with its canopy of changing sky, both teeming with life to his quickened
vision, became not only the outcast's second Bible, but all the almanac
he needed or possessed. With no newspaper to distract his mind, and
perhaps not a letter or a human voice for months, it was on bird and
leaf that he came to rely for the time of year; while the field of his
research was greatly extended by nocturnal exercise upon the
pine-serrated plateau beyond the church. Now the tips of the chestnut
twigs might bulge and bud, but spring was not spring until the plover
paraded his new black breast, or a peewit rose screaming at the midnight
intruder. All summer the small bird was king; hedgerows twittered;
crumbs were scorned; man was jilted for slug and worm. But the end came
in sight with the homebred mallard, flying feebly in his summer
feathers; and the flight of the wild duck was the end of all. The third
year found Carlton watching for the mallard as his bird of ill-omen, and
redoubling his efforts while his ear prepared for the shrill music of
the full-grown quills in final flight. Harsh experience had taught him
how little he could do, with any certainty or any continuity, in the
season when the little birds and he were best friends.
It was late in May, and the church would soon be hidden for another
summer; meanwhile Carlton was still at work upon his transept window, in
a corner which a great stack of undressed sandstone made invisible from
the lane, as it already was from the road. The folk from other villages
were beginning to stop and watch him longer than he liked, and he did
not care to be a cynosure at all. He only asked to build his church in
peace, and with it an example which should do at least a little to
counteract the one he had already set; and he meant both for his own
people, not for the outlying world. He really feared a reaction in his
favour on the part of the sentimental outsider. It would do him fresh
injury in the eyes of many of whom he honestly longed to win back in the
end. Moreover, his head was very level in these days. He saw nothing
heroic in his own conduct. With all his wish to undo a little of the
harm that he had done to others, there was a very human eagerness to
redeem his own past, so far as that was possible upon earth. Carlton was
never unaware of this incentive. He entertained no illusions about
himself, nor did he wish to create any in others. For example, there was
his work. It was never easy, sometimes hopeless, always fascinating. But
the man himself desired no credit for devotion to labour which he loved
for its own sake, and in which he was still capable (but no longer
ashamed) of forgetting the past.
The transept window engrossed him to the last degree; mullion or no
mullion, it involved the largest arch that Carlton had yet attempted;
and already it alone had occupied many weeks. The patterns had been the
easy recreation of his winter evenings, but it had taken him all the
spring to reproduce a score of these in solid stone; for though the
walls were coursed rubble, the windows must have ashlar facings, to be
as they had been before; and ashlar is to coursed rubble what broadcloth
is to Harris tweed. What with indefatigable labour, however, and the
general proficiency which he had now attained in his self-taught craft,
Carlton had his jambs up by the end of May, and his arched framework
fixed between them, all ready to support the arch itself. He was now
engaged upon the nine wedge-shaped stones to form the latter, working
each to the fine ashlar finish, as also to the exact dimensions of its
fellow in tin, wood, or cardboard, and laying them in couples on
alternate sides of the wooden centre, so as to weight it evenly as the
book ordained.
It was the middle of the afternoon, and the quiet corner was already in
shadow; beyond, the wet grass glistened, for the day was a duel between
sun and rain. Carlton was taking the busier advantage of a brilliant
interval, and roughing out a new voussoir with the bold precision of the
expert mason. Ting, ting, ting, fell the hammer on the cold-chisel; the
soft, wet sandstone peeled off in curling flakes; the quick strokes rang
like a bell through the cool and cleanly air. It had been honest rain,
and it was honest sunshine. The green world broke freshly upon all the
senses. Every colour was more vivid than its wont, from the reddish
yellow of the rain-soaked stone to lilac and laburnum in the rectory
garden; from the creamy castles of the full-blown chestnuts to the
emerald sprays which were all that the slower elms had as yet to show
against an uncertain sky. Every inch of earth, every blade and petal,
was contributing its quota to the sweet summer smell. The birds sang;
the bees hummed; the hammer rang. And Carlton was so intent upon his
task, so bent upon making up for time lost that day, that it might have
been mid-winter for the little he looked and listened; yet he heard and
saw none the less; and his face was filled with quiet peace.
