AND MAKES DISCOVERIES.
David Willis stuck to his determination, so suddenly made on that night
of the captain's visit, and the child was duly baptized under the name
of Comethup Willis. Simple David Willis chuckled to himself a little
over his ingenuity; he grew to like the quaintness of the name, and it
was a constant reminder--if such were necessary--of the tragedy which
belonged to the boy's birth. He always spoke the name rapidly when
addressing the child or when referring to it to any one else, slurring
the cumbrous name that he might hide the secret of it; only to himself
did he ever speak it slowly with the added words, "as a flower." It was
a never-ceasing source of joy to him to think how cleverly the name
had been conceived; he dwelt upon it lovingly, with the pride of the
inventor; and it became on his tongue a caress whenever it was uttered.
Apart from the mere name, the child filled his life and his thoughts to
a greater extent than he had ever even dared to hope. He grew rapidly,
and shook off the childish ailments which came with his years with
greater ease than most children; he had about him, even as a little
fellow, the grave, shy tenderness of his mother. Captain Garraway-Kyle
murmured once, as he held him at arms'-length and looked critically at
him, that he had his mother's eyes.
It was a strange life for the child, alone with a dreamy man in that
old house under the shadow of the church; if he could have written down
his impressions of life and those about him at that time, they would
have made curious reading. He remembered when it was possible for him,
by a great effort, to get both hands up to the door knob, and to twist
it round and stagger backward, pulling the door with him; understood
fully what a steep and treacherous affair the stone step was which led
down to the garden; and what a proud and wonderful day it was when he
summoned courage to step straight down upon it, instead of manipulating
the descent with one small bare knee on the stone and the foot of the
other leg feeling for the earth below. He knew his mother's garden by
heart, and all the wondrous corners of it, where strange things hid
which no one saw but himself. He learned early that the roses which
grew there, and nodded in a friendly fashion to him as he passed, only
grew there for a small boyish nose to be poked up at them to get their
scent, and were not to be pulled except on rare occasions, when his
father went round the garden with a basket, and gathered the choicest,
and tied them into a rude kind of wreath. Comethup knew then that a
great expedition was on foot; that they would go out of the gate at the
farthest end of the garden, and that he would stumble--holding fast by
his father's hand--through a place where the grass was very soft and
very green, and where some of it was raised in long hillocks higher
than the rest; a place where large flat stones with curious marks
upon them, and little babies' heads with wings cut on some, cropped up
out of the earth. On one of these hillocks the little homely wreath
would be laid, and his father would kneel and seem to whisper something
behind his hand. He knew that his mother slept there, and that she
would never wake up again, and never walk with him, as his father
walked, in the garden of the roses. Child though he was, he always felt
a little sadness as he stumbled back over the hillocks to the garden
gate, because the mother he had never seen lay, an inscrutable mystery,
out of his sight under the grass.
There was one never-to-be-forgotten day when he first learned of
something outside his own small world. It was Sunday, and the heavy old
bells were swinging, and his father had gone out through the sunlight
with books under his arm to the church. It struck suddenly upon the
child that this day was different from all the rest; that the little
maid-servant had a cleaner face and a whiter apron, and that his own
tiny suit was one which was laid by in a tall old press all the rest of
the week. Most of our impressions, whatever age we may be, come to us
through the sense of smell, and Comethup's impression of the day came
to him through the scent of the clothes. They bore the same scent as
the big best bedroom upstairs--a room in which no one ever slept and
into which he had peeped one day when the door was open; just such a
scent as that which hung about it had been wafted out to his nostrils
then. He began to see that there must be something "best" about this
day also, as there was about everything connected with it.
When David Willis came back from church, the child had got his
questions ready, and knew exactly what answers he required, as a child
always unerringly does. He asked why all the shops along the other side
of the street were closed, and why the bells rang on that day, and why
the people sang in the big church which loomed above them. And then
he heard for the first time of that other world into which we try so
hard to peer; of that dread Presence--dread to a child--beyond the
skies that shuts in our vision. He was puzzled to understand how his
mother could be right above him, watching to see if he were a good
boy or a bad; and why, in that case, those flowers were put upon that
grass-covered bed of hers out in the churchyard. He pondered the matter
deeply, and was much disconcerted to think that the God of whom every
one seemed so much afraid was all round him and could see everything he
did.
