Part 6

“‘Take ’em down,’ says the Bishop; ‘Farmer Price’ll lend ’e a helpin’ hand: and we’ve none too much time to get ’em back to the churchyard and bury ’em.’ Joseph hisself could scarce do nought but stare at ’em. To think that that godless man had kep’ ’em there—one on ’em for nigh on ten years—never thinkin’, not he, that he was keepin’ ’em tied hand and foot to this world, with never no chance of a resurrection till he took it into his wicked head to let ’em go. And there they’d a’ been for ten years longer—for just so long he lived—if Bishop hisself hadn’t got wind on’t and come down right away to bury ’em.

“Anyhow they _did_ get decent burial—the three on ’em—at last. For they had Bishop, and Joseph and Farmer Price; though I don’t take no count o’ he, ’cept that he helped to lower ’em and fill in the grave.

“But Joseph were right glad, he were—and so he told I—to see the rare tug he had in draggin’ they three dead women up hill and down hill ’cross to the church-yard. For Joseph never gived ’en no helpin’ hand—you may take your oath on’t—though he did make a show of pushin’ at the bier whensomever the Bishop looked his way.

“Didn’t no one never hear on’t? Yes, they did. But they didn’t take no count on’t. Our people baint over wise about religion, and things were done in those days that’d make a rare potheration now. Besides, you see, Bishop were there, and he made a sight o’ difference. ’Twas a rare fine buryin’, people thought, wi’ a Bishop to put you unnerground; though ’tis true he hadn’t his fine gran’ toggery on, and his girt white sleeves.”

* * * * *

The actors in our humble drama are dead and gone. The Bishop and Price and Joseph have, each in his turn, been followed to the grave, only with less eccentric rites. But the story of the farmer’s “Happy Family” still lingers in the village, and is told and re-told round many a cottage hearth under the quaint but significant title of “Price’s Menagerie.”

* * * * *

P.S. The “Professor” himself came round to-day—“for a pipe of baccy, Sir, if you have such a thing about you”—so I have utilised him to correct his own proof sheets. “There baint nothin’ wrong in ’em, _Master_ Fred (this to a man of sixty!), so fur as I sees. Only you says ‘gived’ where I says ‘gi’ed.’ But taint no odds. Like enough they’ll guess what you means whatsomever you writes down.” Thanks, Matthew, for your tribute to my clearness of expression.

The Cruel Crawling Foam

IT was a touch of the old wilfulness in Ronald, which cost him dear, and saddened all his future life.

A windy storm-swept sky, though the wind was only playing with the sea as yet. Still, it met us, as we went down to the shore, with a drift of sand that stung the face like pin-pricks—trying, one might easily fancy, to warn us back from our foolhardy enterprise.

A painter would have needed only his blends of grey to paint the scene, till we came upon it, and added, I suppose, a patch of colour. Wiser people than ourselves kept quietly indoors; and the sand, the sea, the gulls, and the hurrying scud could all have been rendered in varying shades of grey. It is, to me, the most fascinating hue that the changeful sea can wear. One great artist, whose sketches are the glory of Girton College, knew it well. With an unerring eye for this sad unity of tone, she admits no faintest touch of colour into her cold grey wastes of sea and sky.

It was a risky and foolhardy attempt on the part of Ronald, and one that he has bitterly repented of, to launch a boat that afternoon. I can never quite forgive him for the sorrow it was to bring on us. But his wife would have it so. It was her greatest enjoyment to put out to sea on such a day. A calm aimless drift, in life or on the sea, was out of harmony with her bright and nerve-wrought soul.

Where Ronald was still more at fault was in the choice of our third hand. True, we had a fair amount of experience between us. But, with a strong south-wester to fight against, weight and strength are the two things needed, and will often win through a gale when experience is powerless. Ronald, however, was in one of his obstinate moods. He would take Oswald or no one, and his wife said ditto. Now Oswald was a lad of eighteen: a good seaman, I grant, but quite unequal to the work we had in view. However, he was the son of Ronald’s favourite gardener, and had been his wife’s pet scholar at her Sunday school, since which time he had been her devoted slave, making himself useful about the house, and looking after her specialities in the garden and conservatory.

