Part 13

“I am glad I gave my shoes,” thought Bertie. Then there was a long silence, broken only by the hissing of the green brambles on the fire and the yelps of the baby.

“Maybe, sir,” said Dick, after a little, “you’d put the saucepan on? I can’t move with this here leg. If you’d pit some water out o’ kittle in him, he’ll be ready for cookin’ when the vittles come.”

“I will do that,” said Bertie, cheerfully, and he set the saucepan on by lifting it with both hands: it was very black, and its crock came off on his knickerbockers. Then, by Dick’s directions, he found a pair of old wooden bellows, and blew on the sticks and sods; but this he managed so ill that Dick wriggled himself along the floor closer to the fire and did it himself.

“You’re a gaby!” he said to his benefactor.

“What is that?” said Bertie.

But Dick felt that it was more prudent not to explain.

In half an hour Tam burst into the room, breathless and joyous, his scruples having disappeared under the basket he bore.

“She gived me five shillin’!” he shouted; “and I’s sure they’s wuth a deal more, ’cos her eyes twinkled and winked, and she shoved me a peg-top in!”

“Gie us o’t!” shrieked Dick, in an agony at being bound to the floor with all these good things before his sight.

Little Tam, who was very loyal, laid them all out on the ground before his elder: two quartern loaves, two pounds of beef, onions, potatoes, a bit of bacon, and a jug of milk.

Dick poured some milk into an old tin mug, and handed it roughly to Bertie.

“Feed the baby, will yer, whiles Tam and me cooks?”

The little Earl took the can, and advanced to the formidable bundle of rags, who was screaming like a very hoarse raven.

“I think you should attend to your mother first,” he said, gently, as the baby made a grab at the little tin pot, the look of which it seemed to know, and shook half the milk over itself.

“Poor mammy!” said Tam, who was gnawing a bit of bread; and, with his bread in one hand, he got up and put a little gin and water quite hot between his mother’s lips. She swallowed it without opening her eyes or seeming to be conscious, and Tam climbed down from the bed again with a clear conscience.

“We’ll gie her some broth,” he said, manfully, while he and Dick, munching bread and raw bacon, tumbled the beef in a lump into the saucepan, drowned in water with some whole onions, in the common fashion of cottage-cooking. The baby, meanwhile, was placidly swallowing the milk that the little Earl held for it very carefully, and, when that was done, accepted a crust that he offered it to suck.

The two boys were crouching before the crackling fire, munching voraciously, and watching the boiling of the old black pot. They had quite forgotten their benefactor.

“My! What’ll Peg say when she’s to home?” chuckled Tam.

“She’ll say that she’d ha’ cooked better,” growled Dick. “Golly! ain’t the fat good?”

Bertie stood aloof, pleased, and yet sorrowful because they did not notice him.

Even the baby had so completely centred its mind in the crust that it had abandoned all memory of the red scarf.

Bertie looked on a little while, but no one seemed to remember him. The boys’ eyes were glowing on the saucepan, and their cheeks were filled out with food as the cherubs in his chapel at home were puffed out with air as they blew celestial trumpets.

He went to the door slowly, looked back, and then retreated into the sunshine.

“It would be mean to put them in mind of me,” he thought, as he withdrew.

Suddenly a sharp pain shot through him: a stone had cut his unshod foot.

“Oh, dear me! how ever shall I walk without any shoes or boots!” he thought, miserably; and he was very nearly bursting out crying.

On the edge of these fields was a wood,—a low, dark, rolling wood,—which looked to the little Earl, who missed his own forests, inviting and cool and sweet. By this time it was getting towards noon, and the sun was hot, and he felt thirsty and very tired. He was sad, too: he was glad to have satisfied those poor hungry children, but their indifference to him when they were satisfied was chilling and melancholy.

“But then we ought not to do a kindness that we may be thanked,” he said to himself. “It is a proper punishment to me, because I wished to be thanked, which was mean.”

So he settled, as he usually did, that it was all his own fault.

Happily for him, the ground was soft with summer dust, and so he managed to get along the little path that ran from the cottage through the lucern-fields, and from there the path became grass, which was still less trying to his little red stockings.

