"To each his sufferings; all are men
Condemned alike to groan.
The tender for another's pain--"
GRAY.
Not even the miser's funeral had produced in the neighbourhood anything
like the excitement which followed that Sunday evening. At first my
mother--her mind filled by the simplest form of the problem, namely,
that Mrs. Wood was in the hands of a tramp--wished my father to take the
blunderbuss in his hand and step down to the farm. He had "pish"ed and
"pshaw"ed about the blunderbuss, and was beginning to say more, when I
was dismissed to bed, where I wandered back over the moors in uneasy
dreams, and woke with the horror of a tramp's hand upon my shoulder.
After suffering the terrors of night for some time, and finding myself
no braver with my head under the bedclothes than above them, I began
conscientiously to try my mother's family recipe for "bad dreams and
being afraid in the dark." This was to "say over" the Benedicite
correctly, which (if by a rare chance one were still awake at the end)
was to be followed by a succession of the hymns one knew by heart. It
required an effort to _begin_, and to _really try_, but the children of
such mothers as ours are taught to make efforts, and once fairly
started, and holding on as a duty, it certainly did tend to divert the
mind from burglars and ghosts, to get the beasts, creeping things, and
fowls of the air into their right places in the chorus of benedictions.
That Jem never could discriminate between the "Dews and Frosts" and
"Frost and Cold" verses needs no telling. I have often finished and
still been frightened and had to fall back upon the hymns, but this
night I began to dream pleasanter dreams of Charlie's father and the
bee-master before I got to the holy and humble men of heart.
I slept long then, and Mother would not let me be awakened. When I did
open my eyes Jem was sitting at the end of the bed, dying to tell me the
news.
"Jack! you have waked, haven't you? I see your eyes. Don't shut 'em
again. What _do_ you think? _Mrs. Wood's husband has come home!_"
I never knew the ins and outs of the story very exactly. At the time
that what did become generally known was fresh in people's minds Jem and
I were not by way of being admitted to "grown-up" conversations; and
though Mrs. Wood's husband and I became intimate friends, I neither
wished nor dared to ask him more about his past than he chose to tell,
for I knew enough to know that it must be a most intolerable pain to
recall it.
What we had all heard of the story was this. Mr. Wood had been a head
clerk in a house of business. A great forgery was committed against his
employers, and he was accused. He was tried, condemned, and sentenced to
fourteen years' penal servitude, which, in those days, meant
transportation abroad. For some little time the jury had not been
unanimous. One man doubted the prisoner's guilt--the man we afterwards
knew as the old miser of Walnut-tree Farm. But he was over-persuaded at
last, and Mr. Wood was convicted and sentenced. He had spent ten years
of his penal servitude in Bermuda when a man lying in Maidstone Jail
under sentence of death for murder, confessed (amongst other crimes of
which he disburdened his conscience) that it was he, and not the man who
had been condemned, who had committed the forgery. Investigation
confirmed the truth of this statement, and Mr. Wood was "pardoned" and
brought home.
He had just come. He was the tramp.
In this life the old miser never knew that his first judgment had been
the just one, but the doubt which seems always to have haunted
him--whether he had not helped to condemn the innocent--was the reason
of his bequest to the convict's wife, and explained much of the
mysterious wording of the will.
It was a tragic tale, and gave a terrible interest to the gaunt,
white-haired, shattered-looking man who was the hero of it. It had one
point of special awe for me, and I used to watch him in church and think
of it, till I am ashamed to say that I forgot even when to stand up and
sit down. He had served ten years of his sentence. Ten years! Ten times
three hundred and sixty-five days! All the days of the years of my life.
The weight of that undeserved punishment had fallen on him the year that
I was born, and all that long, long time of home with Mother and Father
and Jem--all the haymaking summers and snowballing winters--whilst Jem
and I had never been away from home, and had had so much fun, and
nothing very horrid that I could call to mind except the mumps--he had
been an exile working in chains. I remember rousing up with a start from
the realization of this one Sunday to find myself still standing in the
middle of the Litany. My mother was behaving too well herself to find me
out, and though Jem was giggling he dared not move, because he was
kneeling next my father, whose back was turned to me. I knelt down, and
started to hear the parson say--"show Thy pity upon all prisoners and
captives!" And then I knew what it is to wish when it is too late. For I
did so wish I had really prayed for prisoners and captives every Sunday,
because then I should have prayed for that poor man nearly all the long
time he had been so miserable; for we began to go to church very early,
and one learns to pray easier and sooner than one learns anything else.
All this had happened in the holidays, but when they were over school
opened as before, and with additional scholars; for sympathy was wide
and warm with the school-mistress. Strangely enough, both partners in
the firm which had prosecuted Mr. Wood were dead. Their successors
offered him employment, but he could not face the old associations. I
believe he found it so hard to face any one, that this was the reason of
his staying at home for a time and helping in the school. I don't think
we boys made him uncomfortable as grown-up strangers seemed to do, and
he was particularly fond of Cripple Charlie.
This brought me into contact with him, for Charlie and I were great
friends. He was as well pleased to be read to out of the Penny Numbers
as the bee-master, and he was interested in things of which Isaac
Irvine was completely ignorant.
Our school was a day-school, but Charlie had been received by Mrs. Wood
as a boarder. His poor back could not have borne to be jolted to and
from the moors every day. So he lived at Walnut-tree Farm, and now and
then his father would come down in a light cart, lent by one of the
parishioners, and take Charlie home from Saturday to Monday, and then
bring him back again.
