_We spend our years as a tale that is told_
Look, it is evening, quite evening at last. See how the light has
faded, and the shadows have fallen over the hills. The day is over, the
twilight is gathering.
Just so it is with me. My day has long been over; the hours of work are
spent, the twilight seems long, very long, but the night is at hand.
I am glad that it should be so. To the old weary eyes this dim light
is welcome; to the tired frame, 'the night in which no man can work,'
looks full of rest as it draws near.
You ask me how it was with me in the morning.
It is so long ago I can scarcely remember now.
In the morning, when I was young?
Let me look back through the shadowy years.
Ah yes! It comes slowly to me--the wild morning freshness, the
flower-scented air. The dawn has broken; it is all wonderfully bright;
there seem to be no clouds; the sun rises in golden radiance, and the
earth is flooded with glory.
And as my eyes--dazzled at first--grow more used to the splendour of
the young day, robed and crowned with light, I see an old gateway grim
and grey, facing the west. It lies in shadow still, but a child pushes
open the heavy wooden door, and suddenly a stream of sunlight pours
through, and he stands there with the morning light behind him.
How often there may be two meanings in our simplest words. I was
standing truly, on the threshold of life, even as my childish feet
rested on the grey worn stone, and far before me lay the mists and the
shadows, the hopes and the sorrows of my future. Only from behind--my
home lay in there behind--from there the sunshine had never failed me
yet.
My hand, a small soft round one, rested against the arched gateway,
among the stonecrop and the yellow lichen. I remember that I tried to
loosen one of the old stones, but I could not. It was still as strong
and immovable as when, ages ago, it had been fitted into its place.
I daresay it is just as firm now, though the little busy hand is so
withered and feeble.
It was the gateway of a ruined castle, grand and very beautiful in
its ruin. I have heard people say that they wished they could put all
things back, and see it as it once was; but I always wondered at them.
I would not have changed one stone.
I suppose that all places may look sad at times--beneath the grey sky
of winter, or when autumn winds are blowing; but on a summer's day no
place has ever seemed to me so bright with sunshine as our ruins.
It was as if old age had come upon them lightly, bringing with it no
burden of sadness, and that their days of work long over, they were
content to lie idle in the kind warm sun, and to tell stories of the
past.
The birds built their nests in the traceried windows, and sang and
loved each other, and skimmed about at their own wild will above the
flowery turf.
Ivy, the child of old age, had wound itself round the broken towers,
half clinging to them, half supporting them.
It was one of my mother's quaint sayings that the soft mossy grass,
which grew luxuriantly everywhere, reminded her of charity, for that
though Time had stolen much away, all its thefts were covered and
hidden beneath that widely-spread mantle of turf.
I used to listen to my mother telling the stories of the place in her
sweet grave voice. She and my father had charge of the Castle, and we
lived in the rooms over the grand old gateway.
My mother often went round with visitors, for people came from afar to
see the ruins. I liked to follow her, holding her gown bashfully, and
wondering how mother knew that Queen Elizabeth had come there once, or
that Simon De Montford, with a great army, marched up the valley one
dark night and took the Castle by storm.
'Were you here, mother, when Queen Elizabeth came?' I asked her once.
'Oh no, Willie.'
'Then how do you know she ever came and stayed in the Queen's Tower?'
'They say she did,' mother said, smoothing my curly head.
'But do you believe it, mother? How can you tell if it is true?'
'Little Willie,' I remember that she answered, 'we must believe many
things without seeing them,' and I thought that she looked up to
somewhere higher than even the great Queen's Tower.
I thought a little, and then said--
'What a great person she must have been. Would you like to have been
her, mother?'
'Oh, no, no,' and mother smiled, and then knelt down and kissed me. 'My
own little son.'
I did not know what that had to do with Queen Elizabeth, and I don't
know now, but I felt very sure that no queen, however grand, could ever
have been like my mother. She, I thought, was more like an angel, and
I believed I knew quite well how the angels look. For under the ruined
roof of the Castle chapel was a sculptured angel's head with folded
wings. It had just such a face as my mother's, with the same peaceful
brow and loving downward look.
Sometimes I see her still. She comes to me through the long years at
night, and we are together again--not as now, I so old and withered,
she so young and fair--but as it used to be when I fell asleep, a
tired child, on her shoulder. And I think that when the night--I mean
death--really comes for me, and I lie down to sleep, that God will send
her for me, and that she will take me, her weary son, in her dear arms
once more.
I was an only child, but not a lonely one. On the other side of the
ruins, only much lower down, close to the stream that ran under the
Castle cliff, was the forester's cottage, where lived Hildred, my
friend and playfellow.
It was a pretty cottage with a thatched roof, half buried in climbing
roses. The pleasant rippling of the stream sounded there close at hand.
We heard the water, too, up at the gate-house, but more faintly. There
it was the distant rush of the stream tumbling noisily over some rocks
before it took up its quiet song again at a lower level.
The cottage garden was a sunny corner full of flowers and bees and
butterflies. But we liked our grey gateway best, with its broad fair
view. For we could see across to blue hills in the distance, miles and
miles away. Between them and us were broad woods and broken ground,
farm-houses with rich pasture-land round them, and broad fields stately
with yellow corn. It was beautiful to watch the wind sweep over them
with a rough kindly hand, breaking the field into waves of rippled gold
beneath its touch.
I was looking at all this from the gateway on the summer morning I have
been telling you of, and feeling very happy, though I scarcely knew
why. For a child accepts God's gifts with a glad unconsciousness, as
the earth welcomes the sun and rain.
Perhaps you wonder why I tell you so much about a day on which nothing
particular happened, and why I remember it so well. But if you live to
grow old, you will find out that it is not always the great events in
your life that you remember the best and care the most to look back
upon. It is some sunny little bit of every-day life--some homely scene
that passed over and seemed to leave no trace behind, that lingers the
longest in your memory. Just as looking down from a high hill at sunset
over the country below, it is not the biggest things that you see the
most clearly, but the bright spots here and there: a glittering pool of
water, perhaps, or a bush of blooming gorse which has caught and kept
the sunbeams.
You children should not have got an old man talking to-night about what
happened when he was a little boy. Old men are like a great many other
things, easier set a-going than stopped when they have once begun. And
so I am afraid you will find me. I seem to remember so many things now
that I once look back. Sad things, children, as well as merry things,
for there are grey threads woven into the web of every life. I hope
you will not say that mine is too 'grey' a story for New Year's Eve.
Don't be afraid though. There is nothing sad coming yet. I was as happy
a little boy just then, as the sun shone on.
Little Boy Blue
Come blow your horn,
The sheep are in the meadow,
The cows are in the corn--
sang a little clear voice coming through the ruins. That was Hildred.
She always sang unless she was running so fast as to be out of breath.
One day when her sister-in-law was scolding her, she said she believed
Hildred began singing before her eyes were open in the morning, and
that it was very tiresome. Hildred lived with her brother and his wife,
for her own parents were dead.
Her sister-in-law scolded her a great deal, but she could not quite
sadden the brightest little heart that ever beat. Hildred seemed to
get over the scoldings as quickly as a little bird shakes off the
rain-drops that have fallen on its wings.