Yet he was anxious and troubled; he felt heavily weighted for his battle with the world without any shoes on, and he felt he must look ridiculous. For the first time, St. Martin did not seem to him so very much of a hero, because St. Martin’s gift was only a cloak. Besides, without his sash, the band of his knickerbockers could be seen; and he was afraid this was indecent.

Nevertheless, he went on bravely, if lamely. Believe me, nothing sets the world more straight than thinking that what is awry in it is one’s self.

The wood, which was a well-known spinney famous for pheasants, was reached before very long, though with painful effort. It was chiefly composed of old hawthorn-trees and blackthorn, with here and there a larch or holly. The undergrowth was thick, and the sunbeams were playing at bo-peep with the shadows. Far away over the fields and thorns was a glimmer of blue water, and close around were all manner of ferns, of foxgloves, of grasses, of boughs. The tired little Earl sank downward under one of the old thorns with feet that bled. A wasp had stung him, too, through his stocking, and the stung place was smarting furiously. “But how much more Christ and the saints suffered!” thought Bertie, seriously and piously, without the smallest touch of vanity.

Lying on the moss under all that greenery, he felt refreshed and soothed, although the foot the wasp had stung throbbed a good deal.

There were all sorts of pretty things to see: the pheasants, who were lords of the manor till October came round, did not mind him in the least, and swept smoothly by with their long tails like court mantles sweeping the grass. Blackbirds, those cheeriest of all birds, pecked at worms and grubs quite near him. Chaffinches were looking for hairs under the brambles to make their second summer nest with. Any hairs serve their purpose,—cows’, horses’, or dogs’; and if they get a tuft of hare-skin or rabbit-fur they are furnished for the year. A pair of little white-throats were busy in a low bush, gathering the catch-weed that grew thickly there, and a goldfinch was flying away with a lock of sheep’s wool in his beak. There were other charming creatures, too: a mole was hurrying to his underground castle, a nuthatch was at work on a rotten tree-trunk, and a gray, odd-looking bird was impaling a dead field-mouse on one of the thorn-branches. Bertie did not know that this gentleman was but the gray shrike, once used in hawking; indeed, he did not know the names or habits of any of the birds; and he lay still hidden in the ferns, and watched them with delight and mute amazement. There were thousands of such pretty creatures in his own woods and brakes at home, but then he was never alone: he was always either walking with Father Philip or riding with William, and in neither case was he allowed to stop and loiter and lie in the grass, and the sonorous voice of the priest scattered these timid dwellers in the greenwood as surely as did the tread of the pony’s hoofs and the barking of Ralph.

“When I am a man I will pass all my life out of doors, and I will get friends with all these pretty things, and ask them what they are doing,” he thought; and he was so entranced in this new world hidden away under the low hawthorn boughs of this spinney that he quite forgot he had lost his shoes and did not know where he would sleep when night came. He had quite forgotten his own existence, indeed; and this is just the happiness that comes to us always, when we learn to love the winged and four-footed brethren that Nature has placed so near us, and whom, alas! we so shamefully neglect when we do not do even worse and persecute them. Bertie was quite oblivious that he was a runaway, who had started with a very fine idea or finding out who it was that kept him in prison, and giving him battle wherever he might be: he was much more interested in longing to know what the great gray shrike was, and why it hung up the mouse on the thorn and flew away. If you do not know any more than he did, I may tell you that the shrikes are like your father, and like their game when it has been many days in the larder. It is one of the few ignoble tastes in which birds resemble mankind.

The shrike flew away to look for some more mice, or frogs, or little snakes, or cockroaches, or beetles, for he is a very useful fellow indeed in the woods, though the keepers are usually silly and wicked enough to try and kill him. His home and his young ones were above in the thicket, and he had stuck all round their nests insects of all kinds: still, he was a provident bird, and was of opinion that every one should work while it is day.

When the shrike flew away after a bumble-bee, the little Earl fell asleep: what with fatigue, and excitement, and the heat of the sun, a sound, dreamless slumber fell upon him there among the birds and the sweet smell of the May buds; and the goldfinch sang to him, while he slept, such a pretty song that he heard it though he was so fast asleep. The goldfinch, though, did not sing for him one bit in the world; he sang for his wife, who was sitting among her callow brood hidden away from sight under the leaves, and with no greater anxiety on her mind than fear of a possible weasel or rat gnawing at her nest from the bottom.

