LANCELOT AMBER
Mr. Davies was a wisp of a man, with a taste for snuff and for
snuff-coloured garments, and for books in snuffy bindings. His book-shop
in Cliff Street was a dingy place enough, with a smell of leather and
paste about it, and if you stirred a book you brought enough snuffy dust
into the air to make you sneeze for ten minutes. But his own room, which
was above the shop, was blithe enough, and it was there I had my
lessons. Mr. Davies kept a piping bullfinch in it, and a linnet, and
there was a little window garden on the sill, where tulips bloomed in
their season, and under a glass case there was a plaster model of the
Arch of Titus in Rome, of which he was exceedingly proud, and which I
thought very pretty, and at one time longed to have.
Mr. Davies was a smooth and decent scholar, and when he was dreamy he
would shove his scratch back from his forehead and shut his eyes and
recite Homer or Virgil by the page together, while Lancelot and I
listened open-mouthed, and I wondered what pleasure he got out of all
that rigmarole. The heroes of Homer and of Virgil seemed to me very
bloodless, boneless creatures after my kings and wizards out of Mr.
Galland's book; even Ulysses, who was a thrifty, shifty fellow enough,
with some touch of the sea-captain in him, was not a patch upon my hero,
Sindbad of Bagdad, from whose tale I believe the Greek fellow stole half
his fancies, and those the better half.
I remember still clearly the very first afternoon when I presented
myself at Mr. Davies's shop in Cliff Street. He told me I was very
welcome, assured me that on that day I crossed the threshold of the
Muses' Temple, shook me warmly by the hand, and then, all of a sudden,
as if recollecting himself, told me to greet my class-fellow. A lad of
about mine own age came from the window and held out his hand, and the
lad was Lancelot Amber.
I have seen many gracious sights in my time, but only one so gracious as
that sudden flash of Lancelot Amber upon my boyish vision. As he came
forward with the afternoon sunlight strong upon him he looked like some
militant saint. There is a St. George in our church, and there is a St.
Michael too, both splendid in coat-armour and terrible with swords, but
neither of them has ever seemed to me half so heroic or half so saintly
as the boy Lancelot did that morning in Mr. Davies's parlour. He was
tall of his years, with fair hair curling about his head as I have since
seen hair curling in some of the old Pagan statue-work.
The boy came forward and shook hands with me in friendly fashion, with a
friend's grip of the fingers. I gave him the squeeze again, and we both
stood for a moment looking at each other silently, as dogs over-eye one
another on a first meeting. How little it entered into either of our
brains that moment of the times that we should stand together, and the
places and the trials and perils that we should endure together. We were
only two lads standing there in a snug first-floor room, where yellow
parrots sprawled on the painted wall, and a mild-mannered gentleman with
a russet wig motioned us to sit down.
Our life ran in current for long enough. We sat together at Mr. Davies's
feet--I am speaking metaphorically, for in reality we sat opposite to
him--and we thumbed our Cordery and our Nepos together, and made such
progress as our natures and our application permitted. Mine, to be
honest, was little enough, for I hated my grammar cordially.
Lancelot was not like me in this, any more than in bodily favour; he was
keen of wit and quick of memory; he was quick in learning, yet as modest
as he was clever, for he never sought in any way to lord it over me
because I, poor dunce, was not of such nimble parts as himself.
It was the hardest task in the world for me to keep my eyes and my fancy
upon the pages of my book. My eyes were always straying from the print,
first to the painted parrots on the walls, and then, by natural
succession, to the window. Once there, my fancy would put on free wings,
and my thoughts would stray joyously off among the salt marshes, where
the pools shone in the sunlight and a sweet air blew. Or I would stand
upon the downs and look along the curve of cliffs, and note the ships
sailing round the promontory, and the flashes of the sea beyond, and
feel in fancy the breeze blowing through my hair, and puffing away all
the nonsense I had been poring over in the room.
At such times I would quite forget myself, and sit staring into vacancy,
till Mr. Davies, lifting his nose from his volume, would note my absence
and call on me by name, and thump his desk, and startle me with some
question on the matter we were supposed to have in hand. A mighty
matter, truly, the name of some emperor or the date of some
campaign--matter infinitely less real than the name of the ship that
was leaving the harbour or the sunlight on the incoming sail. And I
would answer at random and amiss, and earn reproof. Yet there were
things which I knew well enough, too, and could have given him shrewd
and precise answers concerning them.
Lancelot Amber was never much my companion away from Mr. Davies's room.
His father, whose name he perpetuated, had been a simple, gentle
gentleman and scholar who had married, as one of his kin counted it,
beneath him, because he had married the woman he loved. The woman he
loved was indeed of humble birth, but she made him a fair wife and a
good, and she bore him two children, boy Lancelot and girl Marjorie, and
died for the life of the lass. Her death, so I learned, was the doom of
Lancelot Amber the elder, and there were two babes left in the wood of
the world, with, like the children in the ballad, such claims upon two
uncles as blood might urge and pity supplement. These two uncles, as
Lancelot imagined them to me, were men of vastly different stuff and
spirit, as you may sometimes find such flaming contrasts in families.
The elder, Marmaduke Amber, used the sea, and was, it seems, as fine a
florid piece of sea flesh as an island's king could wish to welcome. His
brother, Nathaniel, had been a city merchant, piling up moneys in the
Levant trade, and now lived in a fine house out in the swelling country
beyond Sendennis, with a fine sea-view. Him I had seen once or twice; a
lean monkey creature with a wrinkled walnut of a face and bright, unkind
eyes. He was all for leaving the boy of three and the girl of two to the
small mercies of some charity school, but the mariner brother gathered
the two forlornlings to his great heart, and with him they had lived and
thriven ever since. Now it seems Captain Marmaduke was on a voyage to
the Bermudas and taking the maid with him, while the boy, to better his
schooling and strengthen his body with sea air, was sent to Sendennis to
stay with his other uncle, Nathaniel Amber, now, to all appearance,
reconciled to the existence of his young relative. This uncle, as I
gathered, did not at first approve overmuch of Lancelot taking lessons
in common with a single mercer's son, but Mr. Davies, I believe, spoke
so well of me that the arrangement was allowed to hold.
But after lesson hours were done Lancelot had always to go back to his
uncle's, and though I walked part of the way, or all the way, with him
most days of the week, I was never bidden inside those doors. Lancelot
told me that he had more than once besought leave to bring me in, but
that the old gentleman was obdurate. So, save in those hours of study in
the parrot-papered room, I saw but little of Lancelot.
I never expected to be asked inside the doors of the great house where
Lancelot's days were passed, and I did not feel any injustice in the
matter. I was only a mercer's son, while Lancelot derived of gentlefolk,
and it never entered into my mind to question the existing order of
things, or to wish to force my way into places where I was not wanted.
Excellent gentlemen on the other side of the Atlantic have made very
different opinions popular from the opinions that prevailed with me in
my youth. Indeed, I myself have now been long used to associate with the
great folk of the earth, and have found them in all essential matters
very much like other men. I have had the honour of including more than
one king amongst my acquaintances, and have liked some and not liked
others, just as if they were plain Tom or Harry. But in the days of my
youth I should have as soon expected to be welcomed at St. James's as to
be welcomed in the great house where Lancelot's uncle lived.