AN EVENING AT WASHINGTON VILLA
Washington Villa appeared, from what one could see in the darkness, to
be a fairly sized house, standing in its own grounds. Considerable
stabling was built apart from, but close to the house, and as the trap
dashed along the little carriage-drive numerous loud-voiced dogs
announced the fact of an arrival to whomever it might concern. The
instant the vehicle stopped, the hall door was opened, and a little
wizened, shrunken man came down the steps. Mr. Bankes threw him the
reins.
"Jump out, you boys, and tumble into the house. Welcome to Washington
Villa." Suiting the action to the word, and before his young friends
had clearly realized the fact of their having arrived at their
destination, he had risen from his seat, sprung to the ground, and was
standing on the threshold of the door. The boys were not long in
following suit.
"Come this way!" Striding on in front of them, through a hall of no
inconsiderable dimensions, he led them into a room in which a bright
fire was blazing, and which was warm with light. A pretty servant girl
made a simultaneous entrance through a door on the other side of the
room. "Catch hold." Tearing rather than taking off his waterproof and
hood, he flung them to the maid. "Where are my slippers?" The maid
produced a pair from the fender, where they had been placed to warm;
and Mr. Bankes thrust his feet into them, flinging his boots off on to
the floor. "Tea for five, and a good tea, too, and in about less time
than it would take me to shoot a snake."
The maid disappeared with a laugh on her face; she was apparently used
to Mr. Bankes, and to Mr. Bankes' mode of speech. Then, after having
attended to his own comfort, the host turned his attention to his
guests.
"Well, you're a nice lot of half-drowned puppies. By right, I ought to
hang you up in front of the kitchen fire to dry."
His guests shuffled about upon their feet with not quite a graceful
air. It was true that they looked in about as miserable a condition as
they very well could do; but considering the circumstances under which
they had travelled, it was scarcely to be wondered at. Had Mr. Bankes
travelled in their place, he might have looked like a half-drowned
puppy too.
"But a wetting will do you good, and as for mud, why, I don't care for
mud. I've swallowed too much of it in my time to stick at a trifle.
When I was a boy, I was the dirtiest little blackguard ever seen. Now,
then, is that tea ready? Come along."
And off he strode into the hall, the boys following sheepishly in the
rear. Wheeler poked Bailey in the side with his elbow, and Bailey
poked Griffin, and they each of them poked the other, and they
grinned. Their feelings were altogether too much for speech. What Mr.
Shane and Mrs. Fletcher would think and say--but that was a matter on
which they would not improbably be able to speak more fully later on.
A more unguestlike-looking set of guests could hardly be conceived.
Not only were their boots concealed beneath thick layers of mud, but
they were spattered with mud from head to foot; their hands and faces
were filthy, and their hair was in a state of untidiness better
imagined than described. They had their everyday clothes on; their
trousers were in general too short in the leg, and their coats too
short in the sleeves; while Griffin was radiant with a mighty patch in
the seat of his breeches of a totally different material to the
original cloth. It was fortunate that Mr. Bankes did not stick at
trifles, or he would never have allowed his newly-discovered guests to
enter his well-kept residence.
They followed their host into a room on the other side of the hall,
and the sight they saw almost took their breath away. A table laden
with more delicacies than they remembered to have seen crowded
together for a considerable space of time was, especially after the
fare to which they were accustomed at Mecklemburg House, a spectacle
calculated at any time to fill them with a satisfaction almost
amounting to awe. But to come out of such a night to such a prospect!
To come to feast from worse than famine! The revulsion of feeling was
considerable, and the aspect of the guests became even more sheepish
than before.
"Sit down, and pitch in. If you're as hungry as I am, you'll eat the
table, legs and all."
The boys needed no second invitation. In a very short space of
time host and guests alike were doing prodigies of execution. The
nimble-handed servant-maid found it as much as she could do to supply
their wants. On the details of the feast we need not dwell. It partook
of the nature of a joke to call that elaborate meal tea. By the time
it was finished the four young gentlemen had not only ceased to think
of what Mrs. Fletcher and Mr. Shane might say, but they had altogether
forgotten the existence of Mecklemburg House Collegiate School; and
even Charlie Griffin was prepared to declare that he had thoroughly
enjoyed that nightmare journey from Mrs. Huffham's to the present
abode of bliss. The meal had been no less to the satisfaction of the
host than of his guests.