When the little Earl awoke, the sun was not full and golden all about him as it had been; there were long shadows slanting through the spinney, and there was a great globe descending behind the downs of the western horizon. It was probably about six in the evening. Bertie could not tell, for, unluckily for him, he had always had a watch to rely upon, and had never been taught to tell the hour from the “shepherd’s hour-glass” in the field-flowers, or calculate the time of day from the length of the shadows. Even now, though night was so nigh, the thought of where he should find a bed did not occur to him, for he was absorbed in a little boy who stood before him,—a very miserable little black-haired, brown-cheeked boy, who was staring hard at him.

“Now, he, I am sure, is as poor as Dick and Tam,” thought the little Earl, “and I have nothing left to give him.”

The little boy was endeavoring to hide behind his back a bright bundle of ruffled feathers, and in his other hand he held a complicated arrangement of twine and twigs with a pendent noose.

That Bertie did know the look of, for he had seen his own keepers destroy such things in his own woods, and had heard them swear when they did so. So his land-owner’s instincts awoke in him, though the land was not his.

“Oh, little boy,” he said, rubbing his eyes and springing to his feet, “what a wicked, wicked little boy you are! You have been snaring a pheasant!”

The small boy, who was about his age, looked frightened and penitent: he saw his accuser was a little gentleman.

“Please, sir, don’t tell on me,” he said, with a whimper. “I’ll gie ye the bird if ye won’t tell on me.”

“I do not want the bird,” said Bertie, with magisterial gravity. “You are a wicked little boy to offer it to me. It is not your own, and you have killed it. You are a _thief_!”

“Please, sir,” whimpered the little poacher, “dad allus tooked ’em like this.”

“Then he is a thief too,” said Bertie.

“He was a good un to me,” said the small boy, and then fairly burst out sobbing. “He was a good un to me, and he’s dead a year come Lady-day, and mother she’s main bad, and little Susie’s got the croup, and there’s nowt to eat to home; and I hear Susie cryin’, cryin’, cryin’, and so I gae to cupboard where dad’s old tackle be kep, and I gits out this here, and says I to myself, maybe I’ll git one of them birds i’ spinney, ’cos they make rare broth, and we had a many on ’em when dad was alive, and Towser.”

“Who was Towser?”

“He was our lurcher; keeper shot him; he’d bring of ’em in his mouth like a Chrisen; and gin ye’ll tell on me, they’ll clap me in prison like they did dad, and it’s birch rods they’d give yer, and mother’s nowt but me.”

“I do not know who owns this property,” said Bertie, in his little sedate way, “so I could not tell the owner, and I should not wish to do it if I could; but still it is a very wicked thing to snare birds at all, and when they are game-birds it is _robbery_.”

“I know as how they makes it so,” demurred the poacher’s son. “But dad said as how——”

“No one makes it so,” said Bertie, with a little righteous anger; “it _is_ so: the birds are not yours, and so, if you take them, you are a thief.”

The boy put his thumb in his mouth and dangled his dead pheasant.

A discussion on the game-laws was beyond his powers, nor was even Bertie conscious of the mighty subject he was opening, though the instincts of the land-owner were naturally in him, and it seemed to him so shocking to find a boy with such views as this as to _meum_ and _tuum_, that he almost fancied the sun would fall from the sky. The sun, however, glowed on, low down in the wood beyond a belt of firs, and the green downs, and the gray sea; and the little sinner stood before him, fascinated by his appearance and frightened at his words.

“Do you know who owns this coppice?” asked Bertie; and the boy answered him, reluctantly,—

“Yes: Sir Henry.”

“Then, what you must do,” said Bertie, “is to go directly with that bird to Sir Henry, and beg his pardon, and ask him to forgive you. Go at once. That is what you must do.”

The boy opened eyes and mouth in amaze.

“That I won’t never do,” he said, doggedly: “I’d be took up to the lodge afore I’d open my mouth.”

“Not if I go with you,” said Bertie.

“Be you one of the fam’ly, sir?”

“No,” said Bertie, and then was silent in some confusion, for he bethought him that, without any shoes on, he might also be arrested at the lodge gates.

