A RUN WITH THE TRUANT; A WALK WITH THE MASTER
The sight of Miss Middleton running inflamed young Crossjay with the
passion of the game of hare and hounds. He shouted a view-halloo, and
flung up his legs. She was fleet; she ran as though a hundred little
feet were bearing her onward smooth as water over the lawn and the
sweeps of grass of the park, so swiftly did the hidden pair multiply
one another to speed her. So sweet was she in her flowing pace, that
the boy, as became his age, translated admiration into a dogged frenzy
of pursuit, and continued pounding along, when far outstripped,
determined to run her down or die. Suddenly her flight wound to an end
in a dozen twittering steps, and she sank. Young Crossjay attained her,
with just breath enough to say: "You are a runner!"
"I forgot you had been having your tea, my poor boy," said she.
"And you don't pant a bit!" was his encomium.
"Dear me, no; not more than a bird. You might as well try to catch a
bird."
Young Crossjay gave a knowing nod. "Wait till I get my second wind."
"Now you must confess that girls run faster than boys."
"They may at the start."
"They do everything better."
"They're flash-in-the-pans."
"They learn their lessons."
"You can't make soldiers or sailors of them, though."
"And that is untrue. Have you never read of Mary Ambree? and Mistress
Hannah Snell of Pondicherry? And there was the bride of the celebrated
William Taylor. And what do you say to Joan of Arc? What do you say to
Boadicea? I suppose you have never heard of the Amazons."
"They weren't English."
"Then it is your own countrywomen you decry, sir!"
Young Crossjay betrayed anxiety about his false position, and begged
for the stories of Mary Ambree and the others who were English.
"See, you will not read for yourself, you hide and play truant with Mr.
Whitford, and the consequence is you are ignorant of your country's
history."
Miss Middleton rebuked him, enjoying his wriggle between a perception
of her fun and an acknowledgment of his peccancy. She commanded him to
tell her which was the glorious Valentine's day of our naval annals;
the name of the hero of the day, and the name of his ship. To these
questions his answers were as ready as the guns of the good ship
Captain, for the Spanish four-decker.
"And that you owe to Mr. Whitford," said Miss Middleton.
"He bought me the books," young Crossjay growled, and plucked at grass
blades and bit them, foreseeing dimly but certainly the termination of
all this.
Miss Middleton lay back on the grass and said: "Are you going to be
fond of me, Crossjay?"
The boy sat blinking. His desire was to prove to her that lie was
immoderately fond of her already; and he might have flown at her neck
had she been sitting up, but her recumbency and eyelids half closed
excited wonder in him and awe. His young heart beat fast.
"Because, my dear boy," she said, leaning on her elbow, "you are a very
nice boy, but an ungrateful boy, and there is no telling whether you
will not punish any one who cares for you. Come along with me; pluck me
some of these cowslips, and the speedwells near them; I think we both
love wild-flowers." She rose and took his arm. "You shall row me on the
lake while I talk to you seriously."
It was she, however, who took the sculls at the boat-house, for she had
been a playfellow with boys, and knew that one of them engaged in a
manly exercise is not likely to listen to a woman.
"Now, Crossjay," she said. Dense gloom overcame him like a cowl. She
bent across her hands to laugh. "As if I were going to lecture you, you
silly boy!" He began to brighten dubiously. "I used to be as fond of
birdsnesting as you are. I like brave boys, and I like you for wanting
to enter the Royal Navy. Only, how can you if you do not learn? You
must get the captains to pass you, you know. Somebody spoils you: Miss
Dale or Mr. Whitford."
"Do they?" sung out young Crossjay.
"Sir Willoughby does?"
"I don't know about spoil. I can come round him."
"I am sure he is very kind to you. I dare say you think Mr. Whitford
rather severe. You should remember he has to teach you, so that you may
pass for the navy. You must not dislike him because he makes you work.
Supposing you had blown yourself up to-day! You would have thought it
better to have been working with Mr. Whitford."
"Sir Willoughby says, when he's married, you won't let me hide."
"Ah! It is wrong to pet a big boy like you. Does not he what you call
tip you, Crossjay?"
"Generally half-crown pieces. I've had a crown-piece. I've had
sovereigns."
"And for that you do as he bids you? And he indulges you because you
. . . Well, but though Mr. Whitford does not give you money, he gives you
his time, he tries to get you into the navy."
"He pays for me."
"What do you say?"
"My keep. And, as for liking him, if he were at the bottom of the water
here, I'd go down after him. I mean to learn. We're both of us here at
six o'clock in the morning, when it's light, and have a swim. He taught
me. Only, I never cared for schoolbooks."
"Are you quite certain that Mr. Whitford pays for you."
