“what a wicked, wicked little boy you are! You have been snaring a
pheasant!”
The small boy, who was about his age, looked frightened and penitent:
he saw his accuser was a little gentleman.
“Please, sir, don’t tell on me,” he said, with a whimper. “I’ll gie ye
the bird if ye won’t tell on me.”
“I do not want the bird,” said Bertie, with magisterial gravity. “You
are a wicked little boy to offer it to me. It is not your own, and you
have killed it. You are a _thief_!”
“Please, sir,” whimpered the little poacher, “dad allus tooked ’em like
this.”
“Then he is a thief too,” said Bertie.
“He was a good un to me,” said the small boy, and then fairly burst out
sobbing. “He was a good un to me, and he’s dead a year come Lady-day,
and mother she’s main bad, and little Susie’s got the croup, and
there’s nowt to eat to home; and I hear Susie cryin’, cryin’, cryin’,
and so I gae to cupboard where dad’s old tackle be kep, and I gits out
this here, and says I to myself, maybe I’ll git one of them birds i’
spinney, ’cos they make rare broth, and we had a many on ’em when dad
was alive, and Towser.”
“Who was Towser?”
“He was our lurcher; keeper shot him; he’d bring of ’em in his mouth
like a Chrisen; and gin ye’ll tell on me, they’ll clap me in prison
like they did dad, and it’s birch rods they’d give yer, and mother’s
nowt but me.”
“I do not know who owns this property,” said Bertie, in his little
sedate way, “so I could not tell the owner, and I should not wish to do
it if I could; but still it is a very wicked thing to snare birds at
all, and when they are game-birds it is _robbery_.”
“I know as how they makes it so,” demurred the poacher’s son. “But dad
said as how——”
“No one makes it so,” said Bertie, with a little righteous anger; “it
_is_ so: the birds are not yours, and so, if you take them, you are a
thief.”
The boy put his thumb in his mouth and dangled his dead pheasant.
A discussion on the game-laws was beyond his powers, nor was even
Bertie conscious of the mighty subject he was opening, though the
instincts of the land-owner were naturally in him, and it seemed to
him so shocking to find a boy with such views as this as to _meum_ and
_tuum_, that he almost fancied the sun would fall from the sky. The
sun, however, glowed on, low down in the wood beyond a belt of firs,
and the green downs, and the gray sea; and the little sinner stood
before him, fascinated by his appearance and frightened at his words.
“Do you know who owns this coppice?” asked Bertie; and the boy answered
him, reluctantly,—
“Yes: Sir Henry.”
“Then, what you must do,” said Bertie, “is to go directly with that
bird to Sir Henry, and beg his pardon, and ask him to forgive you. Go
at once. That is what you must do.”
The boy opened eyes and mouth in amaze.
“That I won’t never do,” he said, doggedly: “I’d be took up to the
lodge afore I’d open my mouth.”
“Not if I go with you,” said Bertie.
“Be you one of the fam’ly, sir?”
“No,” said Bertie, and then was silent in some confusion, for he
bethought him that, without any shoes on, he might also be arrested at
the lodge gates.
“I thought as not, ’cos you’re barefoot,” said the brown-cheeked boy,
with a little contempt supplying the place of courage. “Dunno who you
be, sir, but seems to I as you’ve no call to preach to me: you be
a-trespassin’ too.”
Bertie colored.
“I am not doing any harm,” he said, with dignity; “you are: you have
been stealing. If you are not really a wicked boy, you will take the
pheasant straight to that gentleman, and beg him to forgive you, and I
dare say he will give you work.”
“There’s no work for my dad’s son,” said the little poacher, half
sadly, half sullenly: “the keepers are all agen us: ’tis as much as
mother and me and Susie can do to git a bit o’ bread.”
“What work can you do?”
“I can make the gins,” said the little sinner, touching the trap with
pride. “Mostwhiles, I never comes out o’ daylight; but all the forenoon
Susie was going off her head, want o’ summat t’ eat.”
“I’m sorry for Susie and you,” said the little Earl, with sympathy.
“But indeed, indeed, nothing can excuse a theft, or make God——”
“The keepers!” yelled the boy, with a scream like a hare’s, and he
dashed head-foremost into the bushes, casting on to Bertie’s lap the
gin and the dead bird. Bertie was so surprised that he sat perfectly
mute and still: the little boy had disappeared as fast as a rabbit
bolts at sight of a ferret. Two grim big men with dogs and guns burst
through the hawthorn, and one of them seized the little Earl with no
gentle hand.
“You little blackguard! you’ll smart for this,” yelled the big man.
