refinement that were in his little face and figure, had few marks
of a young gentleman. His snowy serge was smirched and stained with
blackberries; his red stockings, from the sea-water and the field-mud,
had none of their original color; his hat had been bent and crumpled
by his fall, and his hair was rough. Nobody passing him could have
dreamt that this sorry wanderer was a little earl. Nevertheless, when
he had been dressed in his little court suit and had been taken to see
the queen once at Balmoral, he had never been a quarter so proud nor a
tenth part so happy. He longed to meet Cromwell, and Richard the Third,
and Gessler, and Nero. He began to feel like all the knights he had
ever read of, and those were many.
[Illustration: “LITTLE GIRL, WHY DO YOU CRY?” HE SAID]
Presently he saw a little maiden weeping. She was an ugly little
maiden, with a shock head of red hair, and a wide mouth, and a
brickdust skin; but she was crying. In his present heroic mood, he
could not pass her by unconsoled.
“Little girl, why do you cry?” he said, stopping in the narrow green
lane.
She looked at him out of a sharp little eye, and her face puckered up
afresh.
“I’se going to schule, little master!”
“To school, do you mean? And why does that make you cry? Can you read?”
“Naw,” said the maiden, and sobbed loudly.
“Then why are you not glad to go and learn?” said Bertie, in his
superior wisdom.
“There’s naebody to do nowt at home,” said the red-haired one, with
a howl. “Mother’s abed sick, and Tam’s hurt his leg, and who’ll mind
baby? He’ll tumble the kittle o’er hisself, I know he will, and he’ll
be scalt to death, ’ll baby!”
“Dear, dear!” said Bertie, sympathetically. “But why do you go to
school then?”
“’Cos I isn’t thirteen,” sobbed the shock-haired nymph: “I’se only ten.
And daddy was had up las’ week and pit in prison ’cos he kept me at
home. And if I ain’t at home, who’ll mind baby, and who’ll bile the
taters, and who’ll——? Oh, how I wish I was thirteen!”
Bertie did not understand. He had never heard of the School Board.
“What does your father do?” he asked.
“Works i’ brick-field. All on us work i’ brick-field. I can take baby
to brick-field; he sit in the clay beautiful, but they awn’t let me
take him to schule, and he’ll be scalt, I know he’ll be scalt. He’ll
allers get a-nigh the kittle if he can.”
“But it is very shocking not to know how to read,” said the little
Earl, very gravely. “You should have learned that as soon as you could
speak. I did.”
“Maybe yours aren’t brick-field folk,” said the little girl, stung by
her agony to sarcasm. “I’ve allers had a baby to mind, ever since I
toddled; first ’twas Tam, and then ’twas Dick, and now ’tis this un. I
dunno want to read; awn’t make bricks a-readin’.”
“Oh, but you will learn such beautiful things,” said Bertie. “I do
think, you know, that you _ought_ to go to school.”
“So the gemman said as pit dad in th’ lock-up,” said the recalcitrant
one, doggedly. “Butiful things aren’t o’ much count, sir, when one’s
belly’s empty. I oodn’t go to the blackguds now, if ’tweren’t as poor
dad says as how I must, ’cos they lock him up.”
“It seems very hard to lock him up,” said Bertie, with increasing
sympathy; “and I think you ought to obey him and go. I will see if I
can find the baby. Where do you live?”
She pointed vaguely over the copses and pastures: “Go on a mile, and
you’ll see Jim Bracken’s cottage; but, Lord love you! _you_’ll ne’er
manage baby.”
“I will try,” said Bertie, sweetly. His fancy as well as his charity
was stirred; for he had never, that he knew of, seen a baby. “But
indeed you should go to school.”
“I’m a-going,” said the groaning and blowsy heroine with a last sob,
and then she set off running as quickly as a pair of her father’s
boots, ten times too large, allowed her, her slate and her books making
a loud clatter as she struggled on her way.
He was by this time very tired, for he was not used to such long walks;
but curiosity and compassion put fresh spirit into his heart, and his
small legs pegged valorously over the rough ground, the red stockings
and the silver buckles becoming by this time much begrimed with mud.
He knocked at one cottage door, and saw only a very cross old woman,
who flourished a broom at him.
“No, it bean’t Jim Bracken’s. Get you gone!—you look like a runaway.”
Now, a runaway he was; and, as truth when we are guilty is always even
as a two-edged sword, Bertie colored up to the roots of his hair, and
bolted off as fast as he could to the only other cottage visible,
beyond a few acres of mangel-wurzel and all the lucern family, which
the little Earl fancied were shamrocks. For he was far on in Euclid,
could speak German well, and could spell through Tacitus fairly, but
about the flowers of the field and the grasses no one had ever thought
it worth while to tell him anything at all. Indeed, to tell you the
truth, I do not think his tutors knew anything about them themselves.
