THE FAMILIAR SPIRIT.
Now there was a skeleton in the cupboard of General Napoleon Smith. No
distinguished family can be respectable without at least one such. But
that of the new field-marshal was particularly dark and disgraceful.
Very obediently Janet Sheepshanks vanished from the sick-room, and
presently returned with an oblong parcel, which she handed to the hero
of battles.
"Thank you," he said; "are you sure that the children are out?"
"They are sailing paper boats on the mill-dam," said Janet, going to
the window to look.
Hugh John sighed a sigh. He wished he could sail boats on the
mill-dam.
"I hope every boat will go down the mill lade, and get mashed in the
wheel," he said pleasantly.
"For shame, Master Hugh!" replied Janet Sheepshanks, shaking her head
at him, but conscious that he was exactly expressing her own mind, if
she had been lying sick a-bed and had been compelled to listen to some
other housekeeper jingling keys that once were hers, ransacking her
sacredest repositories, and keeping in order the menials of the house.
Hugh John proceeded cautiously to unwrap his family skeleton.
Presently from the folds of tissue paper a very aged and battered
"Sambo" emerged. Now a "Sambo" is a black woolly-haired negro doll of
the fashion of many years ago. This specimen was dressed in simple and
airy fashion in a single red shell jacket. As to the rest, he was bare
and black from head to foot. Janet called him "that horrid object";
but, nevertheless, he was precious in the eyes of Hugh John, and
therefore in hers.
Though twelve years of age, he still liked to carry on dark and covert
intercourse with his ancient "Sambo." In public, indeed, he preached,
in season and out of season, against the folly and wickedness of
dolls. No one but a lassie or a "lassie-boy" would do such a thing. He
laughed at Priscilla for cleaning up her doll's kitchen once a week,
and for organising afternoon tea-parties for her quiet harem. But
secretly he would have liked very well to see Sambo sit at that
bounteous board.
Nevertheless, he instructed Toady Lion every day with doctrine and
reproof that it was "only for girls" to have dolls. And knowing well
that none of his common repositories were so remote and sacred as
long to escape Priscilla's unsleeping eye, or the more stormy though
fitful curiosity of Sir Toady Lion, Hugh John had been compelled to
take his ancient nurse and ever faithful friend Janet into his
confidence. So Sambo dwelt in the housekeeper's pantry and had two
distinct odours. One side of him smelt of paraffin, and the other of
soft soap, which, to a skilled detective, might have revealed the
secret of his dark abode.
But let us not do our hero an injustice.
It was not exactly as a doll that General Smith considered Sambo. By
no means so, indeed. Sometimes he was a distinguished general who came
to take orders from his chief, sometimes an awkward private who needed
to be drilled, and then knocked spinning across the floor for
inattention to orders. For, be it remembered, it was the custom in the
army of Field-Marshal-General Smith for the Commander-in-Chief to
drill the recruits with his own voice, and in the by no means
improbable event of their proving stupid, to knock them endwise with
his own august hand.
But it was as Familiar Spirit, and in the pursuit of occult
divination, that General Napoleon most frequently resorted to Sambo.
He had read all he could find in legend and history concerning that
gruesomely attractive goblin, clothed all in red, which the wicked
Lord Soulis kept in an oaken chest in a castle not so far from his own
father's house of Windy Standard.
And Hugh John saw no reason why Sambo should not be the very one.
Spirits do not die. It is a known fact that they are fond of their
former haunts. What, then, could be clearer? Sambo was evidently Lord
Soulis' Red Imp risen from the dead. Was Sambo not black? The devil
was black. Did Sambo not wear a red coat? Was not the demon of the
oaken chest attired in flaming scarlet, when all cautiously he lifted
the lid at midnight and looked wickedly out upon his master?
Yet the General was conscious that Sambo Soulis was a distinct
disappointment in the part of familiar spirit. He would sit silent,
with his head hanging idiotically on one side, when he was asked to
reveal the deepest secrets of the future, instead of toeing the line
and doing it. Nor was it recorded in the chronicles of Soulis that the
original demon of the chest had had his nose "bashed flat" by his
master, as Hugh John vigorously expressed the damaged appearance of
his own familiar.
Worse than all, Hugh John had tried to keep Sambo in his rabbit-box.
But not only did he utterly fail to put his "fearful head, crowned
with a red night-cap" over the edge of the hutch at the proper
time--as, had he been of respectable parentage, he would not have
failed to do, but, in addition, he developed in his close quarters an
animal odour so pungent and unprofitable that Janet Sheepshanks
refused to admit him into the store-cupboard till he had been
thoroughly fumigated and disinfected. So for a whole week Sambo Soulis
swung ignominiously by the neck from the clothes line, and Hugh John
went about in fear of the questioning of the children or of the
confiscation by his father of his well-beloved but somewhat
unsatisfactory familiar spirit.
It was in order to consult him on a critical point of doctrine and
practice that Hugh John had now sent for Sambo Soulis.
He propped him up before him against a pillow, on which he sat bent
forward at an acute angle from the hips, as if ready to pounce upon
his master and rend him to pieces so soon as the catechism should be
over.
"Look here," said General-Field-Marshal Smith to the oracle,
"supposing the governor tells me to split on Nipper Donnan, the
butcher boy, will it be dasht-mean if I do?"
Sambo Soulis, being disturbed by the delicacy of the question or
perhaps by the wriggling of Hugh John upon his pillow, only lurched
drivellingly forward.
"Sit up and answer," cried his master, "or else I'll hike you out of
that pretty quick, for a silly old owl!"
And with his least bandaged hand he gave Sambo a sound cuff on the
side of his venerable battered head, before propping him up at a new
angle with his chin on his knees.
"Now speak up, Soulis," said General Smith; "I ask you would it be
dasht-mean?"
The oracle was understood to joggle his chin and goggle his eyes. He
certainly did the latter.
"I thought so," said Soulis' master, as is usual in such cases,
interpreting the reply oracular according to his liking. "But look
here, how are we to get back Donald unless we split? Would it not be
all right to split just to get Donald back?"
Sambo Soulis waggled his head again. This time his master looked a
little more serious.
"I suppose you are right," he said pensively, "but if it would be
dasht-mean to split, we must just try to get him back ourselves--that
is, if the beasts have not cut his throat, as they said they would."