The world is like a huge theatrical company in which half the actors and
actresses have been cast for the wrong parts. There are heavy fathers
who ought to be playing the lover, and young men on whose downy chins
one seems to see the spectre of the grey beard that would be suitable to
their natures. Perhaps the hardest case is theirs who by their sex are
called upon to ‘have a swaggering and martial outside,’ ‘a gallant
curtle-axe upon their thigh,’ and yet, like Rosalind in her boy’s dress,
start and turn faint at the sight of blood. The right to be a coward is
one of the dearest prerogatives of woman. No man may be one with
impunity, and it is precisely the women who are the first to despise him
if he be. Those who are born with the gift of personal courage (and they
are happily the greater number) have no adequate idea of their blessing.
To be in harmony with one’s environment, to like the things one ought to
like--that surely is the supreme good. If that be so, then few people
have come into the arena of life less suitably equipped for the part
they had to play than the subject of this history.
Charles Edwin William Augustus Chambers, Marquis and Earl of Belchamber,
Viscount Charmington, and Baron St. Edmunds and Chambers, for all his
imposing list of names and titles started in life without that crowning
gift--wanting which all effort is paralysed--a good conceit of himself.
And in fact, except for the gewgaw of his rank, which sat on him as
uneasily as a suit of his ancestral armour, he had not much that would
win him consideration from the people among whom his lot was cast. From
his father he inherited his feeble constitution, his irresolution and
want of moral courage, from his mother her sallow complexion and lack
of charm, her reserve and shyness, and the rigid conscience which a long
line of Covenanting ancestors had passed down to her, and which in him,
who had none of their counterbalancing force of character, tended always
to become morbid. In his babyhood he had been called Lord St. Edmunds,
as was the custom in the family for the eldest son’s eldest son; his
father in half derisive affection had abbreviated the title into
‘Sainty,’ and Sainty he always continued to be to all who were intimate
enough and to many who were not. He was only three when his father died,
and his baby brother, Arthur, was not yet two. Even in those early days
the contrast was strongly marked between the brothers. Sainty was a pale
nervous child who cried if spoken to suddenly, while Arthur was as fine
a pink and white fat baby as you could see in a picture-book, who crowed
and gurgled and clapped his hands and liked his bath and took kindly to
his food, so that the nurses adored him. When he had a stomach-ache or
was thwarted in his wishes he roared lustily for a minute or two and
then returned to his usual placidity, whereas poor Sainty if anything
‘put him out,’ as his nurse would say, whined and fretted, and kept up a
little sad bleating cry for hours.
He could not remember his father, but with the help of the large
coloured portrait in uniform that stood on a gilt easel in the corner of
his mother’s room he had built up for himself a shadowy heroic figure,
strangely unlike poor Charmington, which in his imagination did duty for
this departed parent. He never spoke of him to any one but Arthur, but
to him he talked with such conviction of ‘Papa,’ that the child, not
very attentive and perhaps not greatly interested, gathered an
impression that the elder boy was drawing on his memory for his facts,
and indeed he almost thought so himself, until one day Lady Charmington,
hearing some such talk between the two, sharply rebuked poor Sainty for
telling falsehoods to his little brother. His earliest impression of his
mother was in her black dress with the gleaming white on head and throat
and wrists, a dress that lent a dignity to Lady Charmington’s somewhat
commonplace figure. When she left off her cap, it was of the nature of a
blow to him. Though he could not have described his sensations, she
seemed somehow discrowned with her sleek, bare head.
Grandpapa’s funeral was a different matter from these early fleeting
impressions. That he remembered clearly, for he was seven when it
happened, and had a little black suit of knickerbockers and black
stockings and gloves, and led Arthur by the hand similarly attired.