She was sorry for a few minutes, but then she ran away to us and forgot
it all. Often there were two big tears on her cheeks when she left
home, but by the time she had got past the keep the wind had dried
the tears, and she was singing again. She left her troubles behind
and forgot them: forgot the sturdy uproarious Robin, the stolidly
domineering Walter--her brother's little twin boys--forgot even that
passionate blue-eyed baby Phillis, the greatest tyrant of them all.
You may be sure that my mother was all the kinder to Hildred because
she had no parents of her own.
The little maiden brought all her small troubles to be cured by my
mother, as grown up people brought her their big troubles. Everyone
that knew my mother came to her. She had remedies for all ills, I
think, from a scratched arm to a broken heart. No one went away from
her without taking some comfort with them. Many people have told me
this. I scarcely know it by my own experience, for as long as she lived
I never needed comfort.
My father was a man of very few words. He seldom came home until the
evening, and then he liked to sit perfectly silent, with his pipe in
his mouth, in the chimney corner if it was winter, or in summer on a
stone bench outside the door.
I was not a bit afraid of him, and chattered on to my mother just the
same, whether he was there or not. I do not know if he ever listened to
what she and I said to one another. At all events he never joined in
our long talks. My mother taught me to look up to him and honour him,
and so I did, but in a far-off sort of a fashion, much as I honoured
our sovereign lord King George.
But she seemed to belong to me so completely that it would have
surprised me very much if father or anyone else had set up a claim on
her that came in the way of my rights.
He was welcome to talk with her, as I sometimes heard him doing, in
slow deep sentences, after my mother had bidden me good night in the
long light summer evening. But she was mine till bed-time.
Bed-time! how I hated the word then! How it brings back now the dear
vision of a little white nest, of a few last thoughts in the waning
light, of hours of dreamless sleep. Then of a glad awakening in the
morning with sunshine on my face, and mother by my bed.
There was an old well under the wall that used to frighten and yet
attract me, it was so very deep and dark. I always fancied that some
unknown danger lurked in its depths, yet I could not resist the
temptation of peering down into it, to see through all the fern and
broad-leaved mulleins, the black water far below marked by one round
spot of light, where the reflection from the sky touched the surface.
It was a daily pleasure to me to see the bucket lowered into the well.
I took a friendly interest in that bucket, almost as if it had been
a thing alive, and used to wonder whether it did not dread the rapid
steady going down into darkness, and the sudden dip into the chill
water at the bottom. I was quite glad when the rusty chain began to be
wound up again, and the brimming bucket loomed slowly into sight.
On a stone in the wall above the well there were some words engraved in
queer old-fashioned characters. When first I knew how to read, I used
to try to spell them out letter by letter, but I could not manage it.
'Why can't I read that,' I asked my mother rather indignantly, 'when I
can read so well?'
'The books we read now-a-days are not printed with those sort of
letters,' she said, pausing for a moment in turning the creaking old
windlass.
I looked down to see how my friend the bucket was getting on, and
seeing him rising up safely towards me, turned back to the inscription.
'How stupid to put it so that we cannot read it,' I said.
'But wise people--people who know a great deal--read it quite easily,'
said my mother.
She had landed the bucket safely on the well-side, and she stood
thoughtfully, and pulled a little moss off one of the old carved
letters. 'It is not that they were stupid, Willie, but that we are
not wise enough to understand. Very often when we think that things
are not right or wise, it is only because we cannot make them out for
ourselves; but if we saw clearer and knew more, we should find out that
they were only too wise for us and too good.'
She was talking to herself, I think, not to me, and I only answered the
last words.
'Good; then are those old words very good?'
'Very good indeed, Willie.'
'What are they?'
She read slowly--
'For whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in My Name;
Verily I say unto you he shall in no wise lose his reward.'
'Why, that is in the Bible,' I said wonderingly.
My mother smiled. 'I told you they were good words.'
'But how did they get there?'
'I don't know. I think some good man must have carved them long, long
ago, that the water we draw up out of the well might remind us of
Christ's words, and that we might remember to try and help one another.'
And then she told me how all service done for our Master's sake--even
the very smallest--should be remembered by Him, and should in no wise
lose its reward.
I have forgotten the words she used, but I remember that I said, 'I
should like to give some one a cup of water, mother.'
She was going back to the house, with the pitcher she had filled, but
she stopped to put her hand upon my head, and answered--
'I hope you will often. Do not forget, Willie.'
I never did. That little talk, with its few and simple words, was to
bring a great change over my life.
One day--it was a hot afternoon in harvest-time--I heard the bell that
hung near the great gateway ring suddenly. A faint ring, as if the hand
that pulled the bell was weak or afraid, but as I stood still for a
minute, listening, it sounded again.
I ran to the door and opened it: a man dressed like a soldier in a
faded red coat was half-sitting, half-lying on the ground leaning
against the archway. Beside him, trying to support him, knelt a boy of
about my own age, who looked up eagerly as I pulled open the gate.
I drew back, startled at the man's haggard face and dark hair, meaning
to go and call my mother, but the boy stretched out his hand to me and
said eagerly--
'Give him a little water, for the love of God!'
A little water--how strange it sounded to me--a cup of water. Mother
had said she hoped I should. I rushed back to the house, seized a horn
mug, and there at the well the bucket stood half full.
The boy put the water to his father's lips, and the poor man swallowed
a few drops with difficulty.
'How tired he is,' I said.
The boy shook back the dark hair from his eyes and looked up at me.
'He can't get on any farther. I don't know what to do.'
'Oh, you must come in here,' I said eagerly. 'Can't he walk? It isn't
far.'
The boy bent down and spoke. I scarcely think the poor soldier
understood what was said to him, but at his son's voice and touch he
strove wearily to get up from the ground. Between us we managed to lead
him into the kitchen. He fell heavily on the oak-settle near the window.
'Is he very ill?' I asked.
'Three days ago he was struck down with fever. Last night we had to
sleep under a hedge, they would not take us in at the place we stopped
at, and to-day he----'
The boy stopped and turned round. Another voice--I scarcely knew it for
my mother's, it was so changed and hoarse--repeated his words, 'Struck
down with fever.'
She drew me hastily away from the sick man, whose hand still rested on
my shoulder.
'Oh, Willie! what have you done--what have you done?'
'Mother, the poor man wanted some water,' I began, but she called to me
to go away, and when I wanted to stay and tell her about it, she pushed
me towards the door with a sort of cry--
'Go, go, I will come to you.'
I went out frightened and puzzled, and waited for her at the well.
When she came to me, I sprang into her arms and sobbed out, 'Mother,
what have I done? You said a cup of water--'
I could not go on, but pointed to the stone. It was strange to see how
the troubled look passed away from her face and the peacefulness I knew
so well came back.
'My boy, you have done nothing--nothing wrong. I hope you will always
try to follow God's commands, though it may lead you into troubles.'
'What is it, mother? Is the man very ill?'
'Very ill, Willie,' she said gently; 'so ill that I don't know yet what
we ought to do. I wish father was at home. I must go back now.'
I sat down by the well and waited, watching the door. It seemed a long
time that it remained closed, and no one came near me.
At last in the stillness I was glad to hear the well-known heavy knock
that Farmer Foster always gave upon the gate with his stick. I went and
pulled it back.
I have not said anything yet about Farmer Foster. But Foster of Furzy
Nook was a name so well known in those days all round the country that
it seems to me as if no one needed to be told about him.