“Treadmill and birch rod, or I’m a Dutchman.”
Bertie was so surprised, still, that he was silent. Then, with his
little air of innocent majesty, he said, simply, “You are mistaken: I
did not kill the bird.”
Now, if Bertie had had his usual nicety of apparel, or if the keeper
had not been in a fuming fury, the latter would have easily seen that
he had accused and apprehended a little gentleman. But no one in a
violent rage ever has much sense or sight left to aid him, and Big
George, as this keeper was called, did not notice that his dogs were
smelling in a friendly way at his prisoner, but only saw that he
had to do with a pale-faced lad without shoes, and very untidy and
dusty-looking, who had snares and a snared pheasant at his feet.
Before Bertie had even seen him take a bit of cord out of his pocket,
he had tied the little Earl’s hands behind him, picked up the pheasant
and the trap, and given some directions to his companion. The real
culprit was already a quarter of a mile off, burrowing safely in the
earth of an old fox killed in February,—a hiding-place with which he
was very familiar.
Bertie, meanwhile, was quite silent. He was thinking to himself, “If I
tell them another boy did it, they will go and look for him, and catch
him, and put him in prison; and then his mother and Susie will be so
miserable,—more miserable than ever. I think I ought to keep quiet.
Jesus never said anything when they buffeted him.”
“Ah, you little gallows-bird, you’ll get it this time!” said the
keeper, knotting the string tighter about his wrists, and speaking as
if he had had the little Earl very often in such custody.
“You are a very rude man,” said Bertie, with the angry color in his
cheeks; but Big George heeded him not, being engaged in swearing at one
of his dogs,—a young one, who was trotting after a rabbit.
“I know who this youngster is, Bob,” he said to his companion: “he’s
the Radley shaver over from Blackgang.”
Bertie wondered who the Radley shaver was that resembled him.
“He has the looks on him,” said the other, prudently.
“Sir Henry’s dining at Chigwell to-night, and he’ll have started afore
we get there,” continued Big George. “Go you on through spinney far as
Edge Pool, and I’ll take and lock this here Radley up till morning.
Blast his impudence,—a pheasant! think of the likes of it! A pheasant!
If ’t had been a rabbit, ’t had been bad enough.”
Then he shook his little captive vigorously.
Bertie did not say anything. He was not in trepidation for himself, but
he was in an agony of fear lest the other boy should be found in the
spinney.
“March along afore me,” said Big George, with much savageness. “And
if you tries to bolt, I’ll blow your brains out and nail you to a
barn-door along o’ the owls.”
The little Earl looked at him with eyes of scorn and horror.
“How dare you touch Athene’s bird?”
“How dare I what, you little saucy blackguard?” thundered Big George,
and fetched him a great box on the ears which made Bertie stagger.
“You are a very bad man,” he said, breathlessly. “You are a very mean
man. You are big, and so you are cruel: that is very mean indeed.”
“You’ve the gift of the gab, little devil of a Radley,” said the
keeper, wrathfully; “but you’ll pipe another tune when you feel the
birch and pick oakum.”
Bertie set his teeth tight to keep his words in: he walked on mute.
“You’ve stole some little gemman’s togs as well as my pheasant,” said
Big George, surveying him. “Why didn’t you steal a pair of boots when
you was about it?”
Bertie was still mute.
“I will not say anything to this bad man,” he thought, “or else he will
find out that it was not I.”
The sun had set by this time, leaving only a silvery light above the
sea and the downs: the pale long twilight of an English day had come
upon the earth.
Bertie was very white, and his heart beat fast, and he was growing very
hungry; but he managed to stumble on, though very painfully, for his
courage would not let him repine before this savage man, who was mixed
up in his mind with Bluebeard, and Thor, and Croquemitaine, and Richard
III., and Nero, and all the ogres that he had ever met with in his
reading, and who seemed to grow larger and larger and larger as the sky
and earth grew darker.
Happily for his shoeless feet, the way lay all over grass-lands and
mossy paths; but he limped so that the keeper swore at him many times,
and the little Earl felt the desperate resignation of the martyr.
At last they came in sight of the keeper’s cottage, standing on the
edge of the preserves,—a thatched and gabled little building, with a
light glimmering in its lattice window.
At the sound of Big George’s heavy tread, a woman and some children ran
out.
“Lord ha’ mercy! George!” cried the wife. “What scarecrow have you been
and got?”
“A Radley boy,” growled George,—“one of the cussed Radley boys at
last,—and a pheasant snared took in his very hand!”
“You don’t mean it!” cried his wife; and the small children yelled and
jumped. “What’ll be done with him, dad?” cried the eldest of them.
