THE REAL MR. GRAY--NURSE BUNDLE REGARDS HIM WITH DISFAVOUR
My feelings may therefore be "better imagined than described" when, at
about ten o'clock the following morning, my father called me
downstairs, and said, with an odd expression on his face,
"Regie, Mr. Gray has come."
Not for one instant did I in my mind accuse my father of deceiving me.
My faith in him was as implicit as he well deserved that it should be.
Black might be white, two and two might make five, impossible things
might be possible, but my father could not be in the wrong. It was
evident that I must have misunderstood him last night. I looked very
crestfallen indeed.
My father, however, seemed particularly cheerful, even inclined to
laugh, I thought. He took my hand and we went to the front door, my
heart beating wildly, for I was a delicate unrobust lad yet, far too
easily upset and excited. More like a girl, in fact, if the comparison
be not an insult to such sturdy maids as Cousin Polly.
Outside we found a man-servant on a bay horse, holding a little white
pony, on which, I supposed, the little tutor had been riding. But he
himself was not to be seen. I tried hard to be manly and calm, and
being much struck by the appearance of the pony, who, when I came down
the steps, had turned towards me the gentlest and most intelligent of
faces, with a splendid long curly white forelock streaming down
between his kind dark eyes, I asked--
"Is that Mr. Gray's pony, father?"
"What do you think of it?" said my father.
"Oh, it's a little dear," was my emphatic answer, and as the pony
unmistakably turned his head to me, I met his friendly advances by
going up to him, and in another moment my arms were round his neck,
and he was rubbing his soft, strong nose against my shoulder, and we
were kissing and fondling each other in happy forgetfulness of
everything but our sudden friendship, whilst the man-servant
(apparently an Irishman) was firing off ejaculations like crackers on
the fifth of November.
"Sure, now, did ever anyone see the like--just to look at the
baste--sure he knows it's the young squire himself entirely. Och, but
the young gintleman's as well acquainted with horses as myself--sure
he'd make friends with a unicorn, if there was such an animal; and
it's the unicorn that would be proud to let him, too!"
"It has been used to boys, I think?" said my father.
"Ye may say that, yer honour. It likes boys better than man, woman, or
child, and it's not every baste ye can say that for."
"A good many beasts have reason to think very differently, I fear,"
said my father.
"And _that's_ as true a word as your honour ever spoke," assented the
groom.
Meanwhile a possible ground of consolation was beginning to suggest
itself to my mind.
"Will Mr. Gray keep his pony here?" I asked,
"The pony will live here," said my father.
"Oh, do you think," I asked, "do you think, that if I am very good,
and do my lessons well, Mr. Gray will sometimes let me ride him? He
_is_ such a darling!" By which I meant the pony, and not Mr. Gray. My
father laughed, and put his hand on my shoulders.
"I have only been teasing you, Regie," he said. "You know I told you
there was no tutor in the case. Mr. Andrewes and I were talking about
this pony, and when Mr. Andrewes said _grey_, he spoke of the colour
of the pony, and not of anybody's name."
"Then is the pony yours?" I asked.
My father looked at my eager face with a pleased smile.
"No, my boy," he said, "he is yours."
The wild delight with which I received this announcement, the way I
jumped and danced, and that Rubens jumped and danced with me, my
gratitude and my father's satisfaction, the renewed amenities between
myself and my pony, his obvious knowledge of the fact that I was his
master, and the running commentary of the Irishman, I will not attempt
to describe.
The purchase of this pony was indeed one of my father's many kind
thoughts for my welfare and amusement. My odd pilgrimage to the
Rectory in search of change and society, and the pettish complaints of
dulness and monotony at home which I had urged to account for my freak
of "dropping in," had seemed to him not without a certain serious
foundation. Except for walks about the farm with him, and stolen
snatches of intercourse with the grooms, and dogs, and horses in the
stables (which both he and Nurse Bundle discouraged), I had little or
no amusement proper to a boy of my age. I was very well content to sit
with Rubens at Mrs. Bundle's apron-string, but now and then I was, to
use an expressive word, _moped_. My father had taken counsel with Mr.
Andrewes, and the end of it all was that I found myself the master of
the most charming of ponies, with the exciting prospect before me of
learning to ride. The very thought of it invigorated me. Before the
Irish groom went away I had asked if my new steed "could jump." I
questioned my father's men as to the earliest age at which young
gentlemen had ever been allowed to go out hunting, within their
knowledge. I went to bed to dream of rides as wild as Mazeppa's, of
hairbreadth escapes, and of feats of horsemanship that would have
amazed Mr. Astley. And hopes and schemes so wild that I dared not
bring them to the test of my father's ridicule, I poured with pride
into Nurse Bundle's sympathetic ear.
Dear, good, kind Nurse Bundle! She was indeed a mother to me, and a
mother's anxieties and disappointments were her portion. The effect of
her watchful constant care of my early years for me, was whatever good
there was about me in health or manners. The effect of it for her was,
I believe, that she was never thoroughly happy when I was out of her
sight. In these circumstances, it seemed hard that when most of my
infantile diseases were over, when I was just becoming very
intelligent (the best company possible, Mrs. Bundle declared), when I
wore my clothes out reasonably, and had exchanged the cries which
exercise one's lungs in infancy for rational conversation by the
nursery fireside, I should be drawn away from nurse and nursery almost
entirely. It was right and natural, but it was hard. Nurse Bundle felt
it so, but she never complained. When she felt it most, she only said,
"It's all just as it should be." And so it was. Boys and ducklings
must wander off some time, be mothers and hens never so kind! The
world is wide, and duck-ponds are deep. The young ones must go alone,
and those who tremble most for their safety cannot follow to take care
of them.