From our windows we could see the twisted chimneys of Furzy Nook farm
peeping through the trees. A quaint old-fashioned farm-house, built of
red brick, standing in a hollow at the end of a long green lane arched
over all the way with trees, that was the pride of the neighbourhood.
To go to Furzy Nook for the afternoon had always seemed to me and
Hildred the greatest happiness that the world had to offer.
Mother used to live there before she married my father, and the kind
old people were almost as fond of her as if she had been a daughter of
their own. Farmer Foster was always coming up to the Castle to see her.
I was very glad this afternoon to see the kind face and the gaiters and
the shaggy pony looking just the same as usual.
'Well, Willie,' called out the loud cheery tones that sounded very
comforting to-day, 'and how's mother?'
Holding on to his stirrup, as he rode slowly in under the archway, I
told him all that had happened in the last half hour.
He gave a sort of whistle of dismay 'Struck down with fever, eh,
Willie?--that's bad. And father won't be home till night?' he said,
biting the end of his whip and staring at the door. 'Well, you'll have
to hold the nag for me, lad, that's what you'll have to do.'
And he got off and went into the house. By and by he came out again
with my mother, and they stood together talking earnestly. I was
leading the pony up and down on the grass, but now and then I overheard
a few of their words.
'You _must_,' Farmer Foster said once or twice.
My mother shook her head: 'I cannot turn the poor creature out to die.'
Something I heard about 'very catching,' and mother said 'hush,' and
looked towards me.
Suddenly I saw the old farmer take her in his arms and kiss her. He
came and took the pony away from me, telling me to go to my mother.
'Is the poor soldier better, mother?'
'No. He is very ill, Willie,' she said, putting both her hands in her
old fond way on to my head; 'so ill that I must send my boy away. No,
Willie, you cannot stay. Farmer Foster is going to take you home with
him.'
I could not cry when I looked at her face. She was so sorry for me. I
knew she would not have sent me away if she could have helped it. I
pressed my two hands on to my breast and looked at the inscription over
the well. My mother's eyes followed mine and she smiled. Perhaps to go
away quietly from her would be more than 'a cup of cold water.'
She took my hand and we went silently to where Farmer Foster stood by
the pony waiting for us.
'He is ready,' said my mother trying to speak cheerfully. 'See, Willie,
the farmer is going to let you ride on his pony.'
Farmer Foster lifted me up. 'I'm afraid he will fret after you, Annie.'
'No,' she said, softly. She came close beside the pony and put her arms
round me, and, as I bent down to her, gave me a long trembling kiss.
'You will be a good boy without me always.'
The shaggy pony walked steadily away with me under the gateway. I
thought my mother had put her hands over her eyes, but when I turned
back again, before we went down the hill, she was looking after us, and
there were tears and smiles both upon her face.
That was a very sad ride. But I think it would scarcely have been in
human nature--at least in a boy's nature--not to be cheered by all the
joyous sights and sounds that greeted us at Furzy Nook. We got to the
end of the sandy lane just at sunset, the pleasantest and noisiest time
of day in a farmyard.
I tried to count the noises, but it was no good. There were too many,
and all going on at the same time.
There were the cows coming home from the up-land pasture to be milked,
and lowing as they wound down the narrow path. The cow-boy had a stick
in his hand, which he flung carelessly among a flock of geese, and
made them run cackling loudly towards their pond, where they launched
themselves into the water with a satisfied splash and glide. Because
the geese cackled of course the ducks began to quack. The supper-bell
was ringing loudly from the farm-house, and the bell excited the big
watch-dog to rush out of his kennel and bark furiously.
We heard the distant cry of the harvesters coming from the field, where
the wheat was being carried, and the creak and rattle of an empty
waggon coming up the lane.
Besides that, the pigs were having a family quarrel over their supper
in the straw-yard. Raised high above the noise, the pigeons cooed
peacefully from their house. The rooks were floating in from the
fields to the tree-tops. Then the donkey, honest fellow, made up his
patient mind to have a share in what was going on, so he lifted up his
voice and brayed. Louder than the pigs--harsher than the geese--more
discordant than the peahen, he stood with his head thrust over a gate
and made his moan to the world.
I suppose the animals all knew that the sun was setting, and were
making the most of the waning day. So were the harvesters, for their
cry sounded oftener--clearer, too, as Farmer Foster crossed the lane
again and opened the gate into one of his big fields.
Most likely you young men now-a-days would say that he was not half
a farmer. I notice that you farm very differently and I dare say you
are right. Only it was not so when I was young. We did not look so
carefully to every inch of land in my time.
The hedgerow trees were allowed to spread out their wide branches where
they would. The ditches were often grassy and full of wild flowers, and
the hedges left untrimmed. So garlands of dog-roses peeped from their
sweetbriar setting. Traveller's-joy and bindweed wreathed themselves
round the trailing bramble shoots. Just now the blackberries were
turning from red to purple, and the furze bushes shone with starry gold.
Yet there seemed to be a pretty heavy crop of corn in the field we went
into. The rakes were going over it for the last time, and the field was
full of gleaners.
The gleaners had a good time on Farmer Foster's land. His people
always expected, if they raked too carefully, to hear his quiet-spoken
'Gently, my lads, gently; remember the gleaners,' behind them. They
said he used slyly to pull handfulls from the finished sheaves and
scatter them near some gleaner, generally a child, whose bundle looked
smaller than the rest, scolding it all the time for not being half a
gleaner.
They were working with a will now, the level sunbeams lighting up
their ruddy faces and bright-coloured aprons, and gilding the yellow
wheat-ears that overflowed the bundles.
So the sun set. The lingering brightness faded from field and hedgerow.
The waggons came back loaded for the last time. The heavily-laden
gleaners went home singing, and the cocks and hens put their heads
under their wings and settled themselves to sleep, standing on one leg.
Dame Foster and the farmer would not let me miss my mother. If I gave
a great sigh they piled my plate higher with brown bread and golden
butter; and once when a sob rose up unexpectedly in my throat it was
stopped by such a big strawberry that I could not eat it and cry too.
And though, when I was put to bed under a patch-work quilt, in a little
white-washed room that was all lighted up by the harvest moon, I am
sure that my last thought was of my mother, it may be that the last but
one was of strawberries and young chickens.
Every day there came to Furzy Nook a message from my mother. She was
well, and sent her grateful respects to the farmer and Dame Foster, and
her dear love to me. What more news the messenger brought was never
told to me. I saw them whisper together and sometimes shake their
heads, but as long as mother was quite well there could be nothing
really wrong.
By and by there were grave faces--they still said mother sent her love
but nothing more. One day, when everybody looked more serious than
usual, they told me that the poor man, the sick soldier at our house,
was dead.
It was very sad, Dame Forster said, very sad indeed. The farmer stroked
my head and took me up on to his knee. I was very sorry for the poor
soldier, but why did they look as if they pitied me?
I had begun to long to go home to my mother. For a time I tried hard to
keep it to myself, because she had told me to be good without her. But
I could not help asking very often if it was not time to go home. They
always said 'not yet.' I got very tired of waiting.
At last Peggy told me the reason why. Peggy was a rosy, kind-hearted
maid at the farm--a likely lass Dame Foster said she was, but not as
discreet with her tongue as could be wished.