“Isn’t that boat too big for us, Oswald? Remember, there are only two of us to handle it, for Ronald’s ill, and can’t be reckoned on for much. Unless I’m mistaken, it intends to blow harder than this before it’s done.”

“Yes, sir. You’re right in a way. But we’ve got the winch to lower and haul her up with. And once at sea she’ll be a deal safer and stauncher than that one,” pointing to a lean, wall-sided thing that was our only alternative. “Besides, we’ll set very little canvas; indeed, to all appearance we shan’t want much.”

What a sail we had that afternoon! I think that I, who had countenanced it least, enjoyed it most. For Ronald was only just recovering from influenza, and certainly not up to a rough and tumble experience of this sort. And Oswald, too, for a lad of his spirits, was strangely depressed. “Never felt like it before,” he said, “and I shall be thankful when we’re safe on shore again. Our old people at home would say that I was walking over my grave, or some folly of the kind. But that can’t be out here,” he added, with a poor attempt to laugh it off.

First of all we took her along under the lee of the shore, where we were able to carry a fair amount of sail, and when we had worked her well round the bay we put her head straight for the south-east, and, with the wind on our beam, raced out into the open sea.

It was a longer and heavier business to work her back again, with the wind right in our teeth, and freshening steadily as the evening wore on. Fortunately for us it had only blown fitfully, and without much weight in it till now. It was still “making up its mind,” as sailors say, whether it would blow or not. But as we were beaching her in a deep sandy cove it had finished apparently with indecision, and began to blow in earnest.

Just as we had landed, and Oswald was preparing to follow us, a terrific squall burst full upon the boat, which lay beam on to it. Relieved of her last weight, as Oswald stepped on shore, she yielded to the pressure, and, heeling over on her side, pinned him to the ground. In a moment the horror of it broke upon us. What could we do, the two of us, even if Ronald hadn’t been shorn of half his strength? It would have taken ten men to pull her over in the face of the gale that was blowing. And the tide was rising rapidly. It was idle to look for help. We had beached her in a quiet sequestered cove, used only by ourselves. But it was closer to Thorpe Hill than the regular landing stage, and, after a hard day’s work, saved us a tedious beat along the coast when the wind was blowing from its present quarter. The high land above us was private property, with no right of way, and on a day like this, for it was beginning to rain, would be lonely as a desert.

Our first thought was of the winch. We had had one fitted up under the cliff in order to save labour in launching and beaching the boat. But, even if it were possible, we had no time nor knowledge how to alter the gear so as to utilise the leverage for righting her. No doubt the incoming tide would help us later on, but its help, when it did come, would come too late. Yet to do anything was better than to do nothing. So we took the balers out of the boat, and, kneeling down beside Oswald, attempted the hopeless task of freeing him by scooping out the sand on either side, till he begged us to desist, as the boat only fell over more heavily, and imprisoned him still deeper in the yielding sand.

And all the time that we were working, Kingsley’s “cruel, crawling foam” beat persistently upon my brain, maddening me with its ghastly congruity. And yet “cruel and crawling” it was not. Quicker it could scarcely have been, and its quickest was (I saw) its kindliest. Already it was playing with the lad’s hair, though his mistress, careless of the risk she ran, knelt down beside him and supported his head in her arms.

“Pray for me,” he said.

She whispered the words in his ear, though if she had shouted them with all her strength they would not have reached us on the other side of the boat, where, with a hope that was hopeless now, we were straining ourselves to no purpose in the attempt to right her.

But Oswald was satisfied. A look of repose and even comfort settled upon his face before the last words came.

“Thank you,” he said, “you have made death easy for me. And you have done so at the risk of your own life. Tell them at home I was not afraid.”

She bent down and kissed his forehead.

“And now—cover my face.”

Our Queen

“And the stars—they shall fall, and the Angels go weeping, Ere I cease to love her, my Queen, my Queen.”

