Kingsley's "Two Years Ago" has been said by his son to be the
only novel, pure and simple, that ever came from the pen of
the famous writer, Published in 1857, it was begun two years
earlier while staying at Bideford. At this time Kingsley was
deeply interested in the Crimean War, and many thousands of
copies of his pamphlet, "Brave Words to Brave Soldiers," were
distributed to the army. His military tastes no doubt go a
long way towards explaining his doctrine in "Two Years Ago"
that the war was to exercise a great regenerating influence in
English life. Although the story is in many respects weaker
than its predecessors, it nevertheless abounds in brilliant
and vivid word-paintings, the descriptions of North Devon
scenery being probably unsurpassed in English prose.
_I.--Tom Thurnall's Wanderings_
To tell my story I must go back sixteen years to the days when the
pleasant old town of Whitbury boasted of forty coaches a day, instead of
one railway, and set forth how there stood two pleasant houses side by
side in its southern suburb.
In one of these two houses lived Mark Armsworth, banker, solicitor, land
agent, and justice of the peace. In the other lived Edward Thurnall,
esquire, doctor of medicine, and consulting physician of all the
countryside. These two men were as brothers, both were honest and
kind-hearted men.
Dr. Thurnall was sitting in his study, settled to his microscope, one
beautiful October morning, and his son Tom stood gazing out of the bay
window.
Tom, who had been brought up in his father's profession, was of that
bull-terrier type so common in England; sturdy, middle-sized,
deep-chested, broad-shouldered, his face full of shrewdness and good
nature, and of humour withal. It was his last day at home; tomorrow he
was leaving for Paris.
Presently Mark Armsworth came in, and Tom was seen cantering about the
garden with a weakly child of eight in his arms.
"Mark, the boy's heart cannot be in the wrong place while he is so fond
of little children."
"If she grows up, doctor, and don't go to join her poor dear mother up
there, I don't know that I'd wish her a better husband than your boy."
"It would be a poor enough match for her."
"Tut! She'll have the money, and he the brains. Doctor, that boy'll be a
credit to you; he'll make a noise in the world, or I know nothing. And
if his fancy holds seven years hence, and he wants still to turn
traveller, let him. If he's minded to go round the world, I'll back him
to go, somehow, or I'll eat my head, Ned Thurnall!"
So Tom carried Mary about all the morning, and next day went to Paris,
and soon became the best pistol shot and billiard-player in the Quartier
Latin. Then he went to St. Mumpsimus's Hospital in London, and became
the best boxer therein, and captain of the eight-oar, besides winning
prizes and certificates without end, and becoming in time the most
popular house-surgeon in the hospital; but nothing could keep him
permanently at home. Settle down in a country practice he would not.
Cost his father a farthing he would not. So he started forth into the
wide world with nothing but his wits and his science, an anatomical
professor to a new college in some South American republic.
Unfortunately, when he got there, he found that the annual revolution
had just taken place, and that the party who had founded the college had
all been shot. Whereat he whistled, and started off again, no man knew
whither.
"Having got round half the world, daddy," he wrote home, "it's hard if I
don't get round the other half."
With which he vanished into infinite space, and was only heard of by
occasional letters dated from the Rocky Mountains, the Spanish West
Indies, Otaheite, Singapore, the Falkland Islands, and all manner of
unexpected places, sending home valuable notes, zoological and
botanical.
At last when full four years were passed and gone since Tom started for
South America, he descended from the box of the day-mail at Whitbury,
with a serene and healthful countenance, shouldered his carpet-bag, and
started for his father's house.
He walked in, and hung up his hat in the hall, just as if he had come in
from a walk. Not finding the old man, he went into Mark Armsworth's,
frightening out of her wits a pale, ugly girl of seventeen, whom he
discovered to be his old playfellow, Mary. However, she soon recovered
her equanimity, and longed to throw her arms round his neck as of old,
and was only restrained by the thought that she was grown a great girl
now. She called her father, and all the household, and after a while the
old doctor came home, and the fatted calf was killed, and all made merry
over the return of this altogether unrepentant prodigal son.
Tom Thurnall stayed a month at home, and then went to America, whence he
wrote home in about six months. Then came a long silence, and then a
letter from California; and then letters more regularly from Australia.
Sickened with California life, he had crossed the Pacific once more, and
was hard at work in the diggings, doctoring and gold-finding by turns.
"A rolling stone gathers no moss," said his father.
"He has the pluck of a hound, and the cunning of a fox," said Mark, "and
he'll be a credit to you yet."