Peggy let out one day that I could not be taken home because my mother
was ill. 'It's the fever she's got, you know, same as what the poor
soldier died of. But I don't think mother's very bad, Willie dear, not
like he was,' said Peggy, frightened at having made me cry. 'You must
bide a bit longer here, that's all. You don't want to go away, not from
the ducklings and all, do you? See, there they go! Come out and feed
them, dear.'
Dame Foster could only tell me the same thing.
'She'll be better soon, please God!' That was what they said every day
now.
They were very good to me, the kind old couple, who had never had
anything to do with a child before.
I might have ridden the farmer's shaggy pony all day long if I had
liked. He would have picked me every cherry off the tree. Dame Foster
and I used to go gravely from one place to another, hand in hand--to
look at the great bars of yellow butter and thick cream in the
dairy--to feed the poultry, to find eggs, or to make posies of the
sweet-smelling cherry pie and clove pinks out of the front garden.
One evening--Farmer Foster was out, gone I did not know where--I
wandered rather disconsolately into the kitchen. It had been a long
day, and it was a dull evening. The summer rain was falling softly over
the garden. Dame Foster sat by the window looking out, and now and
then putting her apron up to her eyes. I asked her what made her cry,
and she said hurriedly first that she wasn't crying, and then that she
supposed she felt dull with the rain and all.
I was dull too, and had nothing to do. I asked presently to go to bed,
so she bade me kneel down and say my evening prayers.
Once when a little schoolfellow of mine lay sick mother taught me to
pray for him and to say, 'God make Charley well, or else take him to
dwell with Thee and with the angels.'
Since I had heard that my mother was ill I had added these words, after
much thought, to her name in my prayers. I said them now.
There was the sound of a stifled sob behind me. Farmer Foster had come
in without my hearing him. 'Bless his dear heart!' the old man said.
'The good Lord has heard his prayer.'
I jumped up from my knees.
'Has mother got quite well?' I asked eagerly.
Oh no! Farmer Foster's averted face--his wife's slow-dropping
tears--Peggy's uplifted hands and pitiful, shocked look, told quite
another story.
They frightened me with their silence and their tears.
'Mother!' I called loudly; 'mother!'
'Oh, little Willie!' Dame Foster said, holding out her arms, 'she
cannot hear you.'
There was no need for them to tell me any more.
My mother was dead.
Who can fathom the quicksands of a child's grief?--its depth and its
shallows, both so real: the passionate sorrow one hour that utterly
refuses comfort, the seeming forgetfulness the next; the bitter, bitter
tears, and by and by a weary peacefulness that comes like balm you do
not know from where, smoothing with soft, cool touches the aching eyes
and brow.
God knows the little ones are weak: He lifts away the load of sorrow
now and then, lest the overburdened little heart should break, the
rough stones pierce the tender feet too sharply.
I did not want anyone to pity me or try to comfort me. She who alone
would have known how was gone away. They talked of my going to her some
day in heaven, but that seemed too far off to do me any good.
As much as I could I kept my tears to myself, for everybody came round
me if they saw me cry, and said kind things in cheerful voices, and
patted me, and stroked my hair. They did not understand. If I stopped
crying, as I always did as soon as ever I could, they were satisfied.
Sometimes at night it was hard to keep my sobs quite silent when I
wanted mother's kiss. But directly I heard Dame Foster open the door
quietly, I used to bury my face upon my arm to hide eyes that the tears
made so burning. I felt the kind old lady straighten the bedclothes
with a gentle hand, and heard her whisper to the farmer outside the
door, 'He's sleeping nicely, bless him!' It only made me wish for
mother more, who would have known all about it, and never have thought
I was asleep.
Those were heavy days. Each one was long and strange like Sunday.
Everybody seemed to watch me, and I felt that something, I did
not quite know what, was expected from me. I walked slow instead
of running, and read to Dame Foster of my own accord out of her
large-print Bible.
Our few neighbours came to pay visits at the farm. I was always sent
for to come and see them. They looked at me and sighed, shaking their
heads gently over Dame Foster's currant wine and harvest cakes, while
they talked in lowered voices about 'the orphan.'
I believe Dame Foster took a kind of pleasure in those tearful
gossipings, and in going over a set of sentences that I, listening
listlessly, grew to know by heart, even down to the sighs and little
groans that always went with the words.
'Ah dear!' said Mistress Janet Morton, our schoolmaster's maiden
sister. 'Ah dear! Here to-day and gone to-morrow, dame.'
'You may well say that, Mistress Janet.'
'The best seem to go the soonest,' Mistress Janet went on. 'There's a
many will grieve for her that's been taken.'
'That's true. Everybody loved her, poor dear. My master takes on
wonderful, just as though it ha' been a daughter of his own. He'll have
every respect paid same as if she'd been really ours. And such a stone,
Mistress Janet, as my master is going to raise to her!'
'Is he indeed? well, sure!'
'He thinks it'll be a comfort like to the dear child some day.'
'Ah! he little knows what he has lost,' said Mistress Janet, looking at
me as I sat wearily on the floor with my arm round the big dog's neck.
'Poor little dear!' and Dame Foster gave her deepest sigh.
'What is the poor widower to do, ma'am, left with that young child?'
'Ah! what indeed?'
'They say he's a hard man, strange and close. I hope he'll use the boy
well.'
Then they lowered their voices, and their two heads almost met across
the table. So I heard no more.
Farmer Foster came home one evening with a long black band round his
hat. No one told me then; I have only guessed since that my mother was
buried that day.
With him was Master Caleb Morton, our schoolmaster. He had been a great
friend of my mother's, and used to come often to the Castle.
Peggy was sent to bring me indoors from my usual place on a high bank
among the furze bushes, from where I could look across the farmyard and
the cornfields--nearly all stubble now--towards the old keep at home.
Master Caleb wanted to see me, Peggy said. I found him with the farmer
and Dame Foster in the best parlour, not in the great kitchen where we
generally lived. All three looked very grave.
'Willie,' Farmer Foster said, holding out his hand to me as I came
near, 'Master Caleb saw your dear mother before she died, and she left
a sort of message for you with him. He is come to give it to you now.'
I looked up at Master Caleb. It seemed a hard, formal way of getting
a message from my mother. I had far rather--and so I think would
he--have gone with him to some quiet corner out of doors, and there
have listened to her last words. But the farmer and his wife treated it
as if it were a sort of solemn ceremony. They sat in two high-backed
chairs opposite to each other, stiff and upright as if they had been in
church, and signed to me to stand before Master Caleb.
He hesitated, looking from me to them. At first he spoke just as he did
in school, but presently he put his hand on my shoulder and drew me
near to him. After all, the words he had to say were but very short and
simple. Only just these:
'I saw your mother, Willie Lisle, the day before she died. Your father
told me that she wished to speak with me. Her weakness was too great
for many words, but her last thoughts and her last cares were all for
you. Her death, like her life, was most peaceful and beautiful. She
bade you remember the promise you made her when Farmer Foster brought
you here, that you would be a good boy without her always. She had
prayed God much that He would help you, and she sent you her blessing.