He went one day into the church with his father--an experience indeed!
It was quite empty, save for themselves, and the first thought
that occurred to him was to wonder where the roof was; and why his
voice rumbled and rattled and sprang at him from far above when he
incautiously spoke in his usual shrill treble. The phrase which his
father used--"the house of God"--awed him; he understood why the roof
was so much higher than that of their own house. A lovely pattern of
many colours on the stone pavement at his feet arrested his attention.
He followed the shafts of light upward to the great rose window high
up in the wall over the porch. His heart went a little quicker, and he
gripped his father's hand with his baby fingers. That surely must be
the eye of God looking down at him.
He went home tremblingly to think the matter over; saw in the childish
wonder of discovery something that no one had found before; screwed his
courage to make further inquiries of his father concerning this dread
Being. It was a terror to him to learn that the Being was everywhere,
not alone in the great place where people went in their best clothes to
worship him. He crept up to his tiny bedroom under the roof that night,
and hurriedly closed the door and drew the curtains, and lay in bed
quakingly triumphant at the thought that he had shut It out, only to
wake up with a start in a little while at the remembrance that It must
have been in the room before his precautions were taken. He climbed out
of bed, and pattered across to the window; pulled back the curtains,
and pushed open the casement. All the benign influence of a summer
starlight night was about him; the lights were twinkling sleepily and
safely down in the town; and he could hear calm, slow country voices in
the street beyond the garden. Life--great and wonderful to his childish
mind, although bounded by so narrow a horizon--seemed beautiful and
good and secure; he smiled, and dropped his sleepy head on his arms on
the window ledge, and slept there calmly till the morning came.
The world is always a place of giants to us when we are very little;
therein lies the tragedy and the terror of it. We are always told that
childhood is such a happy time; we cry always how gladly we would
return to it. But we know well that we would not return to it with the
ignorance with which we left it; that we should go back to its delights
and its irresponsibilities with the magician's wand of Experience in
our hands to make it a fairyland. To a lonely child the world in which
he lives is a place of terrors, with no one who understands his needs
to explain to him all he craves so desperately to know.
Comethup was left pretty much to his own devices in those early days.
David Willis liked to have the boy near him, liked to see him moving
about the house. But, in his dreamy fashion, he took but scant notice
of the child as a child; he painted to himself glowing pictures
of what the boy would be when he had grown older and was ripe for
companionship; for the present, he waited a little impatiently for that
time to come. So it happened that Comethup explored his world alone.
The seasons seemed always to come suddenly. He would wake up, bright
and alert, on a glorious morning of sunshine, with an endless prospect
of sunny days before him; fires were things of the past, and the
garden was no more a sealed place, wherein he must not run for fear of
splashing his little white legs with mud. In just the same way there
seemed no intermediate time between the summer, with its glorious
abundance of roses and its long, hot afternoons, and the time when the
roses were gone, and he was curled up like a little comfortable animal
on the hearthrug before the parlour fire. That was the time, too, for
going to bed in the dark, when the dreadful hour crept inexorably on;
when he must leave the warmth and brightness of the lower room and
climb with reluctant feet into a colder atmosphere, where grim shadows
lurked on the landing, and the pale moon grinned in at him through an
uncurtained window, like a queer face all on one side.
The church grew, quite naturally, from its mystic qualities, to be
his chief delight. Everything about it was wonderful, from the long
flight of stone steps which led up to the organ-loft where his father
played, to the great brown wooden bird, with its beak open, and
with outstretched wings, which stood on a carved pillar before the
altar. Its seats were a never-failing source of delight to the shy
child--places in which one could hide, secure from every one, and look
up at the great roof, and at the sunlight slanting in through the
windows. But perhaps it was best of all to sit up in the organ-loft,
as he sometimes did with his father; to draw a huge hassock close up
against the old-fashioned wooden partition, and sit there and look
down, unseen and unsuspected, at the people below. Comethup always
stood up at the proper places on those occasions, and sat down when the
people rustled into their seats; he tried, too, to murmur something
which sounded a little like the responses which rumbled up from below.