So the years slipped on till the autumn of 1853. And then Tom, at the
diggings at Ballarat, got a letter from Mary Armsworth.
"Your father is quite well in health, but his eyes have grown much
worse, and the doctors are afraid that he has little chance of
recovering the sight, at least of the left eye. And something has
happened to the railroad in which he had invested so much, and he has
given up the old house. He wants you to come home; but my father has
entreated him to let you stay. You know, while we are here, he is safe."
Tom walked away slowly into the forest. He felt that the crisis of his
life was come.
"I'll stay here and work," he said to himself finally, "till I make a
hit or luck runs dry, and then home and settle; and, meanwhile, I'll go
down to Melbourne tomorrow, and send the dear old dad two hundred
pounds."
And there sprang up in him at once the intensest yearning after his
father and the haunts of his boyhood, and the wildest dread that he
should never see them.
_II.--The Wreck_
Half the village of Aberalva is collected on the long sloping point of a
cliff. Sailors wrapped in pilot-cloth, oil-skinned coast guardsmen,
women with their gowns turned over their heads, while every moment some
fresh comer stumbles down the slope and asks, "Where's the wreck?" A
shift of wind, a drift of cloud, and the moon flashes out a moment.
"There she is, sir," says Brown, the head-boatman to the coastguard
lieutenant.
Some three hundred yards out at sea lies a long, curved, black line,
amid the white, wild leaping hills of water. A murmur from the crowd.
"A Liverpool clipper, by the lines of her."
"God help the poor passengers, then!" sobs a woman. "They're past our
help."
A quarter of an hour passes.
"God have mercy!" shouts Brown. "She's going!"
The black curve coils up, and then all melts away into the white
seething waste.
The coastguard lieutenant settles down in his macintoshes, knowing that
his duty is not to leave as long as there is a chance of saving--not a
life, for that was past all hope, but a chest of clothes or a stick of
timber.
And with the coastguardsmen many sailors stayed. Old Captain Willis
stays because Grace Harvey, the village schoolmistress, is there,
sitting upon a flat slope of rock, a little apart from the rest, with
her face resting on her hands, gazing intently out into the wild waste.
"She's not one of us," says old Willis. "There's no saying what's going
on there in her. Maybe she's praying; maybe she sees more than we do,
over the sea there."
"Look at her now! What's she after?" Brown replies.
The girl had raised her head, and was pointing toward the sea. Then she
sprang to her feet with a scream.
"A man! A man! Save him!"
As she spoke a huge wave rolled in, and out of it struggled, on hands
and knees, a human figure. He looked wildly up and around, and lay
clinging with outstretched arms over the edge of the rock.
"Save him!" she shrieked again, as twenty men rushed forward--and
stopped short. The man was fully thirty yards from them, but between
them and him stretched a long, ghastly crack, some ten feet wide, with
seething cauldrons within.
Ere they could nerve themselves for action, the wave had come,
half-burying the wretched mariner, and tearing across the chasm.
The schoolmistress took one long look, and as the wave retired, rushed
after it to the very brink of the chasm, and flung herself on her knees.
"The wave has carried him across the crack, and she's got him!" screamed
old Willis. And he sprang upon her, and caught her round the waist.
"Now, if you be men!" shouted he, as the rest hurried down.
"Now, if you be men; before the next wave comes!" shouted big Jan, the
fisherman. "Hands together, and make a line!" And he took a grip with
one hand of the old man's waistband, and held out the other for who
would to seize.
Strong hand after hand was clasped, and strong knee after knee dropped
almost to the rock, to meet the coming rush of water.
It came, and surged over the man and the girl, and up to old Willis's
throat, and round the knees of Jan and his neighbour; and then followed
the returning out-draught, and every limb quivered under the strain; but
when the cataract had disappeared, the chain was still unbroken.
"Saved!" and a cheer broke from all lips save those of the girl
herself--she was as senseless as he whom she had saved.
Gently they lifted each, and laid them on the rock; and presently the
schoolmistress was safe in bed at her mother's house. And the man, weak,
but alive, had been carried triumphantly up to the door of Dr. Heale,
which having been kicked open, the sailors insisted on carrying him
right upstairs, and depositing him on the best spare bed, saying, "If
you won't come to your patients, doctor, your patients shall come to
you."
The man grumbled when he awoke next morning at being thrown ashore with
nothing in the world but an old jersey and a bag of tobacco, two hundred
miles short of the port where he hoped to land with £1,500 in his
pocket.
