Richard Doddridge Blackmore
Cradock Nowell: A Tale of the New Forest. Vol. 2 (of 3)

CHAPTER I

It was a Tuesday evening when Cradock Nowell and Amy Rosedew signed and sealed, with the moonʼs approval, their bond to one another. On the following day, Dr. Hutton and wife were to dine at Kettledrum Hall; and the distance being considerable, and the roads so shockingly bad – “even dangerous, I am told, to gentlemen who have dined with me, sir,” said Kettledrum, in his proudest manner – they had accepted his offer, and that of Mrs. Kettledrum, which she herself came over to make, that they should not think of returning until after breakfast on Thursday. In consequence of her husbandʼs hints, Rosa felt the keenest interest in “that Mrs. Kettledrum. Leave her to me, dear Rufus. You need not be afraid, indeed. Trust me to get to the bottom of it.” And so she exerted her probing skill upon her to the uttermost, more even than ladies usually do, when they first meet one another. Of course, there was no appearance of it, nothing so ill–bred as that; it was all the sweetest refinement, and the kindest neighbourly interest. They even became affectionate in the course of half an hour, and mutual confidence proved how strangely their tastes were in unison. Nevertheless, each said good–bye with a firm conviction that she had outwitted the other. “Poor thing, she was so stupid. What a bungler, to be sure! And to think I could not see through her!”

But the return–match between these ladies, which was to have come off at Kettledrum Hall – where, by–the–by, there appeared a far greater performer than either of them – this interesting display of skill was deferred for the present; inasmuch as Rosa was taken ill during the mysteries of her toilet. It was nothing more serious, however, than the “flying spasms,” as she always called them, to which she had long been subject, and which (as she often told her husband) induced her to marry a doctor.

Rufus administered essence of peppermint, and then a dose of magnesia; but he would not hear of her coming with him, and he wanted to stop at home with her, and see that she sat by the fire. She in turn would have her way, and insisted that Rue should go, “for he had made himself such a very smart boy, that she was really quite proud of him, and they would all be so disappointed, and he was taller than Mr. Kettledrum, she felt quite sure he was.” The bearing of that last argument I do not quite perceive, but dare not say that she erred therein, and to Rue it was quite conclusive. So Ralph Mohorn was sent for, the pony–carriage countermanded, and Rufus set forth upon Polly, whose oats were now restricted.

Kettledrum Hall stood forth on a rise, and made the very most of itself. Expansive, and free, and obtrusively honest, it seemed to strike itself on the breast (as its master did) with both gables. A parochial assessment committee, or a surveyor for the property–tax, would have stuck on something considerable, if they had only seen the outside of it. Look at the balustrade that went (for it was too heavy to run) all along the front of it, over the basement windows. No stucco, either; but stone, genuine stone, that bellied out like a row of Roman amphoræ, or the calves of a first–rate footman. After that, to see the portico, “decempedis metata,” which “excipiebat Eurum” – not Arcton in this climate. No wonder – although it was rotten inside, and the whole of it mortgaged ten fathom deep – that Bailey Kettledrum hit his breast, and said, “Our little home, sir!”

“Your great home, you mean,” said Rufus; “what a noble situation! You can see all over the county.”

They had come to meet him down the hill, in the kindest country fashion, Mr. and Mrs. Kettledrum, like Jack and Jill going for water.

“Not quite that,” replied Kettledrum; “but we saw you with my binocular, between two and three miles off, and became so anxious about Mrs. Hutton, that I said to my wife, ‘Put your bonnet on;’ and she only said, ‘Bailey, put your hat on;’ nothing more, sir, I assure you; nothing more, sir, upon my honour.”

Rufus could not see exactly why there should have been anything more, but he could not help thanking them for their kindness, and saying to himself, “What nice people! Quite an agricultural life, I see, in spite of that grand mansion.”

“Now,” said Mr. Kettledrum, when Polly had been committed to one of the stable–boys – but Rufus still wanted to look at her, for he never grew tired of admiring anything that belonged to him, and he knew they wouldnʼt do her legs right – “now, Dr. Hutton, you have come most kindly, according to your promise, so as to give us an hour or two to spare before the dinner–time. Shall we take a turn with the guns? I can put my hand on a covey; or shall we walk round the garden, and have the benefit of your advice?”

Rufus looked in dismay at his “choice black kerseymeres;” he had taken his “antigropelos” off, and was proud to find not a flake on them. But to think of going out shooting! He ought not to have dressed before he left home, but he hated many skinnings. And he could only guess the distance from the lodge to this place. So he voted very decidedly for a walk in the kitchen–garden.

Into this he was solemnly instituted, and the beauties all pointed out to him. What a scene of weeds and rubbish! How different from Bull Garnetʼs dainty and trim quarters, or from his own new style of work at Geopharmacy Lodge! Rotten beansticks crackling about, the scum of last summerʼs cabbages, toad–stools cropping up like warts or arums rubbed with caustic, a fine smell of potato–disease, and a general sense of mildew; the wall–trees curled and frizzled up with aphis, coccus, and honeydew; and the standards scraggy, and full of stubs, canker, and American blight, sprawling, slouching, hump–backed, and stag–headed, like the sick ward of a workhouse fighting with tattered umbrellas.

“Ah,” said Rufus, at his wits’ end for anything to praise, “what a perfect paradise – for the songsters of the grove.”

“Oh,” replied Mr. Kettledrum, “you should hear the Dook admire it. ‘Kettledrum, my boy,’ he said, when he dined with me last Friday, ‘there is one thing I do envy you – no, sir, neither your most lady–like wife, nor yet your clever children, although I admit that neither of them can be paralleled in England – but, Kettledrum, it is – forgive me – it is your kitchen–garden.’ ‘My kitchen–garden, your grace,’ I replied, for I hate to brag of anything, ‘it is a poor thing, my lord Dook, compared to your own at Lionshill.’ ‘May I be d – d,’ his grace replied, for I never shall break him of swearing, ‘if I ever saw anything like it, dear Kettledrum, and so I told the Duchess.’ And after all, you know, Dr. Hutton, a man may think too little of what it has pleased God to give him.”

“Well,” said Rufus to himself, “Iʼm blessed if you do. But I donʼt like you any the worse for a bit of brag. I have met great brags in India, and most of them honest fellows. But I must peg him down a bit. I must, I fear; it is my duty as an enlightened gardener.”

“But you see, now,” said Bailey Kettledrum, smacking his lips, and gazing into profundity, “you see, my dear sir, there is nothing ‘ab omni parte beatum;’ perhaps you remember the passage in the heroic epistles of – ah, Cicero it was, I believe, who wrote all those epistles to somebody.”

“No doubt of it,” said Rufus Hutton, who knew more of Hindustani than of Latin and Greek combined; “and yet St. Paul wrote some.”

“Not in Latin, my dear sir; all St. Paulʼs were Greek. ‘Nihil est,’ I now remember, ‘ab omni parte beatum.’ I donʼt know how it scans, which I suppose it ought to do, but that isnʼt my look–out. Perhaps, however, you can tell me?”

“Iʼm blowed if I can,” said Rufus Hutton, in the honesty of his mind; “and I am not quite sure that it has any right to scan.”

“Well, I canʼt say; but I think it ought,” – he was in the mists of memory, where most of the trees have sensitive roots, though the branches are not distinguishable. “However, that canʼt matter at all; I see you are a classical scholar. And, Hutton, I like a classical scholar, because he can understand me. But you see that these trees are rather – ah, what is the expression for it – ?”

“Cankered, and scabby, and scrubs.”

“That is to say – yes, I suppose, they would crop the better, if that be possible, for a little root–pruning.”

“You have gathered the fruit for this year, I presume?”

“Well, no, not quite that. The children have had some, of course. But we are very particular not to store too early.”

“I really donʼt think you need be.”

“Why, many people say, ‘let well alone;’ but my gardener talks of making – ”

“A jolly good bonfire of them, if he knows anything of his business. Then drain the ground, trench, and plant new ones.”

Mr. Kettledrum looked quite thunderstruck; he caught hold of a tree to help him, and a great cake of rotten bark, bearded with moss, came away like the mask of a mummer. It was slimy on the under side, and two of his fingers went through it.

“Nice state of things,” said Rufus, laughing. “I suppose the Dook likes lepers?”

“Why, my dear sir, you donʼt mean to say – ”

“That I would leave only one of them, and I would hang the head–gardener upon it.”

That worthy was just coming round the corner, to obtain the applause of a gentleman well known to the Gardenerʼs Chronicle; but now he turned round abruptly, and scratched his head, and thought of his family.

When Rufus came down and entered the drawing–room, he was perfectly gorgeous; for although he had been in full dress for the main, he knew better than to ride with his Alumbaggah waistcoat on. There was nothing in all the three presidencies to come up to that waistcoat. It would hold Dr. Hutton and Rosa too, for they had stood back to back and tried it. And Rufus vainly sighed for the day when his front should come out and exhaust it. He stole it, they say, from a petty rajah, who came to a great durbar with it, worn like an Oxford hood. At any rate, there it was, and the back of Cashmere stuff would fit either baby or giant. But the front, the front – oh, bangles and jiminy! it is miles beyond me to describe it.

All simple writers, from Job and Hesiod downwards, convey an impression of some grand marvel, not by direct description of it, which would be feeble and achromatic, but by the rebound, recoil, and redouble, from the judgment of some eye–witness. If that eye–witness be self–possessed, wide–awake, experienced, and undemonstrative, the effect upon the readerʼs mind is as of a shell which has struck the granite, burst there, and scattered back on him. So will I, mistrusting the value of my own impressions, give a faint idea of Rufus his waistcoat, by the dount of it on that assembly.

The host was away for the moment somewhere, perhaps blowing up the butler, for his wife was telling her sister how nervous and even fidgety her beloved Bailey was growing; but Mr. Corklemore was there, and came forth to salute the great Rufus, when his heavy eyes settled upon the waistcoat, and all his emotions exploded in a “haw” of incredulous wonder. Mrs. Kettledrum rose at the same instant, and introduced her sister.

“My sister, Dr. Hutton, whom I have so earnestly longed to make acquainted with dear Mrs. Hutton, Mrs. Nowell Corklemore; Mr. Corklemore, I know, has had the pleasure of meeting you. Georgie, dear, you will like her so – oh, goodness gracious me!”

“I donʼt wonder you are surprised at me, Anna,” exclaimed Mrs. Corklemore, with wonderful presence of mind. “How stupid I am, to be sure! Oh, Nowell, why didnʼt you tell me? How shameful of you! But you never look at me now, I think.” And she swept from the room in the cleverest manner, as if something wrong in her own dress had caused her sisterʼs ejaculation.

“Excuse me one moment,” said Mrs. Kettledrum, taking her cue very aptly; and she ran out, as if to aid her sister, but in reality to laugh herself into hysterics.

After all there was nothing absurd, per se, in Rufus Huttonʼs waistcoat, only it is not the fashion, just at present, to wear pictorial raiment; but the worthy doctor could not perceive any reason why it should not be. He was pleased with the prospect of creating a genuine sensation, and possibly leading the mode; and having lost all chance of realizing these modest hopes at Nowelhurst, why, he must content himself with a narrower stage for his triumphs. He had smuggled it from home, however, without his wifeʼs permission: he had often threatened her with its appearance, but she always thought he was joking. And truly it required some strength of mind to present it to modern society, although it was a work of considerable art, and no little value.

The material of it was Indian silk of the very richest quality. It had no buttons, but golden eyelets and tags of golden cowries. The background of the whole was yellow, the foreground of a brilliant green, portraying the plants of the jungle. On the left bosom leaped and roared an enormous royal tiger, with two splendid jewels, called “catʼs–eyes,” flashing, and a pearl for every fang. Upon the right side a hulking elephant was turning tail ignominiously; while two officers in the howdah poked their guns at the eyes of the tiger. The eyes of the officers in their terror had turned to brilliant emeralds, and the blood of the tramping elephant was represented by seed rubies. The mahout was cutting away in the distance, looking back with eyes of diamonds.

Beyond a doubt, it required uncommonly fine breeding, especially in a lady, to meet that waistcoat at a dinner–party, and be entirely unconscious of it. And perhaps there are but few women in England who would not contrive to lead up to the subject, quite accidentally, of course, before the evening was over.

The ladies came back as grave as judges; and somehow it was managed (as if by the merest oversight) that Dr. Hutton should lead to dinner, not the lady of the house, whom, of course, he ought to have taken, but Mrs. Nowell Corklemore. He felt, as he crossed the hall with her, that the beauty of his waistcoat had raised some artistic emotion in a bosom as beautiful as its own. Oh, Rufus, think of Rosa!

Let none be alarmed at those ominous words. The tale of Cradock Nowellʼs life shall be pure as that life itself was. The historian may be rough, and blunt, and sometimes too intense, in the opinion of those who look at life from a different point of view. But be that as it will, his other defects (I trust and pray) will chiefly be deficiencies. We will have no poetical seduction, no fascinating adultery, condemned and yet reprieved by the writer, and infectious from his sympathy. Georgiana Corklemore was an uncommonly clever woman, and was never known to go far enough to involve her reputation. She loved her child, and liked her husband, and had all the respect for herself which may abide with vanity. Nevertheless she flirted awfully, and all married women hated her. “Bold thing,” they called her, “sly good–for–nothing; and did you see how she ogled? Well, if I only carried on so! Oh, if I were only her husband! But, poor man, he knows no better. Such a poor dear stick, you know. Perhaps that is what makes her do it. And nothing in her at all, when you come to think of it. No taste, no style, no elegance! When will she put her back hair up? And her child fit to put into long–clothes! Did you observe her odious way of putting her lips up, as if to be kissed? My dear, I donʼt know how you felt; but I could scarcely stay in the room with her.”

Nevertheless the ladies did stay, and took good care to watch her, and used to say to her afterwards, “Oh, if I were only like you, dear! Then I need not be afraid of you; but you are – now donʼt tell stories —so clever, and so attractive. As if you did not know it, dear! Well, you are so simple–minded. I am always telling my Looey and Maggie to take you for their model, dear!”

On the present occasion, “Georgie Corklemore,” as she called herself, set about flirting with Rufus Hutton, not from her usual love of power, nor even for the sake of his waistcoat, but because she had an especial purpose, and a very important one. The Kettledrum–cum–Corklemore conspiracy was this – to creep in once more at Nowelhurst Hall through the interest of Dr. Hutton. They all felt perfectly certain that Cradock Nowell had murdered his brother, and that the crime had been hushed up through the influence of the family. They believed that the head of that family, in his passionate sorrow and anger, might be brought to their view of the subject, if he could only be handled properly; and who could manage that more adroitly than his first cousin once removed, the beautiful Mrs. Corklemore? Only let her get once invited, once inducted there, and the main difficulty after that would be to apportion the prey between them. They knew well enough that the old entail expired with the present baronet; and that he (before his marriage) held in fee pure and simple all that noble property. His marriage–settlement, and its effects, they could only inkle of; but their heart was inditing of a good matter, and Mr. Chope would soon pump Brockwood. Not quite so fast, my Amphictyonics; a solicitor thirty years admitted (though his original craft may not be equal) is not to be sucked dry, on the surprise, even by spongy young Chope. However, that was a question for later consideration; and blood being thicker than water, and cleaving more fast to the ground, they felt that it would be a frightful injustice if they were done out of the property.

Only two things need be added: one that Sir Cradock had always disliked, and invited them but for appearance’ sake; the other, that they fairly believed in the righteousness of their cause, and that Rufus Hutton could prove it for them, as the principal witness tampered with.

Mrs. Corklemore was now, perhaps, twenty–five years old, possibly turning thirty; for that lustrum of a ladyʼs life is a hard one to beat the bounds of; at any rate, she had never looked better than she did at the present moment. She was just at the age to spread open, with the memory of shyness upon them (like the dew when the sun is up), the curving petals of beauty. Who understands the magnetic current? Who can analyze ozone? Is there one of us able to formularize the polarity of light? Will there ever be an age when chemists metaphysical will weigh – no more by troy weight, and carat, as now the mode is, but by subtle heart–gas – our liking for a woman? Let us hope there never will be.

That soft Georgiana Corklemore, so lively, lovely, and gushing, focussed all her fascinations upon Rufus Hutton. She knew that she had to deal with a man of much inborn acuteness, and who must have seen a hundred ladies quite as fair as Georgie. But had he seen one with her – well, she knew not what to call it, though she thoroughly knew how to use it? So she magnetized him with all her skill; and Rufus, shrewdly suspecting her object, and confiding in a certain triarian charge, a certain thrust Jarnacian, which he would deliver at the proper moment, allowed her to smile, and to show her white teeth and dimples of volatile velvet (so natural, so inevitable, at his playful, delightful humour), and to loose whole quiverfuls of light shafts from the arch flash under her eyelids. What sweet simplicity she was, what innocent desire to learn, what universal charity. “How dreadful, Dr. Hutton! Oh, please not to tell me of it! How could any ladies do it? I should have fainted at once, and died half an hour afterwards.” She turned up her large mild eyes, deeply beaming with centralized light, in a way that said, “If I died, is there any one who would think it a very, very great pity?”

Rufus had been describing historically, not dramatically, the trials of the ladies, when following their regiment during a sudden movement in the perils of the mutiny. With a manʼs far stiffer identity, he did not expect or even imagine that his delicate listener would be there, and go through every hour of it. But so it was, and without any sham; although she was misusing her strange sympathetic power. Mrs. Nowell Corklemore would have made a very great actress; she had so much self–abandonment, such warm introjection, and hot indignant sympathy; and yet enough of self–reservation to hoop them all in with judgment. Meanwhile Mrs. Kettledrum, a lady of ordinary sharpness, like a good pudding–apple – Georgie being a peach of the very finest quality – she, I say, at the top of the table was watching them very intently – delighted, amused, indignant; glad that none of her children were there to store up Auntieʼs doings. As for Mr. Corklemore, he was quite accustomed to it; and looking down complacently upon the little doctor, thought to himself, “How beautifully my Georgie will cold–shoulder him, when we have got all we want out of the conceited chattering jackanapes.”

When the ladies were gone, Mr. Bailey Kettledrum, who had no idea of playing dummy even to Mrs. Corklemore, made a trick or two from his own hand.

“Corklemore, my dear fellow, you think we are all tee–totallers. On with the port, if you please, ‘cessantem Bibuli Consulis amphoram,’ never shall forget that line. The bibulous consul, eh! Capital idea. Corklemore, you can construe that?”

“Haw! Perhaps I canʼt. Really donʼt know; they beat a heap of stuff into me when I was a very small boy; and it was like whipping – ha, haw, something like whipping – ”

“Eggs,” said Rufus Hutton, “all came to bubbles, eh?”

“Not at all, sir, not at all; you entirely misunderstand me. I mean that it was similar to – to the result produced by the whipping of a top.”

“Only made your head go round,” said Mr. Kettledrum, winking at Rufus; and thenceforth had established a community of interest in the baiting of “long Corklemore.” “Well, at any rate,” he continued, “Hutton is a scholar – excuse my freedom, my dear sir; we are such rustics here, that I seldom come across a man who appreciates my quotations. You are a great acquisition, sir, the very greatest, to this neighbourhood. How can we have let you remain so long without unearthing you?”

“Because,” said Rufus to himself, “you did not happen to want me; when are you going to offer to introduce me to ‘the Dook?’”

“And now, gentlemen,” continued Mr. Kettledrum, rising, swelling his chest out, and thumping it athletically, “it is possible that I may be wrong; I have never been deaf to conviction; but if I am wrong, gentlemen, the fault is in yourselves. Mark me now, I am ready, such is the force of truth, I am ready here at my own board (humble as it is) once for all to admit that the fault is in yourselves. But the utterance I swell with, the great thought that is within me, is strife – no, I beg your pardon – is – is – rife and strongly inditing of a certain lady, who is an honour to her sex. I rise to the occasion, friends; I say an honour to her sex, and a blessing to the other one. Gentlemen, no peroration of mine is equal in any way to the greatness of the occasion; could I say, with Cicero, ‘Veni, vidi, vici,’ where would be my self–approval? I mean – you understand me. It is the privilege of a man in this blessed country, the first gem of the ocean – no, I donʼt mean that; it applies, I believe, to Scotland, and the immortal Burns – but this, sir, I will say, and challenge contradiction, a Briton, sir, a Briton, never, never, never will be free! And now, sir, in conclusion, is there one of you, let me ask, who will not charge his eyes, gentlemen, and let his glass run over – ”

“Haw,” cried Mr. Corklemore, “charge his glass, come, Kettledrum, and let his eyes run over – haw – I think that is the way we read it, Dr. Hutton.”

“Gentlemen, I sit down; finding it impossible to obtain an adequate bearing, I close my poor attempt at cleansing my bosom of the perilous stuff, sir – you know the rest – the health of Mrs. Hutton, that most remarkable children – excuse me, most remarkable woman, whose children, I am quite convinced, will be an honour to their age and sex. Port of ‘51, gentlemen; a finer vintage than ‘47.”

He had told them that it was ‘34, but both knew better; and now “in vino veritas.”

At last Mr. Bailey Kettledrum had hit the weak point of Rufus, and, what was more, he perceived it. Himself you might butter and soap for a month, and he would take it at all its value; but magnify his Rosa, exalt the name of his Rosa, and you had him at discretion.

“Remarkable, sir,” he inquired, with a twinkle of fruity port stealing out from his keen little eyes, “you really do injustice; so many ladies are remarkable – ”

“Haw, well, I never heard – ”

“Confound you, Corklemore,” said Kettledrum to him aside, “can you never hold your tongue? Sir,” – to Rufus – “I beg your pardon, if I said ‘remarkable;’ I meant to say, sir, ‘most remarkable!’ The most remarkable lady” – this to Corklemore, in confidence – “I have ever been privileged to meet. ‘What children,’ I said to my wife, but yesterday, ‘what children they will be blest with!’ Oh, heʼs a lucky dog. The luckiest dog in the world, my boy.”

However, they were not so very far from the sloping shores of sobriety when they rejoined the ladies, and made much of the small Misses Kettledrum, tidy children, rather pretty, and all of the pink ribbon pattern. After some melting melodies from soft Georgieʼs lips and fingers, Mrs. Kettledrum said,

“Oh, Dr. Hutton, do you ever play chess? We are such players here; all except my poor self; I am a great deal too stupid.”

“I used to play a little when I was in India. We are obliged to play all sorts of games in India.” Dr. Hutton piqued himself not a little on his skill in the one true game. At a sign from their mother, the small Kettledrums rushed for the board most zealously, and knocked their soft heads together. Mrs. Corklemore was declared by all to be the only antagonist worthy of an Indian player, and she sat down most gracefully, protesting against her presumption. “Just to take a lesson, you know; only to take a lesson, dear. Oh, please, donʼt let any one look at me.” Rufus, however, soon perceived that he had found his match, if not his superior, in the sweet impulsive artless creature, who threw away the game so neatly when she was quite sure of it.

“Oh, poor me! Now, I do declare – Isnʼt it most heartbreaking? I am such a foolish thing. Oh, can you be so cruel?”

Thrilling eyes of the richest grey trembled with dewy radiance, as Rufus coolly marched off the queen, and planted his knight instead of her.

“Mrs. Corklemore, can I relent? You are far too good a player.” The loveliest eyes, the most snowy surge, in the “mare magnum” of ladies, would never have made that dry Rue Hutton, well content with his Rosa, give away so much as the right to capture a pawn in passing.

Now observe the contrariety, the want of pure reason, the confusion of principle – I am sorry and ashamed, but I canʼt express these things in English, for the language is rich in emotion, but a pauper in philosophy – the distress upon the premises of the cleverest womanʼs mind. She had purposely thrown her queen in his way; but she never forgave him for taking it.

A glance shot from those soft bright eyes, when Rufus could not see them, as if the gentle evening star, Venus herself, all tremulous, rushed, like a meteor, up the heavens, and came hissing down on a poor manʼs head.

She took good care to win the next game, for policy allowed it; and then, of course, it was too late to try the decisive contest.

“Early hours. Liberty Hall, Liberty Hall at Kettledrum! Gentlemen stay up, and smoke if they like. But early hours, sir, for the ladies. We value their complexions. They donʼt. That I know. Do you now, my dearest? No, of course you donʼt.” This was Mr. Kettledrum.

“Except for your sake, darling,” said Mrs. Kettledrum, curtseying, for the children were all gone to bed ever so long ago.

“Well,” said Georgie, coming forward, because she knew her figure would look well with three lamps upon it; such a figure of eight! “my opinion is never worth having, I know, because I feel so much; but I pronounce – ” here she stood up like Portia, with a very low–necked dress on – “gentlemen, and ladies, I pronounce that one is quite as bad as the other.”

“Haw!” said Nowell Corklemore. And so they went to bed. And Rufus Hutton wondered whether they ever had family prayers.

When all the rest were at breakfast, in came Mrs. Corklemore, looking as fresh as daybreak.

“Oh, I am so ashamed of myself. What a sluggard you will think me! What is it in the divine song of that great divine, Dr. Watts? Nowell, dear, you must not scold me. I cannot bear being scolded, because I never have tit for tat. Good morning, dearest Anna; how is your headache, darling? Oh, Dr. Hutton, I forgot! No wonder I overlooked you. I shall never think much of you again, because I beat you at chess so.”

“Game and game,” said Rufus, solemnly, “and I ought to have won that last one, Mrs. Corklemore; you know I ought.”

“To be sure, to be sure. Oh, of course I do. But – a little thing perwented him – his antagonist was too good, sir. Ah, weʼll play the conqueror some day; and then the tug of war comes. Oh, Anna, I am so conceited! To think of my beating Dr. Hutton, the best player in all India.”

“Well, darling, we know all that. And we must not blame you therefore for lying in bed till ten oʼclock.”

“Oh,” said Rufus, with a groan, “do look at ladies’ logic! Mrs. Corklemore gained one game out of two – only because I was – ah–hem, I mean by her very fine play – and now she claims absolute victory; and Mrs. Kettledrum accepts it as a premise for a negative conclusion, which has nothing on earth to do with it.”

But Rufus got the worst of that protest. He tilted too hard at the quintain. All came down upon him at once, till he longed for a cigar. Then Mrs. Corklemore sympathized with him, arose, their breakfast being over, and made him a pretty curtsey. She was very proud of her curtseys; she contrived to show her figure so.

“Confound that woman,” thought Rufus, “I can never tell when she is acting. I never met her like in India. And thank God for that same.”

She saw that her most bewitching curtsey was entirely thrown away upon him; for he was thinking of his Rosa, and looking out for the good mare, Polly.

“Dr. Hutton, I thank you for your condescension, in giving me that lesson. You let me win that last game out of pure good nature. I shall always appreciate it. Meanwhile I shall say to every one – ʼOh, do you know, Dr. Hutton and I play even?’ taking very good care meanwhile never to play again with you. Shocking morality! Yes, very shocking. But then I know no better, do I, Nowell, dear?”

“Haw! Well, Georgie, I am not so sure of that. My wife is absolute nature, sir, simple, absolute – haw – unartificial nature. But unartificial nature is, in my opinion – haw – yes, a very wise nature, sometimes.”

“Haw!” said his wife, exactly like him, while everybody laughed. Then she stood upon tiptoe to kiss him, she was so unartificial, even before the company. All the pretty airs and graces of a fair Parisian, combined with all the domestic snugness of an English wife! What a fine thing it is to have a yoke–mate with a playful, charming manner!

“Good–bye, Dr. Hutton. We are on the wing, as you are. I fear you will never forgive me for tarnishing your laurels so.”

Tarnishing laurels! What wonderful fellow so ingeniously mixed metaphors?

“Now or never,” thought Rufus Hutton; “she has beaten me at chess, she thinks. Now, Iʼll have the change out of her. Only let her lead up to it.”

“Mrs. Corklemore, we will fight it out, upon some future occasion. I never played with a lady so very hard to beat.”

“Ah, you mean at Nowelhurst. But we never go there now. There is – I ought to say, very likely, there are mistakes on both sides – still there seems to exist some prejudice against us. – Anna, dear, you put a lump of sugar too much in my tea. I am already too saccharine.”

“Well, dear, I put exactly what you always tell me. And you sent your cup for more afterwards.”

“Matter of fact animal – how can she be my sister?” Georgie only muttered this. Rufus Hutton did not catch it. Mr. Garnet would have done so.

“Now is the time,” thought Rufus again, as she came up to shake hands with him, not a bit afraid of the morning sun upon her smooth rich cheeks, where the colour was not laid on in spots, but seemed to breathe up from below, like a lamp under water. Outside he saw pet Polly scraping great holes in the gravel, and the groom throwing all his weight on the curb to prevent her from bolting homewards. “Hang it, she wonʼt stand that,” he cried; “her mouth is like a sea–anemone. Take her by the snaffle–rein. Canʼt you see, you fool, that she hasnʼt seven coats to her mouth, like you? Excuse my opening the window,” he apologized to Mrs. Corklemore, “and excuse my speaking harshly, for if I had not stopped him, he would have thrown my horse down, and I value my Polly enormously.”

“Especially after her behaviour the other night in the forest. It is the same with all you gentlemen; the worse you are treated, the more grateful you are. Oh yes, we heard of it; but we wonʼt tell Mrs. Hutton.”

“No, indeed, I hope you wonʼt. I should be very sorry for her to get even a hint of it.”

“To be sure,” laughed Georgie, “to be sure we will keep the secret, for ever so many reasons; one of them being that Dr. Hutton would be obliged to part with Miss Polly, if her mistress knew of her conduct. But I must not be so rude. I see you want to be off quite as much as fair Polly does. Ah, what a thing it is to have a happy home!”

Here Mrs. Corklemore sighed very deeply. If a woman who always has her own way, and a woman who is always scheming, can be happy, she, Georgie, must be so; but she wanted to stir compassion.

“Come,” she said, after turning away, for she had such a jacket on – the most bewitching thing; it was drawn in tight at her round little waist, and seemed made like a horseʼs body–clothes, on purpose for her to trot out in, – “come, Dr. Hutton, say good–bye, and forgive me for beating you.” Simple creature, of course she knew not the “sacra fames” of chess–players.

“We must have our return–match. I wonʼt say ‘good–bye’ until you have promised me that. Shall it be at my house?”

“No. There is only one place in the world where I would dare to attack you again, and that is Nowelhurst Hall.”

“And why there, more than anywhere else?”

“Because there is a set of men there, with which I can beat anybody. I believe I could beat Morphy, with those men at Nowelhurst. Ah! you think me, I see, grossly and stupidly superstitious. Well, perhaps I am. I do sympathise so with everything.”