In appearance he was many years older; at a distance he might have
passed for the father of the man who had drawn a larger congregation
than the old church would hold. His hair was grey; his beard was
grizzled. Incessant manual toil had aged him even more by giving his
body a constant stoop. And the hands were the hands of a labouring man.
But the brown eye, once inflammable, was now all gentleness and
humility; the whole face was sweetened and exalted by solitude and
suffering; in expression more patient, less austere; though the
untrained beard and moustache, hiding mouth and jaw, had something to do
with this.
To his gentleness, however, there was striking testimony even now, as
his hammer rained ringing blows upon the cold-chisel; for within easy
reach of it perched the tame robin on another stone, quizzically
watching the performance. Then, in the same moment, three things
happened. The robin flew away, Carlton turned his head, and the ringing
blows broke off.
XXI
AT THE FLINT HOUSE
"The child must have a name, Jasper."
"All right, you give it one. That's nothun to me."
"But he must be christened properly."
"Why must he?"
"Oh, Jasper, if you don't fare to believe, his mother did, poor thing!"
"And a lot of good that did her . . . but do you have your way. Make a
canting little Christian of him if you like. Do you think I care what
you do with the brat? I know what I'd do with it, if that wasn't for the
law!"
So, in the early days, while Robert Carlton was still learning to live
alone, his son was trundled across the heath to Linkworth, and there
christened George after no one in particular. Followed the remaining
period of extreme infancy, during which Jasper Musk seldom set eyes upon
the child, and was more or less oblivious to its concrete existence.
Then one afternoon, the second summer, as Jasper sat smoking at a back
window, in the big chair to which his sciatica would bind him from
morning till night, there was a shuffling and a grunting in the passage,
and in came the child on all fours, with the lamp of adventure alight
and shining in grimy cheeks and great grey eyes.
Musk took the pipe from his mouth, and met the small intruder with an
expressionless stare. Had his wife been by, no doubt he would have
bidden her take the little devil out of his sight; he had done so
before, using a harsher and more literal epithet for choice. But this
afternoon he was alone, and very weary of his solitary confinement. So
for the moment Musk sat stolidly intent; and the child, after a halt
induced by the creaking of the open door and the austere apparition
within, advanced once more, with the infantile equivalent for a cheer.
"Well, you've got a cheek!" said Jasper, grimly.
The boy had reached his legs, and was pulling himself up by the
particularly lame one, chattering the while in the foreign tongue of one
year old. Musk winced and muttered, then suddenly encircled the small
body with his mighty hands, and set the child high and dry upon his
knee.
"And now what?" said he. "And now what?"
For answer a chubby hand flew straight at his whiskers, grabbed them
unerringly, and pulled without mercy, but with yells of delight that
brought Musk's wife in hot haste from a far corner of the rambling
house. In the doorway she threw up her arms.
"Oh, Georgie!" she cried aghast. "You naughty boy--you naughty boy!"
Jasper had already created a diversion in favour of his whiskers, and
was in the act of blowing open an enormous watch when his wife
appeared.
"Now you take and mind your own business," snapped he, "and we'll mind
ours . . . Blow--can't you blow? Like this, then--p-f-f-f--and there you
are! Now you try; blow, and that'll open again."
Georgie walked before the summer was over; and this was the year in
which Jasper scarcely set foot to the ground, so he made use of the
child from the first. Now it was his pipe, now his spectacles, now the
newspaper; these were the first familiar objects which the child came to
know by name before he could speak; and he never saw any one of the
three without taking it as straight as he could toddle to the great grey
man in the chair.
Mrs. Musk suddenly found half her work with Georgie taken entirely off
her hands. She was even quicker over another discovery. Jasper would not
own that he had taken to the child; in her presence, on the contrary, he
ignored its very existence as utterly as heretofore. Yet now every day
she could have found them together at most hours; only she knew better.