This other cottage was so low, so covered up in its broken thatch,
which in turn was covered with lichen, and was so tumble-down and
sorrowful-looking, that Bertie thought it was a ruined cow-shed.
However, it stood where the school-girl had pointed: so he took his
courage in both hands, as we say in French, and advanced to it.
The rickety door stood open, and he saw a low miserable bed with a
miserable woman lying on it; a shock-headed boy sprawled on the floor,
another crouched before a fire of brambles and sods, and between the
legs of this last boy was a strange, uncouth, shapeless object, which,
but for the fact that it was crying loudly, never would have appeared
to his astonished eyes as the baby for whom was prophesied a tragic and
early end by the kettle. The boy who had this object in charge stared
with two little round eyes.
“Mamsey, there’s a young gemman,” he said, in an awed voice.
Bertie took off his hat, and went into the room with his prettiest
grace.
“If you please, are you very ill?” he said, in his little soft voice,
to the woman in bed. “I met—I met—a little girl who was so anxious
about the baby, and I said I would come and see if I could be of any
use——”
The woman raised herself on one elbow, and looked at him with eager,
haggard eyes.
“Lord, little sir, there’s naught to be done for us;—leastways, unless
you had a shillin’ or two——”
“I have no money,” murmured Bertie, feeling very unlike a little
earl in that moment. The woman gave a weary angry sigh and sank back
indifferent.
“Can I do nothing?” said Bertie, wistfully.
“By golly!” said the boy on the floor, “unless you’ve got a few
coppers, little master——”
“Coppers?” repeated the little Earl.
“Pence,” said the boy, shortly; then the baby began to howl, and the
boy shook it.
“Do please not make it scream so,” said Bertie. “That is what you call
the baby, is it not?”
“Iss,” said the boy Dick, sullenly. “This here’s baby, cuss him! and
what bisness be he of yourn?”
For interference without coppers to follow was a barren intruder that
he was disposed to resent.
“I thought I could amuse him,” said Bertie, timidly. “I told your
sister I would.”
Dick roared into loud guffaws.
“Baby’d kick you into middle o’ next week, you poor little puny
spindle-shanks!” said this rude boy; and Bertie felt that he was very
rude, though he had no idea what was meant by spindle-shanks.
The other boy, who was lying on his stomach,—a sadly empty little
stomach,—here reversed his position and stared up at Bertie.
“I think you’re a kind little gemman,” he said, “and Dick’s cross ’cos
he’s broke his legs, and we’ve had no vittles since yesternoon, and
only a sup o’ tea Peg made afore she went, and mother’s main bad, that
she be.”
And tears rolled down this gentler little lad’s dirty cheeks.
“Oh, dear, what shall I do?” said Bertie, with a sigh: if he had only
had the money and the watch that had fallen into the sea! He looked
round him and felt very sick; it was all so dirty, so dirty!—and he had
never seen dirt before; and the place smelt very close and sour, and
the children’s clothes were mere rags, and the woman was all skin and
bone, on her wretched straw bed; and the unhappy baby was screaming
loudly enough to be heard right across the sea to the French coast.
“Baby, poor baby, don’t cry so!” said Bertie, very softly, and he
dangled the ends of his red sash before its tearful eyes, and shook
them up and down: the attention of the baby was arrested, it ceased to
howl, and put out its hands, and began to laugh instead! Bertie was
very proud of his success, and even the sullen Dick muttered, “Well, I
never!”
The little Earl undid his scarf and let the baby pull it towards
itself. Dick’s eyes twinkled greedily.
“Master, that’d _sell_ for summat!”
“Oh, you must not sell it,” said the little Earl, eagerly. “It is to
amuse the poor baby. And what pretty big eyes he has! how he laughs!”
“Your shoes ’ud sell,” muttered Dick.
“Dick! don’t, Dick! that’s begging,” muttered Tam. Bertie stared in
surprise. To sell his shoes seemed as odd as to be asked to sell his
hair or his hands. The woman opened her fading, glazing eyes.
“They’re honest boys, little sir: you’ll pardon of ’em; they’ve eat
nothing since yesternoon, and then ’twas only a carrot or two, and boys
is main hungry.”
“And have you nothing?” said Bertie, aghast at the misery in this
unknown world.
“How’d we have anything?” said the sick woman, grimly. “They’ve locked
up my man, and Peg’s sent to school while we starve; and nobody earns
nothin’, for Dick’s broke his leg, and I’ve naught in my breasts for
baby——”
“But would not somebody you work for—or the priest—?” began Bertie.