Every incident of that frightening, gloomy, yet strangely fascinating
and exciting day, remained engraved in his recollection. He remembered
the crowd in the churchyard, the murmur that greeted his own appearance,
the staggering of the bearers under that long heavy burthen, the gloom
of the church full of people in black, and the great yawning hole in the
chancel pavement. What he did not grasp until very long afterwards, and
then only most imperfectly and by degrees, was the difference the event
of that day made in his own position; but his mother realised it fully,
and indeed it made much more difference to her than to the meek little
boy accustomed from earliest infancy to swallow distasteful puddings and
nauseous drugs at her command, and anxiously to examine his conscience,
if some remnant of the old Adam ever led him to question her decrees.
Henceforth Lady Charmington entered into her kingdom, and it must be
confessed that on the whole she ruled it well and wisely, and entirely
in the interests of her children. Almost the only sensible thing the old
lord had ever done was to appoint her and her brother the guardians of
his grandchildren, and under the careful management of his
daughter-in-law, aided by the wise advice of Lord Corstorphine, the
property was nursed through his grandson’s long minority back to a
tolerably healthy condition.
As to Lady Belchamber, nothing would have bored her more than being
cumbered in any way with the guardianship of her grandchildren. She
carried off what her daughter-in-law declared to be a most ridiculously
disproportionate jointure, and the furniture of her private apartments,
in which some valuable china and cabinets, that she had certainly not
brought into the family, somehow found themselves included at the time
of the move. She even showed a decided inclination to keep the famous
emeralds which, as Lady Charmington said, everybody knew were heirlooms;
but these she was made to send back, by her second husband, the Duke of
Sunborough, one of the oldest and most faithful of her admirers, whom
she married just a year after her lord’s death. On the other hand, she
generously abandoned all claim to a damp and mouldy dower-house in which
she had a right to reside for life, which, considering that the duke had
a palace in London and five country seats, was very handsome of her.
Three generations of gambling and extravagance leave their mark on the
most imposing fortunes, and if the Belchamber estates did not come to
the hammer, it was due to the action of the last person who might have
been expected to save them, in marrying a hardheaded Scotswoman and
dying before his father. To get the estate into order was Lady
Charmington’s prime object in life. To this end she inaugurated a rigid
system of economy, and made a clean sweep of the heads of almost every
department under the old _régime_, toiling early and late to make
herself mistress of many details of which she was ignorant; for this,
she endured the dislike of the poor, whom she benefited in her own
autocratic manner, and much hostile comment from her equals. She was
rigidly just, and generous too in her own way; only prodigality and
waste she would not tolerate, nor look with a lenient eye on the small
peculations which those who serve the great come to regard as quite
within the pale of honesty.
If the mother spared neither time nor labour that she might be able to
hand over his property to her son free of encumbrances when he came of
age, she was not less eager and indefatigable in her efforts to fit him
for the position she was making for him; and this task she found
incomparably the harder of the two. It was not that he was naughty or
insubordinate. A meeker, more obedient child did not live. The
difficulty was far more intangible; it is easier to drive a slightly
pulling horse in crowded thoroughfares than one with so light a mouth
that he never will go properly up to his bit; and Lady Charmington had
not the blessed gift of light hands in conducting the education of a
child, whatever she might have on horseback. As a girl she had ridden a
good deal, and even hunted; and though she gave that up after her
marriage, she still found it possible to keep a more effectual eye on
all corners of the huge estate from her square seat on the back of a
substantial cob than from any other coign of vantage. No farmer ever
rode more diligently and thoroughly about his fields; and on these
excursions it was her pleasure that the boys, and especially Sainty,
should accompany her. Arthur had a natural seat, took to horses from the
first, and wanted to gallop his pony and make him jump before the family
coachman had thought fit to abandon the leading-rein. With poor Sainty
it was far otherwise. He rode, as he ate rice pudding, because he was
told to; but he was cold for an hour beforehand, and he sat his pony, as
his mother remarked, like a sack of potatoes. The smallest thing
unseated him; he was always rolling ignominiously off.
