MAY MORN.
It was the morn when the tall and shapely tower of Magdalen is crowned
with a fillet of shining white, awaiting the first step of sunrise.
Once a year, for generations, this has been the sign of it--eager
eyes, and gaping mouths, little knuckles blue with cold, and clumsy
little feet inclined to slide upon the slippery lead. All are bound to
keep together for the radiant moment; all are a little elated at their
height above all other boys; all have a strong idea that the sun, when
he comes, will be full of them; and every one of them longs to be back
beneath his mother's blankets.
It is a tradition with this choir (handed, or chanted, down from very
ancient choral ancestry) that the sun never rises on May-day without
iced dew to glance upon. Scientific record here comes in to prop
tradition. The icy saints may be going by, but they leave their breath
behind them. And the poets, who have sent forth their maids to "gather
the dews of May," knew, and meant, that dew must freeze to stand that
operation.
But though the sky was bright, and the dew lay sparkling for the
maidens, the frost on this particular morning was not so keen as
usual. The trees that took the early light (more chaste without the
yellow ray) glistened rather with soft moisture than with stiff
encrustment; and sprays, that kept their sally into fickle air half
latent, showing only little scolloped crinkles with a knob in them,
held in every downy quillet liquid, rather than solid, gem.
Christopher Sharp, looking none the worse for his excellent supper of
last night, laid his fattish elbow on the parapet of the bridge, and
mused. Poetical feeling had fetched him out, thus early in the
morning, to hear the choir salute the sun, and to be moved with
sympathy. The moon is the proper deity of all true lovers, and has
them under good command when she pleases. But for half the weeks of a
month, she declines to sit in the court of lunacy; at least, as
regards this earth, having her own men and women to attend to. This
young man knew that she could not be found, with a view to meditation,
now; and his mind relapsed to the sun--a coarse power, poetical only
when he sets and rises.
With strength and command of the work of men, and leaving their dreams
to his sister, the sun leaped up, with a shake of his brow and a
scattering of the dew-clouds. The gates of the east swung right and
left; so that tall trees on a hill seemed less than reeds in the rush
of glory; and lines (like the spread of a crystal fan) trembled along
the lowland. Inlets now, and lanes of vision (scarcely opened
yesterday, and closed perhaps to-morrow) guided shafts of light along
the level widening ways they love. Tree and tower, hill and wall, and
water and broad meadow, stood, or lay, or leaned (according to the
stamp set on them), one and all receiving, sharing, and rejoicing in
the day.
Between the battlements, and above them, burst and rose the choral
hymn; and as the laws of sound compelled it to go upward mainly, the
part that came down was pleasing. Christopher, seeing but little of
the boys, and not hearing very much, was almost enabled to regard the
whole as a vocal effort of the angels: and thus in solemn thought he
wandered as far as the high-tolled turnpike gate.
"I will hie me to Cowley," said he to himself, instead of turning back
again; "there will I probe the hidden import of impending destiny.
This long and dark suspense is more than can be brooked by human
power. I know a jolly gipsy-woman; and if I went home I should have to
wait three hours for my breakfast."
With these words he felt in the pockets of his coat, to be sure that
oracular cash was there, and found a silk purse with more money than
usual, stored for the purchase of a dog called "Pablo," a hero among
badgers.
"What is Pablo to me, or I to Pablo?" he muttered with a smothered
sigh. "She told me she thought it a cruel and cowardly thing to kill
fifty rats in five minutes. Never more--alas, never more!" With a
resolute step, but a clouded brow, he buttoned his coat, and strode
onward.
Now, if he had been in a fit state of mind for looking about him, he
might have found a thousand things worth looking at. But none of them,
in his present hurry, won from him either glimpse or thought. He
trudged along the broad London road at a good brisk rate, while the
sun glanced over the highlands, and the dewy ridges, away on the left
towards Shotover. The noble city behind him, stretched its rising
sweep of tower, and spire, and dome, and serried battlement, stately
among ancient trees, and rich with more than mere external glory to an
Englishman. And away to the right hand sloped broad meadows, green
with spring, and fluttered with the pearly hyaline of dew, lifting
pillars of dark willow in the distance, where the Isis ran.
But what are these things to a lover, unless they hit the moment's
mood? The fair, unfenced, free-landscaped road for him might just as
well have been wattled, like a skittle-alley, and roofed with
Croggon's patent felt. At certain--or rather uncertain--moments, he
might have rejoiced in the wide glad heart of nature spread to welcome
him; and must have felt, as lovers feel, the ravishment of beauty. It
happened, however, that his eyes were open to nothing above, or
around, or before him, unless it should present itself in the image of
a gipsy's tent.