“I hope we may meet at Nowelhurst,” replied Rufus, preparing his blow of Jarnac, “when they have recovered a little from their sad distress.”

“Ah, poor Sir Cradock!” exclaimed the lady, with her expressive eyes tear–laden, “how I have longed to comfort him! It does seem so hard that he should renounce the sympathy of his relatives at such a time as this. And all through some little wretched dissensions in the days when he misunderstood us! Of course we know that you cannot do it; that you, a comparative stranger, cannot have sufficient influence where the dearest friends have failed. My husband, too, in his honest pride, is very, very obstinate, and my sister quite as bad. They fear, I suppose, – well, it does seem ridiculous, but you know what vulgar people say in a case of that sort – they actually fear the imputation of being fortune–hunters!” Georgie looked so arrogant in her stern consciousness of right, that Rufus said, and for the moment meant it, “How absurd, to be sure!”

“Yes,” said Georgie, confidentially, and in the sweetest of all sweet voices, “between you and me, Dr. Hutton, for I speak to you quite as to an old friend of the family, whom you have known so long” – (“Holloa,” thought Rufus, “in the last breath I was a ‘comparative stranger!’”) – “I think it below our dignity to care for such an absurdity; and that now, as good Christians, we are bound to sink all petty enmities, and comfort the poor bereaved one. If you can contribute in any way to this act of Christian charity, may I rely upon your good word? But for the world, donʼt tell my husband; he would be so angry at the mere idea.”

“I will do my best, Mrs. Corklemore; you may rely upon that.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you! I felt quite sure that you had a generous heart. I should have been so disappointed – perhaps, after all, we shall play our next game of chess at Christmas with the men I am so lucky with. And then, look to yourself, Dr. Hutton.”

“I trust you will find a player there who can give me a pawn and two moves. If you beat him, you may boast indeed.”

“What player do you mean?” asked Georgie, feeling rather less triumphant. “Any Indian friend of yours?”

“Yes, one for whom I have the very greatest regard. For whose sake, indeed, I first renewed my acquaintance with Sir Cradock, because I bore a message to him; for the Colonel is a bad correspondent.”

“The Colonel! I donʼt understand you.” As she said these words, how those eyes of hers, those expressive eyes, were changing! And her lovely jacket, so smart and well cut, began to “draw” over the chest.

“Did you not know,” asked Rufus, watching her in a way that made her hate him worse than when he took her queen, “is it possible that you have not heard, that Colonel Nowell, Clayton Nowell, Sir Cradockʼs only brother, is coming home this month, and brings his darling child with him?” Now for your acting, Georgie; now for your self–command. We shall admire, henceforth, or laugh at you, according to your present conduct.

She was equal to the emergency. She commanded her eyes, and her lips, and bosom, after that one expansion, even her nerves, to the utmost fibre – everything but her colour. The greatest actor ever seen, when called on to act in real life, can never command colour if the skin has proper spiracles. The springs of our heart will come up and go down, as God orders the human weather. But she turned away, with that lily–whiteness, because she knew she had it, and rushed up enthusiastically to her sister at the end of the room.

“Dear Anna, darling Anna, oh, I am so delighted! We have been so wretched about poor Sir Cradock. And now his brother is coming to mind him, with such delightful children! We thought he was dead, oh, so many years! What a gracious providence!”

“Haw!” said Nowell Corklemore.

“The devil!” said Bailey Kettledrum, and Rufus caught the re–echo, but hoped it might be a mistake.

Then they all came forward, gushing, rushing, rapturous to embrace him.

“Oh, Dr. Hutton, surely this is too good news to be true!”

“I think not,” said Rufus Hutton, mystical and projecting, “I really trust it is not. But I thought you must have heard it, from your close affinity, otherwise I should have told you the moment I came in; but now I hope this new arrival will heal over all – make good, I mean, all family misunderstandings.”

“Colonel Clayton Nowell,” said Mr. Nowell Corklemore, conclusively, and with emphasis, “Colonel Clayton Nowell was shot dead outside the barracks at Mhow, on the 25th day of June, sir, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and fifty–six. Correct me, sir, if I am wrong.”

“Then,” said Rufus, “I venture to correct you at once.”

“Shot, sir,” continued Corklemore, “as I am, I may say – haw, – in a position to prove, by a man called Abdoollah Manjee, believed to be a Mussulman. Colonel Clayton Nowell, sir, commanding officer in command of Her Majestyʼs Companyʼs native regiment, No· One hundred and sixty–three, who was called, – excuse me, sir, designated, the ‘father of his regiment,’ because he had so many illegitimate – haw, I beg your pardon, ladies – because of his – ha, yes, – patriarchal manners, sir, and kindly disposition, – he – haw, where was I?”

“I am sure I canʼt say,” said Rufus.

“No, sir, my memory is more tenacious than that of any man I meet with. He, Colonel Clayton Nowell, sir, upon that fatal morning, was remonstrated with by the two – ah, yes, the two executors of his will – upon his rashness in riding forth to face those carnal, I mean to say, those incarnate devils, sir. ‘Are you fools enough,’ he replied, ‘to think that my fellows would hurt me? Give me a riding–whip, and be ready with plasters, for I shall thrash them before I let them come back.’ Now isnʼt every word of that true?”

“Yes, almost every word of it,” replied Rufus, now growing excited.

“Well, sir, he took his favourite half–bred – for he understood cross–breeding thoroughly – and he rode out at the side–gate, where the heap of sand was; ‘Coming back,’ he cried to the English sentry, ‘coming back in half an hour, with all my scamps along of me. Keep the coppers ready.’ And with that he spurred his brown and black mare; and no man saw him alive thereafter, except the fellows who shot him. Haw!”

“Yes,” said Rufus Hutton, “one man saw him alive, after they shot him in the throat, and one man saved his life; and he is the man before you.”

“What you, Dr. Hutton! What you! Oh, how grateful we ought to be to you.”

“Thank you. Well, I donʼt quite see that,” Rufus replied, most dryly. Then he corrected himself: “You know I only did my duty.”

“And his son?” inquired Georgie, timidly, and with sympathy, but the greatest presence of mind. She had stood with her hands clasped, and every emotion (except the impossible one of selfishness) quivering on her sweet countenance; and now she was so glad, oh, so glad, she could never tell you. “His poor illegitimate son, Dr. Hutton? Will he bring the poor child home with him? How glad we shall be to receive him!”

“The child he brings with him is Eoa, dear natural odd Eoa, his legitimate daughter.”

“Then you know her, Dr. Hutton; you could depose to her identity?”

A very odd question; but some women have almost the gift of prophecy.

“Oh, yes! I should rather think so. I have known her since she was ten years old.”

“And now they are coming home. How pleasant! How sweet to receive them, as it were from the dead! By the overland route, I suppose, and with a lac of rupees?”

“No,” said the badgered Rufus, “you are wrong in both conjectures. They come round the Cape, by the clipper–ship Aliwal; and with very few rupees. Colonel Nowell has always been extravagant, a wonderfully fine–hearted man, but a hand that could never hold anything – except, indeed, a friendʼs.”

By the moisture in Rue Huttonʼs eyes, Georgie saw that her interests would fare ill with him, if brought into competition with those of Colonel Nowell. Meanwhile Polly was raving wild, and it took two grooms to hold her, and the white froth dribbling down her curb was to Rufus Hutton as the foam of the sea to a sailor. He did love a tearing gallop, only not through the thick of the forest.

“Good–bye, good–bye! I shall see you soon. Thank you, I will take a cheroot. But I only smoke my own. Good–bye! I am so much obliged to you. You have been so very kind. Mrs. Hutton will be miserable until you come over to us. Good–bye; once more, good–bye!”

Rufus Hutton, you see, was a man of the world, and could be false “on occasion.” John Rosedew could never have made that speech on the back of detected falsehood. Away went Polly, like a gale of wind; and Rufus (who was no rogue by nature, only by the force of circumstances, and then could never keep to it), he going along twenty miles an hour, set his teeth to the breeze, which came down the funnel of his cigar as down a steamerʼs chimney, stuck his calves well into Pollyʼs sides, and felt himself a happy man, going at a rocketʼs speed, to a home of happiness. All of us who have a home (and unless we leave our heart there, whenever we go away, we have no home at all), all of us who have a hole in this shifting sandy world – the sand as of an hour–glass – but whence we have spun such a rope as the devil can neither make nor break – I mean to say, we, all who love, without any hems, and haws, and rubbish, those who are only our future tense (formed from the present by adding “so”) – all of us who are lucky enough, I believe we may say good enough, to want no temporal augment from the prefix of society, only to cling upon the tree to the second aorist of our children, wherein the root of the man lurks, the grand indefinite so anomalous; all these fellows, if they can anyhow understand this sentence, will be glad to hear that Rufus Hutton had a jolly ride.

Rosa waited at the gate; why do his mareʼs shoes linger? Rosa ran in, and ran out again, and was sure that she heard something pelting down the hill much too fast, for her sake! but who could blame him when he knew he was coming home at last? Then Rosa snapped poor Jonahʼs head off, for being too thick to hear it.

Meanwhile, a mighty senate was held at Kettledrum Hall, Mrs. Corklemore herself taking the curule chair. After a glimpse of natural life, and the love of man and woman, we want no love of money; so we lift our laps (like the Roman envoy) and shake out war with the whole of them.

Fools who think that life needs gilding – life, whose flowing blood contains every metal but gold and silver – because they clog and poison it! Blessed is he who earns his money, and spends it all on a Saturday. He looks forward to it throughout the week; and the beacon of life is hope, even as God is its pole–star.

CHAPTER II

Mr. Garnetʼs house, well away to the west, was embraced more closely and lovingly by the gnarled arms of the Forest than the Hall, or even the Rectory. Just in the scoop of a sunny valley, high enough to despise the water, and low enough to defy the wind, there was nothing to concern it much, but the sighing of the branches. Over the brown thatch hung two oak–trees, whispering leaves of history, offering the acorn cup upon the parlour hearth, chafing their rheumatic knuckles against the stone of the chimneys, wondering when the great storm should come that would give them an inside view of it. For though the cottage lay so snugly, scarcely lifting its thatched eyebrows at the draught which stole up the valley, nevertheless those guardian oaks had wrestled a bout or two with the tempests. In the cyclone on the morning of November 29th, 1836, and again on the 7th of January, 1842, they had gripped the ground, and set hard their knees, and groaned at the thought of salt water. Since then the wind had been less of a lunatic (although there had been some ruffianly work in 1854), and they hoped there was a good time coming, and so spread their branches further and further, and thought less of the price of timber. There was only one wind that frightened them much, and that was two points north of west, the very direction whence, if they fell, crash they must come on the cottage. For they stood above it, the root–head some ten feet above the back–floor of the basement, and the branches towering high enough for a wood–pigeon not to be nervous there.

Now we only get heavy pressure of squalls from the west–north–west after a thorough–going tempest which has begun in the southward, and means to box half the compass. So the two great oaks were regarded by their brethren up the hill as jolly fellows, happy dogs, born with a silver spoon in their mouths, good for another thousand years, although they might be five hundred old; unless, indeed – and here all the trees shuddered – there came such another hurricane as in 1703. But which of us knows his own brotherʼs condition? Those two oaks stood, and each knew it, upon a steep bank, where no room was for casting out stay–roots to east–south–east.

Bull Garnet hated those two trees, with terror added to hatred. Even if they never crushed him, which depended much on the weather, they would come in at his bedroom window when the moon was high. Wandering shapes of wavering shadow, with the flickering light between them, walking slowly as a ghost does, and then very likely a rustle and tap, a shivering, a shuddering; it made the ground–floor of his heart shake in the nightmare hours.

Never before had he feared them so much, one quarter so much, as this October; and, during the full and the waning moon after Clayton Nowellʼs death, he got very little sleep for them. By day he worked harder than ever, did more than three men ought to do, was everywhere on the estates, but never swore at any one – though the men scratched their ears for the want of it – laboured hard, and early, and late, if so he might come home at night (only not in the dark), come home at night thoroughly weary. His energy was amazing. No man anywhere felling wood – Mr. Garnetʼs especial luxury – no man hedging and ditching, or frithing, or stubbing up fern and brambles, but had better look out what he had in his bag, or “the governor would be there, and no mistake.” A workman could scarcely stand and look round, and wonder how his sick wife was, or why he had got to work so hard, could scarcely slap himself on the breast, or wet his hard hands for a better grip, but there was Bull Garnet before him, with sad, fierce, dogged eyes, worse than his strongest oaths had been.

Everybody said it was (and everybody believed it; for the gossip had spread from the household in spite of the maidens’ fear of him) the cause of it was, beyond all doubt, the illness of his daughter. Pearl Garnet, that very eccentric girl, as Rufus Hutton concluded, who had startled poor Polly so dreadfully, was prostrate now with a nervous fever, and would not see even the doctor. Our Amy, who pleaded hard to see her, because she was sure she could do her good, received a stern sharp negative, and would have gone away offended, only she was so sorry for her. Not that any fervid friendship, such as young ladies exult in for almost a fortnight incessant, not that any rapturous love exclusive of all mankind had ever arisen between them, for they had nothing whatever in common, save beauty and tenacity, which girls do not love in each other: only that she was always sorry for any one deep in trouble. And believing that Pearl had loved Clayton Nowell, and was grieving for him bitterly, how could Amy help contrasting that misery with her own happiness?

For Amy was nice and happy now, in spite of Cradockʼs departure, and the trouble he had departed in. He loved her almost half as much, she believed, as she loved him; and was not that enough for anybody? His troubles would flow by in time; who on earth could doubt it, unless they doubted God? He was gone to make his way in the world, and her only fear was lest he should make it too grand for Amy to share in. She liked the school–children so, and the pony, and to run out now and then to the kitchen, and dip a bit of crust in the dripping–pan; and she liked to fill her dear fatherʼs pipe, and spread a thin handkerchief over his head. Would all these pleasures be out of her sphere, when Cradock came back, with all London crowning him the greatest and best man of the age? Innocent Amy, never fear. “Nemo, nisi ob homicidium, repente fuit clarissimus.”

Mr. Garnet would have felled those oaks, in spite of Sir Cradockʼs most positive orders, if there had not been another who could not command, but could plead for them. Every morning as the steward came out, frowned and shook his fist at them, the being whom he loved most on earth – far beyond himself, his daughter, and the memory of their mother, all multiplied into each other, – that boy Bob came up to him, and said, “Father, donʼt, for my sake.”

We have not heard much of Bob Garnet yet; we have scarcely shaped him feebly; by no means was he a negative character, yet described most briefly by negatives. In every main point, except two, he was his fatherʼs cardinal opposite. Those two were generosity (which combines the love of truth with a certain warmth of impulse) and persevering energy. Even those two were displayed in ways entirely different, but the staple was very similar.

Bob Garnet was a naturalist. Gentle almost as any girl, and more so than his sister, he took small pleasure in the ways of men, intense delight in those of every other creature. Bob loved all things God had made, even as fair Amy did. All his day, and all his life, he would have spent, if he had the chance, among the ferns and mosses, the desmidiæ of the forest pools, the sun–dew and the fungi, the buff–tips and red underwings, privet–hawks, and emperors. He knew all the children of the spring and handmaids of the summer, all of autumnʼs laden train and the comforters of winter. The happiest of mankind is he whose stores of life are endless, whose pure delights can never cloy, who sees and feels in every birth, in every growth or motion, his own Almighty Father; and loving Him is loved again, as a child who spreads his arms out.

Mr. Garnetʼs affection for this boy surpassed the love of women. He petted, and patted, and coaxed him, and talked nonsense to him by the hour; he was jealous even of Bobʼs attachment to his sister Pearl; in short, all the energy of his goodness, which, like the rest of his energies, transcended the force of other menʼs, centred and spent itself mainly there. But of late Bob had passed all his time with his mother – I mean, of course, with Nature; for his mother in the flesh was dead many a year ago. He had now concluded, with perfect contentment, that his education was finished; and to have the run of the forest at this unwonted season more than consoled him for the disgrace of his recent expulsion from school.

Scarcely any one would believe that Bob Garnet, the best and gentlest boy that ever cried over Euripides – not from the pathos of the poet certainly, but from his own – Bob Garnet, who sang to snails to come out, and they felt that he could not beat them, should have been expelled disgracefully from a private school, whose master must needs expel his own guineas with every banished pupil. However, so it was, and the crime was characteristic. He would sit at night in the lime–trees. Those lime–trees overhung the grey stone wall of the playground near Southampton; and some wanton boys had been caught up there, holding amoibæans with little nursemaids and girls of all work, come out to get lung–and–tongue food. Thereupon a stern ukase was issued that the next boy caught up there would be expelled without trial, as the corrupter of that pure flock. The other boys laughed, I am sorry to say, when “Bob, the natural,” as they called him, meaning thereby the naturalist, was the first to be discovered there, crawling upon a branch as cleverly as a looper caterpillar. Even then the capital sentence was commuted that time, for every master knew, as well as every boy, that Bob could never “say bo” to anything of the feminine gender capable of articulating. So Bob had to learn the fourth Georgic by heart, and did most of it (with extreme enjoyment) up in that very same tree. For he kept all his caterpillars there, his beetle–traps, his moth–nets, even some glorious pupæ, which were due at the end of August; and he nursed a snug little fernery, and had sown some mistletoe seeds, and a dozen other delicious things, and the lime–hawks wanted to burrow soon; in a word, it was Bobʼs hearth and heart–place, for no other boy could scale it. But just when Bob had got to the beginning of Aristæus, and the late bees were buzzing around him, although the linden had berried, an officious usher spied him out – a dirty little fellow, known and despised by all the more respectable σιωπητέαι of Southampton. With hottest indignation, that mean low beggar cried out —

“Boy in the tree there! I see you! Your name this moment, you rascal!”

“Garnet, sir, Bob Garnet. And if you please, sir, I am not a rascal.”

“Come down, sir, this very instant; or else Iʼll come up after you.”

“I donʼt think you can, sir,” replied Bob, looking down complacently; for, as we shall see by–and–by, he was no coward in an emergency. “If you please, sir, no boy in the school can climb this tree except me, sir, since Brown senior left.”

“I can tell you one thing, Garnet: itʼs the last time youʼll ever climb it.”

“Oh, then I must collect my things; I am sorry to keep you waiting, sir. But they are such beauties, and I canʼt see well to pack them.”

Bob packed up his treasures deliberately in his red pocket–handkerchief, and descended very cleverly, holding it with his teeth. The next morning he had to pack his box, and became in the school a mere legend.

His father flew into a violent passion, not with the son, but the schoolmaster: however, he was so transported with joy at getting his own Bob home again, that he soon forgave the cause of it. So the boy got the run of the potato–fields, pollard–trees, and rushy pools, and hunted and grubbed and dabbled, and came home sometimes with three handkerchiefs, not to mention his hat, full. One lovely day this October, before the frost set in – a frost of a length and severity most rare at that time of year – Bob Garnet took his basket and trowel, nets, lens, &c., and set out for a sandy patch, not far from the stream by the Rectory, where in his July holidays he had found some Gladiolus Illyricus, a bloom of which he had carried home, and now he wanted some roots of it. He could not think why his father left him so very much to himself now, and had ceased from those little caresses and fondlings, which used to make Bob look quite ashamed sometimes in the presence of strangers. He felt that his father loved him quite as much as ever, and he had found those strong eyes set upon him with an expression, as it appeared to him, of sorrow and compassion. He had a great mind to ask what the matter was; but his love for his father was a strange feeling, mixed with some dread and uncertainty. He would make Pearl tell him all about it, that would be the best way; for she as well had been carrying on very oddly of late. She sat in her own room all day long, and would never come down to dinner, and would never come out for a stroll with him, but slipped out by herself sometimes in the evening; that, at least, he was sure of. And to tell him indeed, him going on now for seventeen years of age, that he was too young to ask questions! He would let her know, he was quite resolved, that because she happened to be two years older – a pretty reason that was for treating him like a baby! She who didnʼt know a wire–worm from a ring–worm, nor an elater from a tipula, and thought that the tippet–moth was a moth that fed upon tippets! Recalling fifty other instances of poor Pearlʼs deep ignorance, Bob grew more and more indignant, as he thought of the way she treated him. He would stand it no longer. If she was in trouble, that was only the greater reason – Holloa!

Helter–skelter, off dashed Bob after a Queen of Spain fritillary, the first he had ever seen on the wing, and a grand prize for any collector, even of ten times his standing. It was one of the second brood, invited by the sun to sport awhile. And rare sport it afforded Bob, who knew it at once from the other fritillaries, for the shape of the wings is quite different, and he had seen it in grand collections. An active little chap it was, greatly preferring life to death, and thoroughly aware that man is the latterʼs chief agent. Once Bob made quite sure of it, for it had settled on a blackberry–spray, and smack the net came down upon it, but a smack too hard, for the thorns came grinning out at the bottom, and away went the butterfly laughing. Bob made good the net in a moment with some very fine pins that he carried, and off again in still hotter pursuit, having kept his eyes on dear Lathonia. But the prey was now grown wondrous skeary since that narrow shave, and the huntsman saw that his only chance was a clever swoop in mid air. So he raised his net high, and zig–zagged recklessly round the trees, through the bushes, up the banks and down them. At last he got quite close to her, but she flipped round a great beech–trunk; Bob made a cast at hazard, and caught not the Queen, but Amy.

Amy was not frightened much, neither was she hurt, though her pretty round head came out through the net – for she had taken her hat off – and the ring lay upon her shoulders, which the rich hair had shielded from bruises. She would have been frightened terribly, only she knew what was going on, and had stepped behind the tree to avoid the appearance of interfering. For she did not wish – she knew not why – but, by some instinct, she did not wish to have much to do with the Garnets. She regarded poor Bob as a schoolboy, who was very fond of insects, and showed his love by killing them.

But if Amy was not frightened much, Bob, the captor, was. He dropped the handle of his net, and fell back against the beech–tree. Then Amy laughed, and took off the net, or the relics of the gauze at least, and kindly held out her hand to him, and said,

“Oh, how you are grown!”

“And so are you. Oh dear me, have you seen her? Have you seen her?”

“Seen whom?” asked Amy, “my Aunt Eudoxia? She is on there, by the ash–tree.”

“The Queen of Spain, Miss Rosedew, the Queen of Spain fritillary! Oh, tell me which way she went! If I lose her, I am done for!”

“Then, I fear, Master Garnet” – [“Confound it,” thought Bob, “how all the girls do patronize me!”] – “I am very much afraid you must make up your mind to annihilation, if by the ‘Queen of Spain’ you mean that common brown little butterfly you wanted just now to kill so much.”

“Is she gone across the river, then? That is nothing, I assure you. I would go through fire after her. Oh, tell me, only tell me.”

Amy could not help laughing; poor Bob looked so ridiculous, fitting a new net all the time upon the ring of the old one, the crown of his hat come to look for his head, his trousers kicked well up over his boots, and his coat an undoubted ventilator.

“I really donʼt know,” said Amy; “how could you expect me to see through your shrimp–net, Master Garnet?”

“Oh, I beg your pardon – how stupid I am, to be sure – I beg your pardon a thousand times; really I might have hurt you. I would not do that for – ”

“Even the Queen of Spain. To tell you the truth, Master Garnet, if I knew where she was gone I would not tell you, because I canʼt bear to have things killed. In my opinion, it is so cruel.”

“Oh!” cried Bob, a very long “oh,” drawn out into half an ell; and he looked at Amy all the time he was saying it, which was a wonderful thing for him to do. Then it occurred to his mind, for the first time possibly, what a beautiful creature she was, more softly shaded than a Chalk–hill blue, and richer than a cream–spotted tiger–moth! The moment he felt this Bob was done for; Amy had caught her captor.

Flushed as he was with the long hot chase, his cheeks grew hotter and redder, as he got a dim consciousness of a few of the things which he was feeling. He was like a chrysalis, touched in the winter, when it goes on one side from the crust of the thorax, and sometimes can never get right again. After having said “oh,” with emphasis and so much diæresis, Bob did not feel called upon for any further utterance till Amy was gone to her Aunt Eudoxia; and then he contrived to say, “Ah!” He was more put out than he had been even when his pet poplar–hawk caterpillar was devoured alive by ichneumon grubs. He went round the tree ever so many times, and wondered what was the matter with him, how he came there, and what he was doing.

Alas, poor Bob! Nature, who overlooks nothing, was well aware of the difficulties when she cried, “Jump up on my lap, Bob, and never be weaned from me.” She knew that things of all sorts would come between herself and her child, some of them drawn from her own mother–milk, but most of them from manʼs muzzling. Of the latter she had not much fear with Bob; but the former, she knew, were beyond her, and she had none but herself to thank for them. She knew that the lad, so strongly imbued with her own pleasant affluences, was almost sure to be touched with that one which comes from her breast the warmest. And then what would become of zoology, phytology, entomology, and all the other yard–long names which her children spin out of her apron–strings?

While Bob was still fiddling with his fingers, and forgetting all about butterflies, Miss Eudoxia, fetched by Amy, came to hold discourse with him.

“Why, Master Robert, I do declare, Robert, my butterfly boy! I have not seen you for such a time, Robert.” And she held out her hand, which Bob took with very little sense of gratitude. To be called a “butterfly boy” before Amy, and Amy to acquiesce in it!

“Ah, you think I have nothing for you, Robert. You school–boys live upon suction. But just wait a moment, my dear.”

She drew forth an old horn comfit–box, which had belonged to her grandmother, and was polished up like amber from the chafing of many a lining. This she opened with much ado, poured three crinkled sugar–plums on her gloved palm, and a smooth one as large as a hazel–nut, and offered them all to Robert, with a smile of the finest patronage.

“No, thank you, Miss Rosedew; no, thank you. I am very much obliged to you.”

Miss Eudoxia had been wondering at her own generosity, and thought that he was overcome with it. So her smile became one of encouragement and assurance against self–sacrifice.

“Oh, you need not be afraid, Robert. And you can put some under your pillow, and wake up in the night and suck them. How nice that will be, to be sure! You see I know what boys are. And I have plenty left for the infant–school. And they donʼt deserve them as you do, Robin.”

“Miss Rosedew,” said Bob, in his loftiest manner, though he was longing for them, only that Amy was there; “you will believe me when I assure you that I never touch sweets of any sort; not even at a late dinner–party.”

Miss Eudoxia turned her eyes up, and almost dropped the sugar–plums. But Amy, instead of being impressed, merrily laughed, and said,

“Give them to me, then, auntie, please. Some of the men at the night–school eat sweets after early suppers.”

Bob said “good–bye” disconsolately, for he knew that he had affronted Miss Doxy, without rising in Amyʼs opinion. He forgot all about the gladiolus, and let many great prizes escape him; for the day was the last of the soft and sunny, which tempt forth the forest denizens ere the frosty seal is set on them. In the glimpses of every brown arcade, in the jumbled gleam of the underwood, in the alleys between the upstanding trees, even in the strong light where the golden patches shone, and the wood fell back to look at them, in all of these he seemed to see and then to lose his angel. Her face he could not see clearly yet, hard as he strove to do it; affection is, but love is not, a photographic power. Still he could see her shadowly; her attitude, the fall of her hair, the manner of her gestures; even the ring of her voice would seem to dwell about the image. But he never got them all together; one each time was the leading thing; vague; and yet it went through him.

He made one attempt – for he feared from the first, although he never could feel it so, that his love was a thorough wild–goose chase – the poor boy made one last attempt to catch at some other pursuit.

“Father,” he said that very same night, after sitting for hours of wandering, “will you give me a gun and let me take to shooting?”

“A gun!” cried Bull Garnet, starting; “a gun, Bob! What do you mean by it?”

“I meant nothing at all, father. Only I know the way to stuff birds, and there are some rare ones here sometimes, and I want to make a collection.”

“Bob Garnet, as long as I am alive, you never shall have a gun.”

“Then, will you lend me yours, father? I know very well how to use it. I mean your patent – ”

“Never, Bob. My son, if you love me, never speak of it again.”

CHAPTER III

When Miss Rosedew and her niece came in to get ready for dinner, Amy cried out suddenly, “Oh, only look at the roses, aunt; how they have opened to–day! What delicious Louise Odier, and just look at General Jacqueminot! and I do declare Jules Margottin is finer than he was at Midsummer. I must cut a few, for I know quite well there will come a great frost if I donʼt, and then where will all my loves be?”

Amyʼs prediction about the weather was as random a guess as we may find in great authorities, who are never right, although they give the winds sixteen points of the thirty–two to shuffle in. But it so turned out that the girl was right – a point of the compass never hit till a day too late by our weather–clerks.

That very same night such a frost set in as had not been known in October for very nearly a century. It lasted nine nights and eight days; twice the mercury fell more than half way from the freezing point to zero, and the grass was crisp in the shade all day, though the high sun wiped off the whiteness at noon wherever he found the way to it. Boys rejoiced, and went mitching, to slide on the pools of the open furzery: no boys since the time of their great–grandfathers had done the heel–tap in October. But the birds did not appreciate it. What in the world did it mean? Why, there were the hips not ripe yet, and the hollyberries come to no colour, and half the blackberries still too acid, and, lo! it was freezing hard enough to make a worm cold for the stomach, even if you could get him! Surely there was some stupid mistake of two months in the piperʼs almanac. All they could say was that, if it were so, those impudent free–and–easy birds who came sponging on them in the winter – and too stuck up, forsooth! to live with them after sucking all the fat of the land, and winning their daughters’ affections – those outlandish beggars – be hanged to them – had got the wrong almanac too.

Why, they had not even heard the chatter, the everlasting high–fashion clack, of those jerk–tail fieldfares yet; nor had a missel–thrush come swaggering to bully a decent throstle that had sung hard all the summer, just because his breast and his coarse–shaped spots were bigger. Why, they had not even seen a clumsy short–eared owl flopping out of the dry fern yet – much good might it do him, the fern that belonged to themselves! – nor a single wedge of grey–lag geese, nor a woodcock that knew his business. And those nasty dissolute quacking mallards that floated in bed all day, the sluggards, and then wouldnʼt let a respectable bird have a chance of a good nightʼs roost – there they were still on the barley–stubble; please God they might only get frozen!

And yet, confound it all, what was the weather coming to? You might dig, and tap, and jump with both feet, and put your head on one side in the most knowing manner possible, and get behind a tuft of grass, and wait there ever so long, and devil a worm would come up! And, as for the slugs, oh, donʼt let me hear of them! Though the thieves had not all got home yet, they were ten degrees too cold for even an oyster–catcherʼs stomach: feathers and pip, my dear fellow! it gives me the colic to think of one. Put your head under my wing, Jenny Wren; oh, my darling, how cold your beak is!