“I thought as not, ’cos you’re barefoot,” said the brown-cheeked boy, with a little contempt supplying the place of courage. “Dunno who you be, sir, but seems to I as you’ve no call to preach to me: you be a-trespassin’ too.”

Bertie colored.

“I am not doing any harm,” he said, with dignity; “you are: you have been stealing. If you are not really a wicked boy, you will take the pheasant straight to that gentleman, and beg him to forgive you, and I dare say he will give you work.”

“There’s no work for my dad’s son,” said the little poacher, half sadly, half sullenly: “the keepers are all agen us: ’tis as much as mother and me and Susie can do to git a bit o’ bread.”

“What work can you do?”

“I can make the gins,” said the little sinner, touching the trap with pride. “Mostwhiles, I never comes out o’ daylight; but all the forenoon Susie was going off her head, want o’ summat t’ eat.”

“I’m sorry for Susie and you,” said the little Earl, with sympathy. “But indeed, indeed, nothing can excuse a theft, or make God——”

“The keepers!” yelled the boy, with a scream like a hare’s, and he dashed head-foremost into the bushes, casting on to Bertie’s lap the gin and the dead bird. Bertie was so surprised that he sat perfectly mute and still: the little boy had disappeared as fast as a rabbit bolts at sight of a ferret. Two grim big men with dogs and guns burst through the hawthorn, and one of them seized the little Earl with no gentle hand.

“You little blackguard! you’ll smart for this,” yelled the big man. “Treadmill and birch rod, or I’m a Dutchman.”

Bertie was so surprised, still, that he was silent. Then, with his little air of innocent majesty, he said, simply, “You are mistaken: I did not kill the bird.”

Now, if Bertie had had his usual nicety of apparel, or if the keeper had not been in a fuming fury, the latter would have easily seen that he had accused and apprehended a little gentleman. But no one in a violent rage ever has much sense or sight left to aid him, and Big George, as this keeper was called, did not notice that his dogs were smelling in a friendly way at his prisoner, but only saw that he had to do with a pale-faced lad without shoes, and very untidy and dusty-looking, who had snares and a snared pheasant at his feet.

Before Bertie had even seen him take a bit of cord out of his pocket, he had tied the little Earl’s hands behind him, picked up the pheasant and the trap, and given some directions to his companion. The real culprit was already a quarter of a mile off, burrowing safely in the earth of an old fox killed in February,—a hiding-place with which he was very familiar.

Bertie, meanwhile, was quite silent. He was thinking to himself, “If I tell them another boy did it, they will go and look for him, and catch him, and put him in prison; and then his mother and Susie will be so miserable,—more miserable than ever. I think I ought to keep quiet. Jesus never said anything when they buffeted him.”

“Ah, you little gallows-bird, you’ll get it this time!” said the keeper, knotting the string tighter about his wrists, and speaking as if he had had the little Earl very often in such custody.

“You are a very rude man,” said Bertie, with the angry color in his cheeks; but Big George heeded him not, being engaged in swearing at one of his dogs,—a young one, who was trotting after a rabbit.

“I know who this youngster is, Bob,” he said to his companion: “he’s the Radley shaver over from Blackgang.”

Bertie wondered who the Radley shaver was that resembled him.

“He has the looks on him,” said the other, prudently.

“Sir Henry’s dining at Chigwell to-night, and he’ll have started afore we get there,” continued Big George. “Go you on through spinney far as Edge Pool, and I’ll take and lock this here Radley up till morning. Blast his impudence,—a pheasant! think of the likes of it! A pheasant! If ’t had been a rabbit, ’t had been bad enough.”

Then he shook his little captive vigorously.

Bertie did not say anything. He was not in trepidation for himself, but he was in an agony of fear lest the other boy should be found in the spinney.

“March along afore me,” said Big George, with much savageness. “And if you tries to bolt, I’ll blow your brains out and nail you to a barn-door along o’ the owls.”

The little Earl looked at him with eyes of scorn and horror.

“How dare you touch Athene’s bird?”

“How dare I what, you little saucy blackguard?” thundered Big George, and fetched him a great box on the ears which made Bertie stagger.

“You are a very bad man,” he said, breathlessly. “You are a very mean man. You are big, and so you are cruel: that is very mean indeed.”

“You’ve the gift of the gab, little devil of a Radley,” said the keeper, wrathfully; “but you’ll pipe another tune when you feel the birch and pick oakum.”

