And he wandered away and away
With Nature the dear old nurse,
Who sang to him, night and day,
The rhymes of the universe.
LONGFELLOW’S _Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz_.
Tim’s real name was not Tim: so much is certain. What it was, I have
never inquired. The nickname had been bestowed on him so early in life
that the memory of such men and women as knew him ran not to the
contrary. Tim was Tim by immemorial custom; even his father, who had
little reverence for established usages, never thought of altering this
one, and, as one name is as good as another, we too will call him by the
only one by which he was ever known.
Tim was a slightly-made, lean, brown child, but without the pretty
colour brown children usually have. He had such regular little features
and such a pale little face that he might almost have been called faded,
had he ever looked otherwise. Mrs. Quitchett had pronounced him to be
‘the thinnest and lightest baby ever she see,’ when he was transferred
to her care from that of the monthly nurse, in which opinion she was
supported by that lady, who might be said to be an authority on such
matters. Possibly she too might throw some light on the question of how
he came by that pre-baptismal nickname of his, for she alone had had
much to do with him previous to the day when he had been carried, a poor
little skinny Christian-elect, to be received into the pale of the
Church.
That event was seven years into the past at the time I write of, and
Tim, despite his puny appearance, having struggled through the usual
maladies of childhood, and cut several of his second teeth, was living
in an old house in one of the western counties of England.
The Stoke Ashton manor-house, of which the most modern rooms dated from
the days of Elizabeth, had been the home of the Darley family through
ages of unbroken descent, until a part of it having been destroyed by
fire in the year of our Lord 1780, the then existing Darley had built
the big house up in the park, and called it Darley Court. Thenceforward
for the next seventy years or so, what was left of the manor-house
became the abode of widowed mothers, spinster sisters, or married sons,
until the day when, no such relative laying claim to it at the moment,
old Squire Darley let it to Tim’s parents.
The first seven years of the child’s life in the queer old house could
not well have been less eventful. He was happy enough in the company of
Mrs. Quitchett and his old setter Bess, partly perhaps from never having
known any other.
‘His father,’ nurse told him, ‘was in India.’
‘Where was that?’ asked Tim.
‘Oh! a long way off.’
‘Farther than Granthurst?’
‘Yes, much farther.’
The schoolmaster, who came and gave him a lesson now and then, showed
him India on the map, but he was not much the wiser. His mother, Mrs.
Quitchett never mentioned, and as she never introduced the subject, he
asked no questions, having the habit of deferring to her in all matters,
and her rule, though absolute, was not a hard one. There was only one
point on which he ever questioned her authority: in his determination on
no account to wear a hat, he was adamant. We all have our
idiosyncrasies, and this was Tim’s. On Sundays alone could he be
prevailed upon to allow a small round covering of mixed straw to be
stuck on the extreme back of his head, when Mrs. Quitchett took him to
church in his best clothes. At first, when he was very little, his
picture-book used to be taken with him; but when he was considered to
have reached an age at which the rector’s discourses would be of service
to him, this indulgence was withdrawn, and he found thenceforward his
principal entertainment in the painted window just opposite his seat. It
had been put up in memory of some dead child, and the subject had a
great fascination for Tim, who used to call it ‘his’ window. It
represented a long stretch of quiet upland, arched by a twilight sky
paling into a streak of soft light where it disappeared on the distant
horizon; walking across the green came the tender gracious figure of the
good shepherd bearing a lamb in his loving arms. Tim knew just such a
bit of down where the lambs played, and could almost fancy sometimes
that he saw the figure coming towards him from out of the sunset. The
whole picture was subdued in colouring, and set for sharp contrast in a
frame of tall lilies and jubilant goldenhaired angels. Not less bright
was the head of the Squire’s little grandson, who sometimes knelt in the
big Court pew hard by, where, almost hidden from the rest of the church,
old Mr. Darley persisted in attending worship, to the scandal of his
daughter Miss Kate, who inclined to High Church, and to whom tall family
pews which turned their backs on the altar were an abomination.