On this and similar shortcomings, he received many admonitions from his
mother and uncle, from which the chief impression he derived was a
rooted belief in the immense superiority of his younger brother. ‘At the
worst there will always be Arthur.’ When and under what circumstances
had he overheard that remark? He never was quite sure that he had not
formulated it for himself. Be that as it might, it early became the
burthen to which his life set itself. Far from resenting the point of
view, he drew from it a certain consolation under his abiding sense of
his many imperfections. He was still quite a small boy when he decided
that his _rôle_ in life would be to die young, and make way for the
younger brother who was so eminently fitted for the position that suited
himself so ill; and he found a certain gloomy satisfaction in settling
the details of pathetic deathbed scenes. I fear an element in these
imaginings which was not without attraction for him, was the thought of
exhorting Arthur with his latest breath on matters in which his
brother’s conduct did not always square with his own more evangelical
standard, such as a certain looseness of statement, and somewhat lax
ideas of property. If Arthur could not find his own cap, or bat, or
riding-whip (and his things were generally tossed about the great house,
wherever he happened to be when he last used them), it was always less
trouble to take Sainty’s, which were sure to be in the right place, than
to go and look for his own. He also on occasion carried the juvenile
habit of untruth rather further than mere thoughtlessness warranted; but
he told his stories with so open a countenance, and such a fearless
gaze, that he was invariably believed, as against poor Sainty, whose
knitted brow and downcast eyes, while he sought in his mind for the
exact truth, had all the appearance of an effort after invention.
‘Arthur is very thoughtless and tiresome,’ Lady Charmington would say,
‘but there’s one comfort about him, I can always depend on his telling
me the truth if I ask him. I wish I could say the same for Sainty; I am
sometimes afraid he is rather sly. I try not to be hard on him, for he
is timid, and I don’t want to frighten him into telling untruths; but I
do wish he was a little more straightforward, and would look one in the
face when he talks.’
Many such hints, all showing a like perspicacious insight into the
characters of her sons, were given by this conscientious lady to the
governess she had engaged to assist her in moulding their dispositions.
Alice Meakins was the daughter of the rector of Great Charmington, and
had the prime recommendation in her employer’s eyes of being her humble
slave and completely under her orders. Had she been a little less in awe
of Lady Charmington, and less impressed with the enormity of differing
from her, she might perhaps have enlightened her on many matters
concerning the little boys. Her mild rule, while it galled his more
spirited brother, sat very lightly on Sainty, who worshipped the
governess as the most talented and accomplished of mortals. ‘But I like
her, I’m fond of her; I don’t _want_ to do what she tells me not,’ he
pleaded to the indignant Arthur, as usual incensed by his brother’s want
of pluck, in refusing to join in some plot against the authority of
their instructress. ‘Ho, ho, Miss Moddlecoddle, you can’t ride, you’ve
got no seat and no hands; Bell said so. You’re jolly bad at games, and
you like to sit and suck up to an old governess, and do needlework with
her, like a beastly girl. I’m a man, and I shan’t do what she tells me.
What business has she to order me about? she is only a servant like the
others.’
Sainty was shocked. ‘O Arthur! you do say _horrid_ things,’ he said. It
was true that he did like sitting with the gentle Meakins, and acquiring
the modest arts of which she was the mistress. She had many little
manual dexterities such as governesses impart to children, whereby the
world is filled with innocent horrors, kettleholders in cross-stitch,
penwipers faintly resembling old women with cloth cloaks and petticoats,
and little black seeds for faces, and book-markers in the shape of
crosses with many steps, plaited of strips of gilt and coloured paper.
In all these manufactures Sainty soon became proficient. He also
illuminated texts, ‘Be thou faithful unto death,’ and ‘The greatest of
these is Charity,’ which were presented to Lady Charmington on her
birthday. On the subject of the texts and the little plaited crosses
Lady Charmington had a word to say to Miss Meakins in private, as being
rather too papistical in tendency; but she was not displeased with the
simple presents, on the whole, until her anxious maternal eye was led to
detect the danger that might lurk in cross-stitch by some petulant
remarks of Arthur’s, who wanted Sainty to come out and play Red Indians
in the long shrubbery. ‘Muvver,’ he cried, bursting into the boudoir,
where his mother was busy with some farm accounts, ‘isn’t Sainty howid?