Bertie set his teeth tight to keep his words in: he walked on mute.

“You’ve stole some little gemman’s togs as well as my pheasant,” said Big George, surveying him. “Why didn’t you steal a pair of boots when you was about it?”

Bertie was still mute.

“I will not say anything to this bad man,” he thought, “or else he will find out that it was not I.”

The sun had set by this time, leaving only a silvery light above the sea and the downs: the pale long twilight of an English day had come upon the earth.

Bertie was very white, and his heart beat fast, and he was growing very hungry; but he managed to stumble on, though very painfully, for his courage would not let him repine before this savage man, who was mixed up in his mind with Bluebeard, and Thor, and Croquemitaine, and Richard III., and Nero, and all the ogres that he had ever met with in his reading, and who seemed to grow larger and larger and larger as the sky and earth grew darker.

Happily for his shoeless feet, the way lay all over grass-lands and mossy paths; but he limped so that the keeper swore at him many times, and the little Earl felt the desperate resignation of the martyr.

At last they came in sight of the keeper’s cottage, standing on the edge of the preserves,—a thatched and gabled little building, with a light glimmering in its lattice window.

At the sound of Big George’s heavy tread, a woman and some children ran out.

“Lord ha’ mercy! George!” cried the wife. “What scarecrow have you been and got?”

“A Radley boy,” growled George,—“one of the cussed Radley boys at last,—and a pheasant snared took in his very hand!”

“You don’t mean it!” cried his wife; and the small children yelled and jumped. “What’ll be done with him, dad?” cried the eldest of them.

“I’ll put him in fowl-house to-night,” said Big George, “and up he’ll go afore Sir Henry fust thing to-morrow. Clear off, young uns, and let me run him in.”

Bertie looked up in Big George’s face.

“I had nothing to do with killing the bird,” he said, in a firm though a faint voice. “You quite mistake. I am Lord Avillion.”

“Stop your pipe, or I’ll choke yer,” swore Big George, enraged by what he termed the “darned cheek” of a Radley boy; and without more ado he laid hold of the little Earl’s collar and lifted him into the fowl-house, the door of which was held open eagerly by his eldest girl.

There was a great flapping of wings, screeching of hens, and piping of chicks at the interruption, where all the inmates were gone to roost, and one cock set up his usual salutation to the dawn.

“That’s better nor you’ll sleep to-morrow night,” said Big George, as he tumbled Bertie on to a truss of straw that lay there, when he went out himself, slammed the door, and both locked and barred it on the outside.

Bertie fell back on the straw, sobbing bitterly: his feet were cut and bleeding, his whole body ached like one great bruise, and he was sick and faint with hunger. “If the world be as difficult as this to live in,” he thought, “how ever do some people manage to live almost to a hundred years in it?” and to his eight-year-old little soul the prospect of a long life seemed so horrible that he sobbed again at the very thought of it. It was quite dark in the fowl-house; the rustling and fluttering of the poultry all around sounded mysterious and unearthly; the strong, unpleasant smell made him faint, and the pain in his feet grew greater every moment. He did not scream or go into convulsions; he was a brave little man, and proud; but he felt as if the long, lonely night there would kill him.

Half an hour, perhaps, had gone by when a woman’s voice at the little square window said, softly, “Here is bread and water for you, poor boy; and I’ve put some milk and cheese, too, only my man mustn’t know it.”

Bertie with great effort raised himself, and took what was pushed through the tiny window; a mug of milk being lowered to him last by a large red fat hand, on which the light of a candle held without was glowing.

“Thanks very much,” said the little Earl, feebly. “But, madam, I did not kill that bird, and indeed I am Lord Avillion.”

The good woman went within to her lord, and said timidly to him, “George, are you sartin sure that there’s a Radley boy? He do look and speak like a little gemman, and he do say as how he is one.”

Big George called her bad names.

“A barefoot gemman!” he said, with a sneer. “You thunderin’ fool! it’s weazened-faced Vic Radley, as have been in our woods a hundred times if wunce, though never could I slap eyes on him quick enough to pin him.”

The good housewife took up her stocking-mending and said no more. Big George’s arguments were sometimes enforced with the fist, and even with the pewter pot or the poker.