“I’ll put him in fowl-house to-night,” said Big George, “and up he’ll
go afore Sir Henry fust thing to-morrow. Clear off, young uns, and let
me run him in.”
Bertie looked up in Big George’s face.
“I had nothing to do with killing the bird,” he said, in a firm though
a faint voice. “You quite mistake. I am Lord Avillion.”
“Stop your pipe, or I’ll choke yer,” swore Big George, enraged by
what he termed the “darned cheek” of a Radley boy; and without more
ado he laid hold of the little Earl’s collar and lifted him into the
fowl-house, the door of which was held open eagerly by his eldest girl.
There was a great flapping of wings, screeching of hens, and piping of
chicks at the interruption, where all the inmates were gone to roost,
and one cock set up his usual salutation to the dawn.
“That’s better nor you’ll sleep to-morrow night,” said Big George, as
he tumbled Bertie on to a truss of straw that lay there, when he went
out himself, slammed the door, and both locked and barred it on the
outside.
Bertie fell back on the straw, sobbing bitterly: his feet were cut
and bleeding, his whole body ached like one great bruise, and he was
sick and faint with hunger. “If the world be as difficult as this to
live in,” he thought, “how ever do some people manage to live almost
to a hundred years in it?” and to his eight-year-old little soul the
prospect of a long life seemed so horrible that he sobbed again at the
very thought of it. It was quite dark in the fowl-house; the rustling
and fluttering of the poultry all around sounded mysterious and
unearthly; the strong, unpleasant smell made him faint, and the pain
in his feet grew greater every moment. He did not scream or go into
convulsions; he was a brave little man, and proud; but he felt as if
the long, lonely night there would kill him.
Half an hour, perhaps, had gone by when a woman’s voice at the little
square window said, softly, “Here is bread and water for you, poor boy;
and I’ve put some milk and cheese, too, only my man mustn’t know it.”
Bertie with great effort raised himself, and took what was pushed
through the tiny window; a mug of milk being lowered to him last by a
large red fat hand, on which the light of a candle held without was
glowing.
“Thanks very much,” said the little Earl, feebly. “But, madam, I did
not kill that bird, and indeed I am Lord Avillion.”
The good woman went within to her lord, and said timidly to him,
“George, are you sartin sure that there’s a Radley boy? He do look and
speak like a little gemman, and he do say as how he is one.”
Big George called her bad names.
“A barefoot gemman!” he said, with a sneer. “You thunderin’ fool! it’s
weazened-faced Vic Radley, as have been in our woods a hundred times
if wunce, though never could I slap eyes on him quick enough to pin
him.”
[Illustration: HE SHARED IT WILLINGLY]
The good housewife took up her stocking-mending and said no more. Big
George’s arguments were sometimes enforced with the fist, and even with
the pewter pot or the poker.
Meanwhile, the little Earl in the hen-house was so hungry that he drank
the milk and ate the bread and cheese. Both were harder and rougher
things than any he had ever tasted; but he had now that hunger which
had made the boy on the stile relish the turnip, and, besides, another
incident had occurred to give him relish for the food.
At the moment when he had sat down to drink the milk, there had tumbled
out from behind the straw a round black-and-white object, unsteady on
its legs, and having a very broad nose and a very woolly coat. The moon
had risen by this time, and was shining in through the little square
window, and by its beams Bertie could see this thing was a puppy,—a
Newfoundland puppy some four months old. He welcomed it with as much
rapture as ever Robert Bruce did the spider. It had evidently been
awakened from its sleep by the smell of the food. It was a pleasant,
companionable, warm and kindly creature; it knocked the bread out of
his hand, and thrust its square mouth into his milk, but he shared it
willingly, and had a hearty cry over it that did him good.
He did not feel all alone, now that this blundering, toppling,
shapeless, amiable baby-dog had found its way to him. He caressed it in
his arms and kissed it a great many times, and it responded much more
gratefully than the human baby had done in Jim Bracken’s cottage, and
finally, despite his bleeding feet and his tired limbs, he fell asleep
with his face against the pup’s woolly body.
When he awoke, he could not remember what had happened. He called for
Deborah, but no Deborah was there. The moon, now full, was shining
still through the queer little dusky place; the figures of the fowls,
rolled up in balls of feathers and stuck upon one leg, were all that
met his straining eyes. He pulled the puppy closer and closer to him:
for the first time in his life he felt really frightened.
“I never touched the pheasant,” he cried, as loud as he could. “I am
Lord Avillion! You have no right to keep me here. Let me out! let me
out! let me out!”