"Done?" They signified by their eloquent looks as much as by their
speech that they emphatically had. "Then let's go back to the other
room." And they went.
A peculiarity of this other room was that all the chairs in it
were arm-chairs; and in four of not the least comfortable of these
arm-chairs the boys found themselves seated at their ease. Over the
fire-place, arranged in the fashion of a trophy, were a large number
of venerable-looking pipes. Taking one of these down, Mr. Bankes
proceeded to fill it from a tobacco jar which stood in a corner of the
mantelshelf. Then he lit it, and, planting himself in the centre of
the hearthrug, right in front of the fire, he thrust his hands into
his pockets and looked down upon his guests, a huge, black-bearded
giant, puffing at his pipe.
"Had a good feed?"
They signified that they had.
"Do you know what I brought you here for?"
The food and the warmth combined had brought them into a state of
exceeding peace, and they were inclined to sleep. Why he had brought
them there they neither knew nor cared; they were beyond such
trifling. They had had a good meal, the first for many days, and it
behoved them to be thankful.
"I'll tell you. I brought you here because I want to get you, the
whole lot of you, to run away."
His listeners opened their eyes and ears. Bailey had made some
acquaintance with his host's character before, but his three friends
stared.
"Every boy worth his salt runs away from school. I did, and it was the
most sensible thing I ever did in my life."
When Mr. Bankes thus repeated the assertion which he had made to
Bailey in the trap, his hearers banished sleep and began to wonder.
"What's the use of school? What do you do there? What do you do at
that tumble-down old red-brick house on the Cobham road? Why, you
waste your time."
This assertion, if, to a certain extent, true, as it applied to the
establishment in question, was a random shot as applied to schools in
general.
"Shall I tell you what I learnt at school? I learnt to hate it, and I
haven't forgotten that lesson to this day; no, and I shan't till I'm
packed away with a lot of dirt on top of me. My father," Mr. Bankes
took his pipe out of his mouth, and pointed his remarks with it as he
went on, "died of a broken heart, and so should I have done if I
hadn't cut it short and run away."
No man ever looked less like dying of a broken heart than Mr. Bankes
did then.
"A life of adventure's the life for me!"
They were the words which had thrilled through Bertie when he had
heard them in the trap; they thrilled him again as he heard them now,
and they thrilled his companions too. They stared up at Mr. Bankes as
though he held them with a spell; nor would that gentleman have made a
bad study for a wizard.
"A life of adventure's the life for me! Under foreign skies in distant
lands, away from the twopenny-halfpenny twaddle of spelling-books and
sums, seeking fortune and finding it, a man in the midst of men, not a
finicking idiot among a pack of babies. Why don't you run away? You
see me? I was at school at Nottingham; I was just turned thirteen: I
ran away with ninepence-halfpenny in my pocket. I got to London
somehow; and from London I got abroad, somehow too; and abroad I've
picked up fortune after fortune, thrown them all away, and picked them
up again. Now I've had about enough of it, I've made another little
pile, and this little pile I think I'll keep, at least just yet
awhile. But what a life it's been! What larks I've had, what days and
nights, what months and years! Why, when I think of all I've done, and
of what I might have done, rotted away my life, if it hadn't been for
that little bolt from school,--why, when I think of that, I never see
a boy but I long to take him by the scruff of the neck, and sing out,
'Youngster, why don't you do as I have done, cut away from school, and
run?'"
Mr. Bankes flung back his head and laughed. But whether he was
laughing at them, or at his own words, or at his recollections of the
past, was more than they could say. They looked at each other,
conscious that their host was not the least part of the afternoon's
entertainment, and somewhat at a loss as to whether he was drawing the
long bow, taking them to be younger and more verdant than they were,
or whether he was seriously advancing an educational system of his
own.
He startled them by putting a question point-blank to Bailey, one
which he had put before.
