IN WHICH AN ENTIRELY NEW, AND, AS WILL BE SEEN HEREAFTER, A MOST
IMPORTANT CHARACTER IS INTRODUCED.
The servants, I mean the stable servants, who lived in the mews where
Charles did, had a club; and, a night or two after he had seen Mary in
the square, he was elected a member of it. The duke's coachman, a wiry,
grey, stern-looking, elderly man, waited upon him and informed him of
the fact. He said that such a course was very unusual--in fact, without
precedent. Men, he said, were seldom elected to the club until they were
known to have been in good service for some years; but he (coachman) had
the ear of the club pretty much, and had brought him in triumphant. He
added that he could see through a brick wall as well as most men, and
that when he see a _gentleman_ dressed in a livery, moping and brooding
about the mews, he had said to himself that he wanted a little company,
such as it was, to cheer him up, and so he had requested the club, &c.;
and the club had done as he told them.
"Now this is confoundedly kind of you," said Charles; "but I am not a
gentleman; I am a gamekeeper's son."
"I suppose you can read Greek, now, can't you?" said the coachman.
Charles was obliged to confess he could.
"Of course," said the coachman; "all gamekeepers' sons is forced to
learn Greek, in order as they may slang the poachers in an unknown
tongue. Fiddle-dedee! I know all about it; least-wise, guess. Come along
with me; why, I've got sons as old as you. Come along."
"Are they in service?" said Charles, by way of something to say.
"Two of 'em are, but one's in the army."
"Indeed!" said Charles, with more interest.
"Ay; he is in your governor's regiment."
"Does he like it?" said Charles. "I should like to know him."
"Like it?--don't he?" said the coachman. "See what society he gets into.
I suppose there ain't no gentlemen's sons troopers in that regiment, eh?
Oh dear no. Don't for a moment suppose it, young man. Not at all."
Charles was very much interested by this news. He made up his mind there
and then that he would enlist immediately. But he didn't; he only
thought about it.
Charles found that the club was composed of about a dozen coachmen and
superior pad-grooms. They were very civil to him, and to one another.
There was nothing to laugh at. There was nothing that could be tortured
into ridicule. They talked about their horses and their business quite
naturally. There was an air of kindly fellowship, and a desire for
mutual assistance among them, which, at times, Charles had not noticed
at the university. One man sang a song, and sang it very prettily, too,
about stag-hunting. He had got as far as--
"As every breath with sobs he drew,
The labouring buck strained full in view,"
when the door opened, and an oldish groom came in.
The song was not much attended to now. When the singer had finished, the
others applauded him, but impatiently; and then there was a general
exclamation of "Well?"
"I've just come down from the Corner. There has been a regular run
against Haphazard, and no one knows why. Something wrong with the horse,
I suppose, because there's been no run on any other in particular, only
against him."
"Was Lord Ascot there?" said some one.
"Ah, that he was. Wouldn't bet though, even at the long odds. Said he'd
got every sixpence he was worth on the horse, and would stand where he
was; and that's true, they say. And master says, likewise, that Lord
Welter would have taken 'em, but that his father stopped him."
"That looks queerish," said some one else.
"Ay, and wasn't there a jolly row, too?"
"Who with?" asked several.
"Lord Welter and Lord Hainault. It happened outside, close to me. Lord
Hainault was walking across the yard, and Lord Welter came up to him and
said, 'How d'ye do, Hainault?' and Lord Hainault turned round and said,
quite quiet, 'Welter, you are a scoundrel!' And Lord Welter said,
'Hainault, you are out of your senses;' but he turned pale, too, and he
looked--Lord! I shouldn't like to have been before him--and Lord
Hainault says, 'You know what I mean;' and Lord Welter says, 'No, I
don't; but, by Gad, you shall tell me;' and then the other says, as
steady as a rock, 'I'll tell you. You are a man that one daren't leave a
woman alone with. Where's that Casterton girl? Where's Adelaide Summers?