Cheerless environment for this new life--a gloomy old house--a grim old
couple. Nevertheless, and in very spite of all the circumstances of his
birth, Georgie from the first evinced that temperament which is a sun
unto itself. An expansive gaiety was his normal mood, and for years the
only variant was a terrible and overwhelming indignation with all his
world. He was, in fact, an entirely healthy little savage, with all the
wild spirits and facile affections of his age, and no exemption from its
traditional ills. Once he had croup so severely that two doctors came
in the middle of the night, and Georgie never forgot their grave faces
and his grandfather's grim one at the foot of the bed. Indeed, the scene
formed his first permanent impression, though the sequel was more
memorable in itself. Georgie seemed to go to sleep for days and days,
and to awake in another world, though the bed was the same, and the
medicine-bottles, and the singing kettle; for it was day-time, and the
room full of sun, and the doctors gone; but in the sunlight there stood
instead the loveliest lady whom Georgie had beheld in his three or four
years of earthly experience. Thereupon he lay with his firm little mouth
pursed up, his grey eyes greater than even their wont, and his mind at
work upon some surreptitious teaching of his grandmother. It was a very
simple question that he asked in the end, but it made the lady kiss him
and cry over him in a way he never could understand.
"Are you a angel?" Georgie had said.
Gwynneth happened to be somewhat morbidly aware of her own poverty in
angelic qualities, though it was not this that made her cry. She was
alone at the hall for the winter, which Sir Wilton and Lady Gleed were
spending upon a well-beaten track abroad, while Sidney was still at
Cambridge. Gwynneth also might have drifted from Cannes to Nice, and
from Nice to Mentone, for she had been taken from school on Lydia's
marriage, and assigned a permanent position at the side of Lady Gleed.
In this capacity the girl had not shone, though her peculiar character
had lost nothing by the duty and faithful practice of consistent
self-suppression. On the other hand, there was the demoralising sense of
personal superiority, which was thrust upon Gwynneth at every turn of
this companionship, causing her to take an unhealthy interest in her own
faults, in order to preserve any humility at all; for she was full of
mental and of bodily vigour, and her aunt was signally devoid of both.
Consequently when Lydia petitioned to go instead (having become a mother
to her great disgust, and demanding an immediate separation from her
infant), the proposal was adopted to the equal satisfaction of all
concerned. Gwynneth, for her part, was very sorry not to travel and see
the world; but she knew, from a tantalising experience, that hotel life
was all that one could count upon seeing with Lady Gleed; and from every
other point of view it was infinite relief to be alone. Literally alone
she was not, since the little German housekeeper never left the hall.
But Fraulein Hentig was a self-contained and entirely tactful companion,
with whom it was possible to enjoy the delights of solitude while
escaping the disadvantages. The two were very good friends.
Gwynneth was now in her twentieth year, a tall and graceful girl, albeit
with the slight stoop of the natural student that she was. At her school
she had won all available honours, but it was not a modern school, and
in those days such as Gwynneth had no definite knowledge of any wider
arena. So she left her school without great regret. She had learnt all
that they could teach her there. And she taught herself twice as much in
stolen hours spent in the hall library, which had been bought with the
place, and hitherto only used by Sidney on wet days. But now there was
no need to steal an hour; the girl's time was all her own, and she held
high revel among the books. Moreover, it was the dawn of the University
Extension system, and Gwynneth heard of a course of lectures upon
English literature, only eight miles from Long Stow, just in time to
attend. To do so she had to fight a weekly battle with the coachman, but
Fraulein Hentig took her side, and the opposition did not endure.
Gwynneth took voluminous notes and wrote elaborate essays, bringing to
the whole interest that energy, thoroughness and enthusiasm, to which,
though each was an essential characteristic, she was only now enabled to
give free play. Yet the young girl was no mere bookworm, though at this
stage of her career she seemed little else. It was a phase of
intellectual absorption, but all the while it needed but a touch of
human interest in her life to awake the deeper nature of the eternal
woman. Such awakening had come with the most alarming period of
Georgie's illness. Gwynneth was starting for her lecture, primed with
sharp pencils and her new essay, when she heard in the village that two
doctors had been at the Flint House in the night. She did not go to that
lecture at all, but for two days and nights was scarcely an hour absent
from the bedside of a little boy whom she had barely known by sight
before. And his first comprehensible words formed the question which
Gwynneth, worn out by watching, had answered in the fashion he could
never understand.
Well, she was destined to be the boy's good angel, though he never
mistook her for one again; and sometimes she looked the part. The dark
eyes, so ardent in the pursuit of knowledge, or of any other of her
heart's desires, could yet sparkle with childish glee, or soften with
the tenderness of the ideal Madonna. The self-willed mouth and nose were
only sweet as Georgie saw them; and none but he knew the warmth of the
pale brown cheek or the crisp electric touch of the dark brown hair.