He won’t come out, though he’s done his lessons, ‘cos he will stick in
and do beastly woolwork.’ One of Arthur’s many charms was a babyish
imperfection of speech. He never could pronounce ‘th’ or ‘r,’ even when
quite grown up.
‘What is it he’s doing?’ asked Lady Charmington.
‘Oh, beastly woolwork; he’s got two-fwee fings he’s makin’, and he likes
to sit like a girl, instead of coming out and playing.’
A shade of annoyance crossed the mother’s face. ‘I wish you wouldn’t use
such words as “beastly,” Arthur,’ she said severely, but the severity
was really addressed to the absent first-born and the effeminacy of his
tastes; and the schoolroom was presently visited by the mistress of the
house, and Sainty duly turned out to distasteful recreation. When he had
gone forth to be scalped by the fraternal savage, his mother turned to
the instructress. ‘I think, Alice,’ she said, holding up the offending
kettleholder, ‘that it is a pity, on the whole, to teach Sainty to work;
he’s quite sufficiently effeminate by nature, without having that side
of him encouraged. I will speak to him about it. I shall tell him I
don’t approve of his working; it’s not manly.’ She was surprised, when
she carried out this intention, by meeting with passionate tears and
protestations.
‘O mother, I love my work; it’s the only thing I do enjoy, except
botany, and reading, and some lessons (not ‘rithmetic or spelling); and
I have to do so many things I _don’t_ like, cricket and riding,
and--and--all the dreadful things that men and gentlemen have to do,’
the little boy concluded, quoting a formula frequently used for his
encouragement.
Though not habitually distrustful of her own judgment, nothing so
confirmed Lady Charmington in a view she adopted as any opposition to
it; and the kettleholders became taboo from that day forward. Poor
Sainty’s confession of dislike for the manlier sports that, as he said,
were considered a necessary part of the education of a gentleman, was
perhaps the most unfortunate argument he could have chosen, for it
naturally convinced his mother that the mischief lay deeper than she
supposed, and suggested to her the advisability of transferring the
boys from petticoat government altogether; that is, of course, as far as
the subordinate powers were concerned. The particular petticoat that
typified her own sway remained in undisturbed possession of the throne
in all her plans for the future.
‘I think the boys are getting too much for poor Miss Meakins,’ she said
to her brother, on his next visit. ‘She is an excellent girl, though a
little inclined to be high church; but they ought to be under a man, I
feel sure.’
‘Don’t tell me that Sainty is becoming insubordinate?’ said Lord
Corstorphine.
‘No; but Arthur hasn’t the smallest respect for her. With Sainty the
danger is of a different kind; he is perhaps _too_ fond of women’s
society.’
‘Not a precocious passion for the governess! I can’t believe that.’
Lady Charmington looked resigned. ‘I don’t deny, Corstorphine,’ she
said, ‘that you have been a great help to me in the management of my
fatherless boys; that is why I am consulting you on the present
occasion. But it is no help to be flippant and funny. What I mean is
that Sainty is quite sufficiently inclined by nature to be a milksop,
without living perpetually with women, and adopting their ways. He likes
better than any game to sit indoors with Miss Meakins on fine days, and
do woolwork.’
‘Have him out, Sarah, by all means,’ returned her brother. ‘I can’t help
being a little pleased at his liking reading. A Chambers who
occasionally opens a book, and is tolerably well behaved, will be an
agreeable variation of the type. But it’s bad his not wanting to be out,
and playing games; it isn’t natural.’
Lord Corstorphine felt that he was as near normal as it was possible to
be, without becoming commonplace, and that those whose tastes differed
widely from his own must always be more or less blamably eccentric.
