Part 14

Meanwhile, the little Earl in the hen-house was so hungry that he drank the milk and ate the bread and cheese. Both were harder and rougher things than any he had ever tasted; but he had now that hunger which had made the boy on the stile relish the turnip, and, besides, another incident had occurred to give him relish for the food.

At the moment when he had sat down to drink the milk, there had tumbled out from behind the straw a round black-and-white object, unsteady on its legs, and having a very broad nose and a very woolly coat. The moon had risen by this time, and was shining in through the little square window, and by its beams Bertie could see this thing was a puppy,—a Newfoundland puppy some four months old. He welcomed it with as much rapture as ever Robert Bruce did the spider. It had evidently been awakened from its sleep by the smell of the food. It was a pleasant, companionable, warm and kindly creature; it knocked the bread out of his hand, and thrust its square mouth into his milk, but he shared it willingly, and had a hearty cry over it that did him good.

He did not feel all alone, now that this blundering, toppling, shapeless, amiable baby-dog had found its way to him. He caressed it in his arms and kissed it a great many times, and it responded much more gratefully than the human baby had done in Jim Bracken’s cottage, and finally, despite his bleeding feet and his tired limbs, he fell asleep with his face against the pup’s woolly body.

When he awoke, he could not remember what had happened. He called for Deborah, but no Deborah was there. The moon, now full, was shining still through the queer little dusky place; the figures of the fowls, rolled up in balls of feathers and stuck upon one leg, were all that met his straining eyes. He pulled the puppy closer and closer to him: for the first time in his life he felt really frightened.

“I never touched the pheasant,” he cried, as loud as he could. “I am Lord Avillion! You have no right to keep me here. Let me out! let me out! let me out!”

The fowls woke up, and then cried and cackled and crowed, and the poor pup whined and yelped dolefully, but he got no other answer. Everybody in Big George’s cottage was asleep, except Big George himself, who, with his revolver, his fowling-piece, and a couple of bull-dogs, was gone out again into the woods.

At home, Bertie in his pretty bed, that had belonged to the little Roi de Rome, had always had a soft light burning in a porcelain shade, and his nurse within easy call, and Ralph on the mat by the door. He had never been in the dark before, and he could hear unseen things moving and rustling in the straw, and he felt afraid of the white moonbeams shifting hither and thither and shining on the shape of the big Brahma cock till the great bird looked like a vulture. Once a rat ran swiftly across, and then the fowls shrieked, and Bertie could not help screaming with them; but in a minute or two he felt ashamed of himself, for he thought, “A rat is God’s creature as much as I am; and, as I have not done anything wrong, I do not think they will be allowed to hurt me.”

Nevertheless, the night was very terrible. Without the presence of the puppy, no doubt, the little Earl would have frightened himself into convulsions and delirium; but the pup was so comforting to him, so natural, so positively a thing real and in no wise of the outer world, that Bertie kept down, though with many a sob, the panics of unreasoning terror which assailed him as the moon sailed away past the square loop-hole, and a great darkness seemed to wrap him up in it as though some giant were stifling him in a magic cloak.

The pup had not long been taken from its mother, and had been teased all day by the keeper’s children, and was frightened, and whimpered a good deal, and cuddled itself close to the little Earl, who hugged it and kissed it in paroxysms of loneliness and longing for comfort.

With these long, horrible black hours, all sorts of notions and terrors assailed him; all he had ever read of dungeons, of enchanted castles, of entrapped princes, of Prince Arthur and the Duke of Rothsay, of the prisoner of Chillon and the Iron Mask, of every kind of hero, martyr, and wizard-bewitched captive, crowded into his mind with horrifying clearness, thronging on him with a host of fearful images and memories.

But this was only in his weaker moments. When he clasped the puppy and felt its warm wet tongue lick his hair, he gathered up his courage: after all, he thought, Big George was certainly only a keeper,—not an ogre, or an astrologer, or a tyrant of Athens or of Rome.

So he fell off again, after a long and dreadful waking-time, into a fitful slumber, in which his feet ached and his nerves jumped, and the frightful visions assailed him just as much as when he was awake; and how that ghastly night passed by him, he never knew very well.

When he again opened his eyes there was a dim gray light in the fowl-house, and sharp in his ear was ringing the good-morrow of the Brahma chanticleer.

It was daybreak.

A round red face looked in at the square hole, and the voice of the keeper’s wife said, “Little gemman, Big George will be arter ye come eight o’clock, and ’t ’ll go hard wi’ yer. Say now, yer didn’t snare the bird?”