I

“OUR Queen” she was to me and Ronald, ever since we first met her at Broadwater, and Ronald had dared to love her. And now that she is gone from us there is little fear that her title will ever be questioned. Neither he nor I need any coarser picture of her than that engraved by memory. But for others—for those who knew her little, or less well—let me try to call her back in clearer and less shadowy outline.

A woman this, to whom you gave your confidence with your first greeting, and never afterwards withdrew it.

Not the face to tempt an artist by its regularity of feature or beauty of colouring. Madonna-like some would call it, and so it was in sweet and loving trustfulness, but far too mobile and human, too full of interest and human sympathy to suggest the reposeful placidity of conventional art. Instinct, rather, with the life and animation that inspires the best work of Gainsborough and Reynolds, and frank with a simplicity that is careless of its surroundings, and therefore conquers them. The centre of her interest was home; thence it radiated outwards. From her family to her friends, from friends to neighbours, her influence passed in ever widening circles like a ripple that, stirred in the centre of some pool, travels to the extremest edge.

Nature creates not many such. Happy the man who has known and honoured one.

Over and over again I have tried to unravel the secret of her inexplicable charm. Seating myself in some sequestered nook, where Ronald himself would find it hard to discover me, it has been my pleasure, through a long evening’s entertainment, to watch her in every graceful word and greeting that she exchanged with her friends. It was a satisfaction even to see her walk across the room—a lost art (they tell us) in these hurried and inartistic days. I tried to learn the mystery from her conversation. The words told nothing, but the tone was less secretive; and, after all, how much more the tone always does tell of the spirit of the speaker than the conventional coinage we have devised in words.

“And how’s that sweet little bairn of yours, Mrs. Macpherson?” (She was half Scotch by birth, and now and again her descent betrayed itself in a pretty mannerism of word and accent.) “I lost my heart to her, I did, when I met her yesterday on the Parade with her nurse.” A greeting old as time can make it, but new, entirely new, in the sympathy she threw into it right from the depths of her heart. No one could hear her and not believe; and Mrs. Macpherson was won. Sometimes, almost awestruck, I asked myself, Is there, _can_ there be a human nature so nearly approximating to the divine as to possess the verity of universal sympathy? And, knowing this woman so nearly and so closely as I knew her, it was impossible, I found, to answer the question with a negative.

“If you are in doubt, play trumps” used to be the rule in whist, and “If you are in doubt, wear black” would be my advice to a lady in difficulty about her dress. And Ronald’s wife suggested it.

To-night she was looking her best—in black, and silver and diamonds. She and Ronald were giving their largest ball of the season, due regularly at this period of the year, and every family of standing for miles round had sent its representative. For a wonder I hadn’t been watching her that evening, and was surprised to feel her gentle touch on my arm.

“Come with me, Fred,” she said, “I want you for a few minutes upstairs. Poor old nurse is dying. We’ve been expecting it, you know, at any moment for some weeks past. But I wish it hadn’t come to-night. It looks so heartless to have all these people about us; and yet I know she wouldn’t have had the ball put off. She was the last person ever to think of self. Still it _does_ look unfeeling to go to her straight from all this light and merriment. Yet I feel it less than most would. Life and death seem to me so closely mixed, that wherever one is there you may expect the other.”

“Of course I’ll come. But oughtn’t Ronald to be there too?”

“Yes; but, you see, we cannot both be spared. He must be here to make excuses for me if I am missed. I don’t want to spoil the pleasure of all these young things during their one great evening of the year.”

“But you’ll change your dress?” I said aghast.

“No, I think not. If death is always so very near to us, it hardly seems worth while to change one’s dress to meet him. Besides, I have a special reason in this case. All her life long dear old nurse has liked to see me in my ball-room dress, and I’m sure she will to-night. She said it gave her an idea of what the angels were like better than did her Bible. And if it could give her one comforting thought to help her, I’d have dressed on purpose as I am.”

