THE LITTLE BOY IN ABERDEEN
“It is magnificent!” Hobhouse looked up as he spoke.
It was in Gordon’s apartment in Reddish’s Hotel. The table was strewn
with loose manuscript--the verses he had laughingly told Sheridan were
“likely to be drivelling idiotism.” Over these Hobhouse had bent for
an hour, absorbed and delighted, breathing their strange spirit of
exhilaration, of freedom from rhythmic shackles, of adventure into
untried poetic depths. They stood out in sharp relief--original,
unique, of classic model yet of a _genre_ all their own. It would be a
facer for Jeffrey, the caustic editor of the _Edinburgh Review_, and
for all the crab-apple following Gordon’s boyish rancor had roused to
abuse. Now he said:
“Nothing like it was ever written before. Have you shown it to a
publisher yet?”
Gordon glanced at the third person in the room--a gray-haired elderly
man with kindly eyes--as he replied:
“Dallas, here, took it to Miller. He declined it.”
“The devil!” shot out Hobhouse, incredulously.
“John Murray will publish it,” Gordon continued. “I had his letter
with the copyhold an hour ago.” He took a paper from his pocket and
held it up to view.
“I congratulate you both,” Hobhouse said heartily.
Gordon shrugged acridly, and rising, began to pace the room. The sore
spot had been rankling since that walk with Sheridan.
“Wait till the critics see it. They will have other opinions, no doubt
Well, never mind,” he added. “I was peppered so highly once that it
must be aloes or cayenne to make me taste. They forced me to bitterness
at first; I may as well go through to the last. _Væ victis!_ I’ll fall
fighting the host. That’s something.”
The gray-haired man had picked up his hat. It was not a hat of the
primest curve, nor were his clothes of a fashionable cut. They were
well-worn, but his neck-cloth was spotless, and though his face showed
lines of toil and anxiety, it bore the inextinguishable marks of
gentility. Gordon had not told him that he had spent a part of the day
inquiring into the last detail of invalid wife and literary failure;
now his glance veiled a singular look whose source lay very deep in the
man.
“Don’t hasten,” he said. “I have a reputation for gloom, but my friends
must not be among the reputants! Least of all you, Dallas.”
The other sat down again and threw his hat on the table, smiling.
“Gloom?” he asked. “And have you still that name? You were so as a
little laddie in Aberdeen, but I thought you would have left off the
Scotch blues long ago with your tartan.”
“I wish I could,” cried Gordon, “as I left off the burr from my tongue.
How I hated the place--all except Dee-side and old Lachin-y-gair!
That pleased me for its wildness. If God had a hand in its valleys,
the devil must have had a hoof in some of its ravines, for the
clouds foamed up from their crevices like the spray of the ocean of
hell. Dallas,” he said, veering, “what a violent, unlovely little
wretch it was we used to know so many years ago,--you never saw him,
Hobhouse!--that little boy in Aberdeen!”
Hobhouse looked up. There was a curious note in the voice, a sort of
brooding inquiry, of regret, of wistfulness all in one. It was a tone
he had never heard so plainly but once before--a night when they two
had sat together before a camp-fire on the Greek sea-coast, when Gordon
had talked of old Cambridge days, and of Matthews, his classmate,
destined to be drowned. It was this tone Hobhouse heard.
The older man’s eyes had a retrospective haze, which he winked away, as
he smoothed down the frayed edges of his waistcoat with a hesitating
hand, as though half-embarrassed under the other’s gaze.
“A little misshapen unit of a million,” continued Gordon, “a miserable
nothing of something, who dreamed barbarous fantasies and found no one
who understood him--no one but one. Do you remember him, Dallas?”
The other nodded, his head turned away. “He was not so hard to
understand.”
“Not for you, Dallas, and it’s for that reason most of all I am
going to paint his picture. Will it bore you, Hobhouse?” he asked
whimsically. “To discuss childhood is such a snivelling, popping
small-shot, water-hen waste of powder to most people.”
Hobhouse shook his head, and the speaker went on:
“First of all, I wish you would witness a signature for me,”--and
handed him the paper he had taken from his pocket.
As the young man glanced at it, he looked up with quick surprise, but
checked himself and, signing it, leaned back in his chair.
Gordon returned to his slow pace up and down the room, and as he went
he talked:
“The fiercest animals have the smallest litters, and he was an only
child, though he had been told he had a half-sister somewhere in the
world. He was unmanageable in temper, sullenly passionate, a queer
little bundle of silent rages and wants and hates--the sort people call
‘inhuman.’ There was never but one nurse, if I remember, who could
manage him at all. He had a twisted foot--the gift of his mother, and
added to by a Nottingham quack. He lived in lodgings,--cursed fusty
they were, too, the fustiest in Aberdeen,--with his mother. He had
never set eyes on his father; how he knew he had one, I can’t imagine.
When he was old enough, he was sent to ‘squeel’, as they called it in
Aberdeen dialect--day-school, where he learned to say:
‘God--made--man.
Let--us--love--Him,’
and to make as poor a scrawl as ever scratched over a frank. He
was a blockhead, a hopeless blockhead! The master,--how devout and
razor-faced and dapper he was! he was minister to the kirk also,--used
to topsy-turvy the class now and then, and bring the lowest highest.