Such, so far as I could gather them, were the sentiments of the birds, and their confabulation, when they went to roost, half an hour earlier than usual – for bed is the warmest place after all; besides, what was there to do? – on the 24th of October, 1859. And they felt the cold rime settling down on grey twig, and good brown leaf. Yet some of the older birds, cocks of long experience, buffers beyond all chaff, perked one eye at the eastern heavens, before tucking it under the scapular down – the eastern heavens all barred with murky red. Then they gave a little self–satisfied tweedle, which meant to the ear of Melampus,

“Ah ha! an old bird like me knows something about the weather! Bless my drumsticks and merrythought, I shanʼt be so cold and hungry, please God, this time to–morrow night.”

Oh you little wiseacres, much you know what impendeth! A worse row than all the mallards you grumble at could make in a thousand years will spoil your roost to–morrow night. Think it a mercy if you do not get your very feathers blown off of you – ay, and the tree of your ancestors snapped beneath your feet – before this time to morrow night.

John Rosedew met the prettiest bird that ever had nest in the New Forest, his own little duck of an Amy, in the passage by the parlour–door, at eight oʼclock in the morning of that 25th of October. He kissed her white forehead lovingly, according to early usage; then he glanced at the weather–glass, and went nearer, supposing that his short sight had cheated him.

“Why, Amy dear, you must have forgotten to set the glass last night.”

“No, indeed, papa. I set it very carefully. You know I can do it as well as you can, since you showed me the way. It was just a little hollow last night, and I moved the Verrier scale just a hundredth part of an inch downwards, and then it was ten oʼclock.”

“Then may the Lord have mercy on all seafaring men, especially our poor boatmen, and the dredging people off Rushford!”

Mr. Rosedew, as has been said before, was parson of Rushford as well as of Nowelhurst. At the former place he kept a curate, but looked after the poor people none the less, for the distance was only six miles; and now, as his legs were getting stiff, he had bought Coræbus to help him. Rushford lies towards the eastern end of the great Hurst shingle bank, the most dangerous part of Christchurch Bay, being fully exposed to the south–west gales, and just in the run of the double tide; in the eddy of the Needles.

“Why, what is the matter, papa? Even if it rains, it wonʼt hurt them much. And itʼs as lovely a morning as ever was seen, and the white frost sparkling beautifully. What a magnificent sunrise! Or, at least, a very strange one.”

“ʼSibi temperat unda carinis.’ All is smooth for the present. But I heard the lash of the ground–sea last night, when I lay awake. Fetch my telescope, darling, and come with me to the green room. We can see thence to St. Albanʼs Head; but the danger is for those beyond it. All the ships on this side of it will have time to work up the Solent. Never before have I known the mercury fall as it has done now. An inch and a tenth in only ten hours!”

When they went to bed on the previous night, the quicksilver stood at 30° 10´. Now it was at 29°, and cupped like the bottom of a champagne bottle, which showed that it still fell rapidly. But as yet the silver of the frost was sparkling on the lawn, and the morning sun looked up the heavens, as if he felt all right. Nevertheless, it was but show: he is bound to make the best of it, and, like all other warm–hearted beings, sometimes has sorry work there.

When they saw that no large craft had rounded St. Albanʼs Head, only that the poor cement–dredgers were working away at septaria, John and his daughter went to breakfast, hoping that no harm would be, while Miss Eudoxia lay in bed, and reflected on her own good qualities.

Amy came out after breakfast, without any bonnet or hat on, to make her own observations. That girl so loved the open air, the ever glorious concave, the frank palm of the hand of God – for in cities we get His knuckles – that she felt as if she had not bowed before her Friend and Maker, the all–giving, the all–loving One, until she had paid her orisons and sung her morning hymn with His own ceiling over her. So now she walked beneath the branches laden with His jewellery, and over the ground hard–trodden by ministers doing His will, and beside the spear and the flat–grass, chilled with the awe of His breath, and among the wailing flowers, wailing and black and shrivelled up, because His face was cold to them.

For these poor Amy grieved sadly, for she was just beginning to care again for the things whose roots were outside of her. Lo the bright chrysanthemums, plumed, reflex, and fimbriate; lo the gorgeous dahlias, bosses quilled and plaited tight, and wrought with depth of colour; and then the elegant asters, cushioned, cochleate, praying only to have their eyes looked into; most of all, her own sweet roses, chosen flowers of the chosen land – they hung their heads, and stuck together, as brown as a quartered apple. Who could look at them, who could think of them, and not feel as if some of herself were dead?

Now, walking there, this youthful maiden, fairest of all His works and purest, began to observe, as He has taught us, the delicacies, the pores, and glints of the grand universal footprint. Not that the girl perceived one–tenth of the things being done around her, any more than I can tell them; for observation grows from as well as begets experience; and the girlish mind (and the boyish too, at any rate for the most part) has very lax and indefinite communion with nature. How seldom do we meet a lady who knows what way the wind is! They all believe that it must freeze harder when the sky is cloudy; not one in fifty but trembles more at the thunder than at the lightning.

Yet Amy, with true womanʼs instinct, being alarmed for the lives of others, after her fatherʼs prediction, looked around her narrowly. And first her eyes went upwards, and they were right in doing so. Of the sky she knew less than nothing – although herself well known there; but the trees – come now, she was perfectly sure she knew something about the trees. So you do, you darling; and yet a very wee little; though more than half the ladies do. You know an elm from a wych–elm, and a hornbeam from a beech; and what more can we expect of you?

The rime upon the dark tree–boles and the forward push of the branches, the rime of white fur, newly breathen but an hour ago, when a flaw from the east came cat–like, and went through without moving anything; this delicate down from the lips of morning, silk work upon the night–fleece, was, as all most beautiful is, the first to fleet and vanish. Changing into a doubtful glister, which you must touch to be sure of it, then trickling away into beaded drops, like a tear which will have no denial, it came down the older and harder rime, and perhaps would bring that into its humour, and perhaps would get colder and freeze again into little lumps, like a tap leaking. Then the white face of the rough pillared trunks, pearled with glistening purity, was bighted into with scoops and dark bays, like the sweep of a scythe in the morning. On the bars of the gate, the silver harvest, spiked and cropping infinitely, began to sheave itself away, and then the sheaves were full ripe tears, and the tears ran down if you thought of them.

But the notable sight of all, at least to a loitering mind the most striking, was to see how the hoar–frost gradually was lifting its light wing from the grass. In little tufts and random patches – random to us who know not why – the spangles, the spears, and the crusted flakes, the fairy tinsel, the ermine of dew, the very down of moonlight, the kiss of the sky too pure for snow, and the glittering glance of stars reflected – all this loveliness, caught and fastened, by the nightʼs halourgic, in one broad sheet of virgin white, was hovering off in tufts and patches, as if a blind angel had breathed on it, with his flight only guided by pity.

But through, and in, and between it all, the boles of the trees, and the bars of the gate, the ridge of the ruts, and dapples of lawn, one thing Amy observed which puzzled her, for even she knew that it was a thing against all usage. The thaw was not on the south side or the south–east side of anything, though the sickly sun was gazing there; but the melting came from the north, and took the frost aback. She wondered vainly about it, but the matter was simple enough, like most of the things which we wonder at, instead of at our own ignorance. A flaw of warm air from the north had set in; a lower warp which shot through and threaded the cold south–eastern woof. This is not a common occurrence. Since my vague, unguided, and weak observations began, I have only seen it thrice. And on each of those three times it has been followed by a fearful tempest. Usually, a frost breaks up with a shift of the wind to the south–east, a gradual relaxing, a fusion of warmer air, and a great effusion of damp, a blanket of clouds for the earth, and a doubt in the sky how to use them. Then the doubt ends – as many other doubts end – in precipitation. The wind chops round to the west of south; the moisture condenses outside our windows, instead of starring the inside; and then come a few spits of rain. But the rain is not often heavy at first, although it is stinging and biting, – a rain which is half ashamed of itself, as if it ought to be hail.

But, after all, these things depend on things we cannot depend upon, – moods of the air to be multiplied into humours of the earth and sea, and the product traversed, indorsed, divided, touched, and sliced at every angle by solar, lunar, and astral influences.

“Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.”

Lucky the man who knows when to take out his umbrella.

That morning, the north wind crept along, sponging the rime from the grass, and hustling it rudely from the tree–sprays, on many of which the black leaves draggled, frozen while yet in verdure. Then the sky began to be slurred across with white clouds breathing out from it, as a child breathes on the blade of a knife, or on a carriage window. These blots of cloud threw feelers out, and strung themselves together, until a broad serried and serrate bar went boldly across the heavens, from south–east to north–west. It marked the point whence the gale would begin, and the quarter where it would end. From this great bar, on either side, dappled and mottled, like the wash of sepia on a drawing, little offsets straggled away, and began to wisp with a spiral motion, slow and yet perceptible.

This went on for an hour or two, darkening and deepening continually, amassing more and more of the sky, gathering vapours to it, and embodying as it got hold of them; but still there was some white wan sunshine through the mustering cloud–blots and the spattering mud of the heavens; and still the good folks who had suffered from chilblains, and found it so much milder, exclaimed, “What a beautiful day!”

Then about noon a mock sun appeared, feeble, wild, and haggard, whose mates on the crown and the east of the arc could scarcely keep him in countenance. Over all this, and over the true sun and the cirrhous outrunners, heavily drove at one oʼclock the laden and leaden cumulus, blurred on the outskirts with cumulostrate, and daubed with lumps of vapour which mariners call “Noahʼs arks.”

Then came the first sough of the wind, a long, prolonged, deep–drawn, dry sob, a hollow and mysterious sound, that shivered through the brown leaves, and moaned among the tree–boles. Away went every beast and bird that knew the fearful signal: the deer lanced away to the holm–frith; the cattle in huffs came belloking to the lew of the boughy trees; the hogs ran together, and tossed their snouts, and skittered home from the ovest; the squirrel hied to his hollow dray, the weasel slunk to his tuffet lair, and every rabbit skipped home from grass. The crows and the magpies were all in a churm; the heavy–winged heron flapped off from the brook–side; the jar–bird flicked out from the ivy–drum; the yaffingale darted across the ride with his strange discordant laugh; even the creepers that ply the trees crept into lichened fastnesses, lay flat to the bark, and listened.

Nor less the solid, heavy powers that have to stay and break the storm, no less did they, the beechen clump, the funnelled glens, the heathery breastwork, even the depths of forest night – whence common winds shrink back affrighted – even the bastions of Norman oak, scarred by many a tempest–siege, and buckled by the mighty gale of 1703, – one and all they whispered of the stress of heaven impending.

First came fitful scuds of rain, “flisky” rain they call it, loose outriders of the storm, spurning the soft ice, as they dashed by, and lashing the woodmanʼs windows. Then a short dark pause ensued, in which the sky swirled up with clouds, and the earth lay mute with terror. Only now and then a murmur went along the uplands.

Suddenly, ere a man might say, “Good God!” or “Where are my children?” every tree was taken aback, every peat–stack reeled and staggered, every cot was stripped of its thatch, on the opposite side to that on which the blow was expected.

The first squall of that great tempest broke from the dark south–east. It burst through the sleet, and dashed it upwards like an army of archers shooting; ere a man could stay himself one way, it had caught him up from another. The leaves from the ground flew up again through the branches which had dropped them; and then a cloud of all manner of foliage, whirling, flustering, capering, flitting, soared high over the highest tree–tops, and drove through the sky like dead shooting–stars.

All that afternoon, the squalls flew faster, screaming onward to one another, furious maniacs dashing headlong, smiting themselves and everything. Then there came a lull. So sudden that the silence was more stunning than the turmoil. A pause for sunset; for brave men countless to see their last of sunlight. That evening, the sundown gun from Calshot was heard over all the forest. I remember to have expected fully that the next flaw of air would come, like a heavy sigh, from the south–west. The expectation showed how much I underrated the magnitude of that broad stormʼs area. If the wind had chopped then, it would have been only a hard gale, not a hurricane.

Like a wave of the sea, it came on solidly, and from the old direction; no squall, no blast, any more; but one bodily rush of phalanxed air through a chasm in the firmament. Black, and tossing stone and metal as a girl jerks up her hat–plume, it swept the breadth of land and sea, as bisons horded sweep the snow–drifts, as Niagara sweeps the weeds away.

Where the full force of that storm broke, any man must have been mad drunk who attempted to go to bed. Houses unroofed, great trees snapped off and flung into another tree, men caught like chaff from the winnowing and dropped somewhere in pond or gravel–pit, the carrierʼs van overthrown on the road, and three oaks come down to lie upon it, – some blown–away people brought news of these things, and fetched their breath up to tell them.

Our own staunch hearths rocked under us, and we looked for the walls to fall in upon us, as every mad rush came plunging.

Miss Eudoxia sat with Amy, near the kitchen fire; at least where the fire should have been, but the wind had quenched it long ago. Near them cowered Jemima and Jenny, begging not to be sent to bed. They had crawled up–stairs to see about it, and the floor came up to them – so they said – like the shifting plate of the oven. The parlour chimney–stack had fallen; but, in Godʼs mercy, clear and harmless from the roof of the house. No fear of the thatch taking fire: that wind would have blown out the fire of London.

Now as they sat, or crouched and sidled, watching the cracks of the ceiling above, jumping every now and then, as big lumps of mortar fell down the chimney, and shrinking into themselves, every time the great stack groaned and laboured so, Miss Eudoxia, full of pluck, was reading aloud – to little purpose, for she scarcely could hear her own voice – the prayers which are meant to be used at sea, and the 107th Psalm. And who shall say that she was wrong, especially as the devil is supposed to be so busy in a gale of wind?

Jemima and Amy were doing their best to catch her voice at intervals. As for Jenny, she did not care much what became of her now. She knew at the last full moon that her sweetheart was thoroughly up for jilting her; and now when she had ventured out – purely of her own self–will – the wind had taken her up anyhow, and whisked her like a snow–flake against the wash–house door. She was sure to have a black eye in the morning, and then it would be all up with her; and Jemima might go sweethearting, and she could not keep her company.

The roar through the wood, the yells at the corners, the bellowing round the chimneys, the thunder of the implacable hurricane; any mortal voice was less than a whisper into a steam–whistle. Who could tell what trees were falling? A monster might be hurled on the roof, and not one of them would know it until it came sheer through the ceiling. Amy was pale as the cinders before her, but firm as the bars of iron, and even trying to smile sometimes at the shrieks and queer turns of the tempest. No candle could be kept alight, and the flame of the parlour lamp quivered like a shirt badly pinned on a washing–line. But Amy was thinking dearly of the father of the household, the father of the parish, out in the blinding wind and rain, and where the wild waves were lashing. And now and then Amy wondered whether it blew so hard in London, and hoped they had no big chimneys there.

John Rosedew had taken his little bundle, in a waterproof case, and set out on foot for Rushford, when the storm became unmistakeable. He would not ride Coræbus; first because he would have found it impossible to wipe him dry, secondly because the wind has such purchase upon a man when he is up there on the pommel. So the rector strode off in his stoutest manner, an hour or so before nightfall, and the rain went into him, neck and shoes, before he got to the peat–rick. To a resolute man, who feels sometimes that the human hide wants tanning, there are few greater pleasures than getting basted and cracklined by the wet wind; only it must not come too often, neither last too long.

So John was in excellent spirits, quelching along and going pop like a ball of India–rubber, when he came on a weaker fellow–mortal, stuck fast in a chair of beech–roots.

“Why, Robert!” said Mr. Rosedew, and nine–tenths of his voice went to leeward; “Robert, my boy; – oh dear!”

That last exclamation followed in vain Johnʼs favourite old hat, which every one in the parish loved, especially the children. The hat went over the crest of the hill, and leaped into an oak–tree, and was seen no more but of turtle–doves, who built therein next summer, and for three or four generations; and all the doves were blessed, for the sake of the man who sought peace and ensued it.

“Let me go after it,” cried Bob, with his knees and teeth knocking together.

“To be sure I will,” replied John Rosedew – the nearest approach to irony that the worst wind ever took him – “now, Robert, come with me.”

He hooked the light stripling, hard and firm, to his own staunch powerful frame, and, like a steamer lashed alongside, forced him across the wind–brunt. And so, by keeping the covered ways, by running the grooves of the hurricane, they both got safe to Rushford; to which achievement Bobʼs loving knowledge of every inch of the forest contributed at least as much as the stern strength of the parson.

Pretty Bob had no right, of course, to be out there at that time; but he had heard of a glorious company of the deathʼs–head caterpillar, in a snug potato–field, scooped from out the woodlands. He knew that they must have burrowed now, and so he set out to dig for them with his little handfork, directly the thaw allowed him. Anything to divert his mind, or rather revert it into the natural channel. He had dreamed about sugar–plums, and Amy, and butterfly–nets, and Queens of Spain, and his father scowling over all, until his brain, at that sensitive time, was like a sirex, trying to get out but stuck fast by the antennæ. Now, Bob, though awake to the little tricks and pleasant ways of Nature, as observed in cricks and crannies, knew nothing as yet of her broader moods, her purging sweeps, her clearances, – in a word, he was a stranger to the law of storms. Therefore he got a bitter lesson, and one which set him a thinking. John Rosedew, with his grand bare head bent forward to the wind–blow, and the grey locks sweeping backward – how Amy would have cried! – towed Bob Garnet down the combe which spreads out to the sea at Rushford. The fall of the waves was short and hard – no long ocean rollers yet, only an angry beating surf, sputtering under the gravel–cliff.

They found some shelter in the hollow, which opens to the south–south–west; for, though it was blowing as hard as ever, the wind had not canted round yet; and the little village of Rushford, upon which the sea is gaining so, was happy enough in its “bunney,” and could keep its candles burning.

“Iʼll go home with the boy at sundown, when the gale breaks, as I hope it will. His father will be in a dreadful way, and I know what that man is. But I could not leave the boy there, neither could I go back again.”

So said John Rosedew, lulled by the shelter, feeling as if he had frightened himself and all his household for nothing; almost ashamed to show himself at Octavius Pellʼs sea–cottage, the very last dwelling of the village. But Octave Pell knew better. He had not lived upon that coast, fagging out as a cricketer of the Church of England, with his feet and his hands ready always, and his spiked shoes holding the ground, – he had not been on the outside of all things, hoping for innings some day, without looking up at the skies sometimes, and guessing about promotion. So he knew that his rector, whom he revered beyond all the fathers of men or women – for he too was soft upon Amy – he saw that his rector was right in coming, except for his own dear sake.

John came in, with his shapely legs stuck all tight in the shrunk kerseymere (shrunk, and varnished, and puckered like plaiting, from the pelt of the rain), and by one hand still he drew the quenched and welyy Bob. The wind was sucking round the cliff, and the door flew open hard enough for a weak manʼs legs to go with it. But “Octave” Pell – as he was called, because he would sing, though he could not – the Reverend Octavius was of a sturdy order, well–balanced and steady–going. He drew in his reeking visitors, and dried, and fed, and warmed them; Bob being lodged in a suit of clothes which he could only inhabit sparsely. Then Pell laid aside his rose–root pipe out of deference to his rector, and made Bob drink hot brandy–and–water till he chattered more than his teeth had done.

That curate was a fine young fellow, a B.A. of John Rosedewʼs college, to whom John had given a title for orders – not sold it, as some rectors do, for a twelvemonthʼs stipend. A tall, strong, gentlemanly parson, stuck up in no wise, nor stuck down; neither of the High nor Low Church rut, although an improvement on the old type which cared for none of these things. He did his duty by his parish; and, as follows almost of necessity, his parish loved and admired him. He never lifted a poor manʼs pot–lid to know what he had for dinner; he never made much of sectarian squabbles, nor tried to exorcise dissent. In a word, he kept his place, because he felt and loved it.

Only two rooms had Pell to boast of, but he was wonderfully happy in them. He could find all his property in the dark, and had only one silver spoon. And the man who can be happy with one, was born with it in his mouth. Those two rooms he rented from old Jacob Thwarthawse, or rather from Mrs. Jacob, for the old man was a pilot on the Southampton Water, and scarcely home twice in a twelvemonth. The little cot looked like a boat–house at the bottom of the bunney; so close it was to the high–water mark, that the froth of the waves and the drifting skates’ eggs came almost up to the threshold when the tide ran big, and the wind blew fresh.

And in the gentle summer night – pray what is it in Theocritus? John Rosedew could tell, but not I – at least, I mean without looking —

 

“Along the pinched caboose, on every side,

With mincing murmur swam the ocean tide.”

 

Id. xxi. 17.

CHAPTER IV

By the time Octavius Pell had clothed, and fed, and warmed his drenched and buffeted guests, the sun was slipping out of sight, and glad to be quit of the mischief. For a minute or two, the cloud–curtain lifted over St. Albanʼs Head, and a narrow bar of lively green striped the lurid heavens. This was the critical period, and John Rosedew was aware of it, as well as Octave Pell. Either the wind would shift to south–west quicker than vanes could keep time with it, and then there would be a lively storm, with no very wide area; or else it would come on again with one impetuous leap and roar, and no change of direction, and work to the south–west gradually, blowing harder until it got there. The sea was not very heavy yet, when they went out to look at it; the rain had ceased altogether; there was not air enough to move the fur of a ladyʼs boa; but, out beyond the Atlantic offing, ridges like edges of knives were jumping, as if to look over the sky–line.

“Nulla in prospectu navis,” said John Rosedew, who always talked Latin, as a matter of course, when he met an Oxford man; “at least, so far as I can see with the aid of my long–rangers.”

“No,” replied Pell, “and Iʼm heartily glad that there is no ship in sight; for, unless Iʼm much mistaken – run, sir, run like lightning. Iʼve got no more dry clothes.”

They ran for it, and were just in time before the fury came down again. Bob Garnet was ready to slip away, for he knew that his father would be wild about him; he had taken his drenched hat from the firetongs, and was tugging at the latch of the door. But now there was no help for it.

“We are in for it now,” cried Mr. Rosedew; “I have not come down for nothing. It is, what I feared this morning, the heaviest storm that has broken upon us for at least a generation. And we are not yet in the worst of it. God grant there be no unfortunate ship making for the Needles. All our boats, you say, Pell, are in the Solent long ago. Bob, my boy, you must not expect to see your father to–night. I hope he will guess what has happened.”

The beach, or pebble bank of Hurst, is a long and narrow spit of land, growing narrower every year, which forms a natural breakwater to the frith of the Solent. It curves away to the south of east from the straighter and more lofty coast of Barton, Hordle, and Rushford. Hurst Castle, in which it terminates, is the eastern horn of Christchurch Bay, as Hengistbury Head is the western. The Isle of Wight and the Needle Rocks protect this bay from the east windʼs power, but a due south wind brings in the sea, and a south–west the Atlantic. Off this coast we see at times those strange floating or rising islands known by the name of the “Shingles;” which sometimes stay above water so long, that their surface is clad with the tender green of bladderwort and samphire; but more often they disappear after taking the air for a few short hours. For several years now they have taken no air; and a boatman told me the other day, that, from the rapid strides of the sea, he thought it impossible for the “Shingles” ever to top the waves again.

Up and down the Solent channel the tide pours at a furious speed; and the rush of the strong ebb down the narrows, flushed with the cross–tide from St. Helenʼs, combs and pants out into Christchurch Bay, above the floodmark of two hours since. This great eddy, or reflux, is called the “double–tide;” and an awkward power it has for any poor vessel to fall into.

All that night it blew and blew, harder and harder yet; the fishermenʼs boats on the beach were caught up, and flung against the gravel–cliff; the stout men, if they ventured out, were snatched up as a mother snatches a child from the wheels of a carriage; the oaks of the wood, after wailing and howling, as they had done to a thousand tempests, found that outcry go for nothing, and with it went themselves. Seven hundred towers of Natureʼs building showed their roots to the morning. The old moon expired at O·32; and many a gap the new moon found, where its mother threw playful shadows. The sons of Ytene are not swift–witted, nor deeply read in the calendar; yet they are apt to mark and heed the great convulsions of nature. The old men used to date their weddings from the terrible winter of 1787; the landmark of the young menʼs annals is the storm of 1859.

All that night, young Robert Garnet was strung by some strange tension. Of course he could not sleep, amid that fearful uproar, although he was plunged and lost from sight in Octavius Pellʼs great chair. The only luxury Pell possessed – and that somehow by accident – was a deep, and soft, and mighty chair, big enough for three people. After one of the windows came in, which it did, with a crash, about ten oʼclock, scattering Pellʼs tobacco–jars, and after they had made it good with books and boxes and a rug, so that the wind was filtered through it, John Rosedew and his curate sat on a couple of hard old Windsors, watching the castle of Hurst. Thence would come the signal flash, if any hapless bark should be seen driving over the waters. There they sat, John Rosedew talking, as he could talk to a younger man, when his great heart was moved to its depth, and the multitude of his mind in march, and his soul anticipating it: talking so that Octave Pell, following his silver tones, even through that turmoil, utterly forgot the tempest, and the lapse of hours, and let fall on his lap the pipe, which John had made him smoke.

The thunder of the billows waxing, for the wind was now south–west, began to drown the roar of the gale, and a storm of foam was flying, when the faint gleam of a gun at sea was answered by artilleryʼs flash from the walls of old Henry the Eighth. Both men saw the landward light leap up and stream to leeward; but only the younger one descried the weak appeal from the offing.

“Where is she, Pell? Have you any idea?”

“She is away, sir, here to the right: dead in the eye of the wind.”

“Then may our God and Father pity our brothers and our sisters!”

Out ran both those strong good men, leaving poor Bob (as they thought) asleep in the depth of the easy–chair. The little cottage was partly sheltered by an elbow of the cliff; otherwise it would have been flying up the bunney long ago. The moment the men came out of the shelter, they were driven one against the other, and both against the cliff.

“My castle will go at high–water,” said Pell, though none could hear him; “but I shall be back in time enough to get the old woman out.”

Then, as far as Pell could make out in the fierce noise and the darkness, John Rosedew begged him to go back, while himself went on alone. For it was Johnʼs especial business; he had procured the lifeboat, chosen the crew, and kept the accounts; and he thought himself responsible for any wreck that happened. But what good on earth could Pell do, and all his chattels in danger?

“No good, very likely,” Pell shouted, “and a good deal perhaps in–doors! Keep the sea out with a besom.”

Octave had a dry way with him, not only when he sang, but when he thought he saw the right, and did not mean to argue it. So rector and curate, old man and young man, trudged along together, each bending low, and throwing his weight, like a quoit, against the wind; each stopping and crouching at every tenth yard, as the blast irresistible broke on them. Crusted with hunks of froth pell–mell, like a storm of eggs on the hustings, drenched by pelting sheets of spray, deafened by the thundering surf, and often obliged to fly with the wind from a wave that rushed up scolloping, they battled for that scoop of the bay where the ship must be flung by the indraught.

Up to the present, Christchurch Point, and St. Albanʼs Head beyond it, broke (as the wind was westering) some little of the wildest sea–brunt. But now they stood, or rather crouched, where the mountain rollers gathering, sweeping, towering onward, avalanche upon avalanche, burst on their destined barrier. A thousand leagues of water, swelled by the whole weight of heaven flung on it, there leaped up on the solid earth, and to the heaven that vexed it. As a strong man in his wrath accepts his wifeʼs endorsement, so the surges took the minor passion of a fierce spring–tide, rolled it in their own, and scorned the flat land they looked down upon. Tush, the combing of their crests was bigger than any town there. On they came, too grand to be hurried even by the storm that roused them; each had a quarter of a mile to himself, and who should take it from him? The white foam fell back in the wide water valleys, and hissed and curdled away in flat loops, and the storm took the mountain ridges again and swept the leaping snow off. Anon, as it struck the shelving shore, each rolling monster tossed its crest unspeakably indignant; hung with impending volume, curling like the scroll of God; then thundered, as in judgment, down, and lashed the trembling earth.

Among them, not a mile from shore, as the breaking daylight showed it, heaved, and pitched, and wallowed hog–like in the trough of waters, a large ship, swept and naked. Swept of her masts, of her canvas naked; but clad, alas! with men and women, clustering, clinging, cowering from the great white grave beneath them. As she laboured, reeled, and staggered up to the storm–rent heavens, and then plunged down the yawning chasm, every attitude, every gesture of terror, love, despair, and madness could be descried on the object–glass of the too–faithful telescope. As a ghastly wan gleam from the east lit up all that quivering horror, all that plight of anguish, John Rosedew turned away in tears, and fell upon his knees.

But Pell caught up the clear Munich glass, blocked every now and then with foam; he wiped it with his cuff, and levelled it on a stony ledge. There he lay behind the pebbles, himself not out of danger, unable to move, or look away, spellbound by the awe of death in numbered moments coming. Round him many a sturdy boatman, gazing, listening, rubbing his eyes, wondering about the wives and children of the brave men there. The great disaster imminent was known all over the village, and all who dared to cross the gale had crept, under shelter, hitherwards. None was fool enough to talk of boat, or tug, or lifeboat; a child who had then first seen the sea must have known better than that. The best ship in the British navy could not have come out of the Needles in the teeth of such a hurricane.

Some of the tars had brought their old Dollonds, preventive glasses long cashiered, and smugglersʼ night–rakers cheek by jowl, and every sort of “perspective,” fifty years old and upward, with the lenses cracked and rattling, and fungoid tufts in the object–glass. Nevertheless, each man would swear that his own glass was the best of the lot, and his neighbourʼs “not of much count.” To their minds, telescopes like spectacles suit the proprietor only.

“By Jove, I believe sheʼll do it!” cried Pell, the chief interpreter, his glass being the only clear one.

“Do what, sir? what?” asked a dozen voices, hurriedly.

“Get her head round to windward, and swing into smoother water. Theyʼre in the undertow already. Oh, if they only knew it!”

They knew it, he saw, in a moment. They ran up a spare sail, ere he could speak, to the stump of the mizen–mast, and a score of brave men strained on the sheets until they had braced them home. They knew that it could not stand long; it would fly away to leeward most likely when once they mounted the wave–crest; but two or three minutes might save them. With eight hands jamming the helm up, and the tough canvas tugging and bellying, the ship, with the aid of the undertow, plunged heavily to windward. All knew that the ship herself was doomed, that she never could fetch off shore; but, if she could only hold her course for some half–mile to the westward, she would turn the flank of those fearful rollers, and a good stout boat might live. For there a south–western headland broke the long fury of the sea.