The sisters came to see him too, by turns, sometimes walking and
sometimes riding a rough-coated pony, who was well content to be tied to
a gate, and eat some of the grass that overgrew the lane. And often
Charlie came to _us_, especially in haytime, for haycocks seem very
comfortable (for people whose backs hurt) to lean against; and we could
cover his legs with hay too, as he liked them to be hidden. There is no
need to say how tender my mother was to him, and my father used to look
at him half puzzledly and half pitifully, and always spoke to him in
quite a different tone of voice to the one he used with other boys.
Jem gave Charlie the best puppy out of the curly brown spaniel lot; but
he didn't really like being with him, though he was sorry for him, and
he could not bear seeing his poor legs.
"They make me feel horrid," Jem said. "And even when they're covered
up, I know they're there."
"You're a chip of the old block, Jem," said my father, "I'd give a
guinea to a hospital any day sooner than see a patient. I'm as sorry as
can be for the poor lad, but he turns me queer, though I feel ashamed of
it. I like things _sound_. Your mother's different; she likes 'em better
for being sick and sorry, and I suppose Jack takes after her."
My father was wrong about me. Pity for Charlie was not half of the tie
between us. When he was talking, or listening to the penny numbers, I
never thought about his legs or his back, and I don't now understand how
anybody could.
He read and remembered far more than I did, and he was even wilder about
strange countries. He had as adventurous a spirit as any lad in the
school, cramped up as it was in that misshapen body. I knew he'd have
liked to go round the world as well as I, and he often laughed and
said--"What's more, Jack, if I'd the money I would. People are very kind
to poor wretches like me all over the world. I should never want a
helping hand, and the only difference between us would be, that I should
be carried on board ship by some kind-hearted blue-jacket, and you'd
have to scramble for yourself."
He was very anxious to know Isaac Irvine, and when I brought the
bee-master to see him, they seemed to hold friendly converse with their
looks even before either of them spoke. It was a bad day with Charlie,
but he set his lips against the pain, and raised himself on one arm to
stare out of his big brown eyes at the old man, who met them with as
steady a gaze out of his. Then Charlie lowered himself again, and said
in a tone of voice by which I knew he was pleased, "I'm so glad you've
come to see me, old Isaac. It's very kind of you. Jack says you know a
lot about live things, and that you like the numbers we like in the
_Penny Cyclopædia_. I wanted to see you, for I think you and I are much
in the same boat; you're old, and I'm crippled, and we're both too poor
to travel. But Jack's to go, and when he's gone, you and I'll follow him
on the map."
"GOD willing, sir," said the bee-master; and when he said that, I knew
how sorry he felt for poor Charlie, for when he was moved he always said
very short things, and generally something religious.
And for all Charlie's whims and fancies, and in all his pain and
fretfulness, and through fits of silence and sensitiveness, he had never
a better friend than Isaac Irvine. Indeed the bee-master was one of
those men (to be found in all ranks) whose delicate tenderness might not
be guessed from the size and roughness of the outer man.
Our neighbours were all very kind to Mr. Wood, in their own way, but
they were a little impatient of his slowness to be sociable, and had, I
think, a sort of feeling that the ex-convict ought not only to enjoy
evening parties more than other people, but to be just a little more
grateful for being invited.
However, one must have a strong and sensitive imagination to cultivate
wide sympathies when one lives a quiet, methodical life in the place
where one's father and grandfather lived out quiet methodical lives
before one; and I do not think we were an imaginative race.
The school-master (as we used to call him) had seen and suffered so much
more of life than we, that I do not think he resented the clumsiness of
our sympathy; but now I look back I fancy that he must have felt as if
he wanted years of peace and quiet in which to try and forget the years
of suffering. Old Isaac said one day, "I reckon the master feels as if
he wanted to sit down and say to hisself over and over again, 'I'm a
free man, I'm a free man, I'm a free man,' till he can fair trust
himself to believe it."
Isaac was probably right, and perhaps evening parties, though they are
meant for treats, are not the best places to sit down and feel free in,
particularly when there are a lot of strange people who have heard a
dreadful story about you, and want to see what you look like after it.
During the summer holidays Jem and I were out the whole day long. When
we came in I was ready for the Penny Numbers, but Jem always fell
asleep, even if he did not go to bed at once. My father did just the
same. I think their feeling about houses was of a perfectly primitive
kind. They looked upon them as comfortable shelter for sleeping and
eating, but not at all as places in which to pursue any occupation.
Life, for them, was lived out-of-doors.
I know now how dull this must have made the evenings for my mother, and
that it was very selfish of me to wait till my father was asleep (for
fear he should say "no"), and then to ask her leave to take the Penny
Numbers down to the farm and sit with Cripple Charlie.
Now and then she would go too, and chat with Mrs. Wood, whilst the
school-master and I were turning the terrestrial globe by Charlie's
sofa; but as a rule Charlie and I were alone, and the Woods went round
the homestead together, and came home hand in hand, through the garden,
and we laughed to think how we had taken him for a tramp.
And sometimes on a summer's evening, when we talked and read aloud to
each other across a quaint oak table that had been the miser's, of
far-away lands and strange birds of gorgeous plumage, the school-master
sat silent in the arm-chair by the open lattice, resting his white head
against the mullion that the ivy was creeping up, and listened to the
blackbirds and thrushes as their songs dropped by odd notes into
silence, and gazed at the near fields and trees, and the little
homestead with its hayricks on the hill, when the grass was apple-green
in the gold mist of sunset: and went on gazing when that had faded into
fog, and the hedgerow elms were black against the sky, as if the eye
could not be filled with seeing, nor the ear with hearing!