"Whose powers shed round him in the common strife
Or mild concerns of ordinary life,
A constant influence, a peculiar grace;
* * * * * *
Or if an unexpected call succeed,
Come when it will, is equal to the need."
WORDSWORTH'S _Happy Warrior._
Judgement came at last. During my first holidays I had posted a letter
from Lewis Lorraine to the uncle in India to whom he had before
endeavoured to appeal. The envelope did not lack stamps, but the address
was very imperfect, and it was many months in reaching him. He wrote a
letter, which Lewis never received, Mr. Crayshaw probably knew why. But
twelve months after that Colonel Jervois came to England, and he lost no
time in betaking himself to Crayshaw's. From Crayshaw's he came to my
father, the only "unexceptionable reference" left to Snuffy to put
forward.
The Colonel came with a soldier's promptness, and, with the utmost
courtesy of manner, went straight to the point. His life had not
accustomed him to our neighbourly unwillingness to interfere with
anything that did not personally concern us, nor to the prudent patience
with which country folk will wink long at local evils. In the upshot
what he asked was what my mother had asked three years before. Had my
father personal knowledge or good authority for believing the school to
be a well-conducted one, and Mr. Crayshaw a fit man for his responsible
post? Had he ever heard rumours to the man's discredit?
Replies that must do for a wife will not always answer a man who puts
the same questions. My great-grandfather's memory was not evoked on this
occasion, and my father frankly confessed that his personal knowledge of
Crayshaw's was very small, and that the man on whose recommendation he
had sent us to school there had just proved to be a rascal and a
swindler. Our mother had certainly heard rumours of severity, but he had
regarded her maternal anxiety as excessive, etc., etc. In short, my dear
father saw that he had been wrong, and confessed it, and was now as
ready as the Colonel to expose Snuffy's misdeeds.
No elaborate investigation was needed. An attack once made on Mr.
Crayshaw's hollow reputation, it cracked on every side; first hints
crept out, then scandals flew. The Colonel gave no quarter, and he did
not limit his interest to his own nephew.
"A widow's son, ma'am," so he said to my mother, bowing over her hand as
he led her in to dinner, in a style to which we were quite unaccustomed;
"a widow's son, ma'am, should find a father in every honest man who can
assist him."
The tide having turned against Snuffy, his friends (of the Driver and
Quills type) turned with it. But they gained nothing, for one morning he
got up as early as we had done, and ran away, and I never heard of him
again. And before nightfall the neighbours, who had so long tolerated
his wickedness, broke every pane of glass in his windows.
During all this, Lewis Lorraine and his uncle stayed at our house. The
Colonel spent his time between holding indignant investigations, writing
indignant letters (which he allowed us to seal with his huge signet),
and walking backwards and forwards to the town to buy presents for the
little boys.
When Snuffy ran away, and the school was left to itself, Colonel Jervois
strode off to the nearest farm, requisitioned a waggon, and having
packed the boys into it, bought loaves and milk enough to breakfast
them all, and transported the whole twenty-eight to our door. He left
four with my mother, and marched off with the rest. The Woods took in a
large batch, and in the course of the afternoon he had for love or money
quartered them all. He betrayed no nervousness in dealing with numbers,
in foraging for supplies, or in asking for what he wanted. Whilst other
people had been doubting whether it might not "create unpleasantness" to
interfere in this case and that, the Colonel had fought each boy's
battle, and seen most of them off on their homeward journeys. He was
used to dealing with men, and with emergencies, and it puzzled him when
my Uncle Henry consulted his law-books and advised caution, and my
father saw his agent on farm business, whilst the fate of one of
Crayshaw's victims yet hung in the balance.
When all was over the Colonel left us, and took Lewis with him, and his
departure raised curiously mixed feelings of regret and relief.
He had quite won my mother's heart, chiefly by his energy and tenderness
for the poor boys, and partly by his kindly courtesy and deference
towards her. Indeed all ladies liked him--all, that is, who knew him.
Before they came under the influence of his pleasantness and politeness,
he shared the half-hostile reception to which any person or anything
that was foreign to our daily experience was subjected in our
neighbourhood. So that the first time Colonel Jervois appeared in our
pew, Mrs. Simpson (the wife of a well-to-do man of business who lived
near us) said to my mother after church, "I see you've got one of the
military with you," and her tone was more critical than congratulatory.