Thus once a week did Tim conform to laws social and religious, but the
other six days saw him scudding bareheaded over the fields, searching
for flowers along the hedgerows, or, tired at last with his wanderings,
sitting by the side of some little brook nursing his knees, and singing
low to himself little quaint snatches of song culled here and there from
old books, and set to the nursery tunes Mrs. Quitchett hummed to him, or
to others picked up, Heaven knows where,--perhaps from the birds.
No place came amiss to Tim as a restingplace except a chair; he would
sit on the soft green grass, in a tree, on a stile, a table, a
window-sill,--anywhere but on those articles of furniture which custom
has set aside for the purpose. In the winter he and Bess curled
themselves up in the shaggy bearskin rug before the fire and fell
asleep; in the summer he sat in the patches of sun on the carpet, and
told Bess stories from the _Arabian Nights_, of which he had discovered
a copy with pictures in the old library. The fairy Pari-banou unlocked
the wonders of her palace for that patient hound; Prince Firouz Shah
flew by on the enchanted horse, Morgiana whirled in her dance, and
Gulnaré rose from the sea to be the bride of the Persian king; only the
story of the lady who whipped the little dogs Tim never related, out of
consideration for his companion’s feelings.
Such was Tim’s life: reading to a dog, singing to the streams, having
fellowship with birds and flowers, in a strange world of his own
creation, hatless, lean, brown, and happy. The hours slipped softly by
him without his noting their passing. He knew when it was Sunday, was
glad when it was fine, not sorry when it rained, full of strange dreams
and fancies, companionless yet not alone, for nature was with him. And
so Tim grew to be eight years old.
One day the postman brought Mrs. Quitchett a letter which had come all
the way from India,--and a long way it was in those days when no Suez
Canal existed to shorten the journey. The letter had no beginning,
because Tim’s father, who had written it, was a man who never quite knew
how to begin his letters to an old nurse. To say ‘Dear Mrs. Quitchett’
seemed to imply undue familiarity. ‘Madam’ was altogether out of the
question. ‘Mrs. Quitchett’ sounded harsh and dictatorial, which he had
no wish to be, and to write a long letter in the third person would have
been a needless exertion. So the letter came to the point at once,
without preliminary compliment.
‘You will perhaps be surprised to hear,’ it said, in neat upstrokes and
downstrokes and beautifully straight lines, ‘that I intend coming home
for good. My doctor strongly advises my leaving India, and I am the more
inclined to consent that I am very desirous of seeing my son, to whom I
am of opinion that the personal care of a father may be of more service
during such time as I am spared to him, than a somewhat larger fortune
at my death.’
Nurse Quitchett glanced over her venerable spectacles at Tim, who was
lying asleep on the window-seat, with his arm round the neck of the
faithful Bess, but returned without making any remark to her reading.
‘You will have the goodness to acquaint my son with my change of plans.
I shall probably reach home by about October, and shall hope to find my
boy ready to give me a welcome. I am afraid his education must have been
rather neglected, but he is young yet, and that deficiency may easily
be supplied; while I am sure that in your hands his health at least must
have been well looked after. I have always disapproved of the
selfishness of some Indian parents who, keeping their children with them
in an unhealthy climate for their own gratification, injure their health
perhaps for life. I hope to be repaid for my six years’ separation from
my only child by finding a true, sturdy little pink-and-white Briton
waiting to greet me on my return. With my best thanks for your care of
the boy and the regular reports you have sent me of him, believe me,
truly yours,
‘WILLIAM EBBESLEY.’
* * * * *
Mrs. Quitchett put down the letter, took off her glasses, which were
somehow quite wet, and looked again, not without apprehension, at the
sleeping boy. In vain she tried to make any of the epithets used in the
letter fit the child before her: he was as unlike the picture of the
true, sturdy little pink-and-white Briton, on which his father’s fancy
dwelt so fondly, as one boy could be unlike another.
William Ebbesley, observing that Anglo-Indian babies were as a rule
small and sallow, had concluded, with defective logic, that his child,
not being brought up in India, would be neither the one nor the other.