The fowls woke up, and then cried and cackled and crowed, and the poor
pup whined and yelped dolefully, but he got no other answer. Everybody
in Big George’s cottage was asleep, except Big George himself, who,
with his revolver, his fowling-piece, and a couple of bull-dogs, was
gone out again into the woods.
At home, Bertie in his pretty bed, that had belonged to the little Roi
de Rome, had always had a soft light burning in a porcelain shade, and
his nurse within easy call, and Ralph on the mat by the door. He had
never been in the dark before, and he could hear unseen things moving
and rustling in the straw, and he felt afraid of the white moonbeams
shifting hither and thither and shining on the shape of the big Brahma
cock till the great bird looked like a vulture. Once a rat ran swiftly
across, and then the fowls shrieked, and Bertie could not help
screaming with them; but in a minute or two he felt ashamed of himself,
for he thought, “A rat is God’s creature as much as I am; and, as I
have not done anything wrong, I do not think they will be allowed to
hurt me.”
Nevertheless, the night was very terrible. Without the presence of
the puppy, no doubt, the little Earl would have frightened himself
into convulsions and delirium; but the pup was so comforting to him,
so natural, so positively a thing real and in no wise of the outer
world, that Bertie kept down, though with many a sob, the panics of
unreasoning terror which assailed him as the moon sailed away past the
square loop-hole, and a great darkness seemed to wrap him up in it as
though some giant were stifling him in a magic cloak.
The pup had not long been taken from its mother, and had been teased
all day by the keeper’s children, and was frightened, and whimpered a
good deal, and cuddled itself close to the little Earl, who hugged it
and kissed it in paroxysms of loneliness and longing for comfort.
With these long, horrible black hours, all sorts of notions and terrors
assailed him; all he had ever read of dungeons, of enchanted castles,
of entrapped princes, of Prince Arthur and the Duke of Rothsay, of the
prisoner of Chillon and the Iron Mask, of every kind of hero, martyr,
and wizard-bewitched captive, crowded into his mind with horrifying
clearness, thronging on him with a host of fearful images and memories.
But this was only in his weaker moments. When he clasped the puppy and
felt its warm wet tongue lick his hair, he gathered up his courage:
after all, he thought, Big George was certainly only a keeper,—not an
ogre, or an astrologer, or a tyrant of Athens or of Rome.
So he fell off again, after a long and dreadful waking-time, into a
fitful slumber, in which his feet ached and his nerves jumped, and the
frightful visions assailed him just as much as when he was awake; and
how that ghastly night passed by him, he never knew very well.
When he again opened his eyes there was a dim gray light in the
fowl-house, and sharp in his ear was ringing the good-morrow of the
Brahma chanticleer.
It was daybreak.
A round red face looked in at the square hole, and the voice of the
keeper’s wife said, “Little gemman, Big George will be arter ye come
eight o’clock, and ’t ’ll go hard wi’ yer. Say now, yer didn’t snare
the bird?”
“No,” said Bertie, languidly, lying full length on the straw; he felt
shivery and chilly, and very stiff and very miserable in all ways.
“But yer know who did!” persisted the woman. “Now, jist you tell me,
and I’ll make it all square with George, and he’ll let you out, and
we’ll gie ye porridge, and we’ll take ye home on the donkey.”
The little Earl was silent.
“Now, drat ye for a obstinate! I can’t abide a obstinate,” said the
woman, angrily. “Who did snare the bird? jist say that; ’tis all, and
mighty little.”
“I will not say that,” said Bertie; and the woman slammed a wooden
door that there was to the loop-hole, and told him he was a mule and
a pig, and that she was not going to waste any more words about him;
she should let the birds out by the bars. What she called the bars,
which were two movable lengths of wood at the bottom of one of the
walls, did in point of fact soon slip aside, and the fowls all cackled
and strutted and fluttered after their different manners, and bustled
through the opening towards the daylight and the scattered corn, the
Brahma cock having much ado to squeeze his plumage where his wives had
passed.
“The puppy’s hungry,” said Bertie, timidly.
“Drat the puppy!” said the woman outside; and no more compassion was
wrung out of her. The little Earl felt very languid, light-headed, and
strange; he was faint, and a little feverish.
“Oh, dear, pup! what a night!” he murmured, with a burst of sobbing.
Yet it never occurred to him to purchase his liberty by giving up
little guilty Dan.
Some more hours rolled on,—slow, empty, desolate,—filled with the whine
of the pup for its mother, and the chirping of unseen martins going in
and out of the roof above-head.
“I suppose they mean to starve me to death,” thought Bertie, his
thoughts clinging to the Duke of Rothsay’s story.