His world widened out a little as the placid years flowed on. The
garden of the roses no longer bounded his horizon; the gate ceased to
be a barrier which must not be passed. The spirit of adventure was
strong in Comethup one summer afternoon, when his father was sleeping
peacefully on the hard horsehair sofa in the parlour, and the little
maid who waited upon them was busied in the kitchen. The garden had
been all explored; on such a day as this, when the air was heavy and
still, the very scent of the roses hung heavily. Poor Comethup was a
little tired of roses--a little tired even of that wonderful garden,
every corner of which, every stick and stone, he knew by heart. And
then, just as he clung to the iron railings of the gate, and looked
out disconsolately into the quiet street, there came a playmate.
It was a dog; a mere boisterous, happy-go-lucky, tumbling, joyous puppy
of a few months; a thing of comical crinkled mouth and serious eyes,
a delightful romping rascal that loved the world and hailed every
creature friend. It stopped opposite the gate where Comethup stood, and
backed itself upon its ridiculous little haunches and inch of tail, and
barked deliriously; then dashed off a foot or two in excited chase of
something which didn't exist; and then, suddenly remembering Comethup,
returned madly to the assault, thrusting its little black nose under
the gate in a frantic endeavour to bite Comethup's little white socks.
It was irresistible. Comethup cautiously pulled open the gate,
trembling at his daring as he did so, and went down on the gravel on
his knees, clapping his hands, and doing all in his power to induce the
puppy to come to him.
But that wary animal knew better than that. He backed away, moving
his stump of tail convulsively, and, as Comethup followed on hands
and knees, backed away farther still out of reach. Finally the puppy
scrambled off sideways, going through the most extraordinary gyrations
and looking back at the child with one ear cocked up, and then dashing
off again sideways, tripping himself up occasionally in his haste.
Comethup got to his feet and set off down the pavement after the puppy,
leaving the garden gate wide open.
The sternness of the chase awoke in Comethup's blood; he determined to
have that puppy at all costs--to feel the soft, warm, live, struggling
thing in his arms. Twice he was certain he had it; had dropped all over
it, so to speak, in a frantic endeavour to clasp it. But the thing slid
from under his arms and impudently snapped at his very nose, and was
off again. At last, however, he ran it to earth in a corner, where it
promptly rolled over on its back, with its four legs in the air, and
surrendered.
By that time Comethup had lost his way; but that fact was of the
smallest possible moment. He was in a glorious city he had not seen
before; a place of curious old houses bending their upper windows
toward each other as though to whisper; of long, quaint gardens thick
with Old-World flowers--stocks and hollyhocks, and others beloved of
our grandmothers; with another church, not so magnificent or so large
as the one he knew, but older and quainter, with a great brass dial up
on one wall from which a brass finger projected to show the shadow of
the afternoon sun. The puppy was struggling in his arms, jerking itself
frantically upward to lick his round, baby face, and to softly bite his
chin. That of course was disconcerting; but Comethup managed to take in
a great deal with his eyes nevertheless.
He managed, among other things, to take in the figure of an upright old
gentleman with a heavy gray mustache, who was clipping and trimming
with a pair of scissors in one of the gardens. Comethup had just
stopped, out of the politest curiosity, to watch him, when the old
gentleman swung round and marched toward the gate, and cried violently,
pointing a finger at the child, "What the devil are you doing with my
dog, boy?"
Poor Comethup had never been spoken to in that fashion before; he
began to see in the old gentleman retributive justice sweeping down
upon him for having left his father's garden--above all, for having
left the gate open, an unpardonable thing. He would have liked to
drop the puppy, but remembered in time that he might hurt it; so he
lowered it gently to the ground, where it at once commenced tugging at
his shoestrings. With as much dignity as he could command under the
circumstances, Comethup tremblingly began to explain that he had found
it.
