was over, we did not find time to think of our solitude, and as
the weeks passed we wondered what new wings had caused them to fly so
swiftly. Each day had its interests of work or study or social function.
Stormy days and unbroken evenings were given to reading. We consumed
many books, both old and new, and we were not forgotten by our friends.
The dull days of winter did not drag; indeed, they were accepted with
real pleasure. Our lives had hitherto been too much filled with the
hurry and bustle inseparable from the fashionable existence-struggle of
a large city to permit us to settle down with quiet nerves to the real
happiness of home. So much of enjoyment accompanies and depends upon
tranquillity of mind, that we are apt to miss half of it in the turmoil
of work-strife and social-strife that fill the best years of most men
and women.
It is a pity that all overwrought people cannot have a chance to relax
their nerves, and to learn the possibilities of happiness that are
within them. Most of the jars and bickerings of domestic life, most of
the mental and moral obliquities, depend upon threadbare nerves, either
inherited or uncovered by friction incident to getting on in the world.
I never understood the comforts that follow in the wake of a quiet,
unambitious life, until such a life was forced upon me. When you
discover these comforts for the first time, you marvel that you have
foregone them so long, and are fain to recommend them to all the world.
Polly and I had gotten on reasonably well up to this time; but before we
became conscious of any change, we found ourselves drawn closer together
by a multitude of small interests common to both. After twenty-five
years of married life it will compensate any man to take a little time
from business and worry that he may become acquainted with his wife. A
few fortunate men do this early in life, and they draw compound interest
on the investment; but most of us feel the cares of life so keenly that
we take them home with us to show in our faces and to sit at our tables
and to blight the growth of that cheerful intercourse which perpetuates
love and cements friendship in the home as well as in the world.
There were no serious cares nowadays, and time passed so smoothly at
Four Oaks that we wondered at the picnic life that had fallen to us. The
village of Exeter was alive in all things social. The city families who
had farms or country places near the village were so fond of them that
they rarely closed them for more than two or three months, and these
months were as likely to come in summer as in winter.
Our friends the Gordons made Homestead Farm their permanent residence,
though they kept open house in town. Beyond the Gordons' was the modest
home of an Irish baronet, Sir Thomas O'Hara. Sir Tom was a bachelor of
sixty. He had run through two fortunes (as became an Irish baronet) in
the racing field and at Homburg, and as a young man he had lived ten
years at Limmer's tavern in London. When not in training to ride his own
steeple-chasers, he was putting up his hands against any man in England
who would face him for a few friendly rounds. He was not always
victorious, either in the field, before the green cloth, or in the ring;
but he was always a kind-hearted gentleman who would divide his last
crown with friend or foe, and who could accept a beating with grace and
unruffled spirit.
He could never ride below the welter weight, and after a few years he
outgrew this weight and was forced to give up the least expensive of
his diversions. The green cloth now received more of his attention,
and, as a matter of course, of his money. Things went badly with him,
and he began to see the end of his second fortune before he called a
halt. Bad times in Ireland seriously reduced his rents, and he was
forced to dispose of his salable estates. Then he came to this country
in the hope of recouping himself, and to get away from the fast set that
surrounded him.
"I can resist anything but temptation," this warm-hearted Irishman would
say; and that was the keynote of his character.
Though Sir Tom was only sixty years old, he looked seventy. He was much
broken in health by gout and the fast pace of his early manhood. But his
spirit was untouched by misfortune, disease, or hardship. His courage
was as good as when he served as a subaltern of the Guards in the
trenches before Sebastopol, or presented his body as a mark for the
sledge-hammer blows of Tom Sayers, just for diversion. His constitution
must have been superb, for even in his decrepitude he was good to look
upon: five feet ten, fine body, slightly given to rotundity, legs a
little shrunken in the shanks, but giving unmistakable signs of what
they had been ("not lost, but gone before," as he would say of them),
hands and feet aristocratic in form and well cared for, and a fine head
set on broad shoulders. His hair was thin, and he parted it with great
exactness in the middle. His eyes were brown, large, and of exceeding
softness. His nose was straight in spite of many a contusion, and his
whole expression was that of a high-bred gentleman somewhat the worse
for wear. Sir Tom was perfectly groomed when he came forth from his
chamber, which was usually about ten in the morning.
Those of us who had access to his rooms often wondered how he ever got
out of them looking so immaculate, for they were a perfectly impassable
jungle to the stranger. Such a tangle of trunks, hand-bags, rug bundles,
clothes, boots, pajamas, newspapers, scrap-books, B. & S. bottles, could
hardly be found anywhere else in the world. He had a fondness for
newspaper clippings, and had trunks of them, sorted into bundles or
pasted in scrap-books. Old volumes of Bell's _Life_ filled more than one
trunk, and on one occasion when he and I were spending a long evening
together, in celebration of his recent recovery from an attack of gout,
and when he had done more than usual justice to the B. & S. bottles and
less than usual justice to his gout, he showed me the record of a
long-gone year in which this same Bell's _Life_ called him the "first
among the gentlemen riders in the United Kingdom," and proved this
assertion by showing how he had won most of the great steeple-chases in
England and Ireland, riding his own horses. This was the nearest
approach to boasting that ever came to my knowledge in the years of our
close friendship, and I would never have thought of it as such had I
not seen that he regarded it as unwarrantable self-praise.
I have never known a more simple, kind-hearted, agreeable, and lovable
gentleman than this broken-down sporting man and gambler. I loved him as
a brother; and though he has passed out of my life, I still love the
memory of his genial face, his courtesy, his unselfish friendship, more
than words can express. A tender heart and a gentle spirit found strange
housing in a body given over to reckless prodigality. The combination,
tempered by time and exhaustion, showed nothing that was not lovable;
and it is scant praise to say that Sir Thomas was much to me.
He was just as acceptable to Polly. No woman could fail to appreciate
the homage which he never failed to show to the wife and mother. Many
winter evenings at Four Oaks were made brighter by his presence, and we
grew to expect him at least three nights each week. His plate was placed
on our round table these nights, and he rarely failed to use it; and the
B. & S. bottles were near at hand, and his favorite brand of cigars
within easy reach.
"I light a 'baccy' by your permission, Mrs. Williams," and a courtly bow
accompanied the words.
At 9.30 William came to bring Sir Tom home. The leave-taking was always
formal with Polly, but with me it was, "Ta-ta, Williams--see you
later," and our guest would hobble out on his poor crippled feet, waving
his hand gallantly, with a voice as cheery as a boy's.
Another family whom I wish the reader to know well is the Kyrles. For
more than twenty-five years we have known no joys or sorrows which they
did not feel, and no interests that touched them have failed to leave a
mark on us. We could not have been more intimate or better friends had
the closest blood tie united us. The acquaintance of young married
couples had grown into a friendship that was bearing its best fruit at a
time when best fruit was most appreciated. We do not consider a pleasure
more than half complete until we have told it to Will and Frances Kyrle,
for their delight doubles our happiness.
They were among the earliest of my patients, and they are easily first
among our friends. I have watched more than a half-dozen of their
children from infancy to adult life, and this alone would be a strong
bond; but in addition to this is the fact that the whole family, from
father to youngest child, possess in a wonderful degree that subtle
sense of true camaraderie which is as rare as it is charming.
The Kyrles lived in the city, but they were foot-free, and we could
count on having them often. Four Oaks was to be, if we had our way, a
country home for them almost as much as for us. Indeed, one of the
rooms was called the Kyrles' room, and they came to it at will. Enough
about our friends. We must go back to the farm interests, which are,
indeed, the only excuse for this history.