He turned to the left, before the road entered the new enclosures
towards Iffley, and trod his own track towards Cowley Marsh. The crisp
dew, brushed by his hasty feet, ran into large globes behind him; and
jerks of dust, brought up by pressure, fell and curdled on them. In
the haze of the morning, he looked much larger than he had any right
to seem, and the shadow of his arms and hat stretched into hollow
places. There was no other moving figure to be seen, except from time
to time, of a creature, the colonist of commons, whose mental frame
was not so unlike his own just now, as bodily form and style of
walking might in misty grandeur seem. Though Kit was not such a stupid
fellow, when free from his present bewitchment.
Scant of patience he came to a place where the elbow of a hedge jutted
forth upon the common. A mighty hedge of beetling brows, and
over-hanging shagginess, and shelfy curves, and brambly depths, and
true Devonian amplitude. High farming would have swept it down, and
out of its long course ploughed an acre. Young Sharp had not traced
its windings far, before he came upon a tidy-looking tent, pitched,
with the judgment of experience, in a snug and sheltered spot. The
rest of the camp might be seen in the distance, glistening in the
sunrise. This tent seemed to have crept away, for the sake of peace
and privacy.
Christopher quickened his steps, expecting to be met by a host of
children, rushing forth with outstretched hands, and shaggy hair, and
wild black eyes. But there was not so much as a child to be seen, nor
the curling smoke of a hedge-trough fire, nor even the scattered ash
betokening cookery of the night before. The canvas of the tent was
down; no head peeped forth, no naked leg or grimy foot protruded, to
show that the inner world was sleeping; even the dog, so rarely
absent, seemed to be really absent now.
The young man knew that the tent was not very likely to be unoccupied;
but naturally he did not like to peep into it uninvited; and he turned
away to visit the chief community of rovers, when the sound of a low
soft moan recalled him. Still for a moment he hesitated, until he
heard the like sound again, low, and clear, and musical from the
deepest chords of sorrow. Kit felt sure that it must be a woman, in
storms of trouble helpless; and full as he was of his own affairs he
was impelled to interfere. So he lifted back the canvas drawn across
the opening, and looked in.
There lay a woman on the sandy ground, with her back turned towards
the light, her neck and shoulders a little raised by the short support
of one elbow, and her head, and all that therein was, fixed in a
rigour of gazing. Although her face was not to be seen, and the
hopeless moan of her wail had ceased, Kit Sharp knew that he was in
the presence of a grand and long-abiding woe.
He drew back, and he tried to make out what it was, and he sighed for
concert--even as a young dog whimpers to a mother who has lost her
pups--and, little as he knew of women, from his own mother, or whether
or no, he judged that this woman had lost a child. That it was her
only one, was more than he could tell or guess. The woman, disturbed
by the change of light, turned round and steadily gazed at him, or
rather at the opening which he filled; for her eyes had no perception
of him. Kit was so scared that he jerked his head back, and nearly
knocked his hat off. He never had seen such a thing before; and, if he
had his choice he never would see such a thing again. The great dark,
hollow eyes had lost similitude of human eyes: hope and fear and
thought were gone; nothing remained but desolation and bare, reckless
misery.
Christopher's gaze fell under hers. It would be a sheer impertinence
to lay his small troubles before such woe.
"What is it? Oh! what is it?" asked the woman, at last having some
idea that somebody was near her.
"I am very sorry; I assure you, ma'am, that I never felt more sorry in
all my life," said Kit, who was a very kind-hearted fellow, and had
now espied a small boy lying dead. "I give you my word of honour,
ma'am, that if I could have guessed it, I would never have looked in."
Without any answer, the gipsy-woman turned again to her dead child,
and took two little hands in hers, and rubbed them, and sat up,
imagining that she felt some sign of life. She drew the little body to
her breast, and laid the face to hers, and breathed into pale open
lips (scarcely fallen into death), and lifted little eyelids with her
tongue, and would not be convinced that no light came from under them;
and then she rubbed again at every place where any warmth or polish of
the skin yet lingered. She fancied that she felt the little fellow
coming back to her, and she kept the whole of her own body moving to
encourage him.
There was nothing to encourage. He had breathed his latest breath. His
mother might go on with kisses, friction, and caresses, with every
power she possessed of muscle, and lungs, and brain, and heart. There
he lay, as dead as a stone--one stone more on the earth; and the whole
earth could not bring him back again.
Cinnaminta bowed her head. She laid the little bit of all she ever
loved upon her lap, and fetched the small arms so that she could hold
them both together, and spread the careless face upon the breast where
once it had felt its way; and then she looked up in search of Kit, or
any one to say something to.
"It is a just thing. I have earned it. I have robbed an old man of his
only child; and I am robbed of mine."
These words she spoke not in her own language, but in plain good
English; and then she lay down in her quiet scoop of sand, and folded
her little boy in with her. Christopher saw that there was nothing to
be done. He cared to go no further in search of fortune-tellers; and,
being too young to dare to offer worthless consolation, he wisely
resolved to go home and have fried bacon; wherein he succeeded.