"My father told me he did, and I must obey him. He heard my father was
poor, with a family. He went down to see my father. My father came here
once, and Sir Willoughby wouldn't see him. I know Mr. Whitford does.
And Miss Dale told me he did. My mother says she thinks he does it to
make up to us for my father's long walk in the rain and the cold he
caught coming here to Patterne."
"So you see you should not vex him, Crossjay. He is a good friend to
your father and to you. You ought to love him."
"I like him, and I like his face."
"Why his face?"
"It's not like those faces! Miss Dale and I talk about him. She thinks
that Sir Willoughby is the best-looking man ever born."
"Were you not speaking of Mr. Whitford?"
"Yes; old Vernon. That's what Sir Willoughby calls him," young Crossjay
excused himself to her look of surprise. "Do you know what he makes me
think of?--his eyes, I mean. He makes me think of Robinson Crusoe's old
goat in the cavern. I like him because he's always the same, and you're
not positive about some people. Miss Middleton, if you look on at
cricket, in comes a safe man for ten runs. He may get more, and he
never gets less; and you should hear the old farmers talk of him in the
booth. That's just my feeling."
Miss Middleton understood that some illustration from the
cricketing-field was intended to throw light on the boy's feeling for
Mr. Whitford. Young Crossjay was evidently warming to speak from his
heart. But the sun was low, she had to dress for the dinner-table, and
she landed him with regret, as at a holiday over. Before they parted,
he offered to swim across the lake in his clothes, or dive to the bed
for anything she pleased to throw, declaring solemnly that it should
not be lost.
She walked back at a slow pace, and sung to herself above her
darker-flowing thoughts, like the reed-warbler on the branch beside the
night-stream; a simple song of a lighthearted sound, independent of the
shifting black and grey of the flood underneath.
A step was at her heels.
"I see you have been petting my scapegrace."
"Mr. Whitford! Yes; not petting, I hope. I tried to give him a lecture.
He's a dear lad, but, I fancy, trying."
She was in fine sunset colour, unable to arrest the mounting tide. She
had been rowing, she said; and, as he directed his eyes, according to
his wont, penetratingly, she defended herself by fixing her mind on
Robinson Crusoe's old goat in the recess of the cavern.
"I must have him away from here very soon," said Vernon. "Here he's
quite spoiled. Speak of him to Willoughby. I can't guess at his ideas
of the boy's future, but the chance of passing for the navy won't bear
trifling with, and if ever there was a lad made for the navy, it's
Crossjay."
The incident of the explosion in the laboratory was new to Vernon.
"And Willoughby laughed?" he said. "There are sea-port crammers who
stuff young fellows for examination, and we shall have to pack off the
boy at once to the best one of the lot we can find. I would rather have
had him under me up to the last three months, and have made sure of
some roots to what is knocked into his head. But he's ruined here. And
I am going. So I shall not trouble him for many weeks longer. Dr.
Middleton is well?"
"My father is well, yes. He pounced like a falcon on your notes in the
library."
Vernon came out with a chuckle.
"They were left to attract him. I am in for a controversy."
"Papa will not spare you, to judge from his look."
"I know the look."
"Have you walked far to-day?"
"Nine and a half hours. My Flibbertigibbet is too much for me at
times, and I had to walk off my temper."
She cast her eyes on him, thinking of the pleasure of dealing with a
temper honestly coltish, and manfully open to a specific.
"All those hours were required?"
"Not quite so long."
"You are training for your Alpine tour."
"It's doubtful whether I shall get to the Alps this year. I leave the
Hall, and shall probably be in London with a pen to sell."
"Willoughby knows that you leave him?"
"As much as Mont Blanc knows that he is going to be climbed by a party
below. He sees a speck or two in the valley."
"He has not spoken of it."
"He would attribute it to changes . . ."
Vernon did not conclude the sentence.
She became breathless, without emotion, but checked by the barrier
confronting an impulse to ask, what changes? She stooped to pluck a
cowslip.
"I saw daffodils lower down the park," she said. "One or two; they're
nearly over."
"We are well off for wild flowers here," he answered.
"Do not leave him, Mr. Whitford."
"He will not want me."
"You are devoted to him."
"I can't pretend that."
"Then it is the changes you imagine you foresee . . . If any occur, why
should they drive you away?"
"Well, I'm two and thirty, and have never been in the fray: a kind of
nondescript, half scholar, and by nature half billman or bowman or
musketeer; if I'm worth anything, London's the field for me. But that's
what I have to try."
"Papa will not like your serving with your pen in London: he will say
you are worth too much for that."
"Good men are at it; I should not care to be ranked above them."
"They are wasted, he says."
"Error! If they have their private ambition, they may suppose they are
wasted. But the value to the world of a private ambition, I do not
clearly understand."