Little knowing it before, and never dreaming of it now, Gwynneth had
long been hankering for all that the little child gave her out of the
fulness and purity of his tiny heart. She supposed that she was happy
because at last she was being of some trifling use to somebody; it made
her think more of herself. Looking deeper (as she thought), through the
deceptive lenses of her inner consciousness, Gwynneth took a still less
favourable view of her latest interest in life. It was that and not much
more to the imperfect introspection of her morbid mood.
Nevertheless, this was the happiest time that she had ever known.
Georgie and she became inseparable, even when the boy was well again;
and on him Gwynneth was really lavishing all the love and tenderness
which had been gathering in her heart since the hour when she had kissed
a dead forehead for the last time. The fact was that the girl had an
inborn capacity for passionate devotion, and was now once more enabled
to indulge this sweet instinct to the full. She still went to her weekly
lecture, read every book in the syllabus, and wrote her essay with as
much care for detail as her innate energy would permit. Nor was her work
the worse for the counter-attraction which now filled her young life to
the brim. Georgie spoke of Gwynneth as his "lady," with a sufficient
emphasis upon the possessive pronoun, and to her by a succession of pet
names of their joint invention.
Croup is an enemy that lives to fight another day, as Dr. Marigold said
when he paid his last visit; and that word was sufficient for the Musks.
Thenceforward Georgie had only to sneeze to be put to bed, where he
wasted many days before the winter was over. But Georgie was not to be
depressed, and as Gwynneth would come and play with him for hours it was
perhaps no wonder. They both had some imagination; one showed it by
extemporary flights of downright romance, and the other by following
these with immense eyes and not a syllable of his own from beginning to
end. Then and there they would dramatise the story, for it was usually
one of adventure, and Georgie had a clockwork paddle-steamer called the
_Dover_, which sailed the bed manned by cardboard sailors of Gwynneth's
making. In these seas the roughest weather was experienced in crossing
Georgie's legs, but the best fun was in the polar regions, where the
vessel lay wedged for months between two pillows, while the crew hunted
bear and walrus over Georgie's person, and dug winter quarters under the
clothes.
One day, when he really had a cold, and had fallen asleep upon the
icebergs, Gwynneth took upon herself to search the cupboard for some
picture-book which he might not have seen before; and in so doing she
came across the photograph of a comely young woman, not much older than
herself, which compelled her attention rather than her curiosity, for
she guessed at once who it was. Moreover, the face was striking and
interesting in itself. The eyes had a strange look, half reckless, half
defiant, but, even in a faded and inartistic photograph, of a subtle
fascination. There was some slight coarseness of eyelid and nostril; but
for all that it was a fine expression, full of courage and full of will.
The will was obvious in the mouth. It had the strength of Musk himself.
Yet there was something about the mouth--so firm--so full--that Gwynneth
did not like. She could not have said what it was, but she preferred
looking into the eyes. They fascinated her, and she did not lift her own
eyes from them till Mrs. Musk entered and caught her thus engaged.
"Oh, where did you find that? Give it to me--give it to me!" and the
poor soul held out hands that trembled with her voice. "That's Georgie's
poor mother," she sobbed, "and I didn't know there was another left. I
thought he'd taken and burnt them every one!"
And she slipped the photograph inside her bodice, and pressed her lean
hands upon it, as though it were the babe itself at her breast once
more. Next instant Gwynneth's arms were about the old woman's neck, and
her fresh lips had touched the wet and shrivelled cheek of Georgie's
grandmother.
"Ah! but you are good to us," said Mrs. Musk. "I never would have
believed a young lady could be so sweet and kind as you!"
Not that Gwynneth was in the habit of going among the people; that was a
practice which Lady Gleed would not permit in a young lady over whom she
exercised any sort of control. Consequently there was some talk in the
village at this time, and a little scene at the hall soon after Sir
Wilton and his wife arrived for the Easter recess. But Gwynneth argued
that in no sense could the Musks be accounted ordinary villagers; and
the squire himself took her side very firmly in the matter.