Still his greater commerce with the world had given him a wider
toleration than either of his sisters, who had been known to call him a
Laodicean, and Sarah once went so far as to draw a parallel between her
brother and Gallio. But though she affected to be shocked at the
looseness of his views, his known moderation made her lean the more
confidently on his judgment. The knowledge that her opinion was backed
by one whom the world praised for common-sense, gave a pleasing security
that her own noble zeal was not hurrying her into extremes. It was
invariably she who initiated every change in the education of her sons.
But, though it may be doubted how she would have borne opposition from
her fellow-guardian, his agreement was always a comfort to her.
So Alice Meakins, with her little crosses and penwipers, returned to the
paternal rectory, with the highest testimonials from her dear Lady
Charmington, to look out for another situation.
Poor Sainty could not be comforted. To be sure, no one tried much to
comfort him. For the first time he felt a rebellious bitterness towards
his mother. Though he could imagine nothing so dashing as active
disobedience, he cherished a dark determination to be very cold and
reserved towards the new tutor, with the natural result that Miss
Meakins’s successor, a youth fresh from Oxford, and also of the children
of the clergy, conceived a great liking for Arthur, and favoured him
prodigiously.
This young man, who had been selected mainly for his reputation as a
cricketer, left Lady Charmington nothing to desire in the matter of
sport, and was quite ready to ride any horse in her limited stable; nor
need she feel anxiety as to his holding extreme views in religious
matters. It is true he attended family prayers with exemplary
punctuality, and accompanied his charges to service twice on Sundays;
but she could detect no sign of the interest in matters ecclesiastical
which she looked for in a son of the Church, and his waistcoats and
riding-boots had a decidedly worldly air.
Under Mr. Kirkpatrick, Sainty early proved the cynical dictum that life
were endurable but for its pleasures, the hated pastimes, in which his
sex and position in life inexorably demanded that he should find
enjoyment. He stood like a martyr at the stake, to be bowled at with the
Englishman’s fetish, that terrible disc of solid leather which he knew
he should not hit, but which not infrequently hit him; and he would
unhesitatingly have indorsed Mr. Pinchbold’s remark that ‘the horse was
a fearful animal.’ He was so painstaking, however, and anxious to do
what was expected of him, that he might possibly have attained in time
to some sort of proficiency in these alien arts, had his efforts been
greeted with a little more encouragement, and a little less ridicule;
but the race is not yet extinct of those who hold that the best way to
teach a child to swim is to throw him into the water.
Meanwhile a new terror arose on Sainty’s horizon. When Mr. Kirkpatrick
had been at Belchamber eighteen months, he one day intimated to Lady
Charmington that he had been offered a mastership in a public school,
and could not afford to remain much longer with his pupils. It was
therefore suggested that, as they were both presently to go to Eton, a
few years at a private school would not be undesirable as a preparation.
Even Arthur was a little daunted at the prospect, while rather
fascinated by it; but to Sainty it loomed black as the final end of all
brightness, closing in the vista of his life and blotting out the sun.
It seemed to him that each step in the _via dolorosa_ of his existence
was fated to be more awful than the last. When his beloved Miss Meakins
had been replaced by the hated Kirkpatrick, he thought to have tasted
the dregs of bitterness; but now a new prospect had come to make life in
the familiar places that he loved with a catlike fidelity appear the one
thing desirable, even shadowed by the tutor and his cricket-ball. I
suppose it seemed a hard thing to our first parents when the Serpent was
introduced into Eden; but life in Paradise, even with a snake in the
garden, was a very different thing from the flaming sword that drove
them out into an unknown world of work and briars. Sainty said little to
earthly ears, but he prayed nightly with intense fervour that he might
die before the day came to go to school, which seemed the only escape
to his poor little hunted mind.
But there was another way, which, if he could have foreseen it, would
have taxed his courage with a far more genuine fright than that vague
abstraction, death, for which we all cry aloud so readily in our youth
when things do not go as we wish. Arthur went to school alone when the
time arrived, and this was how it came about.