Every eye was intent, every bosom drew a deep breath, as the next great billow rose under the ship, and tossed her up to the tempest. They had brought her as near to the wind as they dared, so as still to have steerage way on her, and she took the whole force of the surge on her port bow, not on her beam, as the people on shore had feared. The sea broke bodily over her, and she staggered back from the blow, and shook through every timber, then leaped and lurched down the terrible valley, but still, with the good sail holding. She was under noble seamanship, that was clear to every one, and herself a noble fabric. If she could but surmount two billows more, without falling off from the wind, within three points of which her head lay, most of the crew might be rescued. Already a stout galley, manned with ten oars, was coming out of Christchurch Harbour, dancing like a cork on the waves, though sheltered by the headland.

Our ship rode over the next billow gallantly; it was a wave that had some moderation, and the lungs of the gale for the moment were panting, just as she topped the comb of it. “Hurrah!” shouted the men ashore; “By God, sheʼll do it yet!”

By God alone could she do it. But the Father saw not fit; the third billow was the largest of all that had yet rolled up from the ocean. Beam–end on she clomb the mountain, heeling over heavily, showing to the shore her deck–seams, – even the companion–finial, and the poor things clinging there; a wail broke from them as the great sea struck her, and swept away half a score of them.

“Nowʼs your chance, men. D – n your eyes! She wonʼt hang there two minutes. Out with the boats you – lubbers. Look sharp, and be d – d to you.”

The ancient pilot, Thwarthawse, dancing and stamping, his blue jacket flapping in the wind, and his face of the deepest plum colour, roared to windward his whirlwind of oaths up an old split trumpet, down which the wind came bellowing harder than his voice went up it.

“Stow that, Jacob!” cried an old Scotchman, survivor of many a wreck; “can ye nae see his reverence, mon? Itʼs an unco thing for an auld mon like you to swear at your mates in their shrouds, chap. I ken the skipper of that there ship, and heʼs no lubber, no more than I be.”

Sandy Macbride was known to fear God, and to have fifty pounds in the savings bank. Therefore no one flouted him.

“Youʼre right, Mac; youʼre right, by George!” cried Pell. “What a glorious fellow! I can see him there holding on by the stanchion, giving his orders as coolly as if for the cabin dinner. I could die with that man.”

The tear in Octavius Pellʼs right eye compelled him to shift the glass a bit. He was just the man who would have done even as that captain did.

“Hurrah, hurrah! theyʼve got the launch out; only she and the gig are left. Troops on the deck, drawn up in a line, and the women hoisted in first. Give them three cheers, men, though they canʼt hear you! Three cheers, if you are Englishmen! Glorious, glorious! There they go; never saw such a fine thing in all my life. Oh, I wish I had been a sailor!”

The tears ran down the young parsonʼs cheeks, and were blown into the eyes of old Macbride; or else he had some of his own.

“Shove off, shove off; nowʼs your time, for the under–current is failing her. Both of them off, as Iʼm alive; and yet a third boat I could not see. What magnificent management! That man ought to command a fleet. Two of them off for Christchurch Harbour; away, away, while the wind lulls; but what is the third boat doing?” Every one was looking: no one answered. Old Mac knew what it was, though his eyes were too old to see much.

“Captain Roberts, Iʼll go bail, at his old tricks again. And thereʼs none with the sense to mutiny on him, and lash his legs, as we did in the Samphire.”

“At the side of the ship there is some dispute. The boat is laden to the waterʼs edge, and the ship paying off to leeward, for there is no man at the wheel; there goes the sail from the bolt–ropes. If they donʼt push off, ere an oarʼs length, they will all be sucked into the rollers! Good God! now I see what it is. There is only room for one more, and not one of those three will take it. Two white–haired men and a girl. Life against honour with the old men; and what is life compared with it? Both resolved not to stir a peg; now they join to make the girl go. Her father has got her in his arms to pitch her into the boat; she clings around his neck so that both must go, or neither. He could not throw her; she falls on her knees, and clings to his legs to die with him. Smack – there, the rope is parted, and it is too late for further argument. The troops in the boat salute the officer, and he returns it as on parade.”

“Name of that ship?” said Jacob, curtly, to old Sandy Macbride.

“Aliwal, East India trader, Captain Roberts. Calcutta to Southampton.”

“Then itʼs all up now with the Aliwal, and every soul on board of her.”

“Donʼt want a pilot to tell us that,” answered old Mac, testily. “Youʼve seed a many good craft, pilot, but never one as could last five minutes on the Shingle Bank, with this sea running.”

“Ropes, ropes!” cried Octave Pell; “in five minutes sheʼll be ashore here.”

“No, she ‘ont, nor yet in ten,” answered his landlord, gruffly; “sheʼll fetch away to the eastward first, now she is in the tide again, specially with this gale on; and sheʼll take the ground over yonner, and go to pieces with the next breaker.”

She took her course exactly as old Jacob mapped it out for her. He knew every run and flaw of the tide, and how it gets piled in the narrows by a very heavy storm, and runs back in the eddy which had saved so many lives there. This has nothing to do with the “double tide;” that comes after high–water. As the good ship traced the track of death, doing as the waves willed (like a little boyʼs boat in the Serpentine), the people on shore could see those three, who had contested the right of precedence to another world.

They were all upon the quarter–deck; and three finer figures never yet came to take the air there, in the weariness of an Indian voyage. Captain Roberts, a tall, stout man, with ruddy cheeks and a broad white beard, stood with his hands in his pockets, and his feet asunder, and a sense of discipline in his face, as of a man who has done his duty, and now obeys his Maker. No sign of flinching or dismay in his weather–beaten eyes, as he watched his death roll towards him; though the gazers fancied that one tear rose, perhaps at the thought of his family just coming down–stairs at Lymington. The military man beside him faced his death quite differently; perhaps with even less of fear, but with more defiance, broken, every now and then, by anguish for his daughter. He had not learned to fear the Lord, as those men do who go down into the great deep. He looked as if he ought to be commanding–officer of the tempest. The ship, running now before wind and sea, darted along as a serpent darts over the graves in the churchyard; she did not lurch any more, or labour, but rose and fell, just showing her fore–foot or stern–post, as the billows passed under her. And so that young maiden could stand and gaze, with her fatherʼs arm thrown round her.

She was worthy to be his daughter; tall, and light of form, and calm, with eyes of wondrous brightness, she was looking at her fatherʼs face to say the last good–bye. Then she flung both arms around his neck, and fondly, sadly, kissed him. Meanwhile the ship–captain turned away, and thought of Susy Roberts. Suddenly he espied a life–belt washed into the scuppers. He ran for it in a moment, came behind the maid, and, without asking her consent, threw it over her, and fastened it. There was little chance of it helping her, but that little chance she should have.

“Sheʼll take the ground next biller,” cried the oracular Jacob; “stand by there with the ropes, boys.”

On the back of a huge wave rose for the last time the unfortunate Aliwal. Stem on, as if with strong men steering, she rushed through the foam and the white whirl, like a hearse run away with in snow–drifts. Then she crashed on the stones, and the raging sea swept her from taffrail to bowsprit, rolled her over, pitched her across, and broke her back in two moments. The shock rang through the roar of billows, as if a nerve of the earth were thrilling. Another mountain–wave came marching to the roll of the tempest–drum. It curled disdainfully over the side, like a fog sweeping over a hedgerow; swoop – it broke the timbers away, as a giant tosses a fir–cone.

“I canʼt look any longer,” cried Pell; “give me something to feel, men. Quick, there! I see something!”

He seized the bight of a rope, and rushed anyhow into the waters. But John Rosedew and the life–boatmen held hard upon the coil of it, and drew him with all their might back again. They hauled Octavius Pell up in the manner of a cod–fish, and he was so bruised and stupefied, that he could not tell what he had gone for. They only saw floating timber and gear, and wreck of every sort drifting, till just for one sight–flash a hoary head, whiter than driven waters, leaped out of the comb of the billow. A naval man, or a military – who knows, and to whom does it matter?

Brave men ashore, all waiting ready, dashed down the steep of death to save him, if the great wave should toss up its plaything. All Rushford strained at the cables that held them from the savage recoil. Worse than useless; the only chance of it was to make more widows. The sea leaped at those gallant strong men; there were five on either cable; it leaped at them as the fiery furnace leaped on the plain of Dura. It struck the two ropes into one with a buffet, as a lionʼs paw shatters a cobweb; it dashed the menʼs heads together, and flung them all in a pile on a ballast–heap. Lucky for them that it fought with itself, and clashed there, and made no recoil. The white–haired corpse was seen no more; and all Rushford shrunk back in terror.

The storm was now at its height; and of more than a hundred people gathered on the crown of the shore, and above the reach of the billows, not one durst stand upright. Nearer the water the wind had less power, for the wall of waves broke the full brunt of it. But there no man, unless he were most quick of eye and foot, might stand without great peril. For scarcely a single billow broke, but what, in the first rebound and toss, two churning hummocks of surf met, and flashed up the strand like a mad white horse, far in advance of the rest. Then a hissing ensued, and a roll of shingle, and the water poured huddling and lappeting back from the chine itself had crannied.

As brave men fled from a rush of this sort, and cowards on the bank were laughing at them, something white was seen in the curl of the wave which was breaking behind it. The ebb of that inrush met the wave and partly took the crash of it, then the white thing was shot on the shore like a pellet, and lay one instant motionless. There was no rope there, and the men hung back; John Rosedew cried “Shame!” and ran for it; but they joined hands across and stopped him. Before they could look round again, some one had raised the body. ‘Twas young Bob Garnet, and in his arms lay the maiden senseless. She had looked at him once, and then swooned away from the whirl, and the blows, and the terror. No rope round his body, no cork, no pad; he had rushed full into the raging waves, as he woke from his sleep of heaviness. He lifted the girl, and a bending giant hung thirty feet above them.

Then a shriek, like a womanʼs, rang out on the wind, and two great arms were tossed to heaven. Bull Garnet stood there, and strove to rush on, strove with every muscle, but every nerve strove against it. He was balanced and hung on the wind for a moment, as the wave hung over his heartʼs love. Crash came the wave – what shriek should stop it, after three hundred miles of rolling? – a crash that rang in the souls of all whom youth could move or nobleness. Nothing was seen in the depth of water, the swirling, hurling whiteness, until the billow had spent its onset, and the curdle of the change was. Then Bob, swept many a fathom in–shore, but griping still that senseless thing, that should either live or die with him – Bob, who could swim as well or better than he could climb a tree, but felt that he and his load were only dolls for the wave to dandle – down he went, after showing his heels, and fought the deadly outrush. None but Natureʼs pet would have thought of, none but the favoured of God could have done, it. He felt the back–wave tugging at him, he felt that he was going; if another billow broke on him, it was all up with his work upon wire–worm. Holding his breath, he flung his right leg over the waist of the maiden, dug his two hands deep into the gravel, and clapped his feet together. Scarcely knowing what was up, he held on like grim death for life, and felt a barrowload of pebbles rolling down the small of his back. Presently he saw light again, and sputtered out salt water, and heard a hundred people screaming out “Hurrah!” and felt a strong arm thrown round him – not his fatherʼs, but John Rosedewʼs. Three senseless bodies were borne to the village – Bull Garnetʼs, and Bobʼs and the maidenʼs.

CHAPTER V

Meanwhile that keen engineering firm, wind, wave, and tide, had established another little business on the coast hard by. This was the general wreck and crack–up of the stout Pell–castle, a proceeding unnoticed by any one except good mother Jacob, whose attention was drawn to it forcibly, as the head of the bed fell in upon her. Thereupon the stout dame made a rush for it, taking only her cat and spectacles, and the little teapot of money. As she started at a furious pace, and presented to the elements a large superficial area, the wind could not resist the temptation, but wafted her to the top of the bunney, without her feet so much as once a–touching the blessed earth – she goes mad if any one doubts it – and planted her in a white–thorn tree, and brought an “elam” of thatch to shelter her from her own beloved roof. There, when the wind subsided, she was happily discovered by some enterprising children; the cat was sitting at her side; in one blue hand she held her specs, and in the other a teapot.

Poor Pellʼs easy–chair was thrown up, three miles to the westward, in the course of the next spring–tides, and, being well known all over the neighbourhood (from his lending it to sick people), was brought to him, with a round of cheers, by half a dozen fishermen. They refused the half–crown he offered them, and displayed the greatest anxiety lest his honour should believe it was them as had taken the shine off. The workmanship not being modern, the chair was little the worse for its voyage; only it took six months to dry, and had a fine smell of brine ever afterwards. Then, having been lent to an old saltʼs widow, it won such a reputation, all across the New Forest, as a specific for “rheumatics in the small of the back,” that old women, having no small to their backs, walked all the way from Lyndhurst, “just to sot themselves down in it, and how much was to pay, please, for a quarter of an hour?” “A shilling,” said Octave Pell, “a shilling for the new lifeboat that lives under Christchurch Head.” Then they pulled out mighty silver watches, and paid the shilling at the fifteen minutes. The walk, and the thought of the miracle, and the fear of making fools of themselves, did such a deal of good, that a man got up a ‘bus for it; but Pell said, “No; none who come by ‘bus shall sit in my chair of ease.”

The greedy sea returned brave Pell no other part of his property. His red tobacco–jar, indeed, was found by some of the dredgemen three or four years afterwards, but they did not know it was his, and sold it – crusted as it was with testacea, and ribboned with sea–weed – to the zealous secretary of – I wonʼt say what museum. “Roman, or perhaps Samian, or possibly Phœnician ware,” cried the secretary, lit with fine – though, it may be, loose – ideas; and he catalogued it: “Phœnician in the opinion of an F.A.S. There is every reason to believe it a vase for Thuricremation.” “Hollo!” cried Pell, when he went there to lecture upon cricket as played by Ulysses, “why, Iʼm blessed if you havenʼt got – ” “The most undoubted Phœnician relic contained in any museum!” So he laughed with other peopleʼs cheeks, like a man of sense.

All the folk of Rushford, and many too of Nowelhurst, contributed to a secret fund for refurnishing Octavius Pell. So great were the mystery and speed, and so clever the management of the dissenting parson, that two great vans were down upon Pell before he had heard a word of it. He stood at the door of the cobblerʼs shop, and tried to make a speech; but the hurrahs were too many for him, and he turned away and cried. Tell me that any man in England need be anything but popular who has a heart of his own, and is not ashamed of having it!

At the Crown, where the three sick people were, a very fine trade was doing; but a finer one still upon the beach, as the sea went down and the choice contents of the Aliwal came up. For that terrible storm began to abate about noon on the 26th. It had blown as hard for twenty–four hours as it ever does blow in any land, except in the gaps of the Andes and during cyclones of the tropics. Now the core of the storm had no more cells in it; and the puffs that came from the west and north–west, and so on till it got to the pole–star, were violent indeed, but desultory, and seemed not to know where they were going. Finally, about midnight, the wind owned that its turn was over, and sunk (well satisfied with its work) into the arms of slumber – “placidâque ibi demum morte quievit.” And its work had been done right well. No English storm since the vast typhoon of 1703 – which I should like to write about some day if my little life–storm blows long enough – had wrought such glorious havoc upon that swearing beaver, man. It had routed his villages at the Landʼs End, and lifted like footstools his breakwater blocks; it had scared of their lives his Eddystone watchmen, and put out half his lighthouses; it had broken upon his royalty, and swept down the oaks of the New Forest; it had streaked with wrecks the Goodwin Sands, and washed ships out of harbours of refuge; it had leaped upon London as on a drain–trap, and jarred it as a man whistles upon his fingers; it had huddled pell–mell all the coal–trade; – saddest vaunt (though not the last), it had strewn with gashed and mangled bodies (like its own waves, countless) the coasts of Anglesea and Caernarvon.

On the morning now of the 27th, with the long sullen swell gold–beater–skinned by the recovering sun, the shingle–bank was full of interest to an active trader. They had picked up several bodies with a good bit of money upon them, and the beach was strewn with oranges none the worse for a little tossing. For the stout East Indiaman Aliwal had touched at the Western Islands, and taken on board a thousand boxes of the early orange harvest. And not only oranges were rolling among the wrack, the starfish, the sharkʼs teeth, and the cuttle–eggs, but also many a pretty thing, once prized and petted by women. There were little boxes with gilt and paint, sucked heartily by the salt water, and porcupine–quills rasping up from panels of polished ebony, cracked mirrors inside them, and mother–of–pearl, and beading of scented wood; all the taste and the labour of man yawning like dead cockles, crimped backward, sodden and shredded, as hopeless a wreck as a drunkard.

Then there were barrels, and heavy chests, planking already like hemp in the prison–yard, bulkheads, and bulwarks, and cordage, and reeve–blocks, and ten thousand other things, well appreciated by the wreckers, who were hauling them up the bunneys; while the Admiralty droitsmen made an accurate inventory of the bungs and the blacking bottles. Some of the sailors, and most of the passengers, who had escaped in the boats to Christchurch, came over to look for anything that might turn up of their property. Hereupon several fights ensued, and many poor fellows enjoyed opportunity for a closer inspection of the Rushford stratum than the most sanguine of their number anticipated; until the police came down in force, and extinguished at once all other rights of salvage except their own.

Nevertheless there was yet one field upon which the police could not interfere; although Jack wished for nothing better than to catch the lubbers there. This was Jackʼs own domain, the sea, where an animated search was going on for the body of Colonel Nowell. His servant had hurried from Christchurch to Nowelhurst to report the almost certain death of Sir Cradockʼs only brother. He did not go first to ascertain it; for the road along the cliffs was impassable during the height of the storm. Sir Cradock received the announcement with very few signs of emotion. He had loved that Clayton in early youth, but now had almost forgotten him; and Clayton had never kept his brother at all apprised of his doings. Sir Cradock had gone into mourning for him, some three years ago; and Colonel Nowell never took the trouble to vindicate his vitality until Dr. Huttonʼs return. And, even though they had really known and loved one another as brothers, the loss would have been but a tap on the back to a man already stabbed through the heart. Therefore Sir Cradockʼs sorrow exploded (as we love to make our griefs do, and as we so often express them) in the moneyed form. “I will give 500l. to the man who finds my poor brotherʼs body.”

That little speech launched fourteen boats. What wrecker could hope for anything of a tenth part of the value? Men who had sworn that they never would pull in the same boat again together – might the Great Being, the Giver of life, strike them dead if they did! – forgot the solemn perjuration, and cried, “Give us your flipper, Ben; after all, there are worse fellows going than you, my lad:” and Ben responded, “Jump into the starn–sheets; you are just the hand as we want, Harry. Manyʼs the time Iʼve thought on you.” Even the dredging smacks hauled in–shore from their stations, and began to dredge for the Colonel; till the small boats resolved on united action, tossed oars, and held solemn council. Several speeches were made, none of them very long, but all embodying that fine sentiment, “fiat justitia, ruat cœlum,” in the form of “fair play, and be d – d to you.” Then Sandy Mac, of the practical mind, made a suggestion which was received with three wild rounds of cheers.

“Give ‘em a little ballast, boys, as they be come in–shore to dredge for it.”

With one consent the fourteen boats made for the shore, like the fleet of canoes described by the great Defoe. Nor long before each shallopʼs nose “grated on the golden sands.” The men in the dredging smacks looked at the sky to see if a squall was coming. And soon they got it, thick as hail, and as hot as pepper. The fourteen boats in battle array advanced upon them slowly, only two men rowing in each, all the rest standing up, and every man charged heavily. When they were at a nice wicket distance, old Mac gave the signal, and a flight of stones began, which, in the words of the ancient chroniclers, “well–nigh darkened the noonday sun.” The bravest dredger durst not show his head above the gunwale; for the Rushford stones are close of grain, and it is sweeter to start than to stop them. As for south–westers and dreadnoughts, they were no more use than vine–leaves in a storm of electric hail.

 

“Ah, little then those mellow grapes their vine–leaf shall avail,

So thickly rattles on the tiles the pelting of the hail.”

 

Georg. i. 448.

The dredgers gave in, and hoisted a shirt as a signal for a parley. The Rushford men refused to hear a syllable about “snacks.” What they demanded was “unconditional surrender;” and the dredgers, having no cement–stones on board, were compelled to accept it. So they took up their bags, and walked the smacks off three miles away to their station, with very faint hopes indeed that the obliging body might follow them. The boatmen celebrated their victory with three loud cheers for Sandy Mac, and a glass of grog all round. Then they returned to the likeliest spot, and dragged hard all the afternoon.

“Tarnation ‘cute body,” cried Ben, “as ever I come across. Whoʼd a thought as any perfessing Christian would have stuck to Davy Jonesʼs locker, and refooged the parson and clerk so? Spit on your grapples, my lads of wax, and better luck the cast after.”

“The Lord kens the best,” replied Sandy Mac, with a long–drawn sigh, “us poor vessels canna do more than is the will of the Lord, boys. Howsomever, I brought a bit of bait, a few lug–worms, and a soft crab or two; and please the Lord Iʼll rig my line out, and see if the bass be moving. And likely there may be a tumbling cod on the run speering after the puir bodies. Ah, yes, the will of the Lord; we ates them, and they ates us.”

The canny old Scotchman, without foregoing his share in the general venture – for he helped to throw the grapnels, or took a spell at the rudder – rigged out a hook on his own account, and fastened the line to the rowlocks.

“Fair play, my son,” cried Ben, winking at his comrades; “us go snacks in what you catch, mind. And the will of the Lord be done.”

“Dinna ye wish ye may get it?” – the old man glowered at him indignantly – “Iʼll no fish at all on that onderstanding.”

“Fish away, old boy, and be blessed, then. I see he ainʼt been in the purwentive sarvice for nothing. But Iʼm blowed if heʼll get much supper, Harry, if itʼs all to come off that darned old hook.” They all laughed at old Mac, who said nothing, but regarded his line attentively.

With many a joke and many an oath, they toiled away till the evening fog came down upon the waters. Then, as they turned to go home, old Mac felt a run upon his fishing–gear. Hand over hand he began to haul in, coiling the line in the stern–sheets.

“Itʼs a wapping big fish, as ever I feel, mates; na, na, yeʼll no touch it, or yeʼll be claiming to come and sup wi’ me. And deil a bit – the Lord forgive me – will ye haʼ, for grinning at an auld mon the likes of that, I tell ye. Lord ha’ mercy on me, a wake and sinful crater!”

They all fell back, except Macbride, as before them in the twilight rose the ashy grey face and the long white hair of Colonel Clayton Nowell.

Mac stuck to his haul like a Scotchman; to him the main chance was no ghost. Many a time has he told that story, and turned his quid upon it, cleverly raining between his teeth with fine art to prolong the crisis.

The line being his, and the hook being his, and the haul of his own hands only, Sandy Mac could never see why he should not have all the money. The question came close to litigation; but for that, except as a word of menace, Mac was a deal too wide awake. He compounded at last for 300l. and let the other four share the residue.

So poor Colonel Nowellʼs countenance, still looking grand and dignified, was saved from the congers and lobsters; and he sleeps close by his nephew and namesake in Nowelhurst churchyard. The body of Captain Roberts was found a long way up the Solent. He had always carried a weather helm, and shaped a good course for harbour. May they rest in peace!

I have no doubt that Captain Roberts so rests, and am fain to believe, in the mercy of God, the same of the brave old Colonel. At least, we will hope that he is not gone to that eternal punishment, whose existence our divines contend for in a manner so disinterested. He had been a harum–scarum man; and now, having drowned and buried him, we may enter upon his history with the charity due to both quick and dead, but paid to the latter only.

A soldier is, in many things, by virtue of his calling, a generous, careless man. We have always credited the sailor with these popular qualities; hornpipes, national drama, and naval novels imbuing us. I doubt if the sailor be, on the whole, so careless a man as the soldier. Jack is obliged, by force of circumstance, to bottle up his money, his rollicksomeness and sentimentality, and therefore has more to get rid of, when he comes ashore once in a twelvemonth. But spread the outburst over the year, strike the average of it, and the rainfall at Aldershot will equal that at Portsmouth.

Only by watching the Army List – which at length he was tired of doing – could the English brother tell if the Indian brother were living. Even the most careful of us begin to feel that care is too much for the nine lives of a cat, when Fahrenheit scores 110° in the very coolest corner, and the punkah is too hot to move. So, after one or two Griffin letters, full of marvels which the writer pretended not to marvel at, a silence, as of the jungle, ensued, and Sir Cradock thought of tigers. Then the slides of his own life began to move upon him; and less and less every year he thought of the boy who had laughed and cried with him.

Lieutenant Nowell was ordered suddenly to the borders of the Punjaub, and for twenty years his brother Cradock drank his health at Christmas, and wondered how about the Article against praying for the dead. The next thing he heard, though it proved his own orthodoxy, disproved it by making him swear hard. Clayton Nowell had married; married an Affghan woman, to the great disgust of his brother officers, and the furious disdain of her kinsmen. A very fine family of Affghan chiefs immediately loaded their fusils, and swore to shoot both that English dog and their own Bright Eyes of the Morning.

“To think,” cried Sir Cradock Nowell, “that a brother of mine should disgrace himself, and (what matters far more) his family, by marrying a wretched low Affghan woman!”

“To think,” cried Mohammed Khans, “that a sister of ours should disgrace herself, and (what matters far more) her family, by marrying a cursed low English dog!”

Which party was in the right, judge ye who understand the matter. The officers’ wives got over their prejudice against Bright Eyes of the Morning, and matronised, and petted, and tried to make a Christian of her. Captain Nowell adored her; she was so elegant in every motion, so loving, and so simple. She quite reformed him for the time from his too benevolent anthropology, from the love of dice, and the vinous doings which the Prophet does not encourage.

But the poor thing died in her first confinement, while following her husbandʼs regiment at the foot of the Himalayah, leaving her new–born babe to the care of a faithful Affghan nurse, who had kept at her dear ladyʼs side, even among the infidels. This good nurse, being great of soul, and therefore strong of faith, could not bear that the child of her mistress, the highest blood of the Affghans, should become a low Frank idolater. So she set off with it, in the dark night, crouching past the sentinels, thieves, and other camp followers, and trusted herself to the boundless jungle, with only the stars to guide her. She put the wailing child to her breast, for her own dear babe was dead, and hushed it from the vigilant ears of the man–eating tiger. Then off again for Affghanistan, six hundred miles in the distance.

How this wonderful woman, soothing and coaxing the little stranger (obtrusively remarkable for the power of her squalls), how she got on through the thorns, the fire, the famine, the jaws of the tiger, and, worse than all, the pestilent fever, bred from the rich stagnation of that alluvial soil, is more than I, or any other unversed in womanʼs unity, may pretend to show. Enough that with her eyes upon the grand religious heights – heathen high places, we should call them – she struggled along through nearly three–quarters of her pilgrimage, and then she fell among robbers. A villanous hill–tribe, of mixed origin, always shifting, never working, never even fighting when they could run away, hated and despised by the nobler mountain races, the pariahs of the Himalayah, ignorant of any good, debased as any Africans – in a single word, Rakshas, or worshippers of the devil. A nice school of education for a young lady of tender years – or rather months – to commence in.

The nurse was allotted to one of their chiefs, and the babe was about to be knocked on the head, when it struck an enlightened priest that in two years’ time she would make a savoury oblation to the devil; so the Affghan woman was allowed to keep her, until she began to crawl about among the dogs and babes of the station. Here she so distinguished herself by precocious skill in thieving, that her delighted owner conferred upon her the title of “Never–spot–the–dust,” and even instructed her how to steal the high priestʼs knife of sacrifice. That last exploit saved her life. Such a genius had never appeared in any tribe of the Rakshas until this great manifestation.

So “Never–spot–the–dust” was well treated, and made much of by her owner, to whom she was quite a fortune; and soon all the band looked up to her as the future priestess of the devil. For ten years she wandered about with them, becoming every year more important, proud that none could approach her skill in stealing, lying, and perjury, utterly void of all religion, except the few snatches of Moslemism which her nurse had contrived to impart, and the vague terror of the evil spirit to whom the wild men paid their vows. But, when she was ten years old, a tall and wonderfully active child, and just about to be consecrated by the blood of inferior children, a British force drew suddenly all around the nest of robbers. Of late the scoundrels had done things that made John Bullʼs hair stand on end; and, when his hair is in that condition, sparks are apt to come out of it.

Seeing no chance of escape, and having very faint hopes of quarter, the robbers fought with a bravery which quite astonished themselves; but the evil spirit was against them – a rare inconsistence on his part. Their rascally camp was burnt, which they who had burned some hundreds of villages looked upon as the grossest cruelty, and more than half of their number were sent home to their patron and guardian. Then the Affghan nurse, so faithful and so unfortunate, fled from the burning camp with her charge, fell before the British colonel, and poured forth all her troubles. The Englishman knew Major Nowell, and had heard some parts of his history; so he took “Never–spot–the–dust” to her father, who was amazed at once and amused with her. She could run up the punkah, and stand on the top, and twirl around on one foot; she could cross the compound in three bounds; she could jump upon her fatherʼs shoulder, and stay there with the spring of her sole; she could glide along over the floor like a serpent, and hold on with one hand to anything. And then her most wonderful lightness of touch; she had fully earned her name, she could brush the dust without marking it. She could come behind her fatherʼs back, crawling over the table, and fasten his sword–hilt to his whiskers, without his knowing a thing of it. She could pick all his pockets, of course; but that was too rude an operation for her to take any delight in it. What she delighted to do, and what even she found difficult, was to take off his shoes and stockings without his being aware of it. It was a beautiful thing to see her: consummate skill is beautiful, in whatever way it is exercised. The shoe she could get off easily enough, but the difficulty was with the stocking; and there the chief difficulty was through the sensitiveness of the skin, unaccustomed to exposure. Though she had never heard of temperature, evaporation, or anything long, her genius told her the very first time where the tug was and how to meet it. Keeping her little cornelian lips – lips which you could see through – just at the proper distance, she would breathe so softly upon the skin that the breath could not be felt, as inch by inch she lowered down the thin elastic covering. Then she would jump up out of the ground, and shout into his ears, with a voice of argute silver —

“Faddery, will ‘oo have ‘oor shoe? Fear to go wiyout him?”

She began to talk English, after a bit; and the weather beaten Colonel – for now he had got that far – who had never looked upon any child, except as one rupee per month – thinking of his beloved Bright Eyes of the Morning, who might, with the will of God, have made a first–rate man of him, only she was too good for him, – thinking of her, and seeing the gleam of her glorious eyes in her child, he loved that child beyond all reason, and christened her “Eoa.”

He never took to bad things again. He had something now in pledge with God; a part of himself that still would live, and love him when he was skeleton. And that, his better part, should learn how lying and stealing do not lead to the right half of the other world.

His ideas about that other world were as dormant as Eoaʼs; but now he began to think about it, because he wanted to see her there. So, with lots of tears, not only feminine, Eoa Nowell was sent to the best school in Calcutta, where she taught the other young ladies some very odd things indeed.