To Dr. Heale, and to the Rev. Frank Headley, the curate, who called upon
him, he mentioned that his name was Tom Thurnall, F.R.C.S.
Later in the day Tom met the coastguard lieutenant and old Captain
Willis on the shore, and the latter introduced him to "Miss Harvey, the
young person who saved your life last night."
Tom was struck by the beauty of the girl at once, but after thanking
her, said gently, "I wish to tell you something which I do not want
publicly talked of, but in which you may help me. I had nearly £1,500
about me when I came ashore last night, sewed in a belt round my waist.
It is gone."
Grace turned pale, and her lips quivered. She turned to her mother and
Captain Willis.
"Belt! Mother! Uncle! What is this? The gentleman has lost a belt!"
"Dear me! A belt! Well, child, that's not much to grieve over, when the
Lord has spared his life," said her mother, somewhat testily.
Grace declared the money should be found, and Tom vowed to himself he
would stay in that little Cornish village of Aberalva until he had
recovered it.
So after writing to some old friends at St. Mumpsimus's Hospital to send
him down some new drugs, and to his father, he settled down as Dr.
Heale's assistant; and Dr. Heale being addicted to brandy and water,
there was plenty of room for assistance.
_III.--The Cholera_
Tom Thurnall had made up his mind in June 1854, that the cholera ought
to visit Aberalva in the course of the summer, and, of course, tried his
best to persuade people to get ready for their ugly visitor; but in
vain. The collective ignorance, pride, laziness, and superstition of the
little town showed a terrible front to the newcomer.
"Does he think we was all fools afore he came here?"
That was the rallying cry of the enemy, and sanitary reform was thrust
out of sight.
But Lord Minchampstead, who owned the neighbouring estates of
Pentremochyn, on Mark Armsworth's advice, got Tom to make a report on
the sanitary state of his cottages, and then acted on the information.
Frank Headley backed up Tom in his sanitary crusade, the coastguard
lieutenant proved an unexpected ally, and Grace Harvey promised that she
would do all she could.
Tom wrote up to London and detailed the condition of the place to the
General Board of Health, and the Board returned, for answer, that, as
soon as cholera broke out in Aberalva, they would send down an
inspector.
Then in August it came, and Tom Beer, the fisherman, and one of the
finest fellows in the town, was dead after two hours' illness.
Up and down the town the foul fiend sported, now here, now there,
fleshing his teeth on every kind of prey. He has taken old Beer's second
son, and now clutches at the old man himself; then across the street to
Jan Beer, his eldest; but he is driven out from both houses by chloride
of lime, and the colony of the Beers has peace awhile. The drunken
cobbler dies, of course; but spotless cleanliness and sobriety do not
save the mother of seven children, who has been soaking her brick floor
daily with water from a poisoned well, defiling where she meant to
clean. Youth does not save the buxom lass who has been filling herself
with unripe fruit.
And yet sots and fools escape where wise men fall; weakly women, living
amid all wretchedness, nurse, unharmed, strong men who have breathed
fresh air all day.
Headley and Grace and old Willis, and last, but not least, Tom Thurnall,
these and three or four brave women, organised themselves into a band,
and commenced at once a visitation from house to house, saving thereby
many a life. But within eight-and-forty hours it was as much as they
could do to attend to the acute cases.
Grace often longed to die, but knew that she should not die till she had
found Tom's belt, and was content to wait.
Tom just thought nothing about death and danger at all, but, always
cheerful, always busy, yet never in a hurry, went up and down, seemingly
ubiquitous. Sleep he got when he could, and food as often as he could;
into the sea he leapt, morning and night, and came out fresher every
time; the only person in the town who seemed to grow healthier, and
actually happier, as the work went on, in that fearful week.
The battle is over at last, and Tom is in London at the end of
September, ready to go to war as medical officer to the Turks. The news
of Alma has just arrived.
But he pays a visit to Whitbury first, and there Lord Minchampstead sees
him, and his lordship expresses satisfaction at the way Tom conducted
the business at Pentremochyn, and offers him a post of queen's messenger
in the Crimea, which Tom accepts with profuse thanks.
Before Tom left for the East old Mark Armsworth took him aside, and
said, "What do you think of the man who marries my daughter?"
"I should think," quoth Tom, wondering who the happy man could be, "that
he would be lucky in possessing such a heart."
"Then be as good as your word, and take her yourself. I've watched you,
and you'll make her a good husband."
Tom was too astonished and puzzled to reply. He had never thought that
he had found such favour in his old playfellow Mary Armsworth's eyes.
