Part 1

Transcribed from the 1899 Deighton Bell & Co. edition by David Price.

RONALD AND I

OR

Studies from Life

* * * * *

BY

ALFRED PRETOR

* * * * *

CAMBRIDGE

DEIGHTON BELL & CO.

LONDON GEORGE BELL & SONS

1899

* * * * *

CAMBRIDGE PRINTED BY JONATHAN PALMER ALEXANDRA STREET

PREFACE

Several of the following sketches have appeared already in the _Cambridge Review_ and the _Cantab_. Perhaps the friends who welcomed them then may welcome them now, on their reappearance in another and more permanent form.

The story of “Our Rector” has been received in episcopal quarters with polite incredulity. It may be that episcopal supervision was less far-reaching in those days than now. At any rate, the things I have narrated, and things stranger still, _did_ occur in our village, and in all essential details, including the postprandial cigar, the story of “Our Rector” is a literal “study from life.”

I would forget, if I could, that the “Cruel, Crawling Foam” is also a record of fact.

A. P.

CAMBRIDGE,

_May_, 1899.

* * * * *

_To Mrs. Thomas Hardy_ _who suggested and_ _encouraged the writing_ _of these tales_

CONTENTS

PAGE RONALD AND I: Broadwater: a Shadow from the Past 1 On the Race Course at Bayview 25 On the Sands 31 Our Rector 41 Echoes from an Organ Loft 55 Fighting the Cholera 67 Ronald’s Courtship 79 Judy, or Retrieved 99 The Professor 117 The Cruel, Crawling Foam 133 Our Queen 143 BINDO: a Sketch 155 ‘DECLINED WITH THANKS’: a Postscript 181

Ronald and I

Broadwater A SHADOW FROM THE PAST

I

TURN your steps westward, and about four miles beyond Bayview you will come to a rising ground where three ways meet.

One—the road to the right—trends northward, following with occasional deviations the coast line of Dead Man’s Bay, a replica in miniature of the Bay of Biscay, and one which claims, almost as regularly, its tithe of life and wreckage.

The path on the left hand enters a lodge gate, and begins to fall gently but without intermission towards the sea. A curious impression that you are reaching the end of all things is followed by the feeling that your next step will be planted in the sea—and then you come to Broadwater.

The huge square-set building stands on a level plateau, guarded by a semicircle of hills from every wind that blows, excepting the south-west. The architecture is neither impressive in itself nor characteristic of any particular period. Yet, looking down upon it from the hills above, the eye will find ample satisfaction in the colouring of the roof, for lichens have painted the crumbling tiles with every conceivable hue of vermilion and gold.

A stranger, journeying for the first time along the road, would complain of the lack of trees. And trees in the open there are none. Nothing less cringing than gorse and heather can show front against the brine-laden winds of the Atlantic. The south-west wind is jealous of its prerogatives, and denudes a neighbourhood of isolated growth almost as surely as does the poison-steeped atmosphere of the midlands.

Yet, if you trouble to make nearer acquaintance with Broadwater, you will find that every ravine and gully is crowded with trees—“groves” the villagers call them—whose tops lie level with the ground on either side, so that a slight divergence from the recognised track might land the unwary traveller among their foliage, almost without a change in his plane of elevation.

The grand old house stands, as I have said, on a plateau, protected from the north and east by the hills, down which the road winds in and out like a white ribbon. On the west it faces the Atlantic, and the lawn, merging in the park, falls rapidly seawards till it meets the natural barrier of the beach. As a rule the barrier stands well; yet times there are when the sea will no longer “harrow the valleys, or be bound with a band in the furrow,” but, laughing at the puny obstruction, lays its tribute of drift and wreckage and human life almost on the very door-step of the house.

Whether you love the scene or not, will depend on your age and temperament, and something, too, on the circumstances under which you view it. Steeped in the quiet twilight of an autumn evening, its perfect stillness and repose appeal irresistibly to a heart that yearns for rest, and many such have coveted it. But let a Londoner come upon it when a furious south-wester is raging, and the double windows are veiled with an impermeable film of brine, and you can feel the chimneys rocking overhead—and the chances are he will hurry from it as from the abomination of desolation.

After our uncle’s death, Ronald, it was well known, was to reign in his stead—supplanting myself, albeit the son of an elder brother and the natural heir. But my father had been unlucky enough to marry the woman of old Heyward’s choice, and the sin of the father was to be visited upon the son. Our uncle (to do him justice) never made a pretence of equity in the matter. “I should turn in my grave,” he said, “if I thought that son of his was to follow in my room.” And there the matter ended. Short of this, he was fond of me in his own undemonstrative way. Only lately he had settled me at Bayview with a handsome allowance, where I was to make acquaintance with the rudiments of the law till it was time for me to enter at Cambridge.