Before he had finished a half-dozen words, however, the little old
gentleman, with an exclamation, had pulled the gate open, and had come
out upon the pavement. Comethup began to tremble very much indeed,
but the old gentleman took him--not unkindly--by the chin, and turned
his face up so that he might look at it. Comethup must have looked
very appealing indeed, for the old gentleman suddenly smiled, and
exclaimed, "Why, it's little Comethup!"
"Yes," said Comethup humbly.
The captain, without a word, picked up the puppy with one hand and
offered the other to the child. They went up the garden path together,
into a quaint little room, where everything was very bright and
very straight and very orderly; very poor, too, if Comethup had but
known. There the old gentleman lifted him into a chair, and rang the
bell. Then he turned round, in his abrupt fashion, and held out the
struggling puppy with one hand toward Comethup. "You like this dog?" he
asked.
Comethup faintly admitted that he did.
The old gentleman thrust it into his arms. "Take it," he said. "Be good
to it, and feed it well."
Comethup tried to thank him, but at that moment the puppy had taken
him at a mean disadvantage, and was dancing about frantically in his
arms, and dabbing a tongue much too large for it against his face, so
that speech was difficult. And just then a man came in, taller than the
old gentleman, and much more erect; and put the back of his hand quite
suddenly up to his forehead, and held it there for a moment, and then
brought the hand down smartly with a smack against the side of his leg.
Comethup became vastly interested in a moment; he almost dropped the
puppy in his excitement. He knew that only one class of people did that
kind of thing; the little maid at home, whose sweetheart was a soldier
from Canterbury, had told him all about it. He began to speculate on
what wonderful house this could be, where this sort of thing went on
quite as a matter of course, and no one seemed to think anything of it.
In a vague way he wondered if he could persuade his father to let the
little maid move her hand and arm like that whenever she came into the
parlour at home; it would be something to look forward to--something to
ring the bell for.
The old gentleman ordered tea, and the man who had stood stiffly by
the doorway went through the same wonderful performance again and
disappeared. Comethup's curiosity swept away every other consideration.
"Sir," he said, in an awed voice, "he's a soldier."
"He _was_," returned the old gentleman, shortly. Then stooping near to
the boy, with both hands resting on the table, he asked, with a curious
tenderness in his voice, "Where did you get those eyes, boy?"
Comethup did not remember the other occasion on which Captain
Garraway-Kyle had said that he had the eyes of his dead mother; he did
not even know that this old gentleman was Captain Garraway-Kyle. He
looked up innocently, and smiled, and said he didn't know.
"You got 'em from your mother, boy," said the captain, almost in a
whisper, still looking at him earnestly.
"My mother's in heaven," said Comethup.
"True, boy, true," said the old gentleman, patting him gently on the
shoulder and turning away. "That's very true. Your mother was a saint."
Comethup had not the least idea what a saint was, but he knew it must
be something very good, because the old gentleman looked so serious.
The arrival of tea put an end to further conversation, and Comethup
looked out eagerly for the man to go through his performance, which he
did, to the child's great delight, as he was leaving the room.
The abrupt old captain was as gentle as a woman with the child; busied
himself to mix milk and water for him, and to spread jam on bread. It
was only toward the end of the meal that Comethup suddenly remembered
the chief adventure of the afternoon; that he had left the safe line
which bounded his daily life, and was with strangers in an altogether
different world. Even the possession of the puppy could not wholly
console him; his lips began to quiver, and it was with some difficulty
that he made the captain understand. The captain assured him, with
much earnestness, that he knew the garden where the roses were, and
that he knew Comethup's father, and the little maid, and the church,
and everything. Comethup was comforted, and the strange spectacle
was presented to the town, about half an hour later, of Captain
Garraway-Kyle, as closely buttoned as ever, and with his hat a little
more fiercely tilted than usual, holding Comethup by the hand, on the
way to David Willis's house; Comethup, for his part, clutching the
puppy with difficulty but with determination.