“Passon don’t do nowt for us,—my man’s a Methody; and at brick-field
they don’t mind us; if we be there, well an’ good,—we work and get
paid; and if we isn’t there, well—some un else is. That’s all.” Then
she sank back, gasping.
Bertie stood woe-begone and perplexed.
“Did you say my shoes would sell?” he murmured, very miserably, his
mind going back to the history of St. Martin and the cloak.
Dick brightened up at once.
“Master, I’ll get three shillin’ on ’em, maybe more, down in village
yonder.”
“You mus’n’t take the little gemman’s things,” murmured the mother,
feebly; but faintness was stealing on her, and darkness closing over
her sight.
“Three shillings!” said Bertie, who knew very little of the value of
shillings; “that seems very little! I _think_ they cost sovereigns.
Could you get a loaf of bread with three shillings?”
“Gu-r-r-r!” grinned Dick, and Bertie understood that the guttural sound
meant assent and rapture.
“But I cannot walk without shoes.”
“Walk! yah! ye’ll walk better. We niver have no shoes,” said Dick.
“Don’t you, _really_?”
“Golly! no! Ye’ll walk ten times finer; ye won’t trip, nor stumble, nor
nothin’, and ye’ll run as fast again.”
“Oh, no, I shall not,” murmured Bertie, and he was going to say that he
would be ashamed to be seen without shoes, only he remembered that, as
these boys had none, that would not be kind. A desperate misery came
over him at the thought of being shoeless, but then he reasoned with
himself, “To give was no charity if it cost you nothing: did not the
saints strip themselves to the uttermost shred for the poor?”
He stooped and took off his shoes with the silver buckles on them, and
placed them hastily on the floor.
“Take them, if they will get you bread,” he said, with the color
mounting in his face.
Dick seized them with a yell of joy. “Tarnation that I can’t go mysel’.
Here, Tam, run quick and sell ’em to old Nan; and get bread, and meat,
and potatoes, and milk for baby, and Lord knows what; p’raps a gill of
gin for mammy.”
“I don’t think we ought to rob little master, Dick,” murmured little
Tam. His brother hurled a crutch at him, and Tam snatched up the pretty
shoes and fled.
“My blazes, sir,” said Dick, with rather a shamefaced look, “if you’d
a beast like a lot of fire gnawing at your belly all night long, yer
wouldn’t stick at nowt to get bread.”
Bertie only imperfectly comprehended. The baby, tired of the sash,
began to cry again; and Dick, grown good-natured, danced it up and down.
“How old are you?” said Bertie.
“Nigh on eight,” said Dick.
“Dear me!” sighed the little Earl; this rough, masterful,
coarse-tongued boy seemed like a grown man to him.
“You won’t split on us?” said Dick, sturdily.
“What is that?” asked Bertie.
“Not tell anybody you give us the shoes: there’d be a piece of work.”
“As if one _told_ when one did any kindness!” murmured Bertie, with a
disgust he could not quite conceal. “I mean, when one does one’s duty.”
“But what’ll you gammon ’em with at home?—they’ll want to know what
you’ve done with your shoes.”
“I am not going home,” said the little Earl, and there was a something
in the way he spoke that silenced Dick’s tongue,—which he would have
called his clapper.
“What in the world be the little swell arter?” thought Dick.
Bertie meanwhile, with some awe and anxiety, was watching the livid
face of the sick woman: he had never seen illness or death, but it
seemed to him that she was very ill indeed.
“Are you not anxious about your mother?” he asked of the rough boy.
“Yes,” said Dick, sulkily, with the water coming in his eyes. “Dad’s in
the lock-up: that’s wuss still, young sir.”
“Not worse than death,” said Bertie, solemnly. “He will come back.”
“Oh, she’ll come round with a drop of gin and a sup of broth,” said
Dick, confidently. “’Tis all hunger and frettin’, hers is.”
“I am glad I gave my shoes,” thought Bertie. Then there was a long
silence, broken only by the hissing of the green brambles on the fire
and the yelps of the baby.
“Maybe, sir,” said Dick, after a little, “you’d put the saucepan on? I
can’t move with this here leg. If you’d pit some water out o’ kittle in
him, he’ll be ready for cookin’ when the vittles come.”
“I will do that,” said Bertie, cheerfully, and he set the saucepan on
by lifting it with both hands: it was very black, and its crock came
off on his knickerbockers. Then, by Dick’s directions, he found a pair
of old wooden bellows, and blew on the sticks and sods; but this he
managed so ill that Dick wriggled himself along the floor closer to the
fire and did it himself.