"You have not an evil opinion of the world?" said Miss Middleton, sick
at heart as she spoke, with the sensation of having invited herself to
take a drop of poison.
He replied: "One might as well have an evil opinion of a river: here
it's muddy, there it's clear; one day troubled, another at rest. We
have to treat it with common sense."
"Love it?"
"In the sense of serving it."
"Not think it beautiful?"
"Part of it is, part of it the reverse."
"Papa would quote the 'mulier formosa'".
"Except that 'fish' is too good for the black extremity. 'Woman' is
excellent for the upper."
"How do you say that?--not cynically, I believe. Your view commends
itself to my reason."
She was grateful to him for not stating it in ideal contrast with Sir
Willoughby's view. If he had, so intensely did her youthful blood
desire to be enamoured of the world, that she felt he would have lifted
her off her feet. For a moment a gulf beneath had been threatening.
When she said, "Love it?" a little enthusiasm would have wafted her
into space fierily as wine; but the sober, "In the sense of serving
it", entered her brain, and was matter for reflection upon it and him.
She could think of him in pleasant liberty, uncorrected by her woman's
instinct of peril. He had neither arts nor graces; nothing of his
cousin's easy social front-face. She had once witnessed the military
precision of his dancing, and had to learn to like him before she
ceased to pray that she might never be the victim of it as his partner.
He walked heroically, his pedestrian vigour being famous, but that
means one who walks away from the sex, not excelling in the recreations
where men and women join hands. He was not much of a horseman either.
Sir Willoughby enjoyed seeing him on horseback. And he could scarcely
be said to shine in a drawingroom, unless when seated beside a person
ready for real talk. Even more than his merits, his demerits pointed
him out as a man to be a friend to a young woman who wanted one. His
way of life pictured to her troubled spirit an enviable smoothness; and
his having achieved that smooth way she considered a sign of strength;
and she wished to lean in idea upon some friendly strength. His
reputation for indifference to the frivolous charms of girls clothed
him with a noble coldness, and gave him the distinction of a far-seen
solitary iceberg in Southern waters. The popular notion of hereditary
titled aristocracy resembles her sentiment for a man that would not
flatter and could not be flattered by her sex: he appeared superior
almost to awfulness. She was young, but she had received much flattery
in her ears, and by it she had been snared; and he, disdaining to
practise the fowler's arts or to cast a thought on small fowls,
appeared to her to have a pride founded on natural loftiness.
They had not spoken for awhile, when Vernon said abruptly, "The boy's
future rather depends on you, Miss Middleton. I mean to leave as soon
as possible, and I do not like his being here without me, though you
will look after him, I have no doubt. But you may not at first see
where the spoiling hurts him. He should be packed off at once to the
crammer, before you are Lady Patterne. Use your influence. Willoughby
will support the lad at your request. The cost cannot be great. There
are strong grounds against my having him in London, even if I could
manage it. May I count on you?"
"I will mention it: I will do my best," said Miss Middleton, strangely
dejected.
They were now on the lawn, where Sir Willoughby was walking with the
ladies Eleanor and Isabel, his maiden aunts.
"You seem to have coursed the hare and captured the hart." he said to
his bride.
"Started the truant and run down the paedagogue," said Vernon.
"Ay, you won't listen to me about the management of that boy," Sir
Willoughby retorted.
The ladies embraced Miss Middleton. One offered up an ejaculation in
eulogy of her looks, the other of her healthfulness: then both remarked
that with indulgence young Crossjay could be induced to do anything.
Clara wondered whether inclination or Sir Willoughby had disciplined
their individuality out of them and made them his shadows, his echoes.
She gazed from them to him, and feared him. But as yet she had not
experienced the power in him which could threaten and wrestle to
subject the members of his household to the state of satellites. Though
she had in fact been giving battle to it for several months, she had
held her own too well to perceive definitely the character of the
spirit opposing her.
She said to the ladies, "Ah, no! Mr. Whitford has chosen the only
method for teaching a boy like Crossjay."
"I propose to make a man of him," said Sir Willoughby.
"What is to become of him if he learns nothing?"
"If he pleases me, he will be provided for. I have never abandoned a
dependent."
Clara let her eyes rest on his and, without turning or dropping, shut
them.
The effect was discomforting to him. He was very sensitive to the
intentions of eyes and tones; which was one secret of his rigid grasp
of the dwellers in his household. They were taught that they had to
render agreement under sharp scrutiny. Studious eyes, devoid of warmth,
devoid of the shyness of sex, that suddenly closed on their look,
signified a want of comprehension of some kind, it might be hostility
of understanding. Was it possible he did not possess her utterly? He
frowned up.
Clara saw the lift of his brows, and thought, "My mind is my own,
married or not."
It was the point in dispute.