He heard the tread of Big George on the ground outside, and his deep
voice cursing and swearing, and the children running to and fro, and
the hens cackling. Then the little Earl remembered that he was born
of brave men, and must not be unworthy of them; and he rose, though
unsteadily, and tried to pull his disordered dress together, and
tried, too, not to look afraid.
He recalled Casabianca on the burning ship: Casabianca had not been so
very much older than he.
The door was thrust open violently, and that big grim black man looked
in. “Come, varmint!” he cried out; “come out and get your merits: birch
and bread-and-water and Scripture-readin’ for a good month, I’ll go
bail; and ’t ’ud be a year if I wur the beak.”
Then Bertie, on his little shaky shivering limbs, walked quite
haughtily towards him and the open air, the puppy waddling after him.
“You should not be so very rough and rude,” he said: “I will go with
you. But the puppy wants some milk.”
Big George’s only answer was to clutch wildly at Bertie’s clothes and
hurl him anyhow, head first, into a little pony-cart that stood ready.
“Such tarnation cheek I never seed,” he swore; “but all them Radley
imps are as like one to t’ other as so many ribston-pippins,—all the
gift o’ the gab and tallow-faces!”
Bertie, lying very sick and dizzy in the bottom of the cart, managed to
find breath to call out to the woman on the door-step, “Please do give
the puppy something; it has been so hungry all night.”
“That’s no Radley boy,” said the keeper’s wife to her eldest girl as
the cart drove away. “Only a little gemman ’ud ha’ thought of the pup.
Strikes me, lass, your daddy’s put a rod in pickle for hisself along o’
his tantrums and tivies.”
It was but a mile and a half from the keeper’s cottage to the mansion
of the Sir Henry who was owner of these lands; and the pony spun along
at a swing trot, and Big George, smoking and rattling along, never
deigned to look at his prisoner.
“Another poachin’ boy, Mr. Mason?” said the woman who opened the lodge
gates; and Big George answered, heartily,—
“Ay, ay, a Radley imp caught at last. Got the bird on him, and the gin
too. What d’ye call that?”
“I call it like your vigilance, Mr. Mason,” said the lodge-keeper.
“But, lawks! he do look a mite!”
Big George spun on up the avenue with the air of a man who knew his own
important place in the world, and the little cart was soon pulled up at
the steps of a stately Italian-like building.
“See Sir Henry to wunce: poachin’ case,” said Big George to the footman
lounging about the doorway.
“Of course, Mr. Mason. Sir Henry said as you was to go to him directly.”
“Step this way,” said one of the men; and Big George proceeded to haul
Bertie out of the cart as unceremoniously as he had thrown him in; but
the little Earl, although his head spun and his shoeless feet ached,
managed to get down himself, and staggered across the hall.
“A Radley boy!” said Big George, displaying him with much pride.
“All the spring and all the winter I’ve been after that weazen-faced
varmint, and now I’ve _got_ him.”
“Sir Henry waits,” said a functionary; and Big George marched into a
handsome library, dragging his captive behind him, towards the central
writing-table, at which a good-looking elderly gentleman was sitting.
Arrived before his master, the demeanor of Big George underwent a
remarkable change; he cringed, and he pulled his lock of hair, and
he scraped about with his leg in the humblest manner possible, and
proceeded to lay the dead pheasant and the trap and gear upon the table.
“Took him in the ac’, Sir Henry,” he said, with triumph piercing
through deference. “I been after him ages; he’s a Radley boy, the
little gallows-bird; he’s been snarin’ and dodgin’ and stealin’ all the
winter long, and here we’ve got him.”
“He is very small,—quite a child,” said Sir Henry, doubtingly, trying
to see the culprit.
“He’s stunted in his growth along o’ wickedness, sir,” said Big George,
very positively; “but he’s old in wice; that’s what he is, sir,—old in
wice.”
At that moment Bertie managed to get in front of him, and lifted his
little faint voice.
“He has made a mistake,” he said, feebly: “I never killed your birds at
all, and I am Lord Avillion.”
“Good heavens! you thundering idiot!” shouted Sir Henry, springing to
his feet. “This is the little Earl they are looking for all over the
island, and all over the country! My dear little fellow, how can I
ever——”
His apologies were cut short by Bertie dropping down in a dead faint
at his feet, so weak was he from cold, and hunger, and exhaustion, and
unwonted exposure.
It was not very long, however, before all the alarmed household,
pouring in at the furious ringing of their master’s bell, had revived
the little Earl, and brought him to his senses none the worse for the
momentary eclipse of them.