"I won't have you rate Musk among the yokels," said Sir Wilton
afterwards. "He is the one substantial man in the place, and a very good
friend of mine."
"Well, I don't consider it nice for Gwynneth to be always with that
child."
"She doesn't know the child's history; you have only to hear her talk
about him to see that."
"I don't think it nice, all the same," Lady Gleed repeated.
"Then take her back to town with you."
"No, she is out now, and I can't be bothered with her this season. She
is not like other girls. I've a good mind to send her abroad for a
year."
"You can do as you like about that. It might be a very good thing.
Meanwhile I'm not going to have Musk's feelings hurt; only yesterday,
when I went to see him, he was telling me all Gwynneth has done for them
during the winter. I'm not going to break with a man like that by
suddenly forbidding her to do any more."
So it was decided that Gwynneth should go for a year to a relation of
Fraulein Hentig's at Leipzig, for the sake of her music, which the girl
had neglected rather disgracefully since leaving school, but of which
she was none the less fond, given the proper stimulus. Gwynneth herself
acclaimed the plan, and indeed had a voice in it; there was only one
reason why she was not entirely glad to go; and her devotion to Georgie
was more constant than ever during the few weeks which were left to her.
Summer was beginning, and the boy was well and strong, with chubby
cheeks and sturdy bare legs. Often Gwynneth had him to play in the hall
garden--this on Sir Wilton's own suggestion--but more often she took him
for a walk. There were beautiful walks all round Long Stow. There was
the windy walk across the heather towards Linkworth; there were cool
walks by the tiny river that ran parallel with the village street,
bounding the hall meadow and both meadow and garden of the Flint House;
there was a fascinating expedition, with spade and pail, to the
sand-hills off the road to Lakenhall. Yet it was on none of these
excursions that Gwynneth lost Georgie, but while leaving some papers at
the saddler's workshop, in Long Stow itself.
Fuller would keep her to talk politics, or rather to listen to his own:
it was the year of the first Home Rule Bill, and even Mr. Gladstone had
never stirred the saddler's anger, hatred and contempt to such a pitch
as they reached in this connection. Gwynneth, on her side, had an
insufficient grasp of the measure, but an instinctive veneration for the
man; and she was young enough to grow heated in argument, even with the
saddler. When at length she turned away, more flushed than victorious,
there was no vestige of the child.
"Georgie! Georgie!"
Neither was there any answer. Gwynneth turned upon the politician.
"Didn't you see him, Mr. Fuller?"
"Gord love you, miss, I thought you come alone!"
And the saddler leant across his bench until his spectacles were flush
with the open window at which Gwynneth stood.
"Alone? Georgie Musk was with me; and I've lost him through arguing with
you."
She inquired at the next cottage. Yes, they had seen him pass "with you,
miss," but that was all. There were no cottages further on; the
saddler's was the last on that side and at that end of the village.
Opposite was the rectory gate, with the low flint wall running far to
the right, overhung at present by the great leaves and heavy blossoms of
the chestnuts. And all at once Gwynneth noticed that the chestnut leaves
were very dark, the sky overcast, and another shower even then
beginning.
"He will get wet--it may kill him!"
And the girl ran wildly on along the road; but it was a straight road,
and she could see further than Georgie could possibly have travelled. So
now there was only the lane running up by the church.
Gwynneth took it at top speed; an instant brought her abreast of the
east end, gaping wide and deep for the east window, yet built like a
rock on either side to the height of the eaves. Another step, and
Gwynneth was standing still.
Already her sub-consciousness had remarked the silence of hammer and
chisel, which had tinkled in her ears as she brought Georgie up the
village, ringing more distinctly at every step, and quite loud when
first they had stopped at the saddler's window. Then it must have ceased
altogether. But now Gwynneth heard another sound instead.
XXII
A LITTLE CHILD
Georgie stood beyond the mason's litter, his firm legs planted in the
wet grass, his holland pinafore less brown than his knees. A sailor hat,
with the brim turned down, threw the roguish face into shadow; but the
flush of successful flight was not extinguished; and the great eyes
fixed on Carlton were nowise abashed. Shyness had never been a feature
of Georgie's character.
"Hallo!" said he.
Carlton stood like his own walls.
So this was the child.