Something she said of the day that you left her. "Tell him," the words
were, "that I am glad he gave the cup of water to that dying man, and
that I have rejoiced as I lay here to think how he began then to try
and follow our Lord's command. All that has come of it has been for the
best. Tell him how sure I am of this," and her smile, Willie, when she
said that, was most bright to look upon.'
Master Caleb paused.
'I have little more to say,' he added presently, 'except this, that she
left a solemn charge to you. You remember the sick soldier's son?'
I looked up with sudden remembrance. Until now I had well-nigh
forgotten him.
'Before his father died, your mother had promised him that the boy,
Cuthbert Franklyn, should be to her as her own child. To you she leaves
the fulfilment of her promise, and she bids you be his brother. She was
very earnest about this. I think she would fain have said more, but her
voice failed her. Then she clasped her hands, and though I waited for
her to speak again, only once or twice she whispered your name. A few
hours after I left her she entered into her rest.'
That was all.
Farmer Foster and the dame pushed back their chairs and unfolded their
hands. Master Caleb bent forward, and, looking as if he were half
ashamed to do it, gravely kissed my forehead.
All that evening they were busy over the inscription that was to be put
on my mother's tombstone. Farmer Foster had planned it all out himself,
and wanted the schoolmaster's approval, for he was rather proud of his
work. It was very long, as the fashion was in those days. I think now
that if she herself could have known about it, fewer, plainer words
would have pleased her more. I still hear the farmer's voice repeating
with grave relish the last words: 'She departed this life leaving a
broken-hearted husband and an only child to mourn her irreparable loss.'
Broken-hearted! Was my father really that? I wondered what
broken-hearted people did, and how they went on living. I was sure I
was quite as sorry as my father, and yet my heart beat just the same as
usual.
Whether he were broken-hearted or not, he looked to me quite unchanged,
when he came the next day, with White Billy in the cart, to take me
home.
As usual he said no more than he could help, only thanking the good
old people who had been so kind to me in a few gruff words, when each
holding one of my hands they brought me out of the house and gave me
back to him.
'He's been a very good boy,' said Dame Foster, looking at my father
in a wistful kind of way, as he stood settling something that had got
wrong in Billy's harness.
'I'm glad he's not been troublesome,' he answered slowly.
'He never was. Stephen Lisle'--she laid her hand anxiously on his
arm--'he's but a little boy to be left without his mother. You'll take
good care of him.'
'I must do the best I can, ma'am,' my father said after a minute,
without looking at her.
How much afraid they all seemed to be that my father would be unkind
to me. I wondered over it as White Billy trotted with us up the sandy
lane. It was nothing new to me that he should drive on without saying a
word. I had never been afraid of him, and I fell to questioning again
whether he was heart-broken, and looking up into his face to see if I
could find any signs of it. No; it did not seem as if he were thinking
of anything in particular, unless it might be the pony, who had found
it hard work to drag the cart through the heavy sand-track at a trot,
and so had fallen back into a sober walk.
Since then I have often heard people say that Stephen Lisle was never
just the same man after his wife died. Very likely they were right, and
that it was because I was not old enough to read the marks trouble had
left upon him that I could see no change.
I did not think about him long. The Castle came in sight. We crossed
the bridge and went slowly up the hill. I knew quite well that my
mother was not there, and yet my heart would beat faster and faster.
Home at last, and how unchanged! The same flowerpots in the window, the
roses blooming still. The door stood half open and inside the black cat
sat purring in the sun.
I went in alone, looked all round, opened the door leading into the
inner kitchen where I used to be sure of finding her. The flies buzzed
in the window, and through the stillness the clock ticked slow and loud.
I knew she was not there, yet I called 'Mother,' under my breath, and
when no one answered a terror of loneliness came over me. I rushed out
of the house and round the corner, blinded by quick-coming tears. There
was the well, and the bucket by the side standing half full of water
just as it had stood that day.
Oh, if only I had never given the cup of water to the dying soldier! If
he had never come--and yet mother's message said that she was glad.
Some one was standing at the well, leaning over it and looking, as I
used to do, into the far-down water. It was the soldier's son, Cuthbert
Franklyn.
I could not bear that the strange boy should see me cry. I put up both
my hands to hide my face, but I suppose he saw the tears trickling
through my fingers, for I felt his hand touch mine, and heard him say
'Poor boy!'
In a minute--I don't quite know how--my arms were round his neck. We
were very little fellows then, but we have loved one another ever since.
Cuthbert's eyes were full of tears.
'Somehow it seems as if it was all my fault.'
'How could it be your fault?' I said sadly; 'you could not help it.'
'Oh! I am glad you think that. I wanted you to come back, that I might
see you again, and thank you for being kind to us that day. And I
wanted to say good-bye before I go away.'
He held out his hand.
'Going away?' I said, taking it, and looking up at him, for he was
rather older and taller than I was, 'are you going away? Where to?'
'I don't quite know; father's friends were all dead and gone when we
got home to England.' His lip trembled, and there was a shadow of
trouble on his brave bright face.
'Why do you go away, Cuthbert?'
'I suppose I must not stay here always,' he said simply.
'But you may: haven't you heard? My mother said you were to be my
brother.'
Cuthbert looked up eagerly, and the colour came into his face. 'But
your father.'
'Wait for me here a minute.'
I found my father chopping up logs of wood in the wood-shed.
'Father, Cuthbert Franklyn says he must go away.'
I had to repeat this twice before I could make him hear; when he did,
he only said, 'Well.'
'But father, he needn't go.'
'Where is it he wants to go to?'
'He doesn't know; he thinks he isn't to stay here always; you won't let
him go, father?'
My father took the hatchet up again.
'It's no business of mine; I've no call to stop him if he wants to go.'
'He doesn't want to go; he has got no home, and mother said he was to
be my brother.'
'I don't know how that may be,' my father said slowly.
I was thunderstruck. 'But mother said so, and you promised, father.'
He looked at me.
'I made some sort of a promise may be, as I would have promised
anything then, to keep her quiet.'
He sighed, and drew the back of his hand across his eyes--the only
outward sign of sorrow I ever saw him give.
'Then Cuthbert may stay.'
My father made a few strokes at the wood without answering. At last he
said, 'Look you, Willie; it's a great deal to ask of a poor man.'
'Are you very poor, father?'
He stopped a minute.
'They call me close, but I reckon there's not many of them would do a
thing like this; it's too much to expect.'
'For mother's sake,'--I felt, rather than knew, that this was my best
chance.
'You let me alone!' he said roughly.
I waited with my eyes fixed upon him, for two or three minutes. He went
on with his work; then came a sort of short laugh.
'They preach so much to me about being good to you: why am I to take in
another mouth to feed?--a great growing lad too, that'll take the bread
out of your mouth, most likely.'
'Oh, father!'
'Be still; can't you? I hate to see the boy about the place. He's
brought nought but bad luck to me and mine.'
I thought of Cuthbert waiting for me; I thought of mother's charge to
me, so solemnly given and received. I was almost in despair. If I had
understood my father better, I might have guessed that he would say
less had he been entirely decided and at ease in his own mind.
'A promise such as that binds no one,' he muttered presently.
Another long five minutes passed--log after log of wood was cut and
thrown aside. My hope was almost gone, when suddenly my father laid
down the hatchet and turned round.
'See you here, boy; it'll be the worse for you if I do this; you'll
have to fare rougher, and there'll be less for you to get. You'll have
to be content without so much schooling, and you must work harder.'
