THE MAN.
While Mr. Lowther went to eat his dinner with the hospitable magistrate,
Francis Tredethlyn did his work briskly; folding his master’s coats and
waistcoats, brushing boots, clearing away little heaps of cigar-ash, and
picking up torn scraps of paper and open books cast recklessly upon the
floor by a reader who was too badly disposed towards a world that had
ill-treated him to find the opinions of any author entirely to his
taste.
The soldier whistled that lively melody in praise of Erin’s daughters
all the time, and achieved his task with the rapid neatness of a male
Cinderella specially endowed by some fairy godmother; and when Mr.
Lowther’s humble sitting-room and bed-room were restored to perfect
order, his valet retired to his own little apartment, which was a
shed-like chamber at the back of the cottage, and a kind of compromise
between a dressing-room and a wash-house. Here Mr. Tredethlyn made his
toilet, which consisted of a rapid plunge of his head and throat into a
tub of cold water, some brisk operations with a cake of yellow soap,
accompanied by sputtering and whizzing noises of an alarming character,
a little fierce rubbing down with a coarse towel, and the smart
application of a stiff and implacable-looking hair-brush. When this was
done, Francis Tredethlyn put on his jacket, and went out into the garden
to smoke his pipe and converse with the convicts.
Now that the gifts of nature had been enhanced by the adornments of art,
the ensign’s valet was by no means a bad-looking fellow. He was tall,
broad-shouldered, and muscular in build as a modern Hercules. His
closely cut black hair revealed the outline of a well-shaped head well
placed upon his shoulders. Under his dark, almost gipsy-brown, skin was
a rich crimson glow, which deepened or faded under the influence of any
powerful emotion. His nose was straight, but rather short, and of no
particular type; but a sculptor would have told you there was a special
beauty about the curve of his full open nostrils, and Honoré de Balzac
would have informed you that a man with that kind of nostril is
generally good for something in this world. His forehead was low,
stronger in the perceptive than in the reflective organs; his eyes were
of a clear grey, darkened by the shadow of thick black lashes. He was a
handsome soldier; he would have made a handsome gladiator in the old
Roman days; a noble-looking brigand, in the days when brigands were
chivalrous; a dashing highwayman, in the age when Claude Duval rode
gaily to his death on Tyburn tree; a glorious sporting farmer down in
Leicestershire to-day; but no power upon this earth could have
transformed him into an elegant West-end lounger, an accomplished
dawdler in fashionable drawing-rooms, or a “gentleman” in the modern
acceptation of the word.
He went out into the garden now, to smoke his pipe of bird’s-eye and
talk to the convict gardeners, who brightened at his approach, and
deliberately planted themselves in a convenient position upon their
spades, in order to converse with him. I am sorry to say that he was as
much at home in their society as if they had been the most estimable of
mankind, and that he encouraged them to talk freely of their burglarious
experiences in the Old World. Was there not a smack of brigandage and
adventure in these experiences, and even a dash of chivalry, according
to the two men’s own showing? for they told stories of encounters in
which they shone out quite with heroic lustre from their rooted
objection to cut an elderly lady’s throat, and their gallant bearing
towards a high-minded young damsel who had led them from room to room in
her father’s mansion, and had pointed with her own fair hands to the
whereabouts of the family valuables. Francis Tredethlyn sat upon the
trunk of a fallen acacia, watching the lazy clouds in the still evening
sky, and smoking his pipe, long after the two convicts had struck work
and retired to their own quarters. He sat smoking and musing; thinking,
as I suppose a man so banished must think, of that other far-away world
which he had left behind him; and which it seemed to him sometimes, in
such still moments as these, that he should never see again.
“So far away, so very far away!” he mused. “I wonder how the little
village street upon the hill is looking now? It’s winter time now there,
or getting towards winter time anyhow. I can fancy it of an evening,
with the lights twinkling in the low shop windows, the big castle-gate
frowning down upon the poor little street; the churchyard, where Susy
and I have played, all dark and lonesome in the winter night; and Susy
herself--pretty little dark-eyed Susy--sitting by the hearth in the big
kitchen at Tredethlyn, stitch, stitch, stitch, while the old man nods
and snores over his newspaper. Poor little Susy, what a hard life it is
for her; and the old man as rich as that king of somewhere--Crœsus,
don’t they call him?--if his neighbours are to be believed. Poor little
Susy! is she fond of me, I wonder? and will she be pleased to marry me,
if ever I’m able to go back, and say, ‘Susy, the best I could do, after
running away and ’listing, was to save up money to buy my discharge, so
that I might come home again to claim the old promise--for better for
worse, for richer or poorer’? We couldn’t well be poorer than we should
be just at first; for, of course, the old chap would turn rusty, and cut
Susy off with a shilling; but who cares for that?” thought Francis
Tredethlyn, snapping his fingers in the independence of his spirit. “If
Susy loves me, and I love Susy, and we’re both young and strong and
industrious, what’s to prevent us getting on in the world, without
anybody’s money to help us?”
The soldier smoked another pipe in a dreamy reverie, in which his
thoughts still hovered about one familiar spot in his native country--a
long, low, stone-built farmhouse, standing alone upon a broad plateau of
bare moorland, very dreary of aspect in winter,--a dismal,
ghastly-looking homestead, in which the ornamental had been sacrificed
to the useful,--a gaunt, naked-looking dwelling-place, upon whose
decoration or improvement a ten-pound note had not been expended within
the memory of man,--a house which had gone down through three
generations of close-fisted, cross-grained owners, and which had grown
uglier and drearier under the rule of each generation.
This was the habitation which stood as clearly out against the vague
background of Francis Tredethlyn’s dreams as if it had been palpably
present upon the rising ground on the other side of the bay. This was
the house; and in the low narrow doorway, fronting the desolate expanse
of stunted brown grass, the soldier saw the slender figure of a girl--a
girl with dark, gentle eyes, and a quaker-like dress of coarse brown
stuff,--a girl who stood with her hand shading her eyes, looking at the
distant figure of an old man plodding homeward in the winter twilight.
He had so often seen her thus, that it was only natural the picture of
her should present itself to his mind to-night, as his thoughts wandered
homeward. He was so far away from this girl and the familiar place in
which she lived, that it seemed almost impossible to him that he could
ever see her again, or tread the well-known pathways along which he had
so often walked by her side. He thought of her almost as the dead may
think of the living--if they do think of us.
“Poor little Susy! I wonder whether she loved me--whether she loves me
still? I wasn’t like some of your lovers,--I wasn’t one of your
desperate fellows. I had no hot fits, or cold fits, or jealous fits, or
such like, and there are some folks that might say I was never in love
at all. But I was very fond of Susy--poor little tender-hearted Susy! I
used to think of her, somehow, as if she had been my little sister. I
think of her like that now.”
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