"Why don't you run away?"
"I--I don't know!" stammered Bertie. Then, frankly, as the idea
occurred to him, "Because I never thought of it."
Mr. Bankes laughed. His constant tendency to laughter, with or without
apparent reason, seemed to be his not least remarkable characteristic.
"Now you have thought of it, why don't you run away?"
Bailey turned the matter over in his mind.
"Why should I?"
His friends looked at each other, thinking the conversation just a
trifle queer.
"Why ever should he run away?" asked Griffin.
"And wherever would he run to?" added Wheeler.
Dick Ellis said nothing, but possibly he thought the more. Mr. Bankes
directed his reply directly at Bailey.
"I'll tell you why you ought to run away; because that's the shortest
cut into a world into which you will never get by any other road. I'll
tell you where you ought to run to, out of this little fleabite of an
island, into the lands of golden dreams and golden possibilities, my
lad; where men at night lay themselves down poor, and in the morning
rise up rich."
Mr. Bankes, warming with his theme, began to gesticulate and stamp
about the room, the boys following him with all their eyes.
"I hate your huggermuggering existence; why should a lad of parts
huggermugger all his life away? When I saw you stand up to that great
lout, I said to myself, 'That lad has grit; he's just the very spit of
what I was when I was just his age; he's too good to be left to muddle
in this old worn-out country, to waste his time with books and sums
and trash.' I said to myself, 'I'll lend him a helping hand,' and so I
will. I'll show you the road, if I do nothing else; and if you don't
choose to take it, it's yourself's to blame, not me.
"When I was out in Colorado, at Denver City, there was a boy came
along, just about your age; he came along from away down East. He was
English; he'd got himself stowed away, and he'd made his way to the
promised land. He took a spade one day, and he marked out a claim, and
that boy he worked it, he did, and it turned up trumps; there wasn't
any dirt to dig, because pretty nearly all that his spade turned up
was virgin silver. He sold that claim for 10,000 dollars, money down,
and he went on and prospered. That boy is now a man; he owns, I
daresay, half a dozen silver mines, and he's so rich,--ah, he's so
rich he doesn't know how rich he is. Now why shouldn't you have been
that boy?"
Mr. Bankes paused for a reply, but his listeners furnished none.
Griffin was on the point of suggesting that Bailey was not that boy
because he wasn't; but he refrained, thinking that perhaps that was
not quite the sort of answer that was wanted.
"I knew another boy when I was going up from the coast to Kimberley,
Griqualand West. Do you boys know where that is?"
This sudden plunge into geographical examination took his guests
aback; they did not know where Griqualand West was; perhaps they had
been equally misty as to the whereabouts of Denver City, Colorado.
"It's in South Africa. Ah, that's the way to learn geography, to
travel about and see the places,--pitch your books into the fire!"
"And is the other place in South Africa?" queried Griffin.
Mr. Bankes gave him a look the like of which he had never received
from Mr. Fletcher; a look of thunder, as though he would have liked to
pick him up, then and there, and pitch him after the books into the
fire.
"Denver City, Colorado, in South Africa?" he roared. "Why, you
leather-headed noodle, where were you at school? If I were the man who
taught you, I'd flog you from here to Dublin with a cat-o'-nine-tails,
rather than I'd let you expose your ignorance like that!"
The sudden advent among them of an explosive bomb might have created a
little more astonishment than this speech, but not much. Griffin felt
that he had better abstain from questioning, and let his host run on.
"Denver City is in the United States of America, in the land of the
stars and bars, as every idiot knows! As I was saying, before that
young gentleman wrote himself down donkey--and he looks it, every inch
of him!--as I was saying, when I was going up from the coast to
Kimberley, there was a boy who used to do odd jobs for me; he hadn't
sixpenny-worth of clothes upon his back! I lost sight of him; five
years afterwards I met him again. It was like a tale out of the
_Arabian Nights_, I tell you! That ragged boy that was, when I saw him
again five years afterwards, he reckoned to cover what any half-dozen
men might have put down, and double it afterwards. And look at the
life he'd led! It's no good my talking about it here, you'd hardly
believe me if I told you half the things he'd done. Don't you believe
any of your adventure books. There aren't half the adventures crowded
into any book which that lad had seen. Yes, a life of adventure was
the life for him, and he'd had it, too!"