But when my mother, with unconscious diplomacy, had kept her to
luncheon, and the Colonel had handed her to her seat, and had stroked
his moustache, and asked in his best manner if she meant to devote her
son to the service of his country, Mrs. Simpson undid her
bonnet-strings, fairly turned her back on my father, and was quite
unconscious when Martha handed the potatoes; and she left us wreathed in
smiles, and resolved that Mr. Simpson should buy their son Horace a
commission instead of taking him into the business. Mr. Simpson did not
share her views, and I believe he said some rather nasty things about
swaggering, and not having one sixpence to rub against another. And Mrs.
Simpson (who was really devoted to Horace and could hardly bear him out
of her sight) reflected that it was possible to get shot as well as to
grow a moustache if you went into the army; but she still maintained
that she should always remember the Colonel as a thorough gentleman, and
a wonderful judge of the character of boys.
The Colonel made great friends with the Woods, and he was deeply
admired by our rector, who, like many parsons, had a very military
heart, and delighted in exciting tales of the wide world which he could
never explore. It was perhaps natural that my father should hardly be
devoted to a stranger who had practically reproached his negligence, but
the one thing that did draw him towards the old Indian officer was his
habit of early rising. My father was always up before any of us, but he
generally found the Colonel out before him, enjoying the early hours of
the day as men who have lived in hot climates are accustomed to do. They
used to come in together in very pleasant moods to breakfast; but with
the post-bag Lorraine's uncle was sure to be moved to voluble
indignation, or pity, or to Utopian plans to which my father listened
with puzzled impatience. He did not understand the Colonel, which was
perhaps not to be wondered at.
His moral courage had taken away our breath, and physical courage was
stamped upon his outward man. If he was anything he was manly. It was
because he was in some respects very womanly too, that he puzzled my
father's purely masculine brain. The mixture, and the vehemence of the
mixture, were not in his line. He would have turned "Crayshaw's"
matters over in his own mind as often as hay in a wet season before
grappling with the whole bad business as the Colonel had done. And on
the other hand, it made him feel uncomfortable and almost ashamed to see
tears standing in the old soldier's eyes as he passionately blamed
himself for what had been suffered by "my sister's son."
The servants one and all adored Colonel Jervois. They are rather acute
judges of good breeding, and men and maids were at one on the fact that
he was a visitor who conferred social distinction on the establishment.
They had decided that we should "dine late so long as The Gentleman" was
with us, whilst my mother was thinking how to break so weighty an
innovation to such valuable servants. They served him with alacrity, and
approved of his brief orders and gracious thanks. The Colonel did
unheard-of things with impunity--threw open his bedroom shutters at
night, and more than once unbarred and unbolted the front door to go
outside for a late cigar. Nothing puzzled Martha more than the nattiness
with which he put all the bolts and bars back into their places, as if
he had been used to the door as long as she had.
Indeed he had all that power of making himself at home, which is most
fully acquired by having had to provide for yourself in strange places,
but he carried it too far.
One day he penetrated into the kitchen (having previously been rummaging
the kitchen-garden) and insisted upon teaching our cook how to make
curry. The lesson was much needed, and it was equally well intended, but
it was a mistake. Everything cannot be carried by storm, whatever the
military may think. Jane said, "Yes, sir," at every point that
approached to a pause in the Colonel's ample instructions, but she never
moved her eyes from the magnificent moustache which drooped above the
stew-pan, nor her thoughts from the one idea produced by the
occasion--that The Gentleman had caught her without her cap. In short
our curries were no worse, and no better, in consequence of the shock to
kitchen etiquette (for that was all) which she received.
And yet we modified our household ways for him, as they were never
modified for any one else. On Martha's weekly festival for cleaning the
bedrooms (and if a room was occupied for a night, she scrubbed after the
intruder as if he had brought the plague in his portmanteau) the
smartest visitor we ever entertained had to pick his or her way through
the upper regions of the house, where soap and soda were wafted on high
and unexpected breezes along passages filled with washstands and
clothes-baskets, cane-seated chairs and baths, mops, pails and brooms.