There was little need for Ronald to make excuses for our absence. The old woman was dying when they called us. But her eyes opened and brightened as she saw her mistress.

“What! an angel?” she cried. “No, but my own dear mistress, the best angel of them all, and dressed as I would have her—not yet in her robe of white—not yet.” And, with her mistress’ face pressed close to hers, and the diamonds and silver rippling and shimmering about her pillow, our old nurse died as she would have chosen. Half-an-hour later “Our Queen” was back in the ball-room: bright, and, to all appearance, cheerful as the rest. None that saw her would have guessed the scene from which she had come back to them. “Heartless” they would have said, and will say so still. But Ronald and I knew better. Her heart was in the nursery up stairs.

She wears her white robe now. But, in reverence be it written, I would fain see her come to welcome me, clothed, as she was clothed that night, in black and silver and diamonds.

II

When her own time came, as it did soon after, she met death with the same fearless, friendly courage. Her thoughts were wholly for those who were to stay, and she was even playful in urging upon me never to leave Ronald and the children, but learn to “take her place.” I own I was troubled at times by what seemed almost levity in the face of death, till I began by degrees to realise her point of view.

“I think it will be a very short distance,” she said, “perhaps into another room, perhaps not even so far as that; and the time (to me, at any rate) will certainly seem short—no longer than the night of sleep which separates us from our loved ones till the morning.” And of the future she had no fear. “Nothing,” she said, “could persuade me that the light which has been fanned and quickened here will be extinguished for ever by the incident we call death. The jest would be too horribly, inconceivably malicious. Yet our choice lies between this and the crowning impossibility of a self-created world.”

Not thoughtlessly, but in the hope of finding a standing ground for myself, I would ask her sometimes if she had no misgivings regarding the re-existence of the body, and mutual recognition, and the endless difficulties that centre round the subject.

“None,” she answered, “none. Why should I? Look at the natural world. I know that space must be either limited or limitless; but can I form a conception of either alternative? Yet the problem may be simplicity itself to some larger mind than ours. So why trouble myself about difficulties which may be easier of solution still to those who hold the key? And you think it hard, I know—you have often said so—that many should die, as we know they must, without a friend on earth to whom they can look forward for a welcome when they reach the further shore. To me, I confess, it seems quite the contrary. Surely the burst of welcome will be greater in their ears than in ours, who have lived surrounded by friends, and never known the dearth of sympathy.”

And every difficulty, as I raised it, she met with the same calm, unquestioning certainty.

She died, as she had lived, in ministering to others. Oswald’s death was the first blow. From the exposure and the physical effects she soon recovered—sooner than we expected, considering her frail and uncertain hold on life. But the horror of it was always with her, especially the feeling that it was she who had suggested the fatal experiment. Ever and again, as the subject was referred to, I could see her shuddering at the reminiscence, blaming herself with what was surely the only reproach that can have harassed her bright and blameless conscience. And the remembrance was still upon her when her two children sickened with the scarlet fever. Considering her weak state, and consequent liability to infection, the doctor had strictly forbidden her to enter their room. “I can make no promises,” she said; “if they want me I must go. Till then I will obey your orders. We are told to give up father and mother, and perhaps oneself for one’s husband, but our children, I think, have a prior claim to all.” And so she watched and waited at their door, stealing along the corridor in her robe of white at all hours of the night, listening and listening to hear if a summons came.

One night, unhappily, it came—a summons she was powerless to resist. The elder child was delirious, and she heard it moaning piteously, “Mother, mother, why don’t you come to me?” Without a moment’s hesitation she had entered the room, signing her own death-warrant in the act.

She did not linger long in dying; lingering was little in her way. On a grey morning in October, just ten days after she was taken ill, the gun which welcomes sunrise from the signal-station on the pier echoed like a call. She opened her eyes to greet us, and with the diamonds flickering again about her head—only they were sunbeams now—she passed to that “larger life” of which she, if anyone, held the key.

“Lest we forget.”