Mr. Bankes returned to his post of vantage in front of the fire. In
his excitement he had smoked his pipe to premature ashes; he refilled
and lighted it. Then he addressed himself to Bailey, marking time as
he went on by beating the palm of his right hand against his left.
"I say, don't let a day be wasted--days lost are not recovered; now's
your time, and now's your opportunity; don't let the week's end find
you huggermuggering in that old school. Go out into the world! learn
to be a man! Try your courage! Put your powers to the test! Search for
the golden land! Let a life of adventure be the life for you! As for
you," Mr. Bankes turned with ominous suddenness towards Charlie
Griffin, "I don't say that to you; what I say to you is this: write
home to your mother for a good supply of flannel petticoats, and wrap
yourself up warm, and let your hair grow long, and take care of your
complexion. You're a beauty boy, one of the sort who didn't ought to
be trusted out after dark alone, and who's sure to have a fit if he
sees the moon!"
It is a question if this sudden change of subject made Griffin or his
friends the more uncomfortable. Thinking that Mr. Bankes intended a
joke, and that it would be ungrateful not to laugh, Ellis attempted a
snigger; but a sudden gleam from his host's eyes in his direction
brought his mirth to an untimely ending.
"What are you laughing at?" asked Mr. Bankes. Ellis kept silence,
being most unwilling to confess that he did not know. Mr. Bankes
addressed himself again to Bailey.
"It is you I am advising to do as I did, to try a fall with the world
and to back yourself to win, not such things as those."
Under this heading he included Bertie's three friends, with an
eloquent wave of his hand in their direction.
"It wants a boy to make a man, not a farthing sugar stick! You'll have
cause to bless this evening all your life, and to bless me, too, if
you take the tip I've given you. Don't you listen to those who talk to
you about the hardships you will meet. What's life without hardships,
I should like to know; it's hardships make the man! I'm not advising
you to wrap yourself up in cotton-wool; leave cotton-wool to
mutton-headed dummies;" this with a significant glance in the
direction of Bailey's friends. "Rather I tell you this, you back
yourself to fight, and fight it out, and fight to win, and win you
will! Run away to-night, to-morrow, I don't care when, so long as
it's within the week. There's nothing like striking the iron while
it's hot, and set the clock a-going which will never stop until it
strikes the hour of victory won and fortune made! A life of
adventure's the life for me, and it's the life for you, and the sooner
you begin it the longer it will last and the sweeter it will be."
There was something in Mr. Bankes' tone and manner, when he chose to
put it there, which, in the eyes of his present audience, at any rate,
had all the effect of natural eloquence. His excitement excited them,
and almost he persuaded them to believe in the reality of his golden
dreams. Bailey, indeed, sat silent, spellbound. Mr. Bankes, by no
means a bad judge of character, had not mistaken the metal of which
the boy was made, and every stroke he struck, struck home. As was not
unnatural, Mr. Bankes' eloquence had a very much more mixed effect on
Bailey's friends. Their host gave a sudden turn to their thoughts by
taking out his watch.
"Eleven o'clock! whew-w-w!" This was a whistle. "They'll think you've
run away already! Ha! ha! ha! I'm not going to have you boys sleep
here, so the sooner you go the better. Now then, out you go!"
His guests sprang to their feet as he made a movement as though he
would turn them out with as much precipitation as he had lifted them
into the trap. And, indeed, the manner of their departure was not much
more ceremonious. Before they quite knew what was happening, he had
hustled them into the hall; the hall-door was open; they were the
other side of it, and Mr. Bankes, standing on the doorstep, was
ordering them off his premises.
"Now then, clear out of this! The dogs will be loose in half a second;
you'd better make tracks before they take it into their heads to try
their teeth upon your legs."
The door was shut, and they were left standing in the night,
endeavouring to realize whether their adventure of the night had been
actual fact, or whether they had only dreamed it.