Neither a friend's house, nor your own father's house, is any protection
for a woman against you.' 'Gad,' says Lord Welter, 'you were pretty
sweet on the last-named yourself, once on a time.'"
"Well!" said some one, "and what did Lord Hainault say?"
"He said, 'you are a liar and a scoundrel, Welter.' And then Lord Welter
came at him; but Lord Ascot came between them, shaking like anything,
and says he, 'Hainault, go away, for God's sake; you don't know what you
are saying.--Welter, be silent.' But they made no more of he than----"
(here our friend was at a loss for a simile).
"But how did it end?" asked Charles.
"Well," said the speaker, "General Mainwaring came up, and laid his hand
on Lord Welter's shoulder, and took him off pretty quiet. And that's all
I know about it."
It was clearly all. Charles rose to go, and walked by himself from
street to street, thinking.
Suppose he _was_ to be thrown against Lord Welter, how should he act?
what should he say? Truly it was a puzzling question. The anomaly of his
position was never put before him more strikingly than now. What could
he say? what could he do?
After the first shock, the thought of Adelaide's unfaithfulness was not
so terrible as on the first day or two; many little unamiable traits of
character, vanity, selfishness, and so on, unnoticed before, began to
come forth in somewhat startling relief. Anger, indignation, and love,
all three jumbled up together, each one by turns in the ascendant, were
the frames of mind in which Charles found himself when he began thinking
about her. One moment he was saying to himself, "How beautiful she was!"
and the next, "She was as treacherous as a tiger; she never could have
cared for me." But, when he came to think of Welter, his anger
overmastered everything, and he would clench his teeth as he walked
along, and for a few moments feel the blood rushing to his head and
singing in his ears. Let us hope that Lord Welter will not come across
him while he is in that mood, or there will be mischief.
But his anger was soon over. He had just had one of these fits of anger
as he walked along; and he was, like a good fellow, trying to conquer
it, by thinking of Lord Welter as he was as a boy, and before he was a
villain, when he came before St. Peter's Church, in Eaton Square, and
stopped to look at some fine horses which were coming out of Salter's.
At the east end of St. Peter's Church there is a piece of bare white
wall in a corner, and in front of the wall was a little shoeblack.
He was not one of the regular brigade, with a red shirt, but an "Arab"
of the first water. He might have been seven or eight years old, but was
small. His whole dress consisted of two garments; a ragged shirt, with
no buttons, and half of one sleeve gone, and a ragged pair of trousers,
which, small as he was, were too small for him, and barely reached below
his knees. His feet and head were bare; and under a wild, tangled shock
of hair looked a pretty, dirty, roguish face, with a pair of grey,
twinkling eyes, which was amazingly comical. Charles stopped, watching
him, and, as he did so, felt what we have most of us felt, I dare
say--that, at certain times of vexation and anger, the company and
conversation of children is the best thing for us.
The little man was playing at fives against the bare wall, with such
tremendous energy, that he did not notice that Charles had stopped, and
was looking at him. Every nerve in his wiry, lean little body was braced
up to the game; his heart and soul were as deeply enlisted in it, as
though he were captain of the eleven, or stroke of the eight.
He had no ball to play with, but he played with a brass button. The
button flew hither and thither, being so irregular in shape, and the boy
dashed after it like lightning. At last, after he had kept up
five-and-twenty or so, the button flew over his head, and lighted at
Charles's feet.
As the boy turned to get it, his eyes met Charles's, and he stopped,
parting the long hair from his forehead, and gazing on him, till the
beautiful little face--beautiful through dirt and ignorance and
neglect--lit up with a smile, as Charles looked at him, with the kind,
honest old expression. And so began their acquaintance, almost comically
at first.
Charles don't care to talk much about that boy now. If he ever does, it
is to recall his comical, humorous sayings and doings in the first part
of their strange friendship. He never speaks of the end, even to me.
The boy stood smiling at him, as I said, holding his long hair out of
his eyes; and Charles looked on him and laughed, and forgot all about
Welter and the rest of them at once.