'Oh, I don't care, I don't care!'
'Humph.'
'Then Cuthbert needn't go?'
'Have it your own way.'
'But he may stop with us?'
'I suppose he'll have to, leastways as long as he behaves himself.'
I hardly waited to hear him to the end, or to thank him. I dashed out
of the wood-shed.
Cuthbert had not moved from where I left him. He was watching for me
eagerly.
'It's all right,' I shouted, rushing up to him; you're to stay and be
my brother.'
He drew a quick breath, with a half-uttered 'oh,' and then, seeing my
gladness, he began to smile.
And so my coming home was not all sad.
* * * * *
The good my mother meant to do to the orphan boy was returned in
tenfold blessing to her own child. Truly as brothers--more than as
brothers, if it might be--Cuthbert Franklyn and I came to love each
other.
He who had never had a home before, got to be at home with us. It was
very pleasant to him, though to me it seemed all changed and dreary.
Hitherto his life had been a wandering one, following his father's
regiment wherever it went. He was not born in England, but in the
Island of Malta, and sometimes, when the sky was very blue, he said it
recalled to him a brighter sky still, which he remembered dimly, and
tall white buildings, and stairs that he thought went right down into
the sea. There were sounds of bells and guns, he said, and a vision
of some great ships. That was all he recollected of his birth-place.
His mother had died there, and another soldier's wife had taken care
of him. They went from place to place, sometimes taking long voyages
across the sea, until his father became ill and got his discharge. When
he came back to England he tried to find his relations, but his parents
and his only sister were dead. He was forgotten, and could find no one
to befriend his son. Cuthbert scarcely knew where his father had meant
to go, when the fever came upon him. That was all he could tell us
about himself; only there was no life like a soldier's, Cuthbert said,
with sparkling eyes. He was always whistling the gay tunes that their
band used to play, and imitating the bugle-calls that he had known all
his life long.
My father scarcely ever noticed Cuthbert. To the end I do not think he
grew really to like him; but his word once given, he would not go back
upon it.
In time I almost forgot, and so I think did Cuthbert himself, that he
did not belong to the place as much as I did.
The neighbours wondered very much at my father's having taken in
Cuthbert. It was not a bit like Stephen Lisle, everybody said, to do
such an out-of-the-way thing. Perhaps it was not; but I believe most
people do something that is not a bit like themselves once or twice in
their lives. My father heeded them very little.
He could never make shift to get on, the neighbours further said, all
by himself, with two boys to look after.
That was true enough. He pondered over it in his silent way for many a
day, and at last he made up his mind.
Late one evening White Billy came slowly under the archway, and in the
cart beside my father, who had been away for a day and a half, sat a
little old woman, with a very big black bonnet and a red cloak. My
father called me.
'Willie, here's your grandmother.'
And the little old woman got down slowly from the cart, and said,
'Dear, dear! Is this your boy, Stephen?'
'Yes, mother.'
The name sounded strange from my father's lips, strange and sad too,
for he used to call my mother, 'mother.' It was odd and perplexing to
me altogether, that my father should begin to have a mother just when I
had lost mine. I stared hard at my grandmother. She had come to stay,
I soon found out,--come to take care, my father said, of me and of the
house.
'And of Cuthbert,' I said, jealously.
My father only nodded, but that was consent enough to satisfy me.
My old grandmother took possession quietly and humbly enough. The
morning after she came I found her looking out over the ruins with
rather a forlorn expression on her gentle old face.
'Do you like the Castle?' I asked her.
'I don't know, my dear, I don't know. It looks an outlandish
tumble-down kind of place. I never saw any like it.'
'This was the great gateway,' I said, with a child's eagerness to
teach anybody a great deal older than himself. 'There used to be a
draw-bridge here once.'
'Dear, dear!' said my grandmother not understanding the least, 'was
there indeed?'
'And yonder's the keep. They kept all their stores in there, you know,
grandmother.'
'Well, to be sure!'
'And the dungeons are underneath, where the prisoners used to be.'
'Lawk a' mercy, poor things!'
'And grandmother, you've heard of the Queen's Tower?'
'No, my dear, I know nothing at all about it.'
'But you'll have to tell the people when they come to see it,' I said
anxiously. 'Mother always did.'
'I can't, my dear. I know nothing of the place.'
'But you'll learn, won't you? I will teach you.'
'My dear, I am a great deal too old to learn.'
She looked quite frightened and confused. I shook my head and said no
more. I did not see how she was to get on at all, and I thought how
very different people's mothers could be from one another.
Years afterwards I understood good old Granny better. When she was
very old and feeble she used to tell me--Granny was always fond of
talking--about the little home she had left to come and keep house for
her son in his time of trouble.
'It was a nice clean little place, Willie,' she would say, twirling
her thumbs and looking round her with eyes that had grown very dim,
'clean and very cheerful--just half way down the street, my dear, where
you could see everything that was going on. It was a tidy street; we
all kept our doorsteps so clean, you could have eaten your dinner off
them. We took a pride in it, you see, Willie. We were very sociable and
friendly among ourselves. I could always pop on my pattens and run in
next door, or next door but one, may be, for a word of chat and a dish
of tea. I had lived there a long time, and we were very comfortable,
you see, Willie. It seemed a bit lonesome just at first, when Stephen
brought me here. But it's all for the best, my dear, all for the best,
for sure.'
I could understand then, what I used to wonder at as a child. It must
have been a change from the busy county town, with its orderly trimness
and sociable ways, to the wild silent ruins on the hill-side. But she
had come away willingly from her cosy home, at her son's bidding, and
I am sure she died without ever thinking that the sacrifice so simply
made was anything good in her.
By degrees I got used to seeing the bent figure trotting about, where
my mother used to move; doing her work--not filling her place--keeping
the house beautifully clean and tidy, but for the rest--ah, it would
always seem empty and blank. There would always be the sense of
something wanting.
Granny won my heart, though, by one thing. She was always kind to
Cuthbert, just as kind as she was to me. I believe she took him as a
matter of course. We were both strangers to her, he not much more than
her own grandson. Besides, Cuthbert's bright face and ways won her
heart. 'The boy has such a pretty tongue,' she used to say. He welcomed
her more readily than I did, for he could not compare her, as I was for
ever doing, with my mother.
I told Hildred one day how good Granny was to Cuthbert.
'Perhaps she likes him best,' Hildred said, throwing an apple up into
the air and catching it.
'Oh, do you think so?'
It was a new thought to me. I pondered over it a great deal when I was
alone.
Very likely most people would like Cuthbert best. My mother of course,
would always have cared for me the most, but now it was different and I
should not be first any longer.
Cuthbert wondered why I went up to him that evening and put my arm over
his shoulder. He was hard at work mending a net for our cherry-tree, so
he only just looked up and nodded.
No wonder everybody liked that happy face of his. In truth, I think
there could not have been happier children than we were.