He had thought of this imaginary child of his, until, Prometheus-like,
he had given life to the figure he had himself created; and had any one
cared to inquire what the boy was like, would unhesitatingly have
described him. Nowadays his illusions would be rudely dispelled by
photography; but when Tim was a child, the art was also in its infancy,
and it had not become the fashion to have babies photographed once a
year. On one occasion, when Tim was three years old, Mrs. Quitchett had
set up his hair in a sort of crest and carried him to a neighbouring
town to be photographed, but the child could not be got to sit still,
and ended by a flood of tears, so that the little card which finally
went to Mr. Ebbesley was hardly satisfactory as a likeness. Mrs.
Quitchett herself confessed as much, and the father was quite indignant
at this libel on his child. It never even occurred to him that the
photograph, bad as it was, had at least been taken from the real boy,
and as such might be nearer the truth than the portrait his fancy had
painted.
Writing not being a strong point of Mrs. Quitchett’s, her epistolary
style was remarkable chiefly for its terseness, and she would as soon
have thought of writing a novel at once as of launching into any
description of Tim’s appearance, beyond such casual expressions of
admiration as nurses use of their bantlings, and which are not meant to
be taken literally.
After a while Tim stirred uneasily, and Bess, roused into
semi-consciousness by his change of position, put up her cold nose and
touched his cheek. The boy woke with a start and sat up, to find the
eyes of his old nurse fixed on him with an expression he had never seen
in them before; it was gone as soon as she saw that he was awake, but
not before he had remarked it, and springing quickly to her he asked,
‘Why do you look at me like that? What have you got there?’
The second question happily furnishing nurse with an excuse for evading
the first, which she would have been puzzled how to answer, ‘It’s a
letter from your papa,’ she said, ‘and I’ve got a surprise for you; what
do you think is going to happen?’
‘He’s coming home,’ replied Tim quietly, as if he had known it all
along.
‘Law bless the boy!’ called out Mrs. Quitchett. ‘Whoever could have told
you? But there! nobody could, for I’ve just this minute finished reading
the letter, and it’s not been out of my hand.’
Tim nodded sagaciously: ‘I dreamed it,’ he said, as he walked off into
the garden, leaving his nurse in that condition which she would herself
have described as a capability of being knocked down with a feather.
‘Well, of all the out-of-the-way odd children ever I see!’ she
ejaculated under her breath; and then the father’s picture of the little
Briton recurred to her so pathetically comic in its contrast to facts,
that she could not help smiling, though the tears followed close after,
as she thought, ‘He’ll come between me and my boy; well, I ought to ha’
known how it would be.’
But though the old nurse might shed a few tears in private, and to Tim
the words ‘My father is coming’ conveyed, it is true, some misty sense
of approaching change, the letter and its contents left no perceptible
mark on the inhabitants of the manor-house. Mrs. Quitchett could not
spare much time to speculation, and her charge had not contracted the
habit of looking ahead; what difference his father’s home-coming would
make in his life he knew not, and scarcely cared to imagine.
The summer passed away in no respect unlike those other five or six he
could remember. The roses bloomed and paled and fell; the birds built
their nests, laid their eggs, hatched and reared their young, all in due
order; the cornfields passed through all their accustomed phases; July
succeeded to June, August to July, September to August, and ‘Nature the
dear old nurse’ led this youngest of her nurslings through the peaceful
hot months, unsuspicious of those that were to follow.
The first touch of autumn saddened our Tim; the waving fields of golden
grain, with their wind-rippled orange shadows, had lent a thrill of
happiness to a little soul alive to all such influences, and now that
the meek, stately ears had bowed their heads to the sickle, he missed
their presence, and sorrowed over the stubble.
This month, too, the guns were popping all over the country-side, and
Tim hated guns for two reasons--first, because they startled the quiet
of his usual rambles, giving a sense of insecurity even to the quietest
fields; and secondly, because each report that made the child jump and
tremble, meant the death or wounding of a bird; and that was keen grief
to him.