It was a beautiful day at the end of March. Mr. Kirkpatrick was to leave
at Easter, and the dreaded exodus was only a month away. It was a late
spring, and the snow still lay on the north side of the hedgerows. But
it had rained in the night, and there was that indefinable sense of
spring in the air that sometimes comes quite suddenly. The primroses
were beginning to gem the coppices, the birds to sing late in the long
twilights. Daffodils waved in the fields where the young lambs were
bleating.
‘What are you and the boys going to do this afternoon, Mr. Kirkpatrick?’
asked Lady Charmington at lunch.
The tutor looked inquiringly at the boys. ‘I’ll do whatever they wish,
Lady Charmington. What should you like?’ he asked of Sainty.
‘I should like to go to One-tree Wood, and get primroses,’ Sainty
answered, after the usual slight struggle that it always cost him to
express a wish or an opinion.
‘Get Gwanmuvvers!’ burst in Arthur. ‘Bovver pwimwoses; you don’t care
about ’em, do you, Mr. Kirkpatrick? I want to wide; Bell says the
gwound’s in quite good order to-day, after the wain. We’ve hardly widden
at all lately, ‘cos it’s been so hard.’
As usual, Arthur had his way, and poor Sainty was condemned to ride.
Generally he gained confidence when he had been out a little while, but
to-day somehow everything went wrong. He began by rolling off at the
hall door, because his stirrups were too long, and the pony moved on
unexpectedly while they were being taken up. He was much chaffed for
this misadventure by his companions, and he did not like chaff. Then the
pony was fresh and inclined to shy, after the inaction of the long
frost, so that he had a bad time of it altogether; but he managed to
stick on somehow until they were on their way home.
They had been round by Little Charmington, and their way lay through one
of the high woods. When they came to the gate that led into the park,
they found it locked.
‘I never knew this gate locked before,’ said Kirkpatrick, pulling feebly
at it with his whip. ‘I don’t suppose either of you have got the key by
any chance?’
‘Jaggins must have locked it. He’s got some young pheasants further up
the wood,’ said Arthur; ‘he told me so.’
‘I suppose we must go back,’ said Kirkpatrick, ‘but it’s an awful long
way round. We shall be late for tea, which your mother doesn’t like, and
you’ve got some more work to do afterwards. There’s a gap in the hedge a
little way along here,’ he added more hopefully. ‘I suppose you couldn’t
jump the ditch? It would save us a good two miles, and it’s really
nothing of a jump.’
‘Of course we can jump the ditch. Hurray! what fun!’ cried Arthur, and
without more words he wheeled his pony, put him at the gap, and the next
moment was careering about on the turf beyond, in a great state of
excitement and jubilation.
‘You see, it’s quite easy,’ the tutor said, turning to Sainty, whose
pony was already beginning to fidget, excited by the trampling about on
snapping twigs and the rush past of the other. Sainty was very white.
‘You know I can’t jump, Mr. Kirkpatrick,’ he said, gulping tears. ‘I’m
sure to fall off if I try; I always do.’
‘Not you,’ the young man replied encouragingly. ‘You see your little
brother has done it. I should be ashamed to have him ride so much better
than me, if I were you.’ The poor man was rather in a fix, with one
pupil already across the obstacle and the other resolutely declining to
follow.
‘See,’ he said, ‘I’ll give you a lead. It’s as easy as easy; you’ve
only to sit well back, and give him his head,’ And so saying, he put his
horse at the gap, and followed Arthur into the park. ‘Come on,’ he
called.
‘Jump, Sainty, jump,’ piped Arthur. ‘I wouldn’t be such a funk.’