“No,” said Bertie, languidly, lying full length on the straw; he felt shivery and chilly, and very stiff and very miserable in all ways.

“But yer know who did!” persisted the woman. “Now, jist you tell me, and I’ll make it all square with George, and he’ll let you out, and we’ll gie ye porridge, and we’ll take ye home on the donkey.”

The little Earl was silent.

“Now, drat ye for a obstinate! I can’t abide a obstinate,” said the woman, angrily. “Who did snare the bird? jist say that; ’tis all, and mighty little.”

“I will not say that,” said Bertie; and the woman slammed a wooden door that there was to the loop-hole, and told him he was a mule and a pig, and that she was not going to waste any more words about him; she should let the birds out by the bars. What she called the bars, which were two movable lengths of wood at the bottom of one of the walls, did in point of fact soon slip aside, and the fowls all cackled and strutted and fluttered after their different manners, and bustled through the opening towards the daylight and the scattered corn, the Brahma cock having much ado to squeeze his plumage where his wives had passed.

“The puppy’s hungry,” said Bertie, timidly.

“Drat the puppy!” said the woman outside; and no more compassion was wrung out of her. The little Earl felt very languid, light-headed, and strange; he was faint, and a little feverish.

“Oh, dear, pup! what a night!” he murmured, with a burst of sobbing.

Yet it never occurred to him to purchase his liberty by giving up little guilty Dan.

Some more hours rolled on,—slow, empty, desolate,—filled with the whine of the pup for its mother, and the chirping of unseen martins going in and out of the roof above-head.

“I suppose they mean to starve me to death,” thought Bertie, his thoughts clinging to the Duke of Rothsay’s story.

He heard the tread of Big George on the ground outside, and his deep voice cursing and swearing, and the children running to and fro, and the hens cackling. Then the little Earl remembered that he was born of brave men, and must not be unworthy of them; and he rose, though unsteadily, and tried to pull his disordered dress together, and tried, too, not to look afraid.

He recalled Casabianca on the burning ship: Casabianca had not been so very much older than he.

The door was thrust open violently, and that big grim black man looked in. “Come, varmint!” he cried out; “come out and get your merits: birch and bread-and-water and Scripture-readin’ for a good month, I’ll go bail; and ’t ’ud be a year if I wur the beak.”

Then Bertie, on his little shaky shivering limbs, walked quite haughtily towards him and the open air, the puppy waddling after him. “You should not be so very rough and rude,” he said: “I will go with you. But the puppy wants some milk.”

Big George’s only answer was to clutch wildly at Bertie’s clothes and hurl him anyhow, head first, into a little pony-cart that stood ready. “Such tarnation cheek I never seed,” he swore; “but all them Radley imps are as like one to t’ other as so many ribston-pippins,—all the gift o’ the gab and tallow-faces!”

Bertie, lying very sick and dizzy in the bottom of the cart, managed to find breath to call out to the woman on the door-step, “Please do give the puppy something; it has been so hungry all night.”

“That’s no Radley boy,” said the keeper’s wife to her eldest girl as the cart drove away. “Only a little gemman ’ud ha’ thought of the pup. Strikes me, lass, your daddy’s put a rod in pickle for hisself along o’ his tantrums and tivies.”

It was but a mile and a half from the keeper’s cottage to the mansion of the Sir Henry who was owner of these lands; and the pony spun along at a swing trot, and Big George, smoking and rattling along, never deigned to look at his prisoner.

“Another poachin’ boy, Mr. Mason?” said the woman who opened the lodge gates; and Big George answered, heartily,—

“Ay, ay, a Radley imp caught at last. Got the bird on him, and the gin too. What d’ye call that?”

“I call it like your vigilance, Mr. Mason,” said the lodge-keeper. “But, lawks! he do look a mite!”

Big George spun on up the avenue with the air of a man who knew his own important place in the world, and the little cart was soon pulled up at the steps of a stately Italian-like building.

“See Sir Henry to wunce: poachin’ case,” said Big George to the footman lounging about the doorway.

“Of course, Mr. Mason. Sir Henry said as you was to go to him directly.”

“Step this way,” said one of the men; and Big George proceeded to haul Bertie out of the cart as unceremoniously as he had thrown him in; but the little Earl, although his head spun and his shoeless feet ached, managed to get down himself, and staggered across the hall.

“A Radley boy!” said Big George, displaying him with much pride. “All the spring and all the winter I’ve been after that weazen-faced varmint, and now I’ve _got_ him.”