"I want my boots cleaned," he said.
The boy said, "I can't clean they dratted top-boots. I cleaned a groom's
boots a Toosday, and he punched my block because I blacked the tops.
Where did that button go?"
And Charles said, "You can clean the lower part of my boots, and do no
harm. Your button is here against the lamp-post."
The boy picked it up, and got his apparatus ready. But, before he began,
he looked up in Charles's face, as if he was going to speak; then he
began vigorously, but in half a minute looked up again, and stopped.
Charles saw that the boy liked him, and wanted to talk to him; so he
began, severely--
"How came you to be playing fives with a brass button, eh?"
The boy struck work at once, and answered, "I ain't got no ball."
"If you begin knocking stamped pieces of metal about in the street,"
continued Charles, "you will come to chuck-farthing, and from
chuck-farthing to the gallows is a very short step indeed, I can assure
you."
The boy did not seem to know whether Charles was joking or not. He cast
a quick glance up at his face; but, seeing no sign of a smile there, he
spat on one of his brushes, and said--
"Not if you don't cheat, it aint."
Charles suffered the penalty, which usually follows on talking nonsense,
of finding himself in a dilemma; so he said imperiously--
"I shall buy you a ball to-morrow; I am not going to have you knocking
buttons about against people's walls in broad daylight, like that."
It was the first time that the boy had ever heard nonsense talked in his
life. It was a new sensation. He gave a sharp look up into Charles's
face again, and then went on with his work.
"Where do you live, my little manikin?" said Charles directly, in that
quiet pleasant voice I know so well.
The boy did not look up this time. It was not very often, possibly, that
he got spoken to so kindly by his patrons; he worked away, and answered
that he lived in Marquis Court, in Southwark.
"Why do you come so far, then?" asked Charles.
The boy told him why he plodded so wearily, day after day, over here in
the West-end. It was for family reasons, into which I must not go too
closely. Somebody, it appeared, still came home, now and then, just once
in a way, to see her mother, and to visit the den where she was bred;
and there was still left one who would wait for her, week after
week--still one pair of childish feet, bare and dirty, that would patter
back beside her--still one childish voice that would prattle with her,
on her way to her hideous home, and call her sister.
"Have you any brothers?"
Five altogether. Jim was gone for a sojer, it appeared, and Nipper was
sent over the water. Harry was on the cross--
"On the cross?" said Charles.
"Ah!" the boy said, "he goes out cly-faking, and such. He's a prig, and
a smart one, too. He's fly, is Harry."
"But what is cly-faking?" said Charles.
"Why a-prigging of wipes, and sneeze-boxes, and ridicules, and such."
Charles was not so ignorant of slang as not to understand what his
little friend meant now. He said--
"But _you_ are not a thief, are you?"
The boy looked up at him frankly and honestly, and said--
"Lord bless you, no! I shouldn't make no hand of that. I ain't brave
enough for that!"
He gave the boy twopence, and gave orders that one penny was to be spent
in a ball. And then he sauntered listlessly away--every day more
listless, and not three weeks gone yet.
His mind returned to this child very often. He found himself thinking
more about the little rogue than he could explain. The strange babble of
the child, prattling so innocently, and, as he thought, so prettily,
about vice, and crime, and misery; about one brother transported, one a
thief--and you see he could love his sister even to the very end of it
all. Strange babble indeed from a child's lips.
He thought of it again and again, and then, dressing himself plainly,
he went up to Grosvenor Square, where Mary would be walking with Lord
Charles Herries's children. He wanted to hear _them_ talk.
He was right in his calculations; the children were there. All three of
them this time; and Mary was there too. They were close to the rails,
and he leant his back on them, and heard every word.
"Miss Corby," said Gus, "if Lady Ascot is such a good woman, she will go
to heaven when she dies?"
"Yes, indeed, my dear," said Mary.
"And, when grandma dies, will she go to heaven, too?" said the artful
Gus, knowing as well as possible that old Lady Hainault and Lady Ascot
were deadly enemies.