Honestly I can say that I never grudged Ronald his inheritance. He and I were brothers rather than cousins, and I cannot remember the time when the sturdy little Viking was not dear to my heart. Perhaps it was I who gave the most, and he who took it. But that is only as it should be, provided he who gives and he who takes are equally nothing loth.

The house was an ideal home for us, so long as we shared it in common. When we were separated, it became unutterably dull for the one who was left companionless. Ghosts it must have had in plenty. There certainly was an “impluvium,” which in these days is rarer than a ghost. I mean that the whole centre of the house was open to the winds of heaven, for the purpose of collecting the rain water which fell into a huge reservoir at the basement.

The ghosts, if any, never showed themselves—frightened in all probability by the antagonism of Ronald’s temperament. But we discovered what was next best to the real article—the equipments and paraphernalia of one. In a disused coach-house we came one day on an old travelling carriage of the fashion in use sixty years ago, when paterfamilias took himself and his family for a progress round the country. Rumble it had, and imperial, and a chest of most unearthly pattern, accommodated to the space under the back seat.

But the glass was broken in the frames, and the hangings were mouldy. The very woodwork was so worm-eaten that at a touch you would expect it to crumble into dust, like one of the Pharaohs when he is disencumbered of his trappings. It was painted—or rather had been painted—a sable black, but the colour had deteriorated with time to the hue of rusty crêpe.

Our first impression suggested that it was some time-honoured memorial of the past—the carriage, it might be, in which a bride and bridegroom had made their home-coming under auspices of exceptional promise. But a second glance through the broken semicircular skylight told rather of intentional neglect or indifference. The plaster of the coach-house, where it still clung to the lath, had broken out into patches of mouldiness, defiant of the first principles of cleanliness, while an army of spiders, who must have worked unmolested for years, had tied the carriage to the walls and floor with a net-work of dirt-begrimed strands.

“What on earth is it? and why is it kept here?” asked Ronald of the groom. “I shall get the uncle to have it broken up and burned: it’s only filling the place with moths and insects.”

“Don’t you do nought of the kind, Master Ronald,” said the coachman, lowering his voice to a whisper. “That carriage has been driven up to these very doors by old Nick himself, or one or other of his coachmen. Aye, you may laugh. But it’s true enough, and not so long ago neither. They’d forgotten—had your aunt and uncle—that it was here in the stable at all: it must have been here years before they bought the place—till _he_ came and drove it round to the front door one night, all mouldy and ramshackled just as you see it now.”

“Do tell us, Frampton, about it. I’ll promise not to laugh.”

“Well, ’twas the night before we were starting for the South of France, and I was going with them to look after the horses they were to hire in Paris. The house had been full of visitors for Christmas, but most of them had gone the day before, and the rest of them were to leave along with us.

“It was in the middle of the night, though they never noticed the true time, when they heard, both of them, a carriage drive up to the front door.

“They were fairly puzzled what it could mean, as they expected no visitors, least of all at that time of night. Your aunt got up first and then called your uncle. And there, full in the moonlight, stood that identical carriage, and the coachman was a skellington—dressed in black and weepers, for all the world like an undertaker at a funeral. He turned his eyes—or what should have been his eyes—full upon them both. And then your aunt went faint, and I believe your uncle did no better. Anyhow, when they came back to their senses, carriage and coachman were gone.”

“And what did it mean, Frampton?”

“Well, that’s more than I can tell you, Master Ronald. It’s fairly puzzled all of us. I’m sure I’ve bothered my head times over to try and piece it together, seeing it meant no harm to them, but only to a lot of folk they’d never seen or heard of.”

“How did that come about?”

“When we got to Paris, we put up at one of them big hotels—I forget the name of it. And one day he and she were going up to their rooms in the lift. Just as they were stepping aboard of it, they looked chanceways at the man who managed it, and I’m blessed if it wasn’t the same coachman as had driven that there carriage up to the door at Broadwater. They were that frightened that they stepped back, and the lift went up without them. And well it was they did so, for something or other went wrong with the hauling gear, and every soul on board of it was killed.

“And now you know, Master Ronald, why your uncle won’t have that carriage never touched. He’s got it into his head, and you won’t get it out again, that it was sent to save his life. All I can say is that, if that’s what it did mean, old Nick carries on his business in a queer, roundabout kind of way.”

II

Not many days after Frampton had imparted to us his sensational story, we were told to expect a visit from the family lawyer. Ronald and I always hailed his visits with delight. He was one of those cheery individuals whom boys can chum with. In age he must have been nearly seventy-five, but hale and hearty still: entering into our amusements, never minding our noise, and tipping us when he left with a liberality that appalled our uncle. Ronald and I would have put him down for fifty. But boys do not recognise the gradations of age. To them a man seems definitely old at fifty, and live as long as he may after that, years will add nothing to the mystery of his age, if only he keeps young in heart and interests. At sixty, seventy, or even eighty, he will in their eyes be fifty still.