But the Colonel had "given such a jump" on meeting a towel-horse at
large round a sharp corner, and had seemed so uncomfortable on finding
everything that he thought was inside his room turned outside, that for
that week Martha left the lower part of the house uncleaned, and did not
turn either the dining or drawing rooms into the hall on their appointed
days. She had her revenge when he was gone.
On the day of his departure, my lamentations had met with the warmest
sympathy as I stirred toffy over Jane's kitchen fire, whilst Martha
lingered with the breakfast things, after a fashion very unusual with
her, and gazed at the toast-rack and said, "the Colonel had eaten
nothing of a breakfast to travel on." But next morning, I met her in
another mood. It was a mood to which we were not strangers, though it
did not often occur. In brief, Martha (like many another invaluable
domestic) "had a temper of her own"; but to do her justice her ill
feelings generally expended themselves in a rage for work, and in taking
as little ease herself as she allowed to other people. I knew what it
meant when I found her cleaning the best silver when she ought to have
been eating her breakfast; but my head was so full of the Colonel, that
I could not help talking about him, even if the temptation to tease
Martha had not been overwhelming. No reply could I extract; only once,
as she passed swiftly to the china cupboard, with the whole Crown Derby
tea and coffee service on one big tray (the Colonel had praised her
coffee), I heard her mutter--"Soldiers is very upsetting." Certainly,
considering what she did in the way of scolding, scouring, blackleading,
polishing and sand-papering that week, it was not Martha's fault if we
did not "get straight again," furniture and feelings. I've heard her say
that Calais sand would "fetch anything off," and I think it had fetched
the Colonel off her heart by the time that the cleaning was done.
It had no such effect on mine. Lewis Lorraine himself did not worship
his uncle more devoutly than I. Colonel Jervois had given me a new
ideal. It was possible, then, to be enthusiastic without being unmanly;
to live years out of England, and come back more patriotic than many
people who stayed comfortably at home; to go forth into the world and be
the simpler as well as the wiser, the softer as well as the stronger for
the experience? So it seemed. And yet Lewis had told me, with such tears
as Snuffy never made him shed, how tender his uncle was to his
unworthiness, what allowances he made for the worst that Lewis could say
of himself, and what hope he gave him of a good and happy future.
"He cried as bad as I did," Lewis said, "and begged me to forgive him
for having trusted so much to my other guardian. Do you know, Jack,
Snuffy regularly forged a letter like my handwriting, to answer that one
Uncle Eustace wrote, which he kept back? He might well do such good
copies, and write the year of Our Lord with a swan at the end of the
last flourish! And you remember what we heard about his having been in
prison--but, oh, dear! I don't want to remember. He says I am to forget,
and he forbade me to talk about Crayshaw's, and said I was not to
trouble my head about anything that had happened there. He kept saying,
'Forget, my boy, forget! Say GOD help me, and look forward. While
there's life there's always the chance of a better life for every one.
Forget! forget!'"
Lewis departed with his uncle. Charlie went for two nights to the moors.
Jem's holidays had not begun, and in our house we were "cleaning down"
after the Colonel as if he had been the sweeps.
I went to old Isaac for sympathy. He had become very rheumatic the last
two years, but he was as intelligent as ever, and into his willing ear I
poured all that I could tell of my hero, and much that I only imagined.
His sympathy met me more than half-way. The villagers as a body were
unbounded in their approval of the Colonel, and Mrs. Irvine was even
greedier than old Isaac for every particular I could impart respecting
him.
"He's a _handsome_ gentleman," said the bee-master's wife, "and he
passed us (my neighbour, Mrs. Mettam, and me) as near, sir, as I am to
you, with a gold-headed stick in his hand, and them lads following after
him, for all the world like the Good Shepherd and his flock."
I managed not to laugh, and old Isaac added, "There's a many in this
village, sir, would have been glad to have taken the liberty of
expressing themselves to the Colonel, and a _depitation_ did get as far
as your father's gates one night, but they turned bashful and come home
again. And I know, for one, Master Jack, that if me and my missus had
had a room fit to offer one of them poor young gentlemen, I'd have given
a week's wage to do it, and the old woman would have been happy to her
dying day."