“You’re a gaby!” he said to his benefactor.
“What is that?” said Bertie.
But Dick felt that it was more prudent not to explain.
In half an hour Tam burst into the room, breathless and joyous, his
scruples having disappeared under the basket he bore.
“She gived me five shillin’!” he shouted; “and I’s sure they’s wuth
a deal more, ’cos her eyes twinkled and winked, and she shoved me a
peg-top in!”
“Gie us o’t!” shrieked Dick, in an agony at being bound to the floor
with all these good things before his sight.
Little Tam, who was very loyal, laid them all out on the ground before
his elder: two quartern loaves, two pounds of beef, onions, potatoes, a
bit of bacon, and a jug of milk.
Dick poured some milk into an old tin mug, and handed it roughly to
Bertie.
“Feed the baby, will yer, whiles Tam and me cooks?”
The little Earl took the can, and advanced to the formidable bundle of
rags, who was screaming like a very hoarse raven.
“I think you should attend to your mother first,” he said, gently, as
the baby made a grab at the little tin pot, the look of which it seemed
to know, and shook half the milk over itself.
“Poor mammy!” said Tam, who was gnawing a bit of bread; and, with his
bread in one hand, he got up and put a little gin and water quite hot
between his mother’s lips. She swallowed it without opening her eyes or
seeming to be conscious, and Tam climbed down from the bed again with a
clear conscience.
“We’ll gie her some broth,” he said, manfully, while he and Dick,
munching bread and raw bacon, tumbled the beef in a lump into the
saucepan, drowned in water with some whole onions, in the common
fashion of cottage-cooking. The baby, meanwhile, was placidly
swallowing the milk that the little Earl held for it very carefully,
and, when that was done, accepted a crust that he offered it to suck.
The two boys were crouching before the crackling fire, munching
voraciously, and watching the boiling of the old black pot. They had
quite forgotten their benefactor.
“My! What’ll Peg say when she’s to home?” chuckled Tam.
“She’ll say that she’d ha’ cooked better,” growled Dick. “Golly! ain’t
the fat good?”
Bertie stood aloof, pleased, and yet sorrowful because they did not
notice him.
Even the baby had so completely centred its mind in the crust that it
had abandoned all memory of the red scarf.
Bertie looked on a little while, but no one seemed to remember him. The
boys’ eyes were glowing on the saucepan, and their cheeks were filled
out with food as the cherubs in his chapel at home were puffed out with
air as they blew celestial trumpets.
He went to the door slowly, looked back, and then retreated into the
sunshine.
“It would be mean to put them in mind of me,” he thought, as he
withdrew.
Suddenly a sharp pain shot through him: a stone had cut his unshod foot.
“Oh, dear me! how ever shall I walk without any shoes or boots!” he
thought, miserably; and he was very nearly bursting out crying.
On the edge of these fields was a wood,—a low, dark, rolling
wood,—which looked to the little Earl, who missed his own forests,
inviting and cool and sweet. By this time it was getting towards noon,
and the sun was hot, and he felt thirsty and very tired. He was sad,
too: he was glad to have satisfied those poor hungry children, but
their indifference to him when they were satisfied was chilling and
melancholy.
“But then we ought not to do a kindness that we may be thanked,” he
said to himself. “It is a proper punishment to me, because I wished to
be thanked, which was mean.”
So he settled, as he usually did, that it was all his own fault.
Happily for him, the ground was soft with summer dust, and so he
managed to get along the little path that ran from the cottage through
the lucern-fields, and from there the path became grass, which was
still less trying to his little red stockings.
Yet he was anxious and troubled; he felt heavily weighted for his
battle with the world without any shoes on, and he felt he must look
ridiculous. For the first time, St. Martin did not seem to him so very
much of a hero, because St. Martin’s gift was only a cloak. Besides,
without his sash, the band of his knickerbockers could be seen; and he
was afraid this was indecent.
Nevertheless, he went on bravely, if lamely. Believe me, nothing sets
the world more straight than thinking that what is awry in it is one’s
self.
The wood, which was a well-known spinney famous for pheasants, was
reached before very long, though with painful effort. It was chiefly
composed of old hawthorn-trees and blackthorn, with here and there
a larch or holly. The undergrowth was thick, and the sunbeams were
playing at bo-peep with the shadows. Far away over the fields and
thorns was a glimmer of blue water, and close around were all manner of
ferns, of foxgloves, of grasses, of boughs. The tired little Earl sank
downward under one of the old thorns with feet that bled. A wasp had
stung him, too, through his stocking, and the stung place was smarting
furiously. “But how much more Christ and the saints suffered!” thought
Bertie, seriously and piously, without the smallest touch of vanity.