It was a terrible temptation. He knew the plain English of £50,000, and
Mark Armsworth's daughter, a good house, a good consulting practice,
and, above all, his father to live with him.
And then rose up before his imagination the steadfast eyes of Grace
Harvey, and seemed to look through and through his inmost soul, as
through a home which belonged of right to her, and where no other woman
must dwell, or could dwell; for she was there and he knew it; and knew
that, even if he never married till his dying day, he should sell his
soul by marrying anyone but her.
So Tom told old Mark it was impossible, because he was in love with
another woman. And then just as he was packing up next morning came a
note from Mark Armsworth and a cheque for £500, "To Thomas Thurnall,
Esq., for behaving like a gentleman." And Tom went Eastward Ho!--two
years ago.
_IV.--Christmas Eve_
It was in September, after Tom had left, that Grace found the missing
belt. Her mother had hidden it in a cave on the shore, and Grace,
following her there, came upon the hiding-place. The shock of detection
brought out the disease against which Mrs. Harvey had taken so many
precautions, and within two days the unhappy woman was dead.
Grace sold all her mother's effects, paid off all creditors, and with a
few pounds left, vanished from Aberalva. She had written at once to Tom
at Whitbury, telling him that his belt and money were safe, but had
received no answer; and now she went to Whitbury herself, only to arrive
a week after Tom had gone. Mark Armsworth and Mary kept her for a night,
and she left Tom's money with the old banker, retaining the belt and
then set out Eastward Ho! too, to nurse the wounded in the war; and, if
possible, to find Tom and clear her name of all suspicion.
How Grace Harvey worked at Scutari and at Balaclava, there is no need to
tell. Why mark her out from the rest, when all did more than nobly? In
due time she went home to England--home, but not to Aberalva.
She presented herself one day at Mark Armsworth's house in Whitbury, and
begged him to obtain her a place as servant to old Dr. Thurnall. And by
the help of Mark, and Mary, Grace Harvey took up her abode in the old
man's house; and ere a month was past she was to him a daughter.
Mary loved her--wanted to call her sister; but Grace drew back lovingly,
but humbly, from all advances; for she had divined Mary's secret with
the quick eye of a woman. She saw how Mary grew daily paler, sadder. Be
it so; Mary had a right to him, and she had none.
* * * * *
And where was Tom Thurnall all the while? No man could tell.
Mark inquired; Lord Minchampstead inquired; great personages inquired;
but all in vain. A few knew, and told Lord Minchampstead, who told Mark,
in confidence, that he had been heard of last in the Circassian
Mountains about Christmas 1854; but since then all was blank.
The old man never seemed to regret him; and never mentioned his name
after a while. None knew it was because he and Grace never talked of
anything else. So they had lived, and so they had waited.
And now it is the blessed Christmas Eve; the light is failing fast; when
down the High Street comes Mark's portly bulk. The next minute he has
entered the old doctor's house, and is full of the afternoon's run, for
he has been out fox-hunting.
The old doctor is confident to-day that his son will return, and Grace
reassures him.
"Yes, he is coming soon to us," she half whispers, leaning over the old
man's chair. "Or else we are soon going to him. It may mean that, sir.
Perhaps it is better that it should."
"It matters little, child, if he be near, as near he is."
And sure enough while Mark is telling of the good run he has had, Tom's
fresh voice is heard. Yes! There he was in bodily flesh and blood; thin,
sallow, bearded to the eyes, dressed in ragged sailor's clothes.
Grace uttered a long, soft, half laughing cry, full of the delicious
agony of sudden relief; and then slipped from the room past the
unheeding Tom, who had no eyes but for his father. Straight up to the
old man he went, took both his hands, and spoke in the old, cheerful
voice.
"Well, my dear old daddy! I'm afraid I've made you very anxious; but it
was not my fault; and I knew you would be certain I should come at last,
eh?"
"My son! my son!" murmured the old man. "You won't go away again, dear
boy? I'm getting old and forgetful; and I don't think I could bear it
again, you see."
"Never again, as long as I live, daddy."
Mark Armsworth burst out blubbering like a great boy.
"I said so! I always said so! The devil could not kill him and God
wouldn't."
"Tom," said his father presently, "you have not spoken to Grace yet. She
is my daughter now, Tom, and has been these twelve months past."
"If she is not, she will be soon," said Tom, quietly. With that he
walked straight out of the room to find Grace in the passage.
And Grace lay silent in his arms.
* * * * *