As the quick months and years passed over our heads, the trouble that
never could be cured kept gliding away, further and further back into
some very far-off past, until at last it seemed to me that it was not
I who had lived here with my mother, but another boy, a much smaller,
graver boy--a better boy, too, perhaps--but very different from what
I was now. I looked back at him half wonderingly, half regretfully,
through a sort of mist of brightness and light. It must have been so
easy for him to be good alone with his mother, and hearing nothing day
by day but her good words. What would she have done with the big rough
fellow that had grown by degrees into her little boy's place? Would he
have been quiet and gentle enough for her, if she had lived? Yes, all
the time I felt a sort of certainty that she would have loved me, nay,
that she did love me still. And I should like to have let her know,
that though of course I had got into a harder life--a life in most
things far unlike what it used to be when she was with me--yet that I
still often remembered and wished to obey her words, that I should try
to be good without her always. But these thoughts I never spoke, even
to Cuthbert.
I was a child when Cuthbert came, I was a boy now, and he had helped
to make me one. From the first time I saw him climb the outside of the
Queen's Tower, swinging himself upwards from branch to branch of the
old ivy, he became my pattern: I resolved to follow him, and if it made
Granny scream to see us, why, so much the better.
The Castle ruins were the best play-ground that children ever had. On
half-holidays the whole school used to troop up there directly they
were let out, and the old walls rang with shouts and laughter. Cuthbert
and Hildred were always glad to see them, but I liked it best when we
had it all to ourselves.
There was a hole in the wall, through which we used to creep, a
steep bit of cliff to climb down, and then the stream. Across it such
woods, green, tangled, thick with brambles and underwood, full of wild
strawberries, blackberry bushes, rabbits, and birds'-nests built up in
the huge trees that stood knee-deep in king-fern.
Wherever Cuthbert and I went, and we went everywhere, little Hildred
tried to follow us. It was clearly understood that she was never
to be in the way. 'Girls always were,' Cuthbert said loftily; 'but
still'----It would have been hard to leave her at home because she
was a girl, for she would so fain have been a boy. She might come, if
she would scramble through the brambles, without caring how much she
scratched her arms and legs, and tore her frock. She must be ready
to cross the stream, even if the rains had swollen it, and it was
sparkling away ankle-deep over the stepping-stones.
She must not scream, however high a branch one of us fell off when we
were birds'-nesting. She must share in all our scrapes, and never tell.
She must stifle her terror of robbers in the wood, or adders in the
long grass, and her pinafore must be always ready to hold birds' nests,
eggs, young squirrels, or any prizes that we could not stuff into our
own pockets.
Hildred was well content to come on any terms, and ready for the
roughest expedition--readier often than I was, for in hot weather, when
the ruins were sunny and silent, I liked better to lie on the grass
reading, than even to go ratting with Cuthbert and our dog Trusty.
I was half ashamed of being fond of reading. No other boy was, and
Cuthbert could not understand it at all.
'He's wonderful fond of his book is Willie,' Granny used to say. 'He'll
get to reading to himself by the hour together.'
Cuthbert shook his head with a kind of wondering sorrow. He never
cared much to go anywhere by himself. So there was nothing for it but
to throw the book into the window of the keep, and go off wherever
Cuthbert had made up his mind to take me. And there was Trusty too,
with tail upright and eager eyes, waiting for a start. It would have
been hard to disappoint Trusty.
He was a dog indeed, was our Trusty, commonly called Rusty, because the
wear and tear of life had made his black coat very shabby and brown in
these latter days. He was not a model dog, not brave, and calm, and
wise, like the dogs one reads about in books. Rusty had his foibles.
He was vain, touchy, and changeable. His temper, too, was apt to be
short at times, yet how true-hearted and faithful he was to those he
really loved! Oh, dear old Rusty, laid to rest now, for nearly fifty
years, under the green grass, I have never seen anything like you since!
Who so quick to guess your mood as Rusty? Who so ready as he for a
bit of fun? Who so willing to deceive himself and you, and to growl
savagely or bark shrilly at the mere mention of a rat, that he knew
quite well did not exist? Who so sober and wiselike as Trusty, if you
were in trouble; but who so quick to mark the first lifting of the
cloud, and to know the minute when it would do to break in with a wag
of the tail and a short sharp bark inclining to cheerfulness?
'Come, old fellow, things are not so bad after all,' he has often said
to me; 'don't worry, but come and see after that rabbit under the
Castle wall.'
To say that everybody was fond of Rusty would not be true, for the
worst parts of his character came out with strangers. He was uncertain
to them, uncertain and ungrateful. I have known him form friendships
one day and be ashamed of them the next. He sometimes went so far as to
receive kindnesses from strangers, and then to fly at their legs if he
saw one of his own people coming. But to those who lived with him he
was just perfectly loveable. I don't think I can say more than that. He
and we loved one another.
So Rusty shared all our fun, and all our troubles too--such as they
were--for we had our troubles of course; who hasn't? For instance, we
hated school, at least Cuthbert and Hildred did, and I, wishing to be
like them, said, and I believe thought, that I hated it too.
But I don't think I did; no, I am sure I did not, except when the sun
streamed hotly in at the half-open door, and leaves tapped against the
diamond-paned windows, and bees hummed past out in the warm air, and
the boys were rebellious, and the girls sleepy and cross. Of course no
one could like it then. Nor on a grey day just made for fishing, with
cool shadows lying on the water. Cuthbert began grumbling, on such
mornings, before his eyes were well open, at the hardships of having to
be shut up in school all day. It was rather hard certainly to think of
the river swirling along through the green rushes, eddying round the
stepping-stones under the Castle cliff, or dreaming lazily over the
shallows where the trout lay. I never looked up from my slate on a day
like that, without expecting to see Cuthbert's place empty, and his
cap gone from its peg near the door.
It was no good giving him advice--no good begging him to be
industrious: he always promised, and always meant to keep his word.
All the seasons were alike. Long before I had had time to rejoice at
birds'-nesting being over, the fishing had begun. Then came summer,
with its long hot days--the hay-making and the bathing in the cool
stream. Every bright hour was a temptation. After that the harvest
seemed to come upon us quickly. The holidays began, and I had peace.
But winter was almost the worst of all. How Cuthbert loved the frosty
weather, and the snow and ice! The Castle looked marvellously solemn
and grey, rising out of the snow; and we had to dig paths for ourselves
across the ruins. When we were building a snow man in the Castle
court, and there was sliding and skating going on at the mere, half a
mile away, and the red sun set over the hills at four o'clock in the
afternoon, how was any one, said Cuthbert, to find time for school?
'When the thaw comes, Will, I'll never miss again,' he promised. But
the snow melted, and there came a cloudy day with a southerly wind,
and Cuthbert was off half-a-dozen miles away to see the hounds meet,
and to follow them from covert to heath, and from field to common, all
across the country.
Those lawless doings of Cuthbert's disturbed me very much. I always
felt as if he were in my charge and I had to answer for him.
Our schoolmaster used to frown, and tell Cuthbert he must take the
consequences; and the consequences Cuthbert took, with a great show of
not caring, laughing at Hildred because she could not help crying, and
comforting me as if I had been the one in trouble.
Now and then my father spoke a few rough words, but they did not weigh
much, for Cuthbert said: 'It's not as if he heeded whether I got any
learning or not. It's all one to him. I can see that plain enough.' And
when my father had done speaking he would go off whistling carelessly.
I have seen the tears in his eyes, though, for all his whistling.
If mother had only lived it would have been different. Some of her kind
grave words would have set everything straight. What could poor old
Granny do beyond holding up her hands at him, with her favourite 'Dear,
dear!' and then giving him a double share of dumpling at supper to
cheer him up?