Whether Sainty would ever have found the courage to attempt the jump is
doubtful, if the pony at this stage of the proceedings had not decided
matters by bolting at the gap. But bothered and bewildered by the
tugging of his rider’s despairing hands, he swerved just at the jump,
and, slipping on the trodden earth where Kirkpatrick’s horse had taken
off, he came to the ground; then struggling to his feet, galloped off
through the wood by the road they had come.
The young man was horror-stricken when he saw the accident; he was off
his horse, and by the side of the fallen boy in a second. Sainty was
unconscious, that was all he could tell.
‘Now, Arthur,’ he cried to the younger boy, who was beginning to tremble
and cry, ‘this is the moment to show the stuff you’re made of. I must
stay here with Sainty, but you must get home across the park as hard as
you can go, so as to tell your mother what’s happened, and save her the
shock of seeing Donald come home without his rider. And then send people
here to carry Sainty in; he may be more hurt than we think.’
Arthur waited for no more, but galloped off in the direction of the
house, glad to have something definite to do, instead of staring at poor
Sainty.
Lady Charmington had come home sooner than she expected, and was taking
off her hat, when she saw Arthur come galloping across the park alone.
She looked with pride at the boy, thinking how well he sat his pony; and
she gave a little sigh at the half-formed thought that just crossed her
mind, ‘What a pity he wasn’t the elder!’ The next minute her heart stood
still; she had caught sight in the far distance of a speck, which as it
drew nearer she recognised with sickening terror as Sainty’s pony,
riderless, and with his saddle turned under his belly. ‘Not _that_ way,
my God! I did not mean _that_.’ Was it possible that God was punishing
her for her rebellious thought? could He have thought that she desired
the death of her first-born? And she prayed with all the intensity of
her soul that whatever had happened her boy might not die. ‘Maimed,
crippled, or an idiot, if so it must be; only let him live.’ This was
the cry of her heart, again and again repeated, as guided by the child,
she stumbled across the park with the men who were to bring him home.
Arthur could tell her little, except that Sainty had had a fall and was
hurt. Perhaps even then her child was lying dead, while she was wishing
in her sinful heart that his brother had his heritage.
But Sainty was not dead, and did not die. The pony had kicked him in its
struggles to rise, and he had fainted. There were long nights and days
of pain to be borne, and he bore it as nervous people often do, who can
stand anything but anticipation.
At first he made sure that the death he had asked for had come to him,
and even, one day, when he was a little better, attempted to bring off
one of the beautiful scenes with Arthur, which he had so often
rehearsed. But somehow it was not a great success. Arthur did not do his
part at all nicely. He only said, ‘Oh! bower, dear old Sainty. You ain’t
going to die; what’s ve good of jawing?’ and went off to more congenial
pursuits.
Though his life was not in danger, Sainty’s injury was a grave one; the
hip was broken, and the great London surgeon who was called down, did
not conceal from Lady Charmington that the boy would probably always be
more or less lame.
On one of his visits, Sainty astonished the great man not a little.
‘Sir John,’ he said, ‘I want you to tell me something. Shall I ever be
able to walk and run again?’
The famous surgeon had boys of his own, and his heart smote him at the
pathetic question. ‘Yes, my boy, yes,’ he said; ‘certainly to walk. As
to running, oh! well, you won’t be very good at running, not for some
time; we mustn’t go too fast, not too fast, you know. Walking comes
first; we must get you on your legs first.’
‘But I shan’t ever be able to play games, shall I? not like other boys,
I mean.’
‘Oh! well, never’s a long word. I can’t say, I’m sure. Not for a long
while, I fear. But we never know, we never know----’
‘Well, at any rate, I shan’t be able to ride, shall I?’ persisted the
patient.
Poor Sir John hated to extinguish hope; but thus pushed into a corner,
he admitted, ‘Oh! well, ride, you know--I don’t know. I doubt if
_riding_ would be advisable. My poor little man, if you must know, I’m
afraid you mustn’t count on riding again.’
To his surprise, the boy heaved a sigh of unmistakable relief. ‘Ah!
well, that’s a comfort, anyhow,’ he said.