Wherever she went, she must be foremost; “second to none” was her motto. Therefore she learned with amazing quickness; but it was not so easy to unlearn.

Then arose that awful mutiny, and the Colonel at Mhow was shot through the neck, and let lie, by his own soldiers. His daughter heard of it, and screamed, and no walls ever built would hold her. All the way from Calcutta, up the dreary Ganges, she forced her passage, sometimes by boat, sometimes on her weariless feet.

She had never cared much for civilization, and loved every blade of the jungle. The old life revived within her, as she looked upon the broad waters, and the boundless yellow tangle, wherein glided no swifter thing, nothing more elegant, than herself.

She found her darling father in some rude cantonment, prostrate, helpless, clinging faintly to the verge of death. Dead long ago he must have been but for Rufus Hutton; and dead even now he would have been but for his daughterʼs presence. His dreamy eyes went round the hut to follow her graceful movements; she alone could tend the wounds as if with the fall of gossamer, she alone could soothe and fan the intolerable aching. They looked into each otherʼs eyes and cried without thinking about it.

Then, as he gradually got better, and the surge of trouble passed them, Eoa showed for his amusement all her strange accomplishments. She had not forgotten one of them in the grand school at Calcutta. They had even grown with her growth, and strengthened with her strength.

She would leap over Rufus Huttonʼs head like a flash of light, and stand facing him, without a muscle moving, and on his back would be a land–crab; she would put his up–country hat on the floor, and walk on one foot round the crown of it; she would steal his case of instruments, and toss them in the air all open, and catch them all at once.

By her nursing and her loving, her stealing and her mockery, she won Dr. Huttonʼs heart so entirely that he would have proposed to her, had she only been of marriageable age, or had come to think about anything.

Then they had all to cut and run, with barely three hours’ notice, for the ebb of the rebellion swept through that district mightily. Eoa went to school again, and her father came to see her daily, until he was appointed to a regiment having something more than name and shadow.

Now Eoa, having learned everything that they can teach in Calcutta, the Himalayah, or the jungle, was coming to England to receive the down and crown of accomplishments. Who could tell but what they might even teach her affectation? Youth is plastic and imitative; and she was sure to find plenty of models.

Not that the honest Colonel wished to make a sickly humbug of her. His own views were wide and grand, only too philoprogenitive. Still, like most men of that class, who, upon sudden reformation, love Truth so much that they roll upon her, having no firm rules of his own, and being ashamed to profess anything, with the bad life fresh in memory, he took the opinion of old fogeys who had been every bit as unblest as himself, but had sown with a drill their wild oats. The verdict of all was one – “Miss Nowell must go to England.”

Finding his wound still troublesome, he resolved to retire from service; he had not saved half a lac of rupees, and his pension would not be a mighty one; but, between the two, there would be enough for an old man to live upon decently, and go wherever he was told that his daughter ought to go.

He had seen enough of life, and found that it only meant repentance; all that remained of it should be for the pleasure and love of his daughter. And he knew that there was a sum in England, which must have been long accumulating – a sum left on trust for him and his children, under a very old settlement. He would never touch a farthing of it; every farthing should go to Eoa. Bless her dear eyes; they had the true light of his own Bright Eyes of the Morning.

CHAPTER VI

Eoa was now sixteen years old, tall, and lithe, and graceful as the creepers of tropic woodlands. Her face was of the clearest oval, a quick concise terse oval, such as we find in the eggs of wild birds rather than of tame ones. Her eyes were of bewildering brightness, always flashing, always in motion, rarely allowing the gazer a chance of guessing what their colour was. Very likely they were of no positive colour, but a pure dark lustre, such as a clear swift river has, when overhung by palm–trees. Her complexion, beautifully soft and even, was toned with a delicate eastern tinge, like that fawn–coloured light which sometimes flushes a cloudless sky before the midsummer sunrise. And her warm oriental blood suffused it, at the slightest emotion, as the leaping sun pervades that sky with a flood of limpid rubies.

She had never been flattened by education: all her qualities and feelings, like her beauty, were in excess. You could see it in the quick rise and fall of her breath, in the sudden grace of her movements, in the infinite variety of her attitudes and aspects.

Whatever she thought, she said at once; yet none ever called her a bold girl. Her modes of thought were as widely different from those of an English maiden, as a wild honeysuckle differs in form, habit, and scent, from a rose. She cared for no oneʼs opinion of her, any more than the wind cares how a tree swings; unless indeed it were one whom she loved, and then she would crawl to please him. For she loved with all her heart and soul, and hated with no less; and she always took care in either case to apprise the object of it. And yet, with all her depth of passion, Eoa was pure of heart and mind, – ay, as pure as our own Amy.

She soon recovered from her bruises, being perfectly healthy, and elastic as india–rubber. Nevertheless, she would not have been saved from that terrible sea but for the generosity of poor Captain Roberts, and the gallantry of Bob Garnet.

Now Bob was hurt rather seriously, and, being (as we are well aware) an uncommonly shy young fellow, he was greatly astonished, and shocked a little, when on the Friday morning a beautiful girl, very strangely dressed, ran to the side of his sofa, threw her arms round him, and kissed him till he was out of breath, and his face was wet with the dew of her tears.

“Oh, please donʼt,” said Bob; “I am sure I donʼt deserve it.”

“Yes, you do; and I will marry you when I am old enough. I donʼt know what you are like, and I donʼt care two straws, directly they told me what you had done. Only I must have papaʼs leave. Kiss me again, I like it. Now where is my darling papa?”

“What, donʼt you know? Havenʼt they told you? Oh, poor thing!”

At the tone of his voice she leaped back, like a bird at the gun–flash, and stood with her little hands clasped on her head, her eyes with their deep light quivering, and the whole of her form swinging to and fro, from the wild push of sudden terror. Then she spoke with a hollow depth, which frightened Bob more than the kissing.

“They told me that he was well, gone to his brother somewhere, and I thought it wasnʼt like him to leave me so, and – tell me the truth, or Iʼll shake you to pieces.”

“No, donʼt,” said Bob, as she leaped at him; “I have had shaking enough.”

“Yes, you poor boy, and for my sake. I am a brute, I know. Tell me the truth, if you love me.”

“Your dear father is dead. But they have found his body.”

“Do you mean to say that God has been so wicked as to kill my father?”

“God knows best,” said Bob; he could think of nothing else to say.

“No, He doesnʼt. No, He doesnʼt. No, He never knows anything. He couldnʼt have known who he was, and how terribly I loved him, or He wouldnʼt have the heart to do it. Oh, you wicked boy; oh, you wicked boy! I will never forgive you for saving me. Hya, hya, hya!”

Bob never saw such a thing before, and never will again. And he wonʼt be much the loser; although the sight was magnificent. The screams and shrieks of the clearest voice that ever puzzled echo brought up the landlord and landlady, and our good friend Rufus Hutton, who had set forth full speed from home on hearing about the Aliwal. He caught Eoa in his arms, carried her back to her room, and dosed her. He gave her some Indian specific, some powder of a narcotic fungus, which he had brought on purpose.

It stupefied her for nearly three days, and even then she awoke into the dreamy state of Nirwana, that bliss of semi–consciousness, like mild annihilation, into which the Buddha is absorbed, and to which all pious Buddhists look as their eternal happiness. Then she opened her delicate tapering arms, where you could see the grand muscles moving, but never once protruding, and she called for her darling father to come. Finding that he did not come, she was satisfied with some trifling answer, and then wanted to have Bob instead; but neither was Bob forthcoming.

On the very day when Dr. Hutton came to look for Eoa, Mr. Garnet found himself getting better from that wretched low nervous fever into which his fright had thrown him. Then he asked Dr. Hutton whether there would be any danger in moving Robert, and, finding that there would be none whatever, if it were carefully managed, he ordered a carriage immediately, and with some of his ancient spirit. The Crown, which had the cross–bar of its N set up the wrong way (as is done, by–the–by, on the roof of Hampton Court chapel, and in many other places), made public claim to be regarded as a “commercial hotel and posting–house.” No Rushford folk having yet been known to post anything, except a letter at rare intervals, and a bill at rarer, this claim of the Crown had never been challenged, and strangers entertained a languid theoretical faith in it. But Mr. Brown looked very blue when Bull Garnet in reviving accents ordered “a chaise and pair at the door in half an hourʼs time; a roomy chaise, if you please, because my son must keep his feet up.”

“Yes, sir; yes, to be sure, sir; I quite understand, sir. It shall be attended to, sir.”

“Then why donʼt you go and order it?”

“To be sure, sir; I forgot. I will speak to Mrs. Brown, sir.”

Mrs. Brown, being a woman of resource, mounted the boy on her donkey, the only quadruped she possessed, but a “wonner to go,” as the boy said, “when you knows the right place to prog him in,” and sent him post–haste to Lymington, whence the required conveyance arrived in about an hour and a half.

Rufus Hutton, having promised to be at home that evening, left Eoa to sleep off her heavy soporific, and followed the carriage on horseback; neither did he leave its track where the Ringwood Road turns off, for he had undertaken to tell Sir Cradock how his niece was getting on. He started nearly half an hour after the Lymington chaise, for Polly would never demean herself by trotting behind the “posters.” During that half–hour he drank hot brown brandy–and–water, although he could not bear it, to ingratiate him with Mrs. Brown for the sake of the poor Eoa. For Mrs. Brown had no other hot method of crowning the flowing bowl. And now, while I think of it, let me warn all gentle and simple people who deign on this tale of the New Forest, never to ask for pale brandy within the perambulations. How do you think they make it? By mixing brown brandy with villanous gin. Rufus was up to this, of course; and, as he must take something for the good of the house, and to get at the kindly kernel of the heavy–browed hostess, he took that which he thought would be least for his own evil. Then, leaving Mrs. Brown (who, of course, had taken her own glass at his sole charge and largesse, after fifty times “Oh no, sir, never! Oh Lord, how my Brown would be shocked!”), having imbued that good Mrs. Brown, who really was not a bad woman – which means that she was a good one, for women have no medium – with a strong aromatic impression that he was a pleasant gentleman, and no pride, not a bit of it, in him, no more than you nor me might, – off he trotted at a furious pace, smoking two cheroots at once.

I believe that there was and is – for I am happy to say that he still inhales the breeze of life down his cigar, and looks browner and redder than ever – I believe that, in spite of all his troubles in connexion with this story, which took a good deal out of him, there was and is no happier man in our merry England than the worthy Rufus Hutton. And, as all happiness is negative, and goes without our knowing it, and only becomes a positive past for us to look back upon, so his went before it came, and goes or eʼer it comes. And yet he enjoys it none the less; he multiplies it by three for the past and by nine for the future, and he never finds it necessary to deduct for the present moment.

Happy man who never thinks beyond salutary average, who can accept, in perfect faith, the traditions of his forbears, and yet is shrewd enough to hope that his grandsons will discard at least a portion of them, – who looks upon the passing life as a thing he need not move in, a world which must improve itself, and every day is doing it. And all the while he sympathises with his fellow–men, enjoys a bit of human nature, laughs at the cross–purposes of native truth and training, loves whatever he finds to be true, and does his best to foster it, is pleased with his after–dinner story, and feels universally charitable; then smiles at his wife, and kisses his children; and goes to bed with the firm conviction that they are worth all the rest put together.

Yet this manʼs happiness is not sound, because it is built upon selfishness.

In Nowelhurst village Dr. Hutton met Mark Stote, the gamekeeper, who begged him to stop for a moment, just to hear a word or two. Rufus, after hearing his news, resolved to take the upper road to the Hall, past Mr. Garnetʼs house; it was not so very far out of his way, and perhaps he might be of service there, and – ah, yes, Dr. Hutton, this last was the real motive, though you may not have thought so – what a fine opportunity to discover something which plagued him! Perhaps I ought to say rather, the want of which was plaguing him. Rufus took so kind an interest in his neighbours’ affairs, that anything not thoroughly luculent in their dealings, mode of life or speech, or management of their households, was to him the subject–matter of continual mental scratchings. Ah, how genteel a periphrase, worthy of Bailey Kettledrum; how happily we have shown our horror of that English monosyllable, beginning with the third vowel, which must be (according to Dr. Aldrich) the correlative of scratch! Score two, and go on after Dr. Hutton.

He overtook the Garnets twain just at their front gate, whence the house could not be seen, on account of a bank of evergreens. The maid came out with her cap flying off, and all her mind perturbed. Rufus Hutton, checking his mare, for the road was very narrow, heard the entire dialogue.

“Oh, sir! oh, master! have you heard of it? Such a thing, to be sure!”

“Heard of what, Sarah? Of course I have heard of the great disaster at Rushford.”

“No, no. Here, sir, here! The two big trees is down on the house. Itʼs a mussy as Nanny and me wasnʼt killed. And poor Miss Pearl have been in hysterics ever since, without no dinner. There, you can hear her screeching now, worse than the mangle, ever so much.”

Mr. Garnet did not say a word, but set off for the house full speed, even forgetting that Bob wanted help to get from the gate to the doorway.

Rufus Hutton jumped down from his mare, and called to the driver to come and hold her, just for a minute or two; no fear of his horses bolting. Then, helping Bob to limp along, he followed through the shrubbery. When they came within full view of the house, he was quite amazed at the mischief. The two oaks interlocked had fallen upon it, and, crashing as they did from the height above, the breaches they made were hideous. They had cloven the house into three ragged pieces, from the roof–ridge down to the first floor, where the solid joists had stopped them. It had happened in the afternoon of the second day of the tempest; when the heart of the storm was broken, but tremendous squalls came now and then from the bright north–west. Mr. Garnetʼs own bed was occupied by the tree which he detested. Pearl had screamed “Judgment, judgment!” and danced among the ruins; so the maid was telling Mr. Garnet, as he feared to enter his own door.

“Judgment for what?” asked Rufus Hutton, and Mr. Garnet seemed not to hear him.

“I am sure I donʼt know, sir,” answered the maid, “for none of us done any harm, sir; unless it was the bottle of pickled onions, when master were away, and there was very few of them left, sir, very few, I do declare to you, and we thought they was on the turn, sir, and it seemed such a pity to waste them. And please, sir, weʼve all been working like horses, though frightened out of our lives ‘most; and we fetched down all the things from your room, where the cupboards was broken open, for ‘fraid it should come on to rain, sir; and weʼve taken all our meals standing, sir; and made up a bed in the meat–screen, and another upon the dresser; and Miss Pearl, what turns she have given us – Here she comes, I do declare.”

“Dr. Hutton,” said Bull Garnet, hastily, “good–bye; I am much obliged to you. I shall see you, I hope, next week. Good–bye, good–bye. Excuse me.”

But, before he could get him out of the way – for Rufus lingered strangely – Pearl Garnet came into the little hall, with her eyes distended fearfully. “There, there it is,” she cried, “there it is, I tell you! No wonder the tree came down upon it. No wonder the house was crushed for it.” And she pointed to a shattered box, tilted up endwise, among a heap of account–books, clothes, and furniture.

“Oh yes, you may look at it. To be sure you may look at it. God would not have it hidden longer. I have done my best, God knows, and my heart knows, and my – I mean that man there knows. Is there anything more I can do for you, anything more, dear father? You have done so much for me, you know. And I will only ask you one little thing – put me in his coffin.”

“The girl is raving,” cried Mr. Garnet. “Poor thing, it comes from her mother.”

“No, it comes from her father,” said Pearl, going boldly up to him, and fixing her large bright eyes upon his. “Do as you like with me; I donʼt care; but donʼt put it on any one else. Oh, father, father, father!”

Moaning, she turned away from him; and then sprang into his arms with shrieks. He lifted her tenderly, and forgot all about his own safety. His great tears fell on her wan, sick face; and his heavy heart throbbed for his daughter only, as he felt hers bounding perilously. He carried her off to an inner room, and left them to their own devices.

“I should like uncommonly,” said Rufus Hutton, rubbing his chin, “to know what is in that box. Indeed, I feel it my duty at once to ascertain.”

“No, you shanʼt,” cried Bob, limping across in front of it; “I know no more than you do, sir. But I wonʼt have fatherʼs things pryed into.”

“You are very polite,” replied the Doctor; “a chip of the old block, I perceive. But, perhaps, you will believe me, my boy, when I tell you that, if ever there was a gentleman totally devoid of improper curiosity, it is Dr. Rufus Hutton, sir.”

“Oh, I am so glad,” said Bob; “because you wonʼt be disappointed, then.”

Rufus grinned, in spite of his wrath; but he was not to be baffled so easily. He could not push poor Bob aside, in his present disabled state, without being guilty of cowardice. So he called in an auxiliary.

“Betsy, my dear, your young mistress wished me just to examine that box. Be kind enough to bring it to the light here, unless it is too heavy for your little hands.”

Oh, if he had only said “Miss Sarah,” what a difference it might have made!

“Betsy, indeed!” cried Sarah, who had followed her mistress, but, being locked out, had come back to see the end of it; “my name, sir, is nothing so low as that. My name is Sarah Mackarness, sir, very much at your service; and my mother keeps a potato–shop, the largest business in Lyndhurst, sir. Betsy, indeed! and from a stranger, not to say a strange gentleman, for fear of making a mistake. And as for my hands” – she thought he had been ironical, for her hands were above regulation size – “my hands are such as pleased God to make them, and honest hands, anyhow, and doesnʼt want to interfere with other peopleʼs business. Oh, what will poor Nanny say, to think of me, Sarah Mackarness, be permiscuous called Betsy?”

At this moment, when Sarah Mackarness, having recovered breath, was starting into another native discourse on prænomina, and Rufus was calling upon his resources for some constitutional measure, Bull Garnet came back, treading heavily, defiant of all that the world could do. His quick eyes, never glimpsing that way, but taking in all the room at once, espied the box unmeddled with, and Bob upon guard in front of it. He was his own man now again. What did he care for anybody, so long as he had his children?

“Dr. Hutton, I thought that you were gone.”

“You see I am not,” said Rufus, squaring his elbows, and looking big, for he was a plucky little fellow, “and, whatʼs more, I donʼt mean to go till I know what is in that box.”

“Box, box!” cried Bull Garnet, striking his enormous forehead, as if to recall something; “have we a box of yours, Dr. Hutton?”

“No, no; that box of yours. Your daughter told us to examine it. And, from her manner, I believe that I am bound to do so.”

“Bound to examine one of my boxes!” Bull Garnet never looked once that way, and Rufus took note of the strange avoidance; “my boxes are full of confidential papers; surely, sir, you have caught my daughterʼs – I mean to say, you are labouring under some hallucination.”

“There are no papers in that box. The contents of it are metal. I have seen one article already through the broken cover, and shall not forget its shape. Beware; there have been strange things done in this neighbourhood. If you refuse to allay my suspicions, you confirm them.”

The only answer he received was a powerful hand at the back of his neck, a sensation of being lifted with no increase of facilities for placid respiration; finally, a lateral movement of great rapidity through the air, and a loud sound as of a bang. Recovering reasonʼs prerogative, he found himself in a dahlia, whose blossoms, turned into heel–balls by the recent frost, were flapping round his countenance, and whose stake had gone through his waistcoat back, and grazed his coxendix, or something; he knows best what it was, as a medical man deeply interested.

He had also a very unpleasant reminiscence of some such words as these, to which he had no responsive power – “You wonʼt take a hint like a gentleman; so take a hit like a blackguard.”

Dr. Rufus Hutton was not the man to sit down quietly under an insult of any sort. At the moment he felt that brute force was irresistibly in the ascendant, and he was wonderfully calm about it. He shook himself, and smoothed his waistcoat, and tried the stretch of his garters; then never once looked toward the house, never shook his fist, nor frowned even. He walked off to his darling Polly as if nothing at all had happened; gave the man a shilling for holding her, after looking long for a sixpence; then mounted, and rode towards Nowelhurst Hall, showing no emotion whatever. Only Polly knew that burning tears of a brave manʼs sense of ignominy fell upon her glossy shoulder, and were fiercely wiped way.

At the Hall he said nothing about it; never even mentioned that he had called at Garnetʼs cottage; but told Sir Cradock, like a true man, of Eoaʼs troubles, of her poor forlorn condition, and power of heart to feel it. He even contrived to interest the bereaved man, now so listless, in the young life thrown upon his care, as if by the breath of heaven. We are never so eloquent for another as when our own hearts are moved deeply by the feeling of wrong to ourselves; unless, indeed, we are very small, and that subject excludes all others.

So it came to pass that the grand new carriage was ordered to the door, and Sir Cradock would himself have gone – only Rufus Hutton had left him, and the eloquence was oozing. The old man, therefore, turned back on the threshold, saying to himself that it would be hardly decent to appear in public yet; and Mrs. OʼGaghan was sent instead, sitting inside, and half afraid to breathe for fear of the crystal. As for her clothes, they were good enough, she knew, for the Lord Mayorʼs coach. “Five–and–sixpence a yard, maʼam, lave alone trimming and binding.” But, knowing what she did of herbs, she could not answer for the peppermint.

Of course, they did not intend to fetch poor Eoa home yet; but Biddy had orders to stay there until the young lady was moveable. Biddy took to her at once, in her heavy, long–drawn sleep, with the soft black lashes now and then lifting from the rich brown cheek.

“An’ if she isnʼt illigant, then,” said Biddy to Mrs. Brown, “ate me wiʼout a purratie. Arl coom ov’ the blude, missus. Sazins, then, if me and Pat had oonly got a child this day! Belikes, maʼam, for the matter o’ that, a drap o’ whisky disagrays with you.”

Biddy, feeling strongly moved, and burning to drink her new childʼs health, showed a bottle of brown potheen.

“To tell you the truth, mem,” said Mrs. Brown, “I know nothing about them subjects. Spirituous liquors is a thing as has always been beyond me.”

“Thin Iʼll clap it away again,” said Biddy, “and the divvil only the wiser. I never takes it alone, marm.”

“It would ill become me, mem,” replied Mrs. Brown, “to be churlish in my own house, mem. I have heard of you very often, mem. Yes, I assure you I have, from the people as comes to bathe here, as a lady of great experience in diseases of the chest. If you recommend any cordial, mem, on the strength of your experience, for a female of weak witality, I should take it as a dooty, mem, strictly as a dooty to my husband and two darters.”

“Arrah, then, Iʼm your femmale. Me witality goes crossways, like, till I has a drap o’ the crather.” And so they made a night of it, and Mr. Brown had some.

CHAPTER VII

Leave we now, with story pending, Biddy and Eoa, Pearl, and even Amy; thee, too, rare Bull, and thee, O Rufus, overcast with anger. It is time to track the steps of him whom Fortune, blithe at her cruel trade, shall track as far as Gades, Cantaber, and wild Syrtes, where the Moorish billow is for ever heaving. Will he exclaim with the poet, who certainly was a jolly mortal, – “I praise her while she is my guest. If she flap her nimble wings, I renounce her charities; and wrap me in my manhood robe, and woo the upright poverty, the bride without a dower.” “A very fine sentiment, Master Horace; but were you not a little too fond even of Sabine and Lesbian – when the Massic juice was beyond your credit – to do anything more than feel it?”

As Cradock Nowell trudged that night towards the Brockenhurst Station, before he got very far from Amy, and while her tears were still on his cheek, he felt a little timid lick, a weak offering of sympathy.

Hereby black Wena made known to him that she was melted by his misfortunes, and saw that the right and most feeling course, and the one most pleasing to her dead master, was the transfer of her allegiance, and the swearing of fealty to the brother. To which conclusion the tender mode in which she was being carried conduced, perhaps, considerably; for she was wrapped in Claytonʼs woolly jacket, enthroned on Cradockʼs broad right arm, and with only her black nose exposed to the moon. So she jogged along very comfortably, until she had made up her mind, and given Cradock the kiss of seisin.

“Dear little thing,” he cried, for he looked on her now as Amyʼs keepsake, “you shall go with me wherever I go. You are faithful enough to starve with me; but you shall not starve until after me.”

Then he put her down, for he thought that a little run would do her good, and, in spite of all her misery, Amy had kept her pretty plump, plumper than she herself was; and it became no joke to carry her, with a travelling–bag, &c., after the first half mile.

Then Wena capered about, and barked, and came and licked his shoe, and offered to carry the coat for him. As he would not let her do this, she occupied her mind with the rabbits, which were out upon the feed largely, and were the last she would see for a long while, except the fat Ostenders.

When he got to London, and took small lodgings at a Mrs. Ducksacreʼs, “greengrocer and general fruiterer, Mortimer–street, Cavendish–square,” – I quote from the ladyʼs bags: confound it, there! I am always saying improper things; honi soit– I mean, of course, her paper bags – it was not long before he made two important discoveries, valuable rather than gratifying.

The first of these discoveries was, that our university portals are a mere side–postern, and not the great janua mundi. He found his classical scholarship, his early fame at Oxford, his love of elegant literature, rather a disadvantage than a recommendation for business.

“Prigs, sir, prigs,” said a member of an eminent City firm; “of course, I donʼt mean to be personal; but I have always found you Oxford men prigs, quite unfit for desk–work. You fancy you know so much; you are always discovering mareʼs–nests, and you wonʼt bear to be spoken to, even if you stick to your work; which, I assure you, is quite the exception. Then you hold yourself aloof, with your stupid etiquette, from the other young men, who are quite as good as you are. I assure you, the place was too hot to hold us with the last Oxford man we took in the counting–house; he gave himself such airs, the donkey! I vowed never to do it again: and I never will, sir. Good morning, sir; Gregson, show this gentleman the way out.”

Gregson did so with a grin, for Cradockʼs face proved that the principal had not been altogether wrong.

Is this prejudice, or, rather, perhaps, I should say, this aversion, disappearing now–a–days, or is it upon the increase? At any rate, one cause of it is being removed most rapidly; for the buckram etiquette of Oxford will soon become a tradition. We will only hope she may not run too far into the free and easy.

Cradockʼs other discovery was that 50l. is no large capital to commence in life with, especially when the owner does not find his start prepared for him; fails to prepare it for himself; and has never been used to economy. He would not apply to any of his fatherʼs friends, or of the people whom he had known in London, to help him in this emergency. He would rather starve than do that; for he had dropped all name and claim of Nowell, and cut his life in twain at manhood; and the parts should never join again. Only one feeling should be common to the two existences, to the happy and the wretched life; that one feeling was the love of Amy, and, what now seemed part of it, his gratitude to her father.

John Rosedew had given him a letter to a clergyman in London, a man of high standing and extensive influence, whom John had known at college. But the youth had not undertaken to deliver that credential, and he never did so. It would have kept him to his identity, which (so far as the world was concerned) he wished to change entirely, immediately, and irrevocably. So he called himself “Nowell” no longer – although the name is common enough in one form or another: the Nowells of Nowelhurst, however, are proud of the double l, and think a good deal of the w– and Cradock Nowell became “Charles Newman,” without license of Her Majesty.

Even before his vain attempts to enter the stronghold of commerce, and before he had learned that Oxford men are not thought “prima virorum,” he had lifted the latch of literature, but the door would not swing back for him. The mare magnum– to mix metaphors, although bars are added to the Lucrine – the mare magnum of letters was more like his native element; and, if he once could have gotten – bare–footed as we must be – over the jagged rocks which hedge that sea, I believe he might have swum there.

In one respect he was fortunate. The publishers upon whom he called were gentlemen, and told him the truth.

“Oh, poetry!” exclaimed one and all, as their eyes fell upon his manuscript, “we cannot take it on our own account; and, if we published it at your expense, we should only be robbing you.”

“Indeed!” replied Cradock, in the first surprise; “is there no chance, then, of a sale for it?”

“None whatever. Poetry, unless it be some oneʼs whose name is well known, is a perfect drug in the market. In the course of ten or a dozen years, by advertising continually, by influence among the reviewers, by hitting some popular vein, or being taken up by some authority, you might attain an audience. Are you ready to encounter all this? Even if you are, we must decline, we are sorry to say, to have anything to do with it.”

“Verse, eh? Better have cut your throat,” more tersely replied an elderly gentleman, well known for his rudeness to authors. However, even that last was a friend, when compared with some whom it might have been his evil luck to consult. They advertise their patent methods of putting a work before the public, without any risk to the author, &c. &c. Disinterested gentlemen! They are to have no profit whatever, except from the sale of the work, and they know they wonʼt sell five copies.

However, there are not many of this sort in an honourable and most important profession; and Cradock Nowell was lucky enough not to fall in with any of them. So he accepted the verdict so unanimously returned, and stored away with a heavy heart his laborious little manuscript. It was only a translation in verse of the Halieutics, and a few short original pieces – the former at any rate valuable, as having been revised by John Rosedew.

There are courts and alleys in the neighbourhood of Mortimer–street which, for misery and poverty, dirt and desperation, may vie with almost any of the more famous shames of London.

Cradockʼs own great trouble, the sympathy he had met with, and the comfort he received from it, had begun by this time to soften his heart, and render it more sensitive to the distress of others. At first, it had been far otherwise. The feeling of bitter injustice, resentment at, and defiance of, a blow which seemed to him so unmerited, and, worse than all, his own fatherʼs base and low mistrust of him – who could have been surprised if these things, acting upon a sad lone heart, and a bold mind beginning to think for itself, had made the owner an infidel? And very likely they would have done so, when he was removed from John Rosedewʼs influence, but for that scene with Amy. He loved that girl so warmly, so devotedly, so purely, that, when he found his love returned in equal quantity and quality, it renewed his faith in justice. He saw that there is a measure and law, even where all appears to be anarchy and anomaly; that the hand of God is not stretched forth upon His children wantonly; that we cannot gauge His circling survey by the three–inch space between human eyes, neither does He rest His balance on His earthly footstool. So Cradock escaped the deadly harm, which almost seems designed to poise that noblest gift of Heaven – a free and glorious intellect – he escaped it through the mercy which gave him true affection.

And now once more he looked with love upon his fellow–men, such love as the frigid atheist school shall never form nor educate – which truth alone to a great heart might be conclusive against that school – the love which few religions except our own inculcate, and no other takes for its essence.

As yet he was too young to know the blind and inhuman selfishness, the formality and truckling, and the other paltry dishonesties, which still exist and try to cheat us under the name of “Society.” The cant is going by already. Every man who dares to think knows that its laws are obsolete, because they have not for their basis either of these three – truth, simplicity, charity.