As a matter of course Ronald and I were told to put in an appearance on the day of his arrival. The unvarying order of the programme was that, after he had had a few words with our uncle, we two should form his escort in a progress round the park and outlying farms.

“So your uncle still cherishes the old Crofton coach,” he said, as we passed the outhouse tenanted by the family ghost. “I wonder he cares to keep it,”—almost Ronald’s own words to Frampton, the coachman—from which it was clear he had never heard of our uncle’s visitant, nor did we venture to enlighten him.

“Do you know anything about it, Sir?” asked Ronald, in the eager tone of one who had by no means lost hope of solving the mystery.

“My boy, I’ve _ridden in it_.”

Ronald’s face was a study. “Ridden in it? actually _ridden_ in that coach? And did you, Sir, _did_ you see the devil?” he continued anxiously. “Frampton says he always drives it.”

“Not exactly, Ronald. And, by the way, my lad, I wouldn’t, if I were you, introduce his name quite so familiarly into your conversation. Frampton must be cautioned, Fred, as to what he tells the boy.”

“Well, he didn’t exactly say that, Sir,” continued Ronald, willing to justify his friend. “He called him old Nick.”

“That’s a trifle better. Anyhow, I didn’t see him, though I can’t say honestly that my ride was a pleasant one. I’d been staying here with old Crofton, just before he sold the place to your uncle, and I had business too to transact with Thorpe of Thorpe Hill. As luck would have it, all the carriages here were in use but this one. It wasn’t in the state it is now, but it was out of date and uncomfortable even then. However, it took me there all right. It was on the way back that I had my adventure.

“I had barely composed myself to sleep with the consciousness of having dined too well—Thorpe never stinted his guests—when I was roused by an uneasy feeling that I was not the sole occupant of the carriage. The interior was lit up by a weird, fantastic light that came and went, rose and fell, like the glow that throbs over a brick-kiln or a blast furnace. After all, it may have been only the reflection of my own cigar which I had instinctively kept alight during my short nap. From out the border-land which separates sleep from waking, I saw two figures on the opposite seat. For a time I studied them with hardly more interest than I should the figures in a pantomime, till it was forced upon me by their wild gesticulation that this was no pantomime enacting for my benefit, but a veritable tragedy of life and death. The one figure shrank cowering in a corner of the carriage; the other stood over it with uplifted hand. But no voice or sound proceeded from them. Only on the hand of one, the figure that crouched and trembled, I recognised the famous Thorpe emerald—as the family lawyer I knew it well—while the other that stormed and threatened might have passed for old Crofton himself, in so far as youth of twenty can anticipate the form and lineaments of seventy-five.

“The details had hardly had time to shape themselves within my brain, when the light died out. I heard—or fancied I heard—a short, sharp gasp, an inarticulate cry for mercy, and the carriage drew up before the gate of Broadwater.”

That night after dinner we were subjected to a close cross-examination by our uncle.

“The boys have told me your surprising story, Mr. Roberts. May I ask how it is I never heard it from you before?”

“Why, to tell you the truth, Mr. Heyward, you wouldn’t have heard it now if my little friend Ronald hadn’t rushed me into telling it by his burst of eagerness. You might have said I’d been dining too well—as indeed I had—and that isn’t exactly the thing to recommend a family lawyer. So you’ve got my reputation at your mercy, young gentlemen. For, of course, it _was_ the dinner—a nightmare of some kind, no doubt. Though I’m bound to say I never had a nightmare, either before or afterwards, that was half so vivid and real. It was quite the worst quarter of an hour I ever passed in my life.”

“Perhaps not so much of a nightmare as you suppose,” rejoined the uncle, and then proceeded to narrate his own experiences. I remember thinking how much better Frampton told the story than he did, in spite of his rather unorthodox language.

“Phew! that alters the whole question. Corroborative evidence with a vengeance—evidence that one might almost take into court. For even if _you_ had been dining not wisely, your sister hadn’t, I know. Anyhow, we three staid gentlefolk could create a pretty sensation with our three independent testimonies. To think that a belief in ghosts should be forced upon me at my age! Why I shall be dragged next into believing the village legend.”

“What is it? I never even heard of it.”

“That Ronald’s old carriage is somehow mixed up with the quarrel between Thorpe and Broadwater—that it stands in the way of their family union. So you see, young gentlemen, where you’ve got to look for a wife as soon as the carriage is gone. But it doesn’t look like it yet. Old Thorpe’s dead, and the house shut up, and the only survivor of the family is on the point, they tell me, of marrying her cousin. Above all, you guard the old carriage, Heyward, as if it were a priceless heirloom. But perhaps you are right; it isn’t your business to get rid of it.”

III

So the old carriage mouldered on in the coach-house, and its net-work of cobwebs grew grimier each day.