'Boys ought to like school, Cuthbert,' she told him.
'But you see I don't, Granny. I hate it.'
'But good boys are fond of their book. Look at Willie.'
'As if I should ever be like Will,' he answered, with a look as if he
were proud of me.
'Master Caleb thinks all the world of our Willie,' Granny went on.
'Why, you might go a-walking out with him if you were good, like Willie
does.'
Cuthbert made a wry face. 'I'd much sooner not, Granny, thank you.'
From the time I was a little child I had known Master Caleb Morton
well--he came so often to the Castle. It was he who had told my mother
all the stories she knew about the place. He loved it almost better
than we did, and--we were very proud of that--he had written a book
about it, a real printed book. He gave it to mother, and it stood on
our book-shelf, between 'Pilgrim's Progress' and the 'History of Jack
the Giant-killer'--a thin red book, with a woodcut of Wyncliffe Castle
on the title page.
Cuthbert and I believed that a stone could scarcely fall from the
crumbling walls without his finding it out. He used to stand for hours
with his hands behind his back, gazing up at the grey towers.
Poor dear Master Caleb! He was much too good for us at Wyncliffe; for
he was very clever, very learned, very hard-working, and understood
everything under the sun, except village boys and girls.
They baffled him, for he expected them to like learning, and never
could make out why one and all treated him as an enemy when he wanted
to teach them their lessons.
Years ago he had come a very young man, to be schoolmaster at
Wyncliffe, full of grand plans, and thinking to make good scholars of
at least some among his pupils. He might well have found out, long
since, what a hopeless task it was; but when I went to school, he was
working away, still eager, still hopeful, forever being disappointed,
but never quite losing heart.
However, if he did not know how to keep order in the school--and some
people said he did not--I verily believe he knew everything else in the
world.
He was an Antiquary, I have often heard Mrs. Janet say, and a
Botanist, and a Geologist, and an Astronomer. The words sounded so very
grand as Mrs. Janet rolled them slowly out, that I recollected them
all, though I had not the least idea what any of them meant.
'He's too book-learned for us, that's where it is,' the great men of
the parish sometimes said, shaking their heads wisely. Yet they were
fond of him and proud of him all the same.
Mrs. Janet shook her head too. She would fain have ruled Master Caleb's
scholars for him, as when he was a little boy she used to rule himself.
It was pain and grief to her to sit idle in the parlour, and know that
'the boy' was letting things go their own way too much in the school.
Not that he always did so by any means. The boys said they never knew
what he would be at, for they found themselves brought to justice now
and then when they were least looking for it. There was a boyish corner
in his own heart, staid, quaint, and learned as he was, that gave him
a secret fellow-feeling for Cuthbert's love of roaming, and I guessed
that he was oftentimes the hardest upon him when he was most tempted to
let him off altogether.
With the youngest class of all--a helpless cluster of tiny boys and
girls, who were only sent to school because they were in the way at
home, he was at all events tireless and gentle. Very tenderly he guided
the fat forefingers to point along the lines, helped the lisping baby
tongues over the hard words, and never lost patience with the blue,
wondering, foolish eyes that could see no difference between A and Z.
It was when he turned back to the first class, great boys who could
learn and wouldn't learn, that the puzzled, worried look we all knew
well came across his face. I think the reason he was so good to me was
that I really liked to learn.
So he lent me books, and took me for long walks across the hills.
Wonderful walks they were--very different from the headlong way
Cuthbert went across the country. Master Caleb carried a hammer with
him to chip off bits of rock, and a trowel to dig up out-of-the-way
plants, and a big basket to carry what he called his specimens. He
loved the beautiful earth with a great reverent love.
I think Master Caleb must have been very lonely, or he would never have
made a friend of such a boy as I was; but for all his learning he was
just as simple-hearted as a child.
Even I knew more of the world than he did, at least of the world as
it was at Wyncliffe. He came at last to treat me as if I was nearly
his own age, and to talk to me of the things that he was thinking most
about.
For Mrs. Janet, proud of him as she was, rather disapproved of his
learning. She could not well say what harm she expected it to do him,
but she was clear in her own mind that Caleb went too far. He knew so
much and saw so many sides to everything that he got mazed, she said.
'But there is more than one side to most questions, isn't there?' he
sometimes asked.
'Yes, Caleb. There's a right side and a wrong, and that's enough for
me.'
'Well, my dear,' I remember her saying eagerly to him one day, when it
was so hot that everything and everybody had gone wrong in school, and
the sound of a scuffle had reached her from afar; 'Well, brother, I
trust you haven't spared the rod to-day.'
'Why, Janet,'--he pushed back the hair from his forehead,--'it's very
hot, and everybody feels cross. I'm sure I do.'
'Caleb!' in an awful voice.
'Don't you believe in atmospheric influences?' asked Master Caleb, who
was rather fond of bringing out a hard word now and then.
'Atmospheric nonsense,' said Mrs. Janet, knitting furiously.
He stood at the open door watching the great thunder-clouds that came
marching across the sky to the battle. Cuthbert and I had not gone home
to dinner because of the coming storm, the first heavy rain-drops of
which were beginning to fall sullenly.
'To talk of such-like heathenish things,' burst out Mrs. Janet
presently, 'before your scholars too.'
'Heathenish things--electricity. I will prove to you----'
'Boys,' she went on unheeding, 'the weather is always good weather, and
no one ought to feel different in hot weather or in cold, or whether it
rains or the sun shines. No, Caleb, I don't care what your books say.'
For Master Caleb had brought a big heavy book from the shelf, and after
rubbing the dust off the leaves with loving care, was laying it open on
the table before her.
The mere sight of it scattered his enemies quicker than any of his
arguments could have done; Cuthbert seized his cap, and was through
the door out into the rain in the twinkling of an eye.
Mrs. Janet suddenly remembered that the pudding needed her instant
presence in the kitchen. Master Caleb and I were left alone.
'It's all in here,' he said, looking up at me with a baffled face.
'What is, sir?'
'The Laws of Electricity. It's no good talking to women--to most women,
that is to say. See how clearly he puts it.'
I don't know whether it was the thunder-storm; it may have been the
atmospheric influences (what hard words) that made me feel so stupid. I
looked at the big book with a sigh. 'Did one man write all that, sir?'
'Ay, that, and a vast deal more. It was written, Willie, by Professor
Bruce.'
No wonder he spoke the name in an impressive under-tone. It was one
very familiar to all Master Caleb's friends. Professor Bruce was his
hero. Professor Bruce was seldom out of his mouth. According to him,
Professor Bruce had written something to prove everything that could be
proved. Master Caleb's one boast and source of pride was that he knew
the great man well. Several years ago Professor Bruce--now growing
old--had left London, where he had passed most of his life, writing
books and lecturing, and to the everlasting glory of our quiet old
town, Morechester, he had lived there ever since.
It was the greatest honour Master Caleb could bestow on me, the only
one of his many kindnesses that he ever thought deserved my gratitude,
that a time came when he deemed me worthy to see Professor Bruce. It
was on the day of the thunder-storm that I knew my good fortune first.
'You're a hard-working boy, Willie, and the sight of a great man like
that will do you good. I'll take you into Morechester.'