"I hope so, my dear," said Mary.
"But does Lady Ascot hope so? Do you think grandma would be happy
if----"
It became high time to stop master Gus, who was getting on too fast.
Mary having bowled him out, Miss Flora had an innings.
"When I grow up," said Flora, "I shall wear knee-breeches and top-boots,
and a white bull-dog, and a long clay pipe, and I shall drive into
Henley on a market-day and put up at the Catherine Wheel."
Mary had breath enough left to ask why.
"Because Farmer Thompson at Casterton dresses like that, and he is such
a dear old darling. He gives us strawberries and cream; and in his
garden are gooseberries and peacocks; and the peacock's wives don't
spread out their tails like their husbands do--the foolish things. Now,
when I am married----"
Gus was rude enough to interrupt her here. He remarked--
"When Archy goes to heaven, he'll want the cat to come to bed with him;
and, if he can't get her, there'll be a pretty noise."
"My dears," said Mary, "you must not talk anymore nonsense; I can't
permit it."
"But, my dear Miss Corby," said Flora, "we haven't been talking
nonsense, have we? I told you the truth about Farmer Thompson."
"I know what she means," said Gus; "we have been saying what came into
our heads, and it vexes her. It is all nonsense, you know, about your
wearing breeches and spreading out your tail like a peacock; we mustn't
vex her."
Flora didn't answer Gus, but answered Mary by climbing on her knee and
kissing her. "Tell us a story, dear," said Gus.
"What shall I tell?" said Mary.
"Tell us about Ravenshoe," said Flora; "tell us about the fishermen, and
the priest that walked about like a ghost in the dark passages; and
about Cuthbert Ravenshoe, who was always saying his prayers; and about
the other one who won the boat race."
"Which one?" said silly Mary.
"Why, the other; the one you like best. What was his name?"
"Charles!"
How quietly and softly she said it! The word left her lips like a deep
sigh. One who heard it was a gentleman still. He had heard enough,
perhaps too much, and walked away towards the stable and the
public-house, leaving her in the gathering gloom of the summer's evening
under the red hawthorns, and laburnums, among the children. And, as he
walked away, he thought of the night he left Ravenshoe, when the little
figure was standing in the hall all alone. "She might have loved me, and
I her," he said, "if the world were not out of joint; God grant it may
not be so!" And although he said, "God grant that she may not," he
really wished it had been so; and from this very time Mary began to take
Adelaide's place in his heart.
Not that he was capable of falling in love with any woman at this time.
He says he was crazy, and I believe him to a certain extent. It was a
remarkably lucky thing for him that he had so diligently neglected his
education. If he had not, and had found himself in his present position,
with three or four times more of intellectual cravings to be satisfied,
he would have gone mad, or taken to drinking. I, who write, have seen
the thing happen.
But, before the crash came, I have seen Charles patiently spending the
morning cutting gun-wads from an old hat, in preference to going to his
books. It was this interest in trifles which saved him just now. He
could think at times, and had had education enough to think logically;
but his brain was not so active but that he could cut gun-wads for an
hour or so; though his friend William could cut one-third more gun-wads
out of an old hat than he.
He was thinking now, in his way, about these children--about Gus and
Flora on the one hand, and the little shoeblack on the other. Both so
innocent and pretty, and yet so different. He had taken himself from the
one world and thrown himself into the other. There were two worlds and
two standards--gentlemen and non-gentlemen. The "lower orders" did not
seem to be so particular about the character of their immediate
relations as the upper. That was well, for he belonged to the former
now, and had a sister. If one of Lord Charles Herries's children had
gone wrong, Gus and Flora would never have talked of him or her to a
stranger. He must learn the secret of this armour which made the poor so
invulnerable. He must go and talk to the little shoeblack.
He thought that was the reason why he went to look after the little
rogue next day; but that was not the real reason. The reason was, that
he had found a friend in a lower grade than himself, who would admire
him and look up to him. The first friend of that sort he had made since
his fall. What that friend accidentally saved him from, we shall see.