Even that young man was astonished at the manner in which society ignores its broader and only true meaning – fellowship among men – and renounces all other duties, save that of shaking from its shoes its fellow–dust. He could not look upon the scenes so nigh to him, and to each other, parted often by nothing more than nine inches of brick or two inches of deal; the wealth and the want, the feast and the famine, the satiety and the ravening, the euphemy and the blasphemy – though sometimes that last got inside the door, blew its nose, and was infidelity; the prudery and the indecency, the whispered lie and the yelled one, the sale of maidens by their mothers, or of women by themselves – though here again the difference was never very perceptible; all this impious contrast, spread as if for Godʼs approval, for the Universal Fatherʼs blessing, in the land most chiefly blessed by Him: which of His sons, not cast out for ever, could look on it without weeping?

Cradock did something more than weep. He went with his little stock of money, though he knew it could not do much; and he tried to help in little ways, though as yet he had no experience. He bought meat, and clothes, and took things out of pawn, and tried to make peace where fights were.

At first he was grossly insulted, as a meddlesome swell; but, when he had done two or three good things, and done them as a brother should, he began to be owned among them. In one thing he was right, although he had no experience; he confined his exertions to a very narrow compass. Of course he got imposed upon – of course he helped the unworthy; but after a while he began to know them, and even the unworthy – some two hundred per cent. – began to have faint ideas of trying to deserve good luck.

One man who attempted to pick Cradʼs pocket was knocked down by the biggest thief there. “I wish I had a heap of money,” said Cradock, every day; “I must keep some for myself, I suppose. Perhaps, after all, I was wrong, in throwing up so hastily my chance of doing good.”

Then he remembered that, but for his trouble, he might never have thought of the good to be done. And the good done to him was threefold as much as he could do to others. Every day he grew less selfish, less imperious, less exacting; every day he saw more clearly the good which is in the worst of us.

There is a flint of peculiar character – I know not the local name of it – which is found sometimes on the great Chissel Bank, and away towards Lyme Regis. It is as hard, and sullen, and dull a flint (with even the outside polish lost from the chafing of the waves) – a stone as grey and foggy–looking; – as ever Deucalion took the trouble to cast away over the left into an empty world. Yet it has, through the heart of it, traversing it from pole to pole (for its shape is always conical) a thread, a spindle, a siphuncle, of the richest golden hue. None but those who are used to it can see the head of the golden column, can even guess its existence. The stone is not hollow; it is quite distinct from all pudding–stones and conglomerates.

Many such flints poor Crad came across, and sought in vain for the beauty of them. He never tried to split them with a hammer, as too many do of our Boanergæ; but he was too young to see or feel the chord of the golden siphuncle. One, especially, one great fellow, was harder and rougher than any flint, like the matrix of the concentric jasper.

“Confound that fellow,” said Cradock to himself; “I never shall get at the heart of him. If my pluck were up a little more. Iʼd fight him; though I know he would lick me. Heʼd be sorry for me afterwards.”

Issachar Jupp could lick any two men in the court. He was a bargee, of good intentions – at least, when he took to the cuddy; but his horses had pulled crosswise ever since; and the devil knew, better than the angels, what his nature now was.

“None of your d – d Scripture–reading for me!” he cried, when Cradock came near him; though the young man had never attempted anything of the sort.

He knew that the Word of God is not bread to a blackguardʼs empty belly. And another thing he knew – that he was not of the age and aspect for John Bunyanʼs business. Moreover, Jupp was wonderfully jealous of his wife, a gentle but grimy woman, forty–five years old, whom he larruped every day; although he might be an infidel, he would ensure his wifeʼs fidelity. Nevertheless, he had his pure vein, and Cradock at last got at it.

Mrs. and Miss Ducksacre were very good–hearted women, but, like many other women of that fibre, whose education has been neglected, of a hot and hasty order. Not that we need suppose the pepper to be neutralized by the refinement, only to be absorbed more equably, and transfused more generally.

A little thing came feeling the way into the narrow, dingy shop, one dark November evening, groping along by the sacks of potatoes (all of them “seconds,” for the firm did not deal much in “Ware Regents”), feeling its way along the sacks which towered above its head, like bulky snow–giants embrowned with thaw; and then by the legs of the “tatie–bin,” with the great scales hanging above it, and then by the heap of lighting–wood, piled in halfpenny bundles, with the ends against the wall; and so the little thing emerged between two mighty hills of coleworts, and under the frugal gas–burner, and congratulated itself, with a hug of the heart, upon safety.

“Take care, my dear,” cried Mrs. Ducksacre, looking large behind the counter, “or youʼll tumble down the coal–trap, where the black bogeys lives. Bless my heart, if it ainʼt little Loo! Why, Loo, I hardly knew you. You ainʼt looking like yourself a bit, child. And who sent you out at this time of night? What a shame, to be sure!”

Loo, the pride of Issachar Jupp, was rather a pretty little body, about three and a half years old, “going on for four,” as she loved to say, if anybody asked her; and her pale but clean face would have been very pretty, if her mother would have let her hair alone. But it was all combed back, and tied tightly behind, like the tail of a horse at a fair, or as affording a spout to pour the little girl out by. She looked up at Mrs. Ducksacre, while her fingers played with the coleworts, for her hands were hot, and this cooled them; and then, with the instinct of nature, she stuck up for her father and mother.

“Pease, maʼam, Loo not fray much,” – though her trembling frock belied her, all over the throat and the heart of it – “and father don from home, maʼam, on the Wasintote” [Basingstoke canal], “and mother dot nobody, onʼy Loo, to do thins. And she send this, ‘cause Looʼs poor troat be bad, maʼam.”

The little child, whose throat was tied up with worn flannel from the char–bucket, with the grey edge still upon it, wriggled in and out of her shape and self, in the way only children can do; and at length drew, from some innermost shrine, a halfpenny and a farthing.

“And what am I to give you for it, Loo? Oh, you poor little thing, how very hoarse you are!”

Loo, with a confidence in human nature purely non–Londinian, had placed her cash upon the altar, upon the inside of which so many worship, while on the outside so many are sacrificed; without circumlocution, the counter. Her eyes were below the rim of it, till she stood upon tiptoe with one foot, while the other was up in the colewort roots, and then she could see the money, and she poked out her little lips at it, as if she would fain suck it back again.

“Pease, maʼam, Looʼs troat so bad, mother are goin to make a ‘tew, tree haʼporth of tipe and a haʼporth of ‘egents, and a fardy of inons!”

“What a splendid stew, Loo!” said Mrs. Ducksacre, seeming to smell it; “and so you want a haʼporth of taties, and a farthingʼs worth of onions. And you shall have them, my dear, and as good a three farthings’ worth as ever was put up in London. Where are you going to put them all?”

Loo opened her sore throat, and pointed down it. She had not yet lost her appetite; and that child did love tripe so.

“No, no, I donʼt mean that, Loo. I know you have a nice room inside; though some will be for mother, wonʼt it, now? I mean, how are you going to carry it home?”

“In Looʼs pinney,” replied the child, delighted with her success; for ever so many people had told her, that the Ducksacres now were getting so high, they would soon leave off making farthings–worths; and any tradesman who does that is above the sphere of the street–child.

“My dear, your pinney wonʼt hold them, potatoes are so cheap now” – she had just sworn they were awfully dear to a person she disliked – “I am sure you canʼt carry a haʼporth. Oh, Mr. Newman, you are so good–natured” – Cradock was just coming in, rather glum from another failure – “I really donʼt believe you would think you were bemeaning yourself by going home with this poor little atom.”

“I should rather hope I would not,” replied Cradock, looking grand.

“Oh, I did not know. I beg your pardon, Iʼm sure. I would go myself, only Sally is out, and the boy gone home ever so long ago. I beg your pardon, Iʼm sure, Mr. Newman; I thought you were so good–natured.”

“Mrs. Ducksacre,” said Cradock, “you utterly misunderstand me. I replied to the form of your sentence, perhaps, rather than to its meaning. What I meant was, that I should rather hope I would not think it below me to go home with this little dear. If I could suppose it any disgrace to me, I should deserve to be kicked by your errand–boy all round this shop, Mrs. Ducksacre; and I am surprised you misunderstand me so. Why, I know this little girl well; and her name is Louisa Jupp.”

“Tiss Loo,” said the little child, standing up on tiptoe, and spreading out her arms to Cradock. All the children loved him, as the little ones at Nowelhurst would run after Mr. Rosedew. Children are even better judges of character than dogs.

“Why, you poor little soul,” said Crad, as he seated her on his strong right arm with her little cheek to his, and she drew a thousand straws of light through her lashes from the gas–jet, which she had never yet been so close to, “how hot and dry your lips are! I hope you are not taking the – sickness” – he was going to say “fever,” but feared to frighten Loo.

“Mother fray,” cried the small girl, proud of the importance accruing to her, “Loo dot wever; Irishers dot bad wever on the foor below mother. Loo det nice thins, and lay abed, if me dot the wever.”

“Put the poor childʼs things, whatever they are, in a basket, Mrs. Ducksacre. How odd her little legs feel! And a shillingʼs worth of grapes, if you please, in a bag by themselves. Hereʼs the money for them. You know Iʼll bring back the basket. But the bags donʼt come back, do they?”

“No, sir, of course not. Half–a–crown a gross for the small ones, with the name and the cross–handle basket, and the cabbage and carrots, sir. Sixpence more for cornopean–pattern with a pineapple, and grapes and oranges. But lor, sir, the cornopean” [cornucopiæ] “would frighten half our customers. The basket–pattern pays better for an advertisement than to get them back again, even if parties would bring them, which I knows well they never would, sir.”

Then Cradock set forth with the child on his arm, his coat thrown over his shoulders, and the best shillingʼs worth of foreign grapes – Mrs. Ducksacre never bought English ones – and the best three farthingʼs worth of potatoes and onions that was made that day by any tradesman in any part of London, not excluding “them low costers,” as the Ducksacre firm expressed it.

Little Loo Juppʼs sore throat proved to be, as Cradock feared it would, the first symptom of scarlet fever; and the young man had the pleasure – one of the highest and purest pleasures which any man can have – of saving a human life. He watched that trembling flame of life, and fostered it, and sheltered it, as if “the hopes of a nation hung” – as the penny–a–liners love to say of some babe not a whit more valuable – upon its feeble flicker. He hired another room for her, where the air was purer; he made the doctor attend to the case, which at first that doctor cared little to do; he brought her many a trifling comfort; in a word, he waited upon her so that the old women of the court called him thenceforth “Nurse Newman.”

“What, you here again, you white–livered young sneak!” cried Issachar Jupp, reeling in at the door, just as Cradock was coming out; “take that, then – ” and he lifted a great oak bludgeon, newly cut from the towing–path of the Basingstoke Canal. If Cradock had not been as quick as lightning, and caught the stick over the bargemanʼs shoulder, there would have been weeping and wailing and a lifelong woe for Amy.

“Hush,” he said; “donʼt make such a noise, man. Your child is at the point of death, in the room overhead.”

Poor Crad, naturally of a bright complexion, but pale from long unhappiness, might now have retorted the compliment as to the “pallor jecoris.” The bargee turned so pale, that he looked like a collierʼs tablecloth. Then he planted his heavy stick on the ground; else he would have lain flat on his threshold.

“My Loo, my Loo!” was all he could say; “oh my Loo! Itʼs a lie, sir!”

“I wish it was,” replied Cradock; “take my arm, Mr. Jupp. Donʼt be over–frightened. We hope with all our hearts to save her, and to–night we shall know. Already I think I perceive some change in her breathing, though her tongue is like a furnace.”

He spoke with a tone and in a voice which no man ever has described, nor shall, but which every born man feels to be genuine, long ere he can think.

“[Condemn] me for a [sanguineous] fool,” cried Jupp, with two enormous tears guttering down the coal–dust, and his great chest heaving and wanting to sob, only it didnʼt know the way; “[condemn] my eyes for swearing so, and making such a [female dog] of myself, but what the [Hades] am I to do? Oh my Loo, my Loo! If you die, Iʼll go to [Hades] after you.”

Excuse me for washing out this speech to regulation weakness; perhaps it was entered in white on high, as the turn of a life of blackness.

Cradock turned away, and trembled. Who can see a rugged man split to the bottom of his nature, and not himself be splintered? I donʼt believe that any can: not even the cold iron scoundrels whom modern plays delight in.

“Now come up with me, Mr. Jupp,” said Crad, taking care not to look at him, “out at this door, in at the other. Poor little soul! she has been so good. You canʼt think how good she has been. And she has taken her medicine so nicely.”

“Pray God Almighty not to [condemn] me, for not [condemning] myself enough,” said Issachar Jupp, below his breath, as he leaned on Cradockʼs arm.

It was his form of prayer; and it meant more than most of ours do. Though I may be discarded by turtle–dove quill–drivers for daring to record it, will he ever be worse for uttering it? Of course, it was very shocking; but far more so to men than to angels.

CHAPTER VIII

Little Looʼs fever “took the turn” that night. Cradock went away, of course, now her own father was come; and the savage bargee would have gone on his knees, and crawled in that fashion – wherein all fashion crawls – down the rough stairs, every one of them, if the young man would only have let him. We are just beginning to scorn the serfdom of one mind to another. We begin to desire that no man should, without fair argument, accept our dicta as equal to his own in wisdom. And I fully believe that if fate had thrown us across Shakespeare, Bacon, or Newton, we should now refer to our own reason what they said, before admiring it. For, after all, what are we? What are our most glorious minds? Only one spark more of God.

And yet the servience, not of the mind, but of the heart to a larger one, is a fealty most honourable to the giver and the receiver. In a bold independent man, such as Issachar Jupp was, this fealty was not to be won by any of that paltry sentiment about birth, clanship, precedency, position, appearance, &c., which is our national method of circumcising the New Testament – it was only to be won by proof that the other heart was bigger than his. Prove that once, and till death it was granted.

Now, the small Loo Jupp being out of danger, and her father, grinning like a gridiron with the firelight behind it, every day at her bedside, the force of circumstances – which, in good English, means the want of money – sent Cradock Nowell once more catʼs–cradling throughout London, to answer advertisements. His heart rose within him every day as he set out in the morning, and in the same relative position fell, as he came home every evening.

“Do, sir, do,” cried Issachar Jupp, who never swore now, before Cradock, except under strongest pressure; “do come aboard our barge. Iʼve aʼmost a–got the appointment of skipper to the Industrious Maiden, homeside of Nine Elms, as tight a barge as ever was built, and the name done in gold letters. Fact, I may say, and not tell no secrets; I be safe to be aboord of her, if my Loo allow me to go, and I donʼt swear hard at the check–house. And, perhaps, I shall be able to help it, after Loo so ill, and you such a hangel.”

“Well, I donʼt know,” replied Cradock, who could not bear to simulate intense determination; “I should like a trip into the country, if I could earn my wages as agent, or whatever it is. But suppose the canal is frozen up before our voyage begins, Jupp?”

“Oh, d – n that!” cried Issachar, for the idea was too much for him, even in Cradockʼs presence; “I never yet knew a long winter, sir, after a wonderful stormy autumn.”

And in that conclusion he was right, to the best of my experience. Perhaps because the stormy autumn shows the set of the Gulf Stream.

By this time more than a month had passed since Cradock and Wena arrived in London; half his money was spent, and he had found no employment. He had advertised, and answered advertisements, till he was tired. He had worn out his one pair of boots with walking, for he had thought it better to walk, as it might be of service to him to know London thoroughly; and that knowledge can only be acquired by perpetual walking. No man can be said to know London thoroughly, who does not know the suburbs also – who, if suddenly put down at the Elephant and Castle, or at Shoreditch Church, cannot tell exactly whither each of the six fingers points. Such knowledge very few men possess; it requires the genius loci – to apply the expression barbarously – as well as peculiar calls upon it. Cradock, of course, could not attain such knowledge in a month. Indeed, he was obliged to ask his way to so well–known a part as Hammersmith, when he had seen an advertisement for a clerk, to help in some coal–office there.

With the water quelching in his boots (which were worn away to the welting) – for the sky was like the pulp of an orange, and the pavement wanted draining – he turned in at a little gate near the temporary terminus of the West London line. In a wooden box, with a kitchen behind it, he found Mr. Clinkers; who thought, when he saw Cradʼs face, that he was come to give a large order; and when he saw his boots, that he was come to ask to be errand–boy. Clinkers was a familiar, jocular, red–faced fellow, whom his friends were fond of calling “not at all a bad sort.”

“Take a glass, mister,” said he, when Cradock had stated his purpose; “wonʼt do you no harm such a day as this, and I donʼt fancy ‘twould me either. Jenny! Jenny! Why, bless that gal; ever since my poor wife died, sheʼs along of them small–coals fellows. Iʼll bet a tanner she is. What do you say to it, sir? Will you bet?”

“Well,” replied Cradock, smiling, “it wouldnʼt be at all a fair bet. In the first place, I know nothing of Miss Jennyʼs propensities; and, in the second, I have no idea what the small–coals fellows are.”

The small–coals men are the truck–drivers and the greengrocers in the by–streets, who buy the crushings and riddlings by the sack, at the wharf or terminus, and sell them by the quarter hundred–weight, weight, at a profit of two hundred per cent. Cradock might have known this, but the Ducksacre firm was reticent upon some little matters.

Mr. Clinkers could not stop to explain; only he said to himself, “Pretty fellow to apply for a clerkship in the coal–line, and not know that!”

Jenny appeared at last, looking perfectly self–possessed.

“Jenny, you baggage, two tumblers and silver teaspoons in no time. And the little kettle; mind now, I tell you the little kettle. Canʼt you understand, gal, that I may want to shave with the water, but ainʼt going to have the foot–tub?”

Jennyʼs broad face, mapped with coal–dust, grinned from ear to ear, as she looked at her master saucily – a proof almost infallible of a very genial government. She heard that shaving joke every day, and, the more she heard it, the more she enjoyed it. So the British public, at a theatre, or an election, appreciates a joke according to the square of the number of the times the joke has been poked at it. Hurrah for the slow perception, and the blunt knife that opens the oyster!

“Queer gal, that,” said Clinkers, producing his raw material; “uncommon queer gal, sir, as any you may have met with.”

“No doubt of it,” replied Cradock; “and now for the cause of my visit – ”

“Hang me, sir, you donʼt understand that gal. I say she is the queerest gal that ever lived out of a barge. You should see her when she gets along of some of them small–coals fellows. Blow me if she canʼt twist a dozen of them round her finger, sir.”

“And her master too,” thought Cradock; “unless I am much mistaken, she will be the new Mrs. Clinkers.”

Jenny heard most of her masterʼs commentary as she went to and fro, and she kept up a constant grin without speech, in the manner of an empty coal–scuttle.

“Ah, sir, grief is a dry thing, a sad dry thing;” and Clinkers banged down his tumbler till the spoon reeled round the brandy; “no business, if you please now, not a word of business till we both be below the fiddle; and, if it isnʼt to your liking, speak out like a man, sir.”

“Below the fiddle, Mr. Clinkers! What fiddle? I donʼt at all understand you.”

“Very few people does, young man; very few people indeed. Scarcely any, I may say, except Jenny and the cookshop woman; and the latter have got encumbrances as quite outweighs the business. Ainʼt you ever heard of the fiddle of a teaspoon, sir?”

“Oh, very well,” said Cradock, tossing off his brandy–and–water to bring things to a point. It was a good thing for him that he got it, poor fellow, for he was sadly wet and weary.

“Lor, now, to see that!” cried Clinkers, opening his eyes; “Iʼm blowed if you mustnʼt be a Hoxford gent.”

“To be sure, so I am,” replied Cradock, laughing; “but I should not have thought that you would have known – I mean, I am surprised that you, at this distance, should know anything of Oxford men.”

“Tell you about that presently. Come over again the fire, sir. Up with your heel–tap, and have another.”

“No, thank you, Mr. Clinkers. You are very kind; but I shall not take one drop more.”

“Then you ainʼt been there very long, thatʼs certain. Now you have come about this place, I know; though itʼs a queer one for a Hoxford gent. ‘Gent under a cloud,’ thinks I, the moment I claps eyes on you. Ah, I knows the aristocraxy, sir. Now, what might be your qualifications?”

“None whatever, except such knowledge as springs from a good education.”

“Whew!” whistled Mr. Clinkers, and that sound was worth fifty sentences.

“Then you conclude,” said Cradock, not so greatly downcast, for he had got this speech by heart now, “that I am not fitted for the post offered in your advertisement?”

“Knows what they Hoxford gents is,” continued Clinkers, reflectively; “come across a lot of them once, when I was gay and rattling. They ran into my tax–cart, coming home from Ascot, about a mile this side of Brentford. Famous good company over a glass, when they drops their aristocraxy; they runs up a tick all over town, and leaves a Skye dog to pay for it; comes home about four in the morning, and donʼt know the latch from the scraper. Always pays in the end, though; nearly always pays in the end – so a Hoxford tradesman told me – and interest ten per cent. Differs in that from the medicals; the fast medicals never do pay, sir.”

“Most unjust,” said Cradock, rising, “a most unjust thing, Mr. Clinkers; you not only judge the present by the past, but you reason from the particular to the universal – the most fruitful and womanlike of the fallacies.”

“It ainʼt anything about fallacy, sir, that makes me refuse you,” cried Clinkers, who liked this outburst; “Iʼll tell you just what it is. You Hoxford scholars may be very honest, but you ainʼt got the grease for business.”

Sorely down at heart and heel, Cradock plodded away from the yard of the hospitable Clinkers, who came to the door and looked after him, fearing to indulge his liking for that queer young fellow. But he had taken Cradʼs address; for who knew but something might turn up?

“That man,” said Cradock to himself, “has a kindly heart, and would have helped me if he could. He wanted to pay my fare back to town, but of course I would not let him. It was well worth while to come all this distance, and get wet through twice over, to come across a kind–hearted man, when a fellow is down so. I began with applying for grand places; what a fool I was! Places worth 150l. or 200l. a–year. No wonder I did not get them: and what a lot of boot I have wasted! Now I am come down to 50l. per annum, and 75l. would be a fortune. If I had only begun at that mark, I might have got something by this time. ‘Vaulting ambition doth oʼerleap itself.’ And I might have emigrated – good Heavens! I might have emigrated upon the bounty of Uncle John, to some land where a man is worth more than the cattle of the field. Only Amy stopped me, only the thought of my Amy. Darling love, the sweetest angel – stop, I am so unlucky; if I begin to bless her, very likely sheʼll get typhus fever. After all, what does it matter what sort of life I take to? Or whether, indeed, I take the trouble to take to any at all? Only for her sake. A man who has done what I have lives no more, but drags his life. Now Iʼll go in for common labour, work of the hands and muscles; many a better man has done it; and it will be far wiser for me while my brain is so loose and wandering. I wonder I never thought of that. Isnʼt it raining, though! What we used, in the happy days, to call ‘Wood Fidley rainʼ”.

The future chironax trudged more cheerfully after this decision. But he was very sorry to get so soaked, for he had his only suit of clothes on. He had brought but one suit of his own; and all he had bought with the rectorʼs money was six shirts at 3s. 6d., and four pairs of cotton hose. So he could not afford to get wet.

There could be no doubt that he was shabbily dressed, no rich game to an hotel–tout, no tempting fare to a cabman; but neither could there be any doubt that he was a pure and noble gentleman; that was as clear as in the heyday of finest Oxford dandyism. Only he carried his head quite differently, and the tint of his cheeks was gone. He used to walk with his broad and well–set head thrown back, and slightly inclined to one side; now he bore it flagging, drooping, as if the spring of the neck were gone.

But still the brave clear eyes met frankly all who cared to look at him; the face and gait were of a man unhappy but not unmanly. If, at the time Sir Cradock condemned his only son so cruelly, he had looked at him once, and read the sorrow so unmistakeable in his face, the old man might have repented, and wept, and saved a world of weeping. A tear in time saves ninety–nine; but who has the sense to yield it?

Soaked and tired out at last, he reached his little lodgings – quite large enough for him, though – and found Black Wena warming the chair, the only chair he had to sit on. Unluckily, he did not do what a man who cared for himself would have done. Having no change of raiment – in plain English, only one pair of trousers – he should have gone to bed at once, or at any rate have pulled his wet clothes off. Instead of doing so, he sat and sat, with the wet things clinging closer to him, and the shivers crawling deeper, until his last inch of candle was gone, and the room was cold as an icehouse, for the rain had turned to snow at nightfall, and the fire had not been lit.

Wena sat waiting and nodding upwards, on the yard and a half of brown drugget, which now was her chiefest pulvinar, and once or twice she nudged her master, and whined about supper and bedtime. But Cradock only patted her, and improved the turn of his sentence. He was making one last effort to save from waste and ridicule his tastes and his education. A craftsman, if he have self–respect, is worthy, valuable, admirable, nearer to the perception of simple truth than some men of high refinement. Nevertheless, it is too certain – as I, who know them well, and not unkindly, can testify – that there is scarcely one in a dozen labourers, even around the metropolis, who respects himself and his calling. Whose fault this is, I pretend not – for pretence it would be – to say. Probably, the guilt is “much of a muchness,” as in all mismanaged matters. The material was as good as our own; how has it got so vitiated? It is as lowering to us as it is to themselves, that the “enlightened working–men of England” cannot go out for their holiday, cannot come home from their work, cannot even speak among their own children, and in the goodwifeʼs presence, without words, not of manly strength, but of hoggish coarseness. In time this must be otherwise; but the evil is not cured easily. The boy believes it manly to talk as he hears his father talk; he rejoices in it the more, perhaps, because the school forbids it. He does not know what the foul words mean; and all things strange have the grandest range. Those words tell powerfully in a story, with smaller boys round him upon the green, or at the street–corner. And so he grows up engrimed with them, and his own boys follow suit.

Cradock was young and chivalrous, and knew not much of these things, which his position had kept from him; nor in his self–abandonment cared he much about them. Nevertheless, he shrank unconsciously from the lowering of his existence. And now he sat up, writing, writing, till his wet clothes made little pools on the floor, while he answered twenty advertisements, commercial, literary, promiscuous. Then he looked at his little roll of postage–stamps, and with shivering fingers affixed them. There were only fifteen; and it was too late to get any more that night; and he felt that he could not afford to use them now so rashly. So he ran out into the slushy streets, gamboged with London snow, and posted those fifteen of his letters which were the least ambitious. By this time he knew that the best chance was of something not over–gorgeous. Wena did not go with him, but howled until he came back. Then he gave the poor little thing, with some self–reproach at his tardiness, all the rest of his cottage loaf, and his haʼporth of milk, which she took with some protestations, looking up at him wistfully now and then, to see whether he was eating.

“No, Wena, I canʼt eat to–night; bilious from over–feeding, perhaps. But Iʼve done a good eveningʼs work, and weʼll be very plucky for breakfast, girl, and have sixpenceworth of cold ham. No fear there of making a cannibal of you, you innocent little soul.”

He was desperately afraid, as most young fellows from the country are, of having unclean animals spicily served up by the London allantopolæ. This terror is the result for the most part of rustic sham knowingness, and the British love of stale jokes. However, beyond all controversy, dark are the rites of sepulture of the measly pigs around London.

He crept, at last, beneath his scanty bedding – clean, although so patched and threadbare – and the iron cross–straps shook and rattled with the shudders that went through him.

Wena, who slept beneath the bed in a nest which she made of the drugget–scrap, jumped upon the blanket at midnight, to know pray what was the matter. Then she licked his face, and tried to warm him, in his broken slumbers. That day he had taken a virulent cold, which struck into his system, and harboured there for a fortnight, till it broke out in a raging fever.

The next day, Cradock received a letter, of doubtful classicality, and bearing the Hammersmith post–mark.

“Respected Sir, – Was sorry after you streaked off yesterday that had not kept you longer. You was scarce gone out of the gate as one might say, when in comes a gent, no end of a nob, beats you as one might say in some respects, and a head of hair as good. Known by the name of Hearty, – Hearty Wibraham, Esquire, but friends prefers callin’ him Hearty, such bein’ his character. And hearty he were with my brandy, I do assure you, and no mistake. This gent say as he want to establish a hagency for the sale of first–class Hettons to the members of the bone tons: was I agreeable to supply him? So I say, ‘Certainly, by all means, if I see my way to my money.’ And then he breaks out, in a manner as would frighten some hands, about the artlessness of the age, the suspiciousness of commercial gents, and confidence between man and man. ‘Waste of time,’ says I; ‘coals is coals now, and none of them leaves this yard for nothing. Better keep that sort of stuff,’ says I, ‘for the green young gent from Hoxford as was here just now.’ ‘What,’ says he, ‘Hoxford man after a situation?’ ‘ Yes,’ I says, ‘nice young gent, only under a cloud.’ Says he, ‘I loves a Hoxford man; hope he has got some money.’ ‘ For what?’ I says; ‘have you got anything good for him to invest in?’ ‘Havenʼt I?’ he says; ‘take a little more brandy, old chapʼ – my own brandy, mind you, blow me if he ainʼt a hearty one. Well, I canʼt tell you half he said, not being a talkative man myself, since the time as I lost Mrs. Clinkers. Only the upshot of it is, I think you couldnʼt do no harm by callinʼ, if he write you as he said he would.

“Yours to command, and hope you didnʼt get wet,

“Robert Clinkers, Jun., for Poker, Clinkers, and Co., Coal Merchants, West London Terminuss, Hammersmith.

“N.B. – Coke supplied in your own sacks, on the most moderate terms.”

By the next delivery, Cradock got another letter, far more elegantly written, but not half so honest.

“Mr. Hearty Wibraham, having heard of Mr. Charles Newman from a mutual friend, Mr. Clinkers, of Hammersmith, presents his compliments to the former gentleman, and thinks it might be worth Mr. Newmanʼs while to call upon him, Mr. H. W., at six oʼclock this evening, supposing the post to do its duty, which it rarely does. Hearty Wibraham, No. 66, Aurea Themis Buildings, Notting Hill district. N.B. – The above is bonâ fide. References will be required. But perhaps they may be dispensed with.

“H. W.”

“Well,” said Cradock to Wena, shivering as he said it, for the cold was striking into him, “you see we are in request, my dear. Not that I have any high opinion of Mr. Hearty Wibraham; as a gentleman, I mean. But for all that he may be an honest man. And beggars – as you know, Wena, dear, when you sit up so prettily – beggars must not be choosers. Do you think you could walk so far, Wena? If you could, it would do you good, my beauty; and Iʼll see that you are not run over.”

Wena agreed, rather rashly, to go; for the London stones, to a country dog, are as bad as a mussel–bank to a bather; but she thought she might find some woodcocks – and so she did, at the game–shops, and some curlews which they sold for them – but her real object in going, was that she had made some nice acquaintances in the neighbourhood, whom she wanted to see again. She wouldnʼt speak to any low dog, for she meant to keep up the importance and grandeur of the Nowell family, but there were some dogs, heigho! they had such ways with them, and they were brushed so nicely, what could a poor little country dog do but fall in love with them?