Lying on the moss under all that greenery, he felt refreshed and
soothed, although the foot the wasp had stung throbbed a good deal.
There were all sorts of pretty things to see: the pheasants, who were
lords of the manor till October came round, did not mind him in the
least, and swept smoothly by with their long tails like court mantles
sweeping the grass. Blackbirds, those cheeriest of all birds, pecked
at worms and grubs quite near him. Chaffinches were looking for hairs
under the brambles to make their second summer nest with. Any hairs
serve their purpose,—cows’, horses’, or dogs’; and if they get a tuft
of hare-skin or rabbit-fur they are furnished for the year. A pair of
little white-throats were busy in a low bush, gathering the catch-weed
that grew thickly there, and a goldfinch was flying away with a lock
of sheep’s wool in his beak. There were other charming creatures, too:
a mole was hurrying to his underground castle, a nuthatch was at work
on a rotten tree-trunk, and a gray, odd-looking bird was impaling a
dead field-mouse on one of the thorn-branches. Bertie did not know
that this gentleman was but the gray shrike, once used in hawking;
indeed, he did not know the names or habits of any of the birds; and
he lay still hidden in the ferns, and watched them with delight and
mute amazement. There were thousands of such pretty creatures in his
own woods and brakes at home, but then he was never alone: he was
always either walking with Father Philip or riding with William, and in
neither case was he allowed to stop and loiter and lie in the grass,
and the sonorous voice of the priest scattered these timid dwellers in
the greenwood as surely as did the tread of the pony’s hoofs and the
barking of Ralph.
“When I am a man I will pass all my life out of doors, and I will
get friends with all these pretty things, and ask them what they are
doing,” he thought; and he was so entranced in this new world hidden
away under the low hawthorn boughs of this spinney that he quite forgot
he had lost his shoes and did not know where he would sleep when night
came. He had quite forgotten his own existence, indeed; and this is
just the happiness that comes to us always, when we learn to love the
winged and four-footed brethren that Nature has placed so near us, and
whom, alas! we so shamefully neglect when we do not do even worse and
persecute them. Bertie was quite oblivious that he was a runaway, who
had started with a very fine idea or finding out who it was that kept
him in prison, and giving him battle wherever he might be: he was much
more interested in longing to know what the great gray shrike was, and
why it hung up the mouse on the thorn and flew away. If you do not know
any more than he did, I may tell you that the shrikes are like your
father, and like their game when it has been many days in the larder.
It is one of the few ignoble tastes in which birds resemble mankind.
The shrike flew away to look for some more mice, or frogs, or little
snakes, or cockroaches, or beetles, for he is a very useful fellow
indeed in the woods, though the keepers are usually silly and wicked
enough to try and kill him. His home and his young ones were above in
the thicket, and he had stuck all round their nests insects of all
kinds: still, he was a provident bird, and was of opinion that every
one should work while it is day.
When the shrike flew away after a bumble-bee, the little Earl fell
asleep: what with fatigue, and excitement, and the heat of the sun,
a sound, dreamless slumber fell upon him there among the birds and
the sweet smell of the May buds; and the goldfinch sang to him, while
he slept, such a pretty song that he heard it though he was so fast
asleep. The goldfinch, though, did not sing for him one bit in the
world; he sang for his wife, who was sitting among her callow brood
hidden away from sight under the leaves, and with no greater anxiety on
her mind than fear of a possible weasel or rat gnawing at her nest from
the bottom.
When the little Earl awoke, the sun was not full and golden all about
him as it had been; there were long shadows slanting through the
spinney, and there was a great globe descending behind the downs of the
western horizon. It was probably about six in the evening. Bertie could
not tell, for, unluckily for him, he had always had a watch to rely
upon, and had never been taught to tell the hour from the “shepherd’s
hour-glass” in the field-flowers, or calculate the time of day from
the length of the shadows. Even now, though night was so nigh, the
thought of where he should find a bed did not occur to him, for he was
absorbed in a little boy who stood before him,—a very miserable little
black-haired, brown-cheeked boy, who was staring hard at him.
“Now, he, I am sure, is as poor as Dick and Tam,” thought the little
Earl, “and I have nothing left to give him.”
The little boy was endeavoring to hide behind his back a bright bundle
of ruffled feathers, and in his other hand he held a complicated
arrangement of twine and twigs with a pendent noose.
That Bertie did know the look of, for he had seen his own keepers
destroy such things in his own woods, and had heard them swear when
they did so. So his land-owner’s instincts awoke in him, though the
land was not his.