* * * * *

Bindo A Sketch

I

THE last notes of “Jerusalem, Jerusalem!”—sung as no other boy on earth could sing it—had just died away in a storm of applause. Now and again the surge of voices reached the green-room in a muffled roar, where Eric was protesting to the Manager that nothing would induce him to sing another note that night. “They’ve had four songs,” he said, “what on earth do they want more? As it is, I shall break my voice some day in that confounded hall. It was never meant for a boy to sing in—all wood and iron and glass—with nothing to help you or carry the voice. No! I _won’t_ sing, that’s flat; tell them I’m ill, or my mother’s come for me, or anything you like. Sing again, I _won’t_.” “Yes, I’ll tell them your mother’s come for you,” said the Manager with a laugh, “but, remember, they’ll be clamouring for ‘A boy’s best friend is his mother’ if I do.”

As if to confirm Eric in his determination there came a knock at the door, and a boyish face peeped _in_. “Sorry, Hudson, if I’ve interrupted business, but they told me the show was over, and I want Eric for supper. By the way, you can come too, if you like. Andrews and Thorne are there already, and have finished supper by this time, I expect. But there’ll be some champagne and lobster-salad left for us.”

“Thanks, Lord Eastonville, I’ll come with pleasure, but I must first go and quiet these lunatics. They’re roaring for Eric like a lioness robbed of her cub.”

Ten minutes later the three were entering a room in Hope Square, so rich in its decorations of china, tapestries, and antique bronzes that it might have been transported by a slave of the lamp direct from Aladdin’s palace, or have done duty for a catalogue of Roman luxury: “The merchandise of gold and silver and precious stones and of pearls and fine linen and silk and scarlet and all manner of vessels of most precious wood and of brass and iron and marble and frankincense, and souls of men.”

By the fire (for it was early in May) stood an oval table, covered with old glass and silver in pleasant confusion. The fruit—a distinctive feature—piled artistically in a ribbed basket of the Queen Anne period, not disposed at the rate of four apples here, flanked by four oranges there, after the fashion dear to the soul of the British householder when he calls his neighbours to a feast.

The three new comers were greeted with a round of applause as hearty in spirit as the cheer which had followed them from the hall.

“Why, Bindo, you’ve the very boy we’ve been longing for. We’ve finished supper and used up our talk, and it’s too late for a theatre and too early for bed. Singing will just fill the interval before cards.”

“Not a note from me, Thorne, till I’ve had some supper. I must clear my throat from the dust of the hall with champagne first. Why you’re as bad as the audience, who think that songs can be pumped out of one as easily as you can get squeaks out of a gutta-percha doll.”

While Eric is better employed we can introduce the party.

Lord Eastonville, who owns the rooms, is a thorough gentleman of the well-bred English type, with brains enough to carry him safely through life—good-looking, generous, easy-going to a fault, and twenty-five. Too fond, it may be, of taking his ease, as all well-to-do Englishmen are now-a-days, but a man who could fight for his country, as in the old Crimean times, when war galvanised our lethargy into life. War is no unmixed evil; it carries with it a blessing in disguise. It is the scare and shadow of war that is the curse without the blessing.

Thorne, as a minute in his company would prove to you, is a hard-headed journalist; witty, and an excellent talker; facile, of course, with his pen, and ready to turn out a new theology as easily as he could write an article on the last discovered butterfly or grub.

Andrews is a graduate of London University, spending with Eastonville the remnant of a holiday. Fairly humorous and incorrigibly deaf—never more so (his friends say) than when a subject bores him—he is himself a trifle of a bore to-night. In his latest translation of Vergil “ploughed with a team” has become in the hands of the printers “ploughed with steam,” an anachronism that pleases him mightily.

He is also sorely exercised over the term “Prolegomena,” used in connexion with our classical editions. “Either the word’s bad Greek,” he says, “or else it’s rank nonsense. ‘Things that are being said before’ means just nothing at all. What they want is a Perfect, ‘things that have been said beforehand,’ which is not only more grammatical, but also (he adds with a chuckle) much more descriptive of prefaces in general.”