Therefore Wena came after her master, and made believe not to notice them, but she lingered now and then at a scraper, and, when she snapped, her teeth had gloves on.

When Cradock and his little dog, after many a twist and turn, found Aurea Themis Buildings, the master rang at the sprightly door, newly grained and varnished. Being inducted by a young woman, with a most coquettish cap on, he told black Wena to wait outside, and she lay down upon the door–step.

Then he was shown into the “first–floor drawing–room,” according to arrangement, and requested to “take a seat, sir.” The smart maid, who carried a candle, lit the gas in a twinkling, but Cradock wondered why the coal–merchant had no coals in his fireplace.

Just when he had concluded, after a fit of shivering, that this defect was due perhaps to that extreme familiarity which breeds in a grocer contempt for figs, Mr. Wibraham came in, quite by accident, and was evidently amazed to see him.

“What! Ah, no, my good sir, not Mr. Charles Newman, a member of the University of Oxford!”

“Yes, sir, I am that individual,” replied Cradock, very uncomfortable at the prominent use of his “alias.”

“Then, allow me, sir, to shake hands with you. I am strongly prepossessed in your favour, young gentleman, from the description I received of you from our mutual friend, Mr. Clinkers. Ah, I like that Clinkers. No nonsense about Clinkers, sir.”

“So I believe,” said Cradock; “but, as I have only seen him once, it would perhaps be premature of me – ”

“Not a bit, my dear sir, not a bit. That is one of the mistakes we make. I always rely upon first impressions, and they never deceive me. Now I see exactly what you are, an upright honourable man, full of conscientiousness, but not overburdened here.”

He gave a jocular tap to his forehead, which was about half the width of Cradockʼs.

“Well,” thought Cradock, “you are straightforward, even to the verge of rudeness. But no doubt you mean well, and perhaps you are nearer the truth than the people who have told me otherwise. Anyhow, it does not matter much.” But, in spite of this conclusion, he bowed in his stately manner, and said:

“If that be the case, sir, I fear it will hardly suit your purpose to take me into your employment.”

“Ah, I have hurt your feelings, I see. I am so blunt and hasty. Hearty Wibraham is my name; and hearty enough I am, God knows; and perhaps a little too hearty. ‘Hasty Wibraham, you ought to be called, by Jove, you ought,’ said one of my friends last night, and by Gad I think he was right, sir.”

“I am sure I donʼt know,” said Cradock; “how can I pretend to say, without myself being hasty?”

“I suppose, Mr. Newman, you can command a little capital? It is not at all essential, you know, in a bonâ fide case like yours.”

“Thatʼs a good job,” said Cradock; “for my capital, like the new one of Canada, is below contempt.”

“To a man imbued, Mr. Newman, with the genuine spirit of commerce, no sum, however small, but may be the key of fortune.”

“My key of fortune, then, is about twenty pounds ten shillings.”

“A very, very small sum, my dear sir; but I dare say some of your friends would assist you to make it, say fifty guineas. You Oxford men are so generous; always ready to help each other. That is why I canʼt help liking you so. Thoroughly fine fellows,” he added, in a loud aside, “thoroughly noble fellows, when a messmate is in trouble. Canʼt apply to his family, I see; but it would be mean in him not to let his friends help him. I do believe the highest privilege of human life is to assist a friend in difficulties.”

Cradock, of course, could not reply to all this, because he was not meant to hear it; but he gazed with some admiration at the utterer of such exalted sentiments. Mr. Hearty Wibraham, now about forty–five years old, was rather tall and portly, with an aquiline face, a dark complexion, and a quick, decisive manner. His clothes were well made, and of good quality, unpretentious, neat, substantial. His only piece of adornment was a magnificent gold watch–chain, which rather shunned than courted observation.

“No,” said Cradock, at last, “I have not a single friend in the world to whom I would think of applying for the loan of a sixpence.”

“Well, we are independent,” Mr. Wibraham still held discourse with himself; “but Hearty Wibraham likes and respects him the more for that. Heʼll get over his troubles, whatever they are. My good sir,” he continued, aloud, “I will not utter any opinion, lest you should think me inclined to flatter – the last thing in the world I ever would do. Nevertheless, in all manly candour, I am bound to tell you that my prepossession in your favour induces me to make you a most advantageous offer.”

“I am much obliged to you. Pray, what is it?”

“A clerkship in my counting–house, which I am just about to open, having formed a very snug little connexion to begin with.”

“Oh!” cried Cradock, for, green as he was, he would rather have had to do with a business already established.

“I see you are surprised. No wonder, sir; no wonder! But you must know that I shall have at least my quid pro quo. My connexion is of a very peculiar character. In fact, it lies entirely in the very highest circles. To meet such customers as mine, not only a man of gentlemanly manners is required, but a man of birth and education. How could I offer such a man less than 150l. per annum?”

“Your terms are very liberal, very liberal, I am sure,” replied Cradock, reddening warmly at the appraisement of his qualities. “I should not be comfortable without telling you frankly that I am worth about half that yearly sum; until, I mean, until I get a little up to business. I shall be quite content to begin upon 100l. a year.

“No! will you, though?” exclaimed Hearty Wibraham, flushed with a good heartʼs enthusiasm. “You are the finest young fellow I have seen since I was your age myself. Suppose, now, we split the difference. Say 125l.; and I shall work you pretty hard, I can tell you. For we do not confine our attention exclusively to the members of the Ministry, and the House of Lords; we also deal with the City magnates, and take a contract for Somerset House. And remember one thing; you will be in exclusive charge whenever I am away negotiating. A man deserves to be paid, you know, for high responsibility.”

“And where will the” – he hardly knew what to call it – “the office, the counting–house, the headquarters be?”

“Not in any common thoroughfare,” replied Mr. Wibraham, proudly; “that would never do for a business of such a character. What do you think, sir, of Howard Crescent, Park Lane? Not so bad, sir, is it, for the sale of the grimy?”

“I really do not know,” said Cradock; “but it sounds very well. When do we open the books?”

“Monday morning, sir, at ten oʼclock precisely. Let me see: to–day is Friday. Perhaps it would be an accommodation to you, to have your salary paid weekly, until you draw by the quarter. Now, remember, I rely upon you to promote my interest in every way consistent with honour.”

“That you may do, most fully. I shall never forget your kind confidence, and your liberality.”

“You will have two young gentlemen, if not three, wholly under your orders. Also a middle–aged gentleman, a sort of sleeping partner, will kindly attend pro tem., and show you the work expected of you. I myself shall be engaged, perhaps, during the forenoon, in promoting the interests of the business in a most important quarter. Now, be true to me, Newman – I take liberties, you see – keep your subordinates in their place, and make them stick to work, sir. And remember that one ounce of example is worth a pound of precept. If you act truly and honestly by me, as I know you will, you may look forward to a partnership at no distant date. But donʼt be over–sanguine, my dear boy; there is hard work before you.”

“And you will not find me shrink from it,” said Cradock, throwing his shoulders back; “but we have not settled yet as to the amount of the premium, or deposit, whichever it may be.”

“Thank you. To be sure. I quite forgot that incident. Thirty guineas, I think you said, was all that would be convenient to you.”

“No, Mr. Wibraham; I said twenty pounds ten shillings.”

“Ah, yes, my mistake. I knew that there was an odd ten shillings. Say twenty–five guineas. A mere matter of form, you know; but one which we dare not neglect. It is not a premium; simply a deposit; to be returned at the expiration of the first twelve months. Will you send it to me by cheque? That, perhaps, would be the more convenient form. It will save you from coming again.”

“I am sorry to say I cannot; for now I have no banker. Neither can I by any means make it twenty–five guineas. I have stated to you the utmost figure of my present census.”

“Ah, quite immaterial. I am only sorry for your sake. The sum will be invested. I shall hold it as your trustee. But, for the sake of the books, merely to look well on the books, we must say twenty guineas. How could I invest twenty pounds ten shillings?”

This appeared reasonable to Cradock, who knew nothing about investment; and, after reflecting a minute or two, he replied as follows:

“I believe, Mr. Wibraham, that I might manage to make it twenty guineas. You said, I think, that my salary would be payable weekly.”

“To be sure, my dear boy, to be sure. At any rate until further arrangements.”

“Then I will undertake to pay you the twenty guineas. Next Monday, I suppose, will do for it?”

“Oh yes, Monday will do. But stop, I shall not be there on that morning; and, for formʼs sake, it must be paid first. Let us say Saturday evening. I shall be ready with a stamped receipt. Will you meet me here at six oʼclock, as you did this evening?”

Cradock agreed to this, and Mr. Hearty Wibraham shook hands with him most cordially, begging that mutual trust and amity might in no way be lessened by his own unfortunate obligation to observe certain rules and precedents.

In the highest spirits possible under such troubles as his were, Crad strode away from Aurea Themis Buildings, and whistled to black Wena, whom two of the most accomplished dog–stealers in London had been doing their best to inveigle. Failing of skill – for Wena was a deal too knowing – they at last attempted violence, putting away their chopped liver and hoof–meat, and other baits still more savoury, upon which I dare not enlarge. But, just as Black George, having lifted her boldly by the nape of the neck, was popping her into the sack tail foremost, though her short tail was under her stomach, what did she do but twist round upon him, in a way quite unknown to the faculty, and make her upper and lower canines meet through the palm of his hand? It wonʼt do to chronicle what he said – I am too much given to strictest accuracy; enough that he let her drop, in the manner of a red–hot potato; and Blue Bill, who made a grab at her, only got a scar on the wrist. Then she retreated to her step, and fired a royal salute of howls, never ending, ever beginning, until her master came out.

“Wena, dear,” he said, for he always looked on the little thing as an inferior piece of Amy, “you are very tired, my darling; the pavement has been too much for you. Sit upon my arm, pretty. We are both going to make our fortunes. And then you ‘shall walk in silk attire, and siller hae to spare.’”

Wena nuzzled her nose into its usual place in Cradockʼs identicity, and growled if any other dog took the liberty of looking at him. And so they got home, singing snug little songs to each other upon the way; and they both made noble suppers on the strength of their rising fortunes.

CHAPTER IX

The following day was Saturday, and the young fellow spent great part of it in learning the rules, the tables, and statistics of the coal trade, so far as they could be ascertained from a sixpenny work which he bought. Not satisfied with this, he went to the Geological Museum, in Jermyn–street, and pored over the specimens, and laid in a stock of carbonic knowledge that would have astonished Clinkers and Jenny. When the building was closed at four oʼclock he hurried back to Mortimer–street, paid Mrs. Ducksacre for his weekʼs lodgings, and ran off to a pawnbrokerʼs to raise a little money. Without doing this, he would not be able to deposit the twenty guineas. Mr. Gillʼs shopman knew Cradock well, from his having been there frequently to redeem some trifling articles for the poor people of the court, and felt some good–will towards him for his kindness to the little customers. It increased the activity of his trade, for most of the pledges were repledged or ever the week was out. And of course he got the money for issuing another duplicate.

“Hope thereʼs nothing amiss, Mr. Newman,” said the pawnbrokerʼs assistant; “sorry to see you come here, sir, on your own account.”

“Oh, you ought to congratulate me,” returned Cradock, with a knowing smile: “I am going to pay a premium, and enter into a good position upon advantageous terms; very advantageous, I may say, seeing how little I know of the coal trade.”

“Take care, sir, take care, I beg of you. People run down our line of business, and call it coining tears, &c.; but you may take my word for it, there is a deal more roguery in the coal trade, or rather in the pretence of it, than ever there is in the broking way.”

“There can be none in the present case, for the simple reason that I am not in any way committed to a partnership, neither am I to be at all dependent upon the profits.” And Cradock looked thankful for advice, but a deal too wise to want it.

“Well, sir, I hope it may be all right; for I am sure you deserve it. But there is a man, not far from here, I think you took some things out for him, by the name of Zakey Jupp; a shrewdish sort of fellow, though a deal too fond of fighting. Heʼll be up to some of the coal tricks, I expect, heʼs about in the yards so much; and the whippers and heavers are good uns to talk. Donʼt you think it beneath you, sir, to consult with Zakey Jupp, if you have the pleasure of his acquaintance.”

“I am proud to say that I have at last,” replied Cradock, smiling grimly; “but he went on board the Industrious Maiden, at Nine Elms, yesterday morning, and may not be back for a month. He wanted me to go with him; but I did not see how to be useful, and had not given my landlady notice. Now, if you please, I have not a moment to spare.”

The shopman saw that he could not, without being really impertinent, press his advice any further; and, although Cradock was so communicative, as young men are apt to be, especially about their successes, he never afforded much temptation to any one for impertinence.

“And how much upon them little articles?” was the next question put to Cradock; and he did not ask any very high figure, for fear of not getting them out again.

As he set off full speed for Aurea Themis Buildings, without inviting Wena, it struck him that it would be but common prudence just to look at the place of business; so he dashed aside out of Oxford–street, at the rate of ten miles an hour – for he was very light of foot – and made his way to Howard–crescent, whose position he had learned from the map. Sure enough there it was, when he got to the number indicated. And what a noble plate! So large, indeed, that it was absolutely necessary to have it in two parts. What refulgent brass! What fine engraving, especially on the lower part! You might call it chalco–illumination, chromography, chromometallurgy; I do not know any word half grand enough to describe it. And the legend itself so simple, how could they have made so much of it? The upper plate, though beautifully bright, was comparatively plain, and only carried the words, “Wibraham, Fookes, and Co.;” the lower and far more elaborate part enabled the public to congratulate itself upon having the above as “Coal Merchants and Colliery Agents to Her Most Gracious Majesty and the Duchy of Lancaster. Hours of Business, from Ten till Four.”

Cradock just took time to read this, by the light of the gas–lamp close to it; then glanced at the house (which looked clean and smart, though smaller than what he expected), and, feeling ashamed of his mean suspiciousness, darted away towards Notting Hill. When he arrived at Aurea Themis Buildings, he was kept waiting at the door so long that it made him quite uneasy, lest Hearty Wibraham should have forgotten all about his little deposit. At last the smart girl opened the door, and a short young man, whose dress more than whispered that he was not given to compromise his æsthetic views, came out with a bounce, and clapped a shilling in the hand of the smiling damsel. “There, Polly, get a peach–coloured cap–ribbon, and wear it in a true knot for my sake. I fancy Iʼve done your governor. Heʼs a trifle green; isnʼt he?” But, in spite of his conversational powers, the handmaid dismissed him summarily, when she saw Cradock waiting there.

The gas in the drawing–room was lit this time, and a good fire burning; and Mr. Wibraham, in spirits absolutely jocular, sprang forward to meet Cradock, and cried, “Hail, oh future partner!” Then he offered him a glass of “rare old Madeira;” and, producing a blank receipt form, exclaimed, “Whatever you do, my young friend, never let it be known in the counting–house that I accepted you with so ridiculous a deposit as the sum of thirty guineas.”

“Twenty, sir, twenty was what you agreed to accept.” Poor Cradock trembled from head to foot, lest even now, at the last moment, he should be rejected. But, to his delight, his new principal replied,

“Then, sir, twenty be it: if in a weak moment I agreed. Hearty Wibraham would rather throw up all his connexion than allow any man to say of him, sir, that he had departed from his word.” His voice trembled slightly, and there was a twinkle as of tears in his eyes. Crad began to apologize, though he could not quite see what harm he had done.

“Dash it, my boy, not another word. We understand each other. There is your receipt.”

In his confidence, Hearty Wibraham passed the receipt form, now filled up, to the aspiring coal–merchant, without having seen so much as the colour of his money. Then Cradock pulled out Amyʼs purse, in which he had put the cash, for good luck, and paid his footing bravely.

“Sir, I will not thank you,” said Mr. Wibraham, as he took the money, “because the act would not be genuine. And I am proudly able to declare that I have never yet done anything, even for the sake of the common courtesies of life, which has not been thoroughly genuine. My boy, this paltry twenty guineas is the opening of your mercantile life. May that life be prosperous; as I am sure you deserve.”

Cradock took another glass of Madeira, as genuine as its owner, and, after a hearty farewell, felt so rapidly on the rise, so touched, for the first time of many weeks, by the dexter wand of fortune, that he bought a quarter of an ounce of birdʼs–eye with an infusion of “Latakia” (grown in the footpath field at Mitcham), and actually warmed his dear brotherʼs pipe, which had not once been incremated ever since the sacred fire of the Prytaneum had languished.

Wena was overjoyed to see him, and she loved the smell of tobacco, and had often come sniffing about on the hearth–rug (or the bit of baize that did for it) to know whether it was true that a big man – a mastiff of a man, they told her – had succeeded in abolishing it; now, seeing the blue curls quivering nicely, she jumped upon his lap; and, although she was rather heavy, he thought it would be practice towards the nursing of Amy, and possibly Amyʼs children. Then, when he thought of that, he grew more happy than fifty emperors.

Fortune may jump on a young fellowʼs heart, with both heels set together; but, the moment she takes one off, up it comes, like a bladder too big to go into the football.

On Monday morning at ten oʼclock, our Crad, in a state of large excitement, appeared before the gorgeous plate, and rang the bell thereover. It was answered by an office–boy, with a grin so intensely humorous that it was worth all the guineas that could have been thrust into the great mouth he exhibited.

“Mr. Newman?” asked the boy, with a patronizing air, which a little mind would have found offensive.

“To be sure,” replied Cradock; “I suppose I am expected.”

“That you are,” said the cheeky boy, grinning harder than ever; “the other three gents is waiting, sir. Get you a penny paper for three half–pence.”

“Thank you,” answered Cradock, hoping to depress that boy, “I am not come here, young man, I trust, to waste time in reading the papers.”

“Oh no! oh lor no,” cried the boy as he led the way in; “tip–top business this is, and all of us wears out our marrow–bones. His Ro–oyal Highness will be here bumbye. ‘Spect theyʼll appoint you to receive him, ‘cos you would look such a swell with our governorʼs best boots on. Donʼt you refoose now, mind me, donʼt refoose, mate, if you loves me.”

“You want a little whipcord,” said Cradock; “and you shall have it too, my boy, if you come much into my neighbourhood.”

“There now; there now!” sighed the boy – who would have been worth something on the stage – “I have never been appreciated, and suppose I never shall. Whatʼs the odds to a jinker? Cockalocks, there go in, and let me mind your beaver.”

Cradock was shown into a room furnished as philosophically as the wash–house of Cincinnatus; still, it looked like business. There was no temptation to sit down, even though one had rowing–trousers on. There were four tall desks of deal uncovered; each had four legs, and resembled a naked Punch–and–Judy box. Hales, the Norfolk giant, could not have written at either of them, while sitting on any of the stools there.

Three of these desks were appropriated by three very nice young gentlemen, all burning to begin their labours. Two of the men were unknown to Cradock; but the third, the very short one, who had taken a stool to stand upon, and was mending a pen most earnestly – him Cradock recognised at once as the disburser of the shilling, the sanguine youth, of broad views in apparel, who had cheated Mr. Wibraham so.

“Mr. Fookes, I presume,” he exclaimed, with a leap from the stool, and a little run towards Cradock; “you see we are all ready, sir, to receive the junior partner. Hardly know what to be up to.”

“I am sure I cannot tell you,” answered Crad, with a smile; “I do not belong to the firm as yet, although I am promised a partnership at a date not very distant.”

“So am I,” said the little man, staring; “indeed, I came up from Cambridge principally upon the strength of it.”

“The deevil you did!” cried a tall, strapping fellow, crossing suddenly from his desk; “if yeʼll hearken me, my time comes first. The agrahment was signed for Candlemas, when the gloot of business allows it. And a Durham man knows what coals are.”

“Agrayment, thin, is it?” exclaimed the fourth, a flourishing, red–haired Irishman; “do you think Iʼd a left me Oonivarsity, Thrinity College, Dooblin, wiʼout having it down all black and white? By the same token, itʼs meself as is foremost. Christmas is the time, me boys; and the farst dividend on St. Pathrickʼs Day, wakely sthipend in the intherim. Divil take me sowl, but none o’ ye shall git before Manus OʼToole.”

“Gentlemen,” said Cradock, “donʼt let us be in a hurry. No doubt Mr. Fookes will be here presently, and then we can settle precedence. I see there is work set out for us; and I suppose we are not all strangers here.”

“Canʼt answer for the other gentlemen,” returned the little Cambridge man, “but I was never here before, except to see the place on Saturday.”

“And thatʼs joost my own predeecament,” cried the tall man from Hatfield Hall.

“Chop me up smarl,” said the Irishman, when they turned to him as their senior, “but the gintleman has the advantage o’ me. I niver was here at all, at all; and I hope I niver shall be.”

The four young men gathered round a desk, and gazed sadly at one another. At this moment the office–boy, seeing the distance safe, for he had been watching through the keyhole, pushed his head in at the door, and shouted, “Hi! there, young coal–merchants, donʼt yer sell too much now! Telegram from the Exchange, gents; grimy is on the rise. But excoose me half an hour, gents; Her Majesty have commanded my presence, to put the ro–oyal harms on me. Ho–hoop! Iʼm after you, Molly. Donʼt be afraid of my splashing your legs, dear.”

“Well,” said Cradock, as the rising young coal–merchants seemed to look to him for counsel, and stood in silent bewilderment – “it appears to me that there is something wrong. Let us hope that it is a mistake only; at any rate, let us stop, and see the matter out. I trust that none of you gentlemen have paid a premium, as I have.”

“I am sure I donʼt know,” said the Cantab, “what the others have done; but I was allowed to enter the firm for the sum of eighty guineas, a great deal too little, considering all the advantages offered – the proper sum being a hundred; but an abatement was made in my favour.”

“Ahty guineas!” cried the Durham man; “why I was admeeted for saxty, because I had no more.”

“Itʼs me blessed self, then, as bates you all,” shouted the son of Dublin; “shure and Iʼve made a clear sixty by it, for I hadnʼt no more than forty.”

“And I,” replied Cradock, with a melancholy air, “was received for the trifling sum of twenty, on account of my being an Oxford man.”

“Why, gentlemen,” said the little Cantab, “let us shake hands all round. We represent the four chief universities, only Scotland being omitted.”

“Catch a Scotchman with salt, me frinds!” cried the red Hibernian, as they went through the ceremony. “By Jasers, but that infarnal old Jew would have had to pay the porridge–man, for the pleasure of his company.”

“Now let us fall to our work, gentlemen” (Crad tried to look hopeful as he said it); “the books before us may throw some light upon this strange, and, as it seems, very roguish matter. I was told to act for our principal, during the absence of the sleeping partner; to keep you all in your places, and make you stick to your work; and especially to remember that one ounce of practice is worth a pound of precept.”

“I should be most happy, sir, to obey orders,” said the little Cambridge man, bowing; “only I hold the identical commission, ounce of practice and all, for your benefit, my good sir, and that of all the other juniors.”

“Now that shows a want of vareaty,” cried the tall Dunelmian, “for the sole charge of all of ye is commeeted to me.”

“Itʼs me blessed self that got it last, and that manes to kape it. What time wur you there, gintlemen, at Ory Thamis Buildings?”

It was settled that the Irishman had received his commission last, for, some whisky having been produced, he and Hearty Wibraham had kept it up until twelve oʼclock on the Saturday night. So, to his intense delight, he was now appointed captain.

“An’ if I donʼt drag him from his hole, to pay him the sixty guineas I owe him, out of your money, gintlemen, say my name isnʼt Manus OʼToole. Now the fust arder I give, is to have in the bhoy, and wallop him.”

Easier said than done, Mr. Toole. There was no boy to be found anywhere; and the only result of a strong demonstration in the passage was a curt note from the landlord.

“Gentlemen, – I understood as I had lett my rooms to a respectable party, rent payable weakly, and weak is up this day. Will take it a favuor to reseeve two pound ten per bearer.

“John Codger.”

The four university men looked wondrously blank at this – “gelidusque per ima cucurrit ossa tremor.”

“Well, I am blowed!” cried the little Cantab, getting smaller, and with the sky–blue stripes on his trousers quivering.

“Thereʼs a cousin of mine, a soleecitor,” said the young north countryman, “would take up this case for us, if we made a joint deposeet.”

“Have down the landlord and fight him,” proposed the Emerald Islander.

“I donʼt care a fig for the landlord,” said Cradock, who now recalled some shavings of law from the Quarter Sessions spokeshave; “he can do nothing at all to us, until twelve oʼclock, and then he can send us about our business, and no more harm done. We were not parties to the original contract, and have nothing to do with the rent. Now, gentlemen, there is only one thing I would ask you, in return for my lucid legal opinion.”

“What is that?” cried all the rest; “whatever it is, you shall have it.”

“That you make over to me, vivâ voce, your three–fourths of the brass–plate. I have taken a strange fancy to it; the engraving is so fine.”

“You are perfectly welcome to it,” exclaimed the other three; “but wonʼt it belong to the landlord?”

“Not if it is merely screwed on, as probably is the case. And I have a screw–driver in my knife, which very few screws can resist.”

“Then go and take it, by all means, before twelve oʼclock, for afterwards we shall only be trespassers.”

Crad put his hat on and went out, but returned with the wonderful screw–driver snapped up into his knife–handle, and the first flush of real British anger yet seen upon his countenance. What wonderful beings we are! He had lost nearly all his substance, and he was vexed most about the brass–plate.

“Done at every point,” he said; “that glorious under–plate is gone, and only the narrow bar left with the name of the thief upon it, which of course would not suit him again.”

“Oysters all round!” cried the Cambridge man, “as the landlord cannot distrain us. An oyster is a legal esculent; I see they teach law at Oxford; let us at least die jolly. And I claim the privilege of standing oysters, because I have paid the highest premium, and am the most promising partner – at any rate, the softest fellow. Gentlemen, if you refuse me, I claim our captainʼs decision. Captain OʼToole, how is it?”

“Arrah, thin, and I order eysters at this gintlemanʼs expinse, London stout for the waker stomiks, and a drop o’ poteen for digestion, to them as are wakest of all.”

“Done,” said the little Cantab, “if only to rile the landlord, and he may distrain the shells. Call four university men, by implication, unrespectable parties! We must have our action against him. Gentlemen. I am off for the grub, and see that I get in again.”

“Faix, then, my honey,” cried the Irishman, forgetting all university language, “and, if ye donʼt, ‘twill be a quare job for the bones on the knuckles of Manus OʼToole.”

While all four were enjoying their oysters – for Cradock, being a good–natured fellow, did not withhold his assistance – a sharp rap–rap announced the postman, and Mr. OʼToole returned from the door with a large square letter, sealed with the coat of arms of the company. “Ship–letther, and eightpence to pay, begorra. Gintlemen, will we take it?”

“How is it addressed?” asked two or three.

“Most gintaal. ‘To the sanior clerk or junior partner of the firm of Wibraham, Fookes, and Co., Coal Merchants,’ and thatʼs meself, if itʼs nobody.”

“Then itʼs you to pey the eightpence,” cried the Durham man.

“Do yer think, then, itʼs me who canʼt do it?” answered Mr. OʼToole, angrily. And then he broke open the letter and read:

“P. & O. steamer Will o’ the Wisp, off the Start Point. —Sunday.

“Respected and beloved Partners, – His Royal Highness the Pasha of Egypt, having resolved to light with gas the interior of the Pyramids, also to provide hot–water bottles for the comfort of his household–brigade, principally female, and to erect extensive gas–cooking premises, where hot crocodile may always be had, has entrusted me with the whole arrangements, and the entire supply of coal, with no restriction except that the Nile shall not be set on fire.

“Interested as you are in the success of our noble firm, you will thank, instead of blaming me, for an apparently unceremonious departure. By an extraordinary coincidence, Mr. Fookes has also been summoned peremptorily to Constantinople, to contract with the Sultan for warming the sacks of the ladies who are, from time to time, deposited in the Bosporus.

“Therefore, gentlemen, the entire interest of the London branch is left in your experienced hands. Be steady, I entreat you; be diligent, be methodical. Above all things, remember that rigid probity, and the strictest punctuality in meeting payments, are the very soul of business, and that an ounce of practice is worth a pound of precept. But I have the purest confidence in you. I need not appeal to the honour of four university men. From my childhood upward, I have admired those admirable institutions, and the knowledge of life imparted by them. ‘Quid leges sine moribus?’ Excuse me; it is all the Latin I know.

“There is a raw Irishman among you, rather of the physical order; if he is violent, expel him. Every gentleman will be entitled to his own deal desk, upon discharge of the bill, which he will find made out in his name, in the drawer thereof. And now farewell. I have been prolix in the endeavour to be precise.

“There are no funds in hand for the London branch, but our credit is unbounded. Push our united interests, for I trust you to the last farthing. I hope to find you with coffers full, and commercial honour untainted, on the 31st of February prox.

“Believe me, Gentlemen, ever your affectionate partner,

“Hearty Wibraham, D.C.L.

“P.S. – If none of my partners know the way to enter an order, the office–boy will instruct the manager of the firm. – H. W.”

“Consummate scoundrel!” exclaimed the little Cantab, with the beard of an oyster in his throat.

“Detasteable heepocrite!” cried the representative of Durham.

“Raw Irishman! Oh then the powers! And the punch of the head I never giv’ him, a week will be next Saturday.” Mr. OʼToole danced round the room, caught up the desks like dolls, and dashed all their noses together. Then he summoned the landlord, and pelted him out of the room and up the stairs with oyster–shells, the books, and the whisky–bottle, and two pewter–pots after his legs, as he luckily got round the landing–place. The terrified man, and his wife worse frightened, locked themselves in, and then threw up a window and bawled out for the police.

Cradock, feeling ashamed of the uproar, seized OʼToole by the collar; and the Durham man, being sedate and steady, grasped him on the other side. So they lifted him off the ground, and bore him even into Hyde Park, and there they left him upon a bench, and each went his several way. The police, according to precedent, were in time to be too late.

CHAPTER X

Cradock Nowell shivered hard, partly from his cold, and partly at the thought of the bitter life before him. He had Amyʼs five and sixpence left, an immutable peculium. In currency his means were limited to exactly four and ninepence. With the accuracy of an upright man (even in the smallest matters), he had forced upon Mr. OʼToole his twopence, the quaternary of that letter. Also he had insisted upon standing stout, when thirst increased with oysters. Now he took the shillings four, having lost all faith in his destiny, and put one in each of his waistcoat pockets; for he had little horse–shoes upwards, as well as the straight chinks below. This being done, he disposed of his ninepence with as tight a view to security.

All that day he wandered about, and regretted Issachar Jupp. Towards nightfall, he passed a railway terminus, miserably lighted, a disgrace to any style of architecture, teeming with insolence, pretence, dirt, discomfort, fuss, and confusion. Let us call it the “Grand Junction Wasting and Screwing Line;” because among railway companies the name is generally applicable.