How the spiders maintained themselves was a mystery, for no fly could have run the blockade of the window, even if the inducement had been greater. At last Ronald and I wove a legend around them in our turn, which terrified us more than did the carriage itself. We decided that, after long years of mutual slaughter, the victory had rested in the end with two or three hoary monsters, who had ensconced themselves within the framework of the ruined carriage, from which they looked out upon the solitude they were creating. Little by little the uncanny idea grew upon us till, regardless of all probability, we fancied we could see their eyes peering out of the darkness.

More than once we made illicit expeditions at midnight in the hope that we might find the ghostly coachman cleaning and repairing his equipage for another sortie. But we could see nothing. If either of us had gone alone, the result might have been different; we should have seen, or pretended to see, many matters of interest.

November was, as a rule, our month of storms at Broadwater, though February often ran it close; and, in the year that followed upon Frampton’s story, a gale broke upon us on the third of the month that beat the record of our times for violence. We had not been without warning of its coming. The sea had been “crying out” at intervals—sure token that the storm had paused to gather breath, bidding the sea take forward its message to the shore.

Not when the gale is at its height—at any rate along our coast—can you best realise the grandeur of the sea. Study it rather on one of these quiet days of warning, when you can trace a wave almost from its inception, till it curls over at your feet with a dull roar, regular as the boom of a minute gun, and audible for miles inland.

Lashed into foam, and its voice drowned by the wind, it parts with much of its majesty, and becomes merely a symbol of turmoil and unrest. What it gains in wildness, it loses in self-control, like the seething rapids of Niagara before they compose themselves into dignity prior to the final plunge.

Then came another and a final warning. It was one of those rare sunsets which leave an imprint on the memory for life. Not a sunset in which conflicting colours are fused into each other by soft and subtle gradations—these we see often and soon forget—but one of war and discord; when colours, the most antagonistic, meet without blending, and produce effects that would be called crude and coarse upon a painter’s canvas.

On a background of unvarying crimson, black and purple clouds were projected, clean cut in outline, and solid, to all appearance, as the hull of an Atlantic liner that was cleaving her way across the sea beneath them. The sea itself borrowed its colours from the sky, but jealously guarded them from encroaching on the beach beyond, which shone white as silver in the unnatural glow. Beyond it still, the valleys and hills that rose behind Broadwater were painted a dark and luminous green, on which a few scattered homesteads stood out in clear and startling relief. For the moment distance was annihilated, and a step or two, or so it seemed, might have compassed the mile of space that separated us from our own house door.

A sunset like this, following upon a “crying” sea, can never be misread by the dwellers on our coast. It warns every fisherman that he must haul his lerret to the very summit of the ridge, and every Coastguard station along the dreaded Bay that it behoves them to be awake and watching. But it was not till midnight that the storm broke upon us.

Our faith in the old house was strong. It had outlived so many storms, and the gale of ’24 must have been worse than this, or so we kept saying for mutual encouragement. But it was hard to believe it, and the comfort was quickly followed by a disquieting thought that each year, as it passed, left the chimneys older and less capable of resisting the pressure. We were disquieted, too, for others; we knew well by experience what a night like this might bring us from the sea. Times upon times, in similar gales, we had been hurried to the beach by signals of distress, and had helped the Coastguard, sometimes in saving life, oftener in furthering that painful recall to life which is more agonizing to witness than death itself.

Happily there came to-night no appealing cry. Even if it had pierced its way through wind and rain, those whom it summoned could only have watched and waited for one of those strange freaks by which the sea now and again elects to spare a human life. At the height of the gale, when gust upon gust followed each other with ever increasing fury, we were still seated in the drawing-room under various pretences. Ronald and I said openly that we were afraid of venturing our lives in the upper rooms, just under the chimneys. Our uncle jeered at our cowardice, but stayed where he was. “The noise would prevent my sleeping,” he said, “but, as for danger, I’d as lief sleep in the garrets as anywhere; only the servants’ beds ain’t as comfortable as my own. The old house’ll last our time yet.”

As if in answer to his boast, the gale made another defiant howl. It was answered by a dull crash, followed by a continuous roar of falling materials—followed again by a dead silence that was audible above the rush of wind and rain. It took us only a few minutes to satisfy ourselves that the fabric of the house was safe. It was a chimney stablewards that had gone, crashing through a hay loft and lumber room right down on the top of our ghostly carriage, and clearing Broadwater of spiders for the period of our lives. Even the uncle himself could find no plea for extending his protection to a mass of shivered fragments. If the powers of darkness had destroyed their own handiwork, or failed in ability to protect it, there was no reason to suppose that the hand of man would be more successful. So the fiat went forth—not, I believe, without great searching of heart on the part of our uncle—and carriage and cobwebs, and even the stable itself were swept away, and, as Bunyan says, I saw them no more.