“Sir Henry waits,” said a functionary; and Big George marched into a handsome library, dragging his captive behind him, towards the central writing-table, at which a good-looking elderly gentleman was sitting.

Arrived before his master, the demeanor of Big George underwent a remarkable change; he cringed, and he pulled his lock of hair, and he scraped about with his leg in the humblest manner possible, and proceeded to lay the dead pheasant and the trap and gear upon the table.

“Took him in the ac’, Sir Henry,” he said, with triumph piercing through deference. “I been after him ages; he’s a Radley boy, the little gallows-bird; he’s been snarin’ and dodgin’ and stealin’ all the winter long, and here we’ve got him.”

“He is very small,—quite a child,” said Sir Henry, doubtingly, trying to see the culprit.

“He’s stunted in his growth along o’ wickedness, sir,” said Big George, very positively; “but he’s old in wice; that’s what he is, sir,—old in wice.”

At that moment Bertie managed to get in front of him, and lifted his little faint voice.

“He has made a mistake,” he said, feebly: “I never killed your birds at all, and I am Lord Avillion.”

“Good heavens! you thundering idiot!” shouted Sir Henry, springing to his feet. “This is the little Earl they are looking for all over the island, and all over the country! My dear little fellow, how can I ever——”

His apologies were cut short by Bertie dropping down in a dead faint at his feet, so weak was he from cold, and hunger, and exhaustion, and unwonted exposure.

It was not very long, however, before all the alarmed household, pouring in at the furious ringing of their master’s bell, had revived the little Earl, and brought him to his senses none the worse for the momentary eclipse of them.

“Please do not be angry with your man,” murmured Bertie, as he lay on one of the wide leathern couches. “He meant to do his duty; and please—will you let me buy the puppy?”

Of course Sir Henry would not allow the little Earl to wander any farther afield, and of course a horseman was sent over in hot haste to apprise his people, misled by the boat-lad, who, frightened at his own share in the little gentleman’s escape, had sworn till he was hoarse that he had seen Lord Avillion take a boat for Rye.

So Bertie’s liberty was nipped in the bud, and very sorrowfully and wistfully he strayed out on to the rose-terrace of Sir Henry’s house, awaiting the coming of his friends. The puppy had been fetched, and was tumbling and waddling solemnly beside him; yet he was very sad at heart.

“What are you thinking of, my child?” said Sir Henry, who was a gentle and learned man.

Bertie’s mouth quivered.

“I see,” he said, hesitatingly,—“I see _I_ am nothing. It is the title they give me, and the money I have got, that make the people so good to me. When I am only _me_, you see how it is.”

And the tears rolled down his face, which he had heard called “wizen” and “puny” and likened to tallow.

“My dear little fellow,” said his grown-up companion, tenderly, “there comes a day when even kings are stripped of all their pomp, and lie naked and stark; it is then that which they have done, not that which they have been, that will find them grace and let them rise again.”

“But I am nothing!” said Bertie, piteously. “You see, when the people do not know who I am, they think me nothing at all.”

“I don’t fancy Peggy and Dan will think so when we tell them everything,” said the host. “We are all of us nothing in ourselves, my child; only, here and there we pluck a bit of lavender,—that is, we do some good thing or say some kind word,—and then we get a sweet savor from it. You will gather a great deal of lavender in your life, or I am mistaken.”

“I will try,” said Bertie, who understood.

So, off the downs that day, and in the pleasant hawthorn woods of the friendly little Isle, he plucked two heads of lavender,—humility and sympathy. Believe me, they are worth as much as was the moly of Ulysses.

* * * * *

Transcriber’s Notes:

Obvious punctuation errors repaired.

Page 22, “thei” changed to “their” (even in their dulness)

Page 51, “draw” changed to “drew” (drew out with his teeth)

Page 70, “gir” changed to “girl” (girl whom he afterwards)

Page 119, “drins” changed to “drink” (drink your reward at)

Page 133, “al” changed to “all” (were all bad trades)

Page 136, “ooks” changed to “looks” (and looks; there is)

Page 139, “beautifu” changed to “beautiful” (beautiful in their own)

Page 140, “mac-roni” over two lines changed to “macaroni” (long coils of macaroni)

Page 155, “grea” changed to “great” (great eyes glared and)

Page 157, “on” changed to “one” (that every one in the long)

Page 204, “the” changed to “she” (she was very ill indeed)

Page 229, “come” changed to “comes” (I never comes)