These were the only times the boy was at the head. Then the master
would say, ‘Now, George, man, let’s see how soon you can limp to the
foot again!’ This was a jest, but when the others shouted, the boy
used to turn cold with shame. Small wonder he didn’t learn, for he
didn’t want to. A pity, too, Dallas, for in those days three words and
a half-smile would have changed him. I venture it would take more than
that to-day!”
He paused, his brows frowning, his lips drawn softly. When he went on,
it was in a more constrained tone:
“One year, suddenly, everything changed. His guardian took him from
the school and he had a tutor--a very serious, saturnine young man,
with spectacles,”--Dallas had taken off his own and was polishing them
earnestly with his handkerchief,--“who didn’t make the boy hate him--a
curious thing! He was a great man already in the boy’s eyes, because he
had been in America when the Colonies were fighting King George. The
boy would have liked to be a colonist too--he had never been introduced
to the gaudy charlatanry of kings and the powwowishness of rank. He
hadn’t become a lord then, himself.
“This marvel of a tutor wasn’t pestilently prolix. He taught him no
skimble-skamble out of the catechism, though he was a good churchman;
but the first time the boy looked in those big horn spectacles, he knew
there was one man in the world who could understand him. The tutor made
him want to learn, too, and strangest of all, he never seemed to notice
that his pupil was lame. How did he perform that miracle, Dallas?”
The older man set his glasses carefully on the ridge of his nose, as he
shook his head with a little graceful, deprecating gesture that was
very winning. Hobhouse’s eyes were tracing the design of the carpet.
“I remember once,” Gordon continued, “a strange thing happened.
The boy’s father came to Aberdeen. One day--the boy was walking up
the High Street with his tutor--some one pointed him out. To think
that splendid-looking man in uniform was his father! He felt very
pitiful-hearted, but he plucked up courage and went up to him and told
him his name.”
Dallas, who had shifted uneasily in his chair, cleared his throat with
some energy, rose and stood looking out of the window.
“The splendid gentleman forgot to take the boy in his arms. He looked
him over and lisped: ‘A pretty boy--but what a pity he has such a leg!’
A queer thing to say, wasn’t it, Hobhouse!
“One of those fits of rage that made all right-minded people hate him
came over the boy when he heard that. ‘Dinna speak of it! Dinna speak
of it!’ he screamed, and struck at the man with his fist. Then he ran
away--off to the fields, I think--as fast as he could, and that was the
first and the last time he ever saw his father.
“He had forgotten all about his tutor, but the tutor ran after him, and
found him, and took him for a wonderful afternoon--miles away, clear to
the seaside, where they lay on the purple heather and he read to him
out of the history--what was it he read to the boy, Dallas?”
The man by the window jumped. “Bless my soul,” he said, wiping his eyes
vigorously; “I do believe it was the battle of Lake Regillus!”
“Yes, it was, Dallas! And they went in swimming and had supper at a
farmhouse--”
“So they did! So I believe they did!”
“And they didn’t get home till the moon was up. Ah--Dallas!”
Gordon went over and laid his hand on the other’s arm. “Do you think I
shall ever forget?” he said.
“I imagine that was the end of the tutorship,” observed Hobhouse.
“Yes, the idiots!” Gordon laughed a little, as did the elder man,
though there was a suspicious moisture in the latter’s eyes. “They said
he was spoiling me. You came to London, Dallas, and wrote books--moral
essays and theology--too good to give you money or fame. Yes, yes,”--as
Dallas made a gesture of dissent,--“much too good for this thaw-swamped
age of rickety tragedy and canting satire! But when you left Aberdeen,
you left something behind. It was a pony--four sound straight legs,
Dallas, to help out a crooked one--a fat, frowsy, hard-going little
beast, I’ve no doubt, but it seemed the greatest thing in all Scotland
to me.”
“Pshaw!” protested Dallas. “It laid me only four pounds, I’ll swear.”
“Well,” pursued Gordon, “the boy finally dropped back into the old
stubborn rut. He went to Harrow and came out a solitary, and to
Cambridge and they called him an atheist. Life hasn’t been all mirth
and innocence, milk and water. I’ve seen nearly as many lives as
Plutarch’s, but I’m not bilious enough to forget, Dallas. You were
the first of all to write and congratulate me when the critics only
sneered. When I came to London to claim my seat in the Lords (a scurvy
honor, but one has to do as other people do, confound them!) without
a single associate in that body to introduce me--I think a peer never
came to his place so unfriended--you rode with me to the door, Dallas,
you and I alone, and so we rode back again.”
He paused, took up the paper Hobhouse had signed and handed it to the
man who still stood by the window.
“Dallas,” he said, “you gave me my first ride in the saddle. I’ve been
astride another bigger nag lately--one they call Pegasus; this is its
first real gallop, and I want you to ride with me.”
With a puzzled face Dallas looked from the speaker to the paper. It was
Gordon’s copyhold of the verses that lay there in manuscript, legally
transferred to himself.
As he took in its significance, a deep flush stole into his
scholarly-pale cheeks, and tears, unconcealed this time, clouded his
sight. He put out one uncertain hand, while Hobhouse made a noisy
pretense of gathering together the loose leaves under his hands.
“It’s for six hundred pounds!” he said huskily; “six hundred pounds!”