I really shrink from realizing to myself what Nurse Bundle must have
suffered whilst I was learning to ride. The novel exercise, the
stimulus of risk, that "put new life into me," were to her so many
daily grounds for the sad probability of my death.
"Every blessed afternoon do I look to see him brought home on a
shutter, with his precious neck broken, poor lamb!" she exclaimed one
afternoon, overpowered by the sight of me climbing on to the pony's
back, which performance I had brought her downstairs to witness, and
endeavoured to render more entertaining and creditable by secretly
stimulating the pony to restlessness, and then hopping after him with
one foot in the stirrup, in what I fancied to be a very knowing
manner.
"Why, my dear Mrs. Bundle," said my father, smiling, "you kill him at
least three hundred and sixty-four times oftener in the course of the
year than you need. If he does break his neck, he can only do it once,
and you bewail his loss every day."
"Now, Heaven bless the young gentleman, sir, and meaning no
disrespect, but don't ye go for to tempt Providence by joking about
it, and him perhaps brought a hopeless corpse to the side door this
very evening," said Mrs. Bundle, her red cheeks absolutely blanched by
the vision she had conjured up. Why, I cannot say, but she had fully
made up her mind that when I was brought home dead, as she believed
that, sooner or later, I was pretty sure to be, I should be brought to
the side-door. Now "the side-door," as it was called, was a little
door leading into the garden, and less used, perhaps, than any other
door in the house. Mrs. Bundle, I believe, had decided that in that
tragedy which she was constantly rehearsing, the men who should find
my body would avoid the front-door, to spare my father the sudden
shock of meeting my corpse. The side-door, too, was just below the
nursery windows. Mrs. Bundle herself, would, probably, be the first to
hear any knocking at it, and she naturally pictured herself as taking
a prominent part in the terrible scene she so often fancied. It was
perhaps a good thing, on the whole, that she chose this door in
preference to those in constant use, otherwise every ring or knock at
the front or back door must have added greatly to her anxieties.
I fear I did not do much to relieve them. I rather aggravated them.
Partly I believe in the conceit of showing off my own skill and
daring, and partly by way of "hardening" Mrs. Bundle's nerves. When
more knowledge, or longer custom, or stronger health or nerves, have
placed us beyond certain terrors which afflict other people, we are
apt to fancy that, by insisting upon their submitting to what we do
not mind, our nervous friends can or ought to be forced into the
unconcern which we feel ourselves; which is, perhaps, a little too
like dosing the patient with what happens to agree with the doctor.
Thus I fondled my pony's head and dawdled ostentatiously at his heels
when Nurse Bundle was most full of fears of his biting or kicking. But
I feel sure that this, and the tricks I played to show the firmness of
my "seat," only made it seem to her the more certain that, from my
recklessness, I must some day be bitten, kicked, or thrown.
I had several falls, and one or two narrow escapes from more serious
accidents, which, for the moment, made my father as white as Mrs.
Bundle. But he was wise enough to know that the present risks I ran
from fearlessness were nothing to the future risks against which
complete confidence on horseback would ensure me. And so with the
ordinary mishaps, and with days and hours of unspeakable and healthy
happiness, I learnt to ride well and to know horses. And poor Mrs.
Bundle, sitting safely at home in her rocking-chair, endured all the
fears from which I was free.
"Now look, my deary," said she one day; "don't you go turning your
sweet face round to look up at the nursery windows when you're a
riding off. I can see your curls, bless them! and that's enough for
me. Keep yourself still, love, and look where you're a going, for in
all reason you've plenty to do with that. And don't you go a waving
your precious hand, for it gives me such a turn to think you've let
go, and have only got one hand to hold on with, and just turning the
corner too, and the pony a shaking its tail, and shifting about with
its back legs, till how you don't slip off on one side passes me
altogether."
"Why, you don't think I hold on by my hands, do you?" I cried.
"And what should you hold on with?" said Mrs. Bundle. "Many's the
light cart I've rode in, but never let go my hold, unless with one
hand, to save a bag or a bandbox. And though it's jolting, I'm sure a
light cart's nothing to pony-back for starts and unexpectedness."
I tried in vain to make Nurse Bundle like my pony.
"I've seen plenty of ponies!" she said, severely; by which she meant
not that she had seen many, but that what she had seen of them had
been more than enough. "My brother-in-law's first cousin had one--a
little red-haired beast--as vicious as any wild cat. It won a many
races, but it was the death of him at last, according to the
expectations of everybody. He was brought home on a shutter to his
family, and the pony grazing close by in the ditch as if nothing had
happened. Many's the time I've seen him on it expecting death as
little as yourself, and he refused twenty pound for it the Tuesday
fortnight before he was killed. But I was with his wife that's now his
widow when the body was brought."
By the time that I heard this anecdote I was happily too good a rider
to be frightened by it; but I did wish that Mrs. Bundle's relative had
died any other death than that which formed so melancholy a precedent
in her mind.
The strongest obstacle, however, to any chance of my nurse's looking
with favour on my new pet was her profound ignorance of horses and
ponies in general. Except as to colour or length of tail, she
recognized no difference between one and another. As to any
distinctions between "play" and "vice," a fidgety animal and a
determined kicker, a friendly nose-rub and a malicious resolve to
bite, they were not discernible by Mrs. Bundle's unaccustomed eyes.
"I've seen plenty of ponies," she would repeat; "I know what they are,
my dear," and she invariably followed up this statement by rehearsing
the fate of her brother-in-law's cousin, sometimes adding--
"He was very much giving to racing, and being about horses. He was a
little man, and suffered a deal from the quinsies in the autumn."
"What a pity he didn't die of a quinsy instead of breaking his neck!"
I felt compelled to say one day.
"He might have lived to have done that if it hadn't a been for the
pony," said Mrs. Bundle emphatically.