In a window, never cleaned since the prorogation of Parliament, the following “Notice” tried to appear; and, if you rubbed the glass, you might read it.

“Wanted immediately, a smart active young man, of good education. His duties will not be onerous. Wages one pound per week. Uniform allowed. Apply to Mr. Killquick, next door to the booking–office.”

Cradock read this three times over, for his wits were dull now, and then he turned round, and felt whether all his money was safe. Yes, every blessed halfpenny, for he had eaten nothing since the oysters.

“Surely I am an active young man, of good education,” said Crad to himself, “although not very smart, perhaps, especially as to my boots; but a suit, all uniform, allowed, will cure my only deficiency. I could live and keep Wena comfortably upon a pound a week. I hope, however, that they cash up. Railway companies have no honour, I know; but I suppose they pay when they canʼt help it.”

Having meditated with himself thus much, he went, growing excited on the way – for now he was no philosopher – to the indicated whereabouts of that lineʼs factotum, Mr. Killquick. Here he had to wait very nearly an hour, Mr. Killquick being engaged, as usual, in the companyʼs most active department, arranging very effectually for a collision down the line. “Successfully,” I would have said; but, though the accident came off quite according to the most sanguine, or sanguinary expectation, the result was a slur on that companyʼs fame; only three people being killed, and five–and–twenty wounded.

“Now, young man,” asked Mr. Killquick, when all his instructions were on the wires, “what is your business with me?”

Cradock, having stated his purpose, name, and qualifications, the traffic–manager looked at him with interest and reflection. Then he said impressively, “You can jump well, I should think?”

“I have never yet been beaten,” Crad answered, “but of course there are many who can beat me.”

“And run, no doubt? And your sight is accurate, and your nerves very good?”

“My nerves are not what they were, sir; but I can run fast and see well.”

“Why do you shiver so? That will never do. And the muscles of his calf are too prominent. We lost No. 6 through that.”

“It is only a little cold I have caught. It will go off in a moment with regular work.”

“You have no relation, I suppose, in any way connected with the law? No friends, I mean, of litigious tendencies?”

“Oh no. I have no friends whatever; none, I mean, in London, only one family, far in the country, to care at all about me.”

“No father or mother to make a fuss, eh? No wife to prevent your attending to business?”

“No, sir, nothing of the sort. I am quite alone in the world; and my life is of no importance.”

“Wonderful luck,” muttered Mr. Killquick; “exactly the very thing for us! And I have been so put out about that place, it has got such a reputation. Poor Morshead cannot get through the work any longer by himself. And the coroner made such nasty remarks. If we kill another man there before Easter, the Times will be sure to get hold of it. Young man,” he continued in a louder tone, “you are in luck this time, I believe. It is a very snug situation; only you must look sharp after your legs, and be sure you never touch spirits. Not given to blue ruin, I hope?”

“Oh no. I never touch it.”

“Thatʼs right. I was afraid you did, you look so down in the mouth. You can give us a reference, I suppose?”

“Yes, to my landlady, Mrs. Ducksacre, a most respectable person, in trade in Mortimer–street.”

“Good,” replied Mr. Killquick; “you mustnʼt be alarmed, by the way, by any foolish rumours you may hear as to dangers purely imaginary. Your predecessor lost his life through the very grossest carelessness. You are as safe there as in your bed, unless your nerves happen to fail you. And, when that is the case, I should like to know,” asked the traffic–manager indignantly, “which of us is not in danger, even in coming down–stairs?”

“What will my duties be, then?” asked Cradock, with some surprise.

“Why, you are not afraid, are you?” Mr. Killquick looked at him contemptuously.

“No, I should rather hope not,” replied Cradock, meeting him eye to eye, so that the wholesale smasher quailed at him; “there is no duty, even in a powder–mill, which I would shrink from now.”

“Ah, terrible things, those powder–mills! A perfect disgrace to this age and country, their wanton waste of human life. How the Legislature lets them go on so, is more than I can conceive. Why, they think no more of murdering and maiming a dozen people – ”

“Please, sir,” cried one of the clerks, coming down from the telegraph office, “no end of a collision on the Slayham and Bury Branch. Three passengers killed, and twenty–five wounded, some of them exceedingly fatally.”

“Bless my heart if I didnʼt expect it. Told Sykes it would be so. Howʼs the engine, Jemmy?”

“Sheʼs all right, sir; jumped over three carriages, and went a header into a sand–hill. Driver cased in glass, from vitrifaction of the sand. Stoker took the hot water – a thing he ainʼt much accustomed to.”

“No! What a capital joke. Hell–fire–Jack (I can swear it was him), preserved in a glass case, from the results of his own imprudence! I shall be up with you in five minutes, James. Be quite ready to begin.”

“Now,” said Mr. Killquick, drawing out his cigar–case, “I have little more to say to you, young man, except that you can begin at eight oʼclock to–morrow morning. We will dispense with the references, for I have the utmost confidence in you, and you will be searched very carefully every time you come out of the gate – which you never will be allowed to do, except when your spell is over, and your mate is in. You will go at once to our outfitters, and, upon presenting this ticket, they will fit you up, as tightly as possible, with your regimentals. And see that you donʼt take boots, but the very best shoes for jumping in. What they call ‘Oxford shoes’ are best, when tied tight over the instep, and not too thick in the sole. No nails, mind, for fear of slipping upon the flange. Good–bye, my boy; be very careful. By–the–by, you say you donʼt value your life?”

“Very little indeed,” said Cradock, “except just for one reason.”

“Then now you must add another reason; you must value it for our sake. The Company canʼt have another inquest for at least six months. I mean, of course, by the same coroner. Confound that fellow; he will not take a right view of things. At eight oʼclock to–morrow morning, you will be at the gate of the Cramjam goods station. The clerk there will have his orders about you. He will supply you with a book, and map out for you your duties. Also Morshead, your mate, an invaluable man, will show you the practical part of it. Now, good–bye, my lad. Remember, you never wear any except your official dress. We allow you two suits in the twelvemonth. Your duties will be of a refined character, and the exercise exhilarating. I trust to receive a good report of you; and I hope, my boy, that you are at peace, both with God and man.”

Even Mr. Killquick had been touched a little by Cradockʼs air of uncomplaining sorrow, and the stamp of high mind and good breeding.

“Very foolish of me,” he muttered, as he lit his cigar, and went up to telegraph to the Slayham station–master – ʼCommit yourself to nothing; observe the strictest economy; and no bonfires of the splinter–wood, as they had last weekʼ – “very foolish of me,” he said on the stairs, “but it goes to my heart to kill that young fellow. How I should like to know his history! That face does not mean nothing.”

Cradock, caring very little what his duties might be, and feeling the night–wind go through his heart, hastened to the outfittersʼ, and there he was received with a grin by an experienced shopman, on the production of his note.

“Capital customers, sir,” he said; “famous customers of ours, that Grand Junction Wasting and Screwing Line, and the best of all for the gentlemen in your way of business, sir. Must have new clothes every new hand, and they changes pretty often, sir. Pervides all the comforts of a home for you, and a gentlemanly competence, before youʼve been half a year with them.”

The man grinned still more at his own grim wit, while Cradock stared at him in wonderment.

“Donʼt you see, sir, they canʼt pass the clothes on, after the man has been killed, even if thereʼs a bit of them left; for they must fit you like your skin, sir. The leastest little wrinkle, sir, or the ruffle of a hinch, or so much as the fray of a hem, and there you are, sir; and they have to look for another hactive young man, sir. And hactive young men are getting shy, sir, uncommon shy of it now, except they come from the country. Hope you insured your life, sir, before taking the situation. Thereʼs no company will accept your life now, sir. What a nice young man the last were, – what a nice young man, to be sure! outrageous fond of filberts; till they cracked him, and found a shell for him.”

“Well,” said Cradock, whom the busy tailor had been measuring all this while, “from all that you tell me, there would be less imprudence in ordering my coffin than to–morrowʼs dinner. What is there so very dangerous in it?”

“Well, youʼll see, sir, youʼll see. I would not frighten you for the world, because itʼs all up in a moment, if you lose your presence of mind. Thank you, sir; all right now, except the legs of the tights, and thatʼs the most particular part of it all. May I trouble you to turn your trousers up? It will never do to measure over them. We shall put six hands on at once at the job. The whole will be ready at eleven this evening. You must kindly call and try everything. We are ordered to insist upon that.”

The next morning, Crad, in a suit of peculiar, tough, and yet most elastic cord, which fitted him as if he had been dipped in it, walked in at the open gates of the front yard, leading to the Cramjam general goods terminus. This was the only way in or out (except along “the metals”), and, as it was got up with heaps of stucco, all the porters were very proud of it, and called it a “slap–up harchway.”

“Stop, stop,” cried a sharp little fellow, gurgling up, like a fountain, from among the sham pilasters; “whatʼs your business here, my man, on the premises of the Grand Junction Wasting and Screwing Company? Ah, I see by your togs. Just come this way, if you please, then.”

Here let me call a little halt, for time enough to explain that the more fashionable of the railway companies have lately agreed that a station–yard is a sort of royal park, which cannot be kept too private, which no doors may rashly open upon, a pleasant rural solitude and weed–nursery for the neighbourhood, and wherein the senior porter has his private mushroom–bed. They are wise in this seclusion, and wholesome is their privacy, so long as they discard all principle – so long as they are allowed to garotte us, while they jabber about “public interests.” Perhaps, ere very long, we shall have a modern Dædalus; and then the boards of directors, so ready to do collectively things which, done individually, no gentleman would own to, may abate a few jots of their arrogance, and have faint recollections of honour.

Cradock, not very deeply impressed by the “compo” arch (about half the size of the stone one at Nowelhurst Hallʼs chief entrance), presented himself to the sharp little fellow, and told him what he was come for.

“Glad to hear it,” said the gateman, “uncommonly glad to hear it. Morshead is a wonderful fellow; there is not another man in England could have stuck to that work as he has done. He ought to have five pounds a week, that he ought, instead of a single sovereign. Screwing Co.” (this was their common name) “will be sorry when they have lost him. Now your duty is to enter, in this here book, the number of every truck, jerry, trod, or blinkem, tarpaulin, or covering of any sort; also the destination chalked on it, and the nature of the goods in the truck, so far as you can ascertain them; coals, iron, chalk, packing–cases, boxes, crates, what not, so fast as they comes into the higher end, or so fast as they goes out of it. You return this book to the check office every time you come off duty. You begin work at eight in the morning, and you leave at eight in the evening. You donʼt pass here meanwhile, and you canʼt pass up the line. Hope you have brought some grub. Youʼll have five minutes in the afternoon, long enough to get a snack in, after the up goods for Millstone is off. Oh, you ought to have brought some grub; if you faint, you will never come to again. But perhaps Morshead can spare you a bit. Heʼll be glad to see you, thatʼs certain, for he ainʼt slept a wink for a week. And such a considerate chap. I enter you in and out. ‘Number–taker 26.’ Thatʼs all right from your cap, my lad. No room for it on your sleeve. Might stick out, you know, and you must pack tighter than any of the goods is. ‘Undertakers,’ we call you always. Good–bye, sir; Morshead will tell you the rest, and I hope to see you all right at eight P.M. The first day is always the worst. Go in at that door by the Pickford, and ask the first porter you see for Morshead, and take care how you get at him.”

Morshead was resting for a moment upon a narrow piece of planking, amid a regular Seven Dials of sidings, points, and turn–tables. Cradock could scarcely see him, for trucks and vans and boxes on wheels were gliding past in every direction, thick as the carts on London Bridge, creaking, groaning, ricketing, lurching; thumping up against one another, and then recoiling with a heavy kick, straining upon coupling–chains, butting against bulkheads, staggering and jerking into grooves and out of them, crushing flints into a shower of sparks, doing anything and everything except standing still for a moment. And among them rushed about, like dragons – ramping, and routing, and swearing fearfully, gargling their throats with a boiling riot, and then goring the ground with tusks of steam, whisking and flicking their tails, and themselves, in and out at the countless cross–webs, screaming, and leaping, and rattling, and booming – the great ponderous giant goods–engines. Every man was out–swearing his neighbour, every truck browbeating its fellow, every engine out–yelling its rival. There is nothing on earth to compare with this scene, unless it be the jostling and churning of ice–packs in Davisʼs Straits, when the tide runs hard, and a gale of wind is blowing, and the floes have broken up suddenly. And even that comparison fails, because, though the monsters grind and crash, and labour and leap with agony, they do not roar, and vomit steam, and swear at one another.

At the risk of his life, for as yet he knew nothing of the laws that governed their movements – a very imperfect code, by–the–by – Cradock made his way to the narrow staging where Morshead was taking a breathing–time. His fellow “number–taker” of course descried him coming; for he had acquired the art of seeing all round, as a spider is falsely supposed to do. He knew, in a moment, by Cradockʼs dress, what business he was meant for; and he said to himself, “Thank God!” in one breath, for the sake of his wife and family; and “Oh, poor fellow!” in the next, as he saw how green our Cradock was. Then he held up his hands for Cradock to stop and waved them for him to run; and so piloted him to the narrow knife–board, “where a manʼs life was his own aʼmost.”

The highest and noblest of physical courage is that which, fully perceiving the danger, looking into the black pit of death, and seeing the night of horrors there (undivested of horror by true religion), encounters them all, treads the narrow cord daily, not for the sake of honour or fortune; not because of the dash in it, and the excitement to a brave soul; not even to win the heartʼs maiden, that pearl of romance and mystery: but simply to supply the home, to keep in flow the springs of love – whence the geyser heat is gone – to sustain and comfort (without being comforted by them) the wife, whose beauty is passed away, and who may have taken to scold, and the children, whose chief idea of daddy is that he has got a halfpenny.

This glorious inglorious courage, grander than any that ever won medal or cross for destroying, had a little home – though he knew it not, and never thought about it – in the broad, well–rounded bosom of simple Stephen Morshead. None but himself knew his narrow escapes; an inch the wrong way and he was a dead man, fifty times a day. And worst of all in the night – oh, in the horrible night, and yet more in the first gleam of morning, when the body was worn out, and dreams came over the eyes, but were death if they passed to the brain, and the trucks went by like nightmares – that very morning he had felt, after taking duty night and day for more than a week, since they killed his partner, he had felt that his Sally must be a widow, and his seven children orphans, if another night went over him without some relief of sleep. That every word of this is true, many a poor man would avouch (if he only had time and the money to read it, and were not afraid); but few rich men will care to swallow facts so indigestible.

Stephen Morshead was astonished at seeing that his mate was come. None of the men in the goods station would have anything to do with it. It was very well to be up in the trucks, or upon the engines, or even to act as switchman, for you had a corner inviolable, and could only do mischief to others. But to run in and out, and through and through, in that perpetual motion, to be bound to jot down every truck, the cover, and contents of it, entering or departing from that crammed and crowded terminus, to have nobody to help you therein, and nobody to cry “dead man” if you died, and the certainty that if you stood a hairʼs–breadth out of the perpendicular, or a single wheel had a bunion, you with the note–book in your hand must flood the narrow ‘tween–ways, and find your way out underneath to heaven; all this, and the risk of the fearful jumps from one sliding train to another, sliding oppositely, and jerking, perhaps, as you jumped; and yet if you funked the jump you must be crushed, like a frog beneath a turf–beater: these considerations, after many pipes were smoked over them, had induced all the porters and stokers to dwell on the virtues of the many men killed, and to yield to their wives’ entreaties, acquiesce in their sixteen shillings, nor aspire to the four shillings Charon–fare.

“Now,” said Morshead, “shake hands with me,” as Cradock, breathless with running wonder, leaped upon the nine–inch gangway. “I see you belongs to a different horder of society; obliged to keep my eyes open, mate; but, as long as you and I works together, I ask it as a favour of you, to shake hands night and morning.”

“With the greatest pleasure,” said Cradock, “if you think thereʼs room for our funny–bones.”

“Ha, ha!” laughed Morshead, “you are the right sort for it. Not a bit afeard, I see. Now I mustnʼt stop to talk; just follow me, and do as I do. I can put you up to it in six hours; and then if you can spare me for the other six, ‘twill be the saving of the little ones. But tell the truth if youʼre tired. I should scorn myself if harm came to you.”

“You are the bravest man I ever met,” said Cradock, with his heart rising; “you cannot expect me to be like you. But you shall not find me a coward.”

“I can see it by your eyes, lad. No sparkle, but a glowing like. I can always tell by the eyes of a man how long he will last at this work. Now come along o’ me, and Iʼll show you the nine worst crushing places.”

Cradock followed him through the threads – threads of Clotho and Atropos – feeling the way with his legs, like a gnat who “overs the posts” of a spiderʼs web. In and out, with a jump here and there, when two side–boards threatened to shear them, they got to the gorge at the entrance, where the main turmoil of all was. The Symplegades were a joke to it. And all because the Screwing Company would not buy land enough to get elbow room. There are several lines of railway which do a much larger business; there is no other which attempts to do so much upon less than four times the acreage.

“Iʼve tottled all them as are going out,” Mr. Morshead informed Cradock; “now youʼll see how we enters them as they enters.”

Laughing at his own very miserable joke, he leaped on the chains of the passing waggons, and held up his hand for Cradock not to attempt to do the same.

“Takes a deal of practice that,” he cried, after he had crossed the train; “it ainʼt like a passenger–train, you know; and you must larn when they are standing. I need not to have done it now, but sometimes I be forced. Bide where you are; no danger unless they comes with the flaps down.”

Then he jotted down, with surprising quickness, all the necessary particulars of the train that was coming in. It happened to be an easy one; for there were no tarpaulins at all, and it was not travelling faster than about four miles an hour.

“Some drivers there is,” said Morshead, as he rejoined Cradock round the tail of the train, “who really seem to want to kill a fellow, they come by at such a pace, without having any call for it. I believe they think, the low fools, that we are put as spies upon them, and they would rather kill us than not. – Hold your tongue,” to a man in a truck, who was interrupting his lecture; “donʼt you know better than to offer me that stuff? Never touch what they offers you, sir. They means no harm, but you had safer take poison when you be on duty. There is not much real danger just here, if a fellow is careful, because the rails run parallo; there is nothing round the curve now, I see, and only two coming out, and both of they be scored; itʼs a rare chance to show you the figures of eight, and slide–points where the chief danger is. Show you where poor Charley was killed last week, and how he did it.”

“Poor fellow! Did he leave any family?”

“Twelve in all. No man comes here, unless he be tired of his life, or be druv to it by the little ones.”

“And what did the Company do for them?”

“Oh, behaved most ‘andsome for them. Allowed ‘em two bob a week for a twelvemonth to come – twopence apiece all round. But they only did it to encourage me, for fear I should funk off. I have seen out three mates now. Please God, I shanʼt see you out too, my lad.”

“If you do, it shanʼt be from funk, Morshead. I rather like the danger.”

“Thatʼs the worst thing of all,” replied Stephen; “I beg of you not to say that, sir.”

A thoroughly brave man almost always has respect for order. The bold man – which means a coward with jumps in him – generally has none. It was strange to see how Stephen Morshead, in all that crush, and crash, and rattle, that swinging and creaking as of the Hellespontic boat–bridge, mixed deference with his pity for Cradock. He saw, from his face, and air, and manner, that he was bred a gentleman. Shall we ever come – or rather the twentieth generation come – to the time when every man of England (but for his own fault) shall be bred and trained a gentleman in the true and glorious sense of it?

Cradock saw the fatal places, where the sleepers still were purple, where danger ran in converging lines, where a man must stand sideways, like a duellist, and with his arms in like a drill–sergeantʼs, and not shrink an inch from the driving–wheels; where his size was measured as for his coffin, and if he stirred he would want nothing more. Then, if a single truck–flap were down, if an engine rollicked upon the rail, if a broad north–country truck, overreaching, happened to be in either train, when you were caught between the two, your only chance was to cry, “Good God!” and lie upon your side, and straighten all your toes out.

And yet these were the very places where, most of all, the “number–taker” was bound to have his stand – where alone he could contrive to check two trains at once. “Could they help starting two trains at once?” poor Crad asked himself – for he had found no time to ask it before – when, weary to the last fibre with the work of the day, he fell upon his little bed, and could hardly notice Wena. Perhaps they could not; it was more than he knew; only he knew that, if they could, they were but wanton man–slaughterers.

After a deep sleep, all in his clothes, he awoke the next morning quite up for his work, and Morshead, who had been on duty all night, and whose eyes seemed cut out of card–board, only stayed for an hour with him, and then, feeling that Crad was quite up to the day–work, ran home and snored for ten hours, as loud as Phlegethon or Enceladus.

The most fearful thing, for a new hand, was, of course, the night–work; and Stephen Morshead, delighted to have such a mate at last, had begged to leave Cradock the day–spell, at least for the first three weeks; for to Stephen the moon was as good as the sun, and sweet sleep fell like wool when plucked at, and hushed the tramping steeds of the day–god. Only, for the sake of Stephenʼs eyes, on whose accuracy hung the life–poise, it was absolutely necessary not to dilate the pupils incessantly.

But Cradock never took night–work there; and the change came about on this wise. Wena felt that she was wronged by his going away from her every day so early in the morning, and not coming home to her again till ever so late at night, and then too tired to say a word, or perhaps he didnʼt care to do it. Like all females of any value – unless they are really grand ones, and, if such there be, please to keep them away – Wena grew jealous desperately. She might as well be anybody elseʼs dog; and the bakerʼs dog was with his master all day; and the butcherʼs lady dog, a nasty ill–bred thing – the idea of calling her a lady! – why, even she was allowed, though the selfish thing didnʼt care for it, unless there was suet on his apron, to jump up at him and taste him, all the time he was going for orders. And then look even at the Ducksacre dog, a despicable creature – his father might have been a bull–terrier, or he might have been a Pomeranian, or a quarter–bred Skye, or the Lord knows who, very likely a turnspit, and his mother, oh! the less we say of her the better; – why, that wretched, lop–eared, split–tailed thing, without an eye fit to look out of, had airs of his own; and what did it mean, she would like to know, and she who had formed some nice acquaintances, dogs that had been presented at Court, and got Eau–de–Cologne every morning, and not a blessed [run away] upon them? Why, it meant simply this: that Spot, filthy plague–spot, was allowed to go out with the baskets, and made a deal of by his owners, and might cock his tail with the best of them, while she, black Wena, who had been brought up so differently —

Here her feelings were too much for her, and she put down her soft flossy ear upon the drugget–scrap, and looked at the door despairingly, and howled until Mrs. Ducksacre was obliged to come up and comfort her. Even then she wouldnʼt eat the dripping.

From that day she made her mind up. She would watch her opportunity. What was the good of being endowed with such a nose as she had, unless she could smell her master out, even through the streets of London? What did he wear such outlandish clothes for? Very likely, on purpose to cheat her. Very likely he was even keeping some other dog. At any rate, she would know that, if it cost her her life to do it. What good was her life now to her, or anybody else? Heigho!

On the following Saturday, when Cradock was gone to his fifth dayʼs work, what does Wena do, when Mrs. Ducksacre came up on purpose to coax and make much of her, but most ungratefully give her the slip, with a skill worthy of a better purpose, then scuttle down the stairs, all four legs at once, in that sort of a bone–slide which domestic dogs acquire. Miss Ducksacre ran out of the shop at the noise – for this process is not a silent one; but she could only cry, “Oh, Lord!” as Wena, with the full impact of her weight multiplied into her velocity; or, if that is wrong, with the cube of her impetus multiplied into the forty–two stairs – bang she came anyhow, back–foremost, against the young ladyʼs – nay, you there, I said, “lower limbs” – and deposited her in a bushel of carrots, just come from Covent Garden.

“Stop her, Joe, for Godʼs sake, stop her!” Miss Ducksacre cried to the shop–boy, as well as she could, for the tail of a carrot which had gotten between her teeth.

“Blowed if I can, miss,” the boy responded, as Wena nipped his fingers for him; the next moment she was free as the wind, and round the corner in no time.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” cried Polly Ducksacre, a buxom young lady, with fine black eyes, “whatever will Mr. Newman think of us? It will seem so unkind and careless; and he does love that dog so!”

Polly was beginning to entertain a tender regard for Cradock; especially since he had shown his proportions in “them beautiful buff pantaloons.” What a greengrocer he would make, to be sure, so hupright and so lordly like; and sheʼd like to see the man in the “Garden” who would tell her she had eaten sparrow–pie, with Mr. Newman to hold the basket for her.

By this time, Mrs. Ducksacre was come down the stairs, screaming “Wena!” at the top of her voice the whole way; and out they ran, boy and all, to search for her, while three or four urchins came in, without medium of exchange, and filled cap, mouth, and pocket. One brat was caught upon their return, and tied up for the day in an empty potato–sack, and exposed, behind the counter, to universal execration; in which position he took such note of manner and custom, time and place, that it was never safe for the Ducksacre firm to dine together afterwards.

Meanwhile, that little black Wena, responsive and responsible to none except her master, pursued the even tenor of her way, nosing the ground, and asking many a question of the lamp–posts, as far as the Cramjam Terminus, at least three miles from Mortimer–street. The sharp little gate–clerk, animated with railway love of privacy, ran out, and clapped his hands, and shouted “hoo” at Wena; but she only buttoned her tail down, and cut across the compound. As for the stone he threw at her, she caught it up in her mouth as it rolled, and carried it on to her master.

There was Cradock, in the thick of it, standing on a narrow pile of pig–iron, one of his chief fortalices; his book was in his hand, and he was entering, as fast as he could, all the needful particulars of a goods train sliding past him.

Creak, and squeak, and puff, and shriek, – Oh, what a scene, thought Wena, – and the rattle of the ghostly chains, and the rushing about, and the roaring. She lost her presence of mind in a moment, – she always had been such a nervous dog – she tightened her tail convulsively, and dropped her ears, while her eyes came forth; and, glancing at the horrors on every side, she fled for dear life from the evil to come.

The faster she fled, the more they closed round her. She had not espied her master yet; she could not find the way back again; she was terrified out of all memory; and a host of frightful genii, more sooty than Cocytus, and riding hideous monsters, were yelling at her on every side, clapping black hands, and hooting. The dog on the Derby course, when the race rushes round the corner, was in a position of glory and safety compared to poor Wenaʼs now. Already the tip of her tail was crushed, already one pretty paw was broken; for she had bolted in and out through the trains, truck bottoms, wheels, and driving–wheels. Oh, you cowards, to yell at her! with black death grating and grinding upon her soft silky back!

At last, she gave in altogether. They had hunted her to her grave. Who may contend with destiny? She lay down under a moving coal–train, and resigned herself to die. But first she must ask for sympathy, although so unlikely to get it. She looked once more at her wounded foot, and shivered and sobbed with the agony; and then gave vent to one long low cry, to ask if no one loved a poor dog there.

Cradock heard it, and started so that it was nearly all up with him too. Thoroughly he knew the cry, wherein she had wailed for Clayton. He flung down his book, and dashed to the place, and there he saw Wena, and she saw him. She began to try to limp to him, but he held up his hand to stop her; disabled as she was, she was sure to be caught by the wheel. Could she stay there, and let the train pass her? No. At its tail was an empty horse–box, almost scraping the ground, perfectly certain to crush her. Crying, “Down, down, my poor darling!” he ran down the train, which was travelling seven or eight miles an hour, seized the side of a truck, and leaped, at the risk of his life, upon the fender in front of the horse–box. Then he got astride of the coupling–chain, and kept his right hand low to the ground, to snatch her up ere the crusher came. Knowing where she was, he caught her by the neck the instant the truck disclosed her, and, with a strong swing, heaved her up into it. But he lost his balance in doing it, and fell sideways, with his head on the other coupling–chain. Stunned by the blow, he lay there, only clinging by his right calf to the chain he had sat astride upon. The first jerk of either chain, the first swing of either carriage, and he must be ground to powder.

Luckily for him and for Amy, Morshead was not gone home yet, seeing more to do than usual. Missing his mate from the proper place, he had run up in terror to look for him, when a man in a truck, who had vainly been shouting to stop the coal–trainʼs engine, pointed and screamed to him where and what was doing. Morshead jumped on the heap of pig–iron, and sideways thence on the board of the truck just passing, as dangerous a leap as well could be, but luckily that truck was empty. He jumped into the truck, a shallow one, where poor Wena lay quite paralysed, and, stooping over the back with both arms, he got hold of Cradockʼs collar. Then, with a mighty effort, he jerked him upon the tail–board, and lugged him in, and bent over him.

Wounded Wena crawled up, and begged to have her poor foot looked at, then, obtaining no notice at all, she felt that Cradock must be killed and dead, just as Clayton had been. Upon this conclusion, she fetched such a howl, though it shook her sore tail to do it, that the engine–driver actually looked round, and the train was stopped.

Hereupon, let me offer a suggestion – everybody now is allowed to do so, though nobody ever takes it. My suggestion is, that no man should be allowed to drive an engine without having served a twelvemonthʼs apprenticeship as an omnibus conductor. I donʼt mean to say it would improve his morals – probably rather otherwise; but it would teach him the habit of looking round; it would let him know that there really is more than one quarter of the heavens. At present, all engine–drivers seem afraid of being turned into pillars of salt. So they fix themselves, like pillars of stone, and stare, ἀχηνίαις ὀμμάτων, through their square glass spectacles.

When one of the railway bajuli – who are, on the whole, very good sort of fellows, and deserve their Christmas–boxes – came home in the cab with Cradock and Wena at the expense of the Company (which was boasted of next board–day) – when one of them came home with Crad – for Morshead had double work again – Polly Ducksacre went into strong hysterics, and it required two married men and a boy to get her out of the potato–bin.

It was all up with our Crad that night. The overwork of brain and muscle, the presence of mind required all the time when his mind was especially absent, the impossibility of thinking out any of his trains of ideas when a train of trucks was upon him, the native indignation of a man at knowing that his blood is meant to ebb down a railway sewer, and a new broom will sweep him clean – all these worries and wraths together, cogging into the mill–wheel of cares already grinding, had made such a mill–clack in his head near the left temple, where the thump was, that he could only roll on his narrow bed at imminent risk of a floor–bump.

Then the cold, long harbouring, struck into his heart and reins; and he knew not that Dr. Tink came, and was learned and diagnostic upon him; nor even that Polly Ducksacre took his feet out of bed, and rubbed them until her wrists gave way; and then, half ashamed of her womanhood, sneaked away, and cried over Wena.

Wenaʼs foot was put into splinters, Wenaʼs tail was stypticised; but no skill could save her master from a furious brain–fever.