Part 4

Fortunately, means were at hand for resolving any doubts on the subject, since the morning was Sunday, and already the bells were ringing for church. Lest the connexion may not be evident at first sight, I should explain that the gloomy period of church-time, with its enforced inaction and its lack of real interest—passed, too, within sight of all that the village held of fairest—was just the one when a young man’s fancies lightly turned to thoughts of love. The rest of the week afforded no leisure for such trifling; but in church—well, there was really nothing else to do! True, noughts-and-crosses might be indulged in on flyleaves of prayer-books while the Litany dragged its slow length along; but what balm or what solace could be found for the Sermon? Naturally the eye, wandering here and there among the serried ranks, made bold untrammelled choice among our fair fellow-supplicants. It was in this way that, some months earlier, under the exceptional strain of the Athanasian Creed, my roving fancy had settled upon the baker’s wife as a fit object for a life-long devotion. Her riper charms had conquered a heart which none of her be-muslined tittering juniors had been able to subdue; and that she was already wedded had never occurred to me as any bar to my affection. Edward’s general demeanour, then, during morning service was safe to convict him; but there was also a special test for the particular case. It happened that we sat in a transept, and, the Larkins being behind us, Edward’s only chance of feasting on Sabina’s charms was in the all-too fleeting interval when we swung round eastwards. I was not mistaken. During the singing of the Benedictus the impatient one made several false starts, and at last he slewed fairly round before ‘As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be’ was half finished. The evidence was conclusive: a court of law could have desired no better.

The fact being patent, the next thing was to grapple with it; and my mind was fully occupied during the sermon. There was really nothing unfair or unbrotherly in my attitude. A philosophic affection such as mine own, which clashed with nothing, was (I held) permissible; but the volcanic passions in which Edward indulged about once a quarter were a serious interference with business. To make matters worse, next week there was a circus coming to the neighbourhood, to which we had all been strictly forbidden to go; and without Edward no visit in contempt of law and orders could be successfully brought off. I had sounded him as to the circus on our way to church, and he had replied briefly that the very thought of a clown made him sick. Morbidity could no further go. But the sermon came to an end without any line of conduct having suggested itself; and I walked home in some depression, feeling sadly that Venus was in the ascendant and in direful opposition, while Auriga—the circus star—drooped declinant, perilously near the horizon.

By the irony of fate, Aunt Eliza, of all people, turned out to be the _Dea ex machinâ_. The thing fell out in this wise. It was that lady’s obnoxious practice to issue forth, of a Sunday afternoon, on a visit of state to such farmers and cottagers as dwelt at hand; on which occasion she was wont to hale a reluctant boy along with her, from the mixed motives of propriety and his soul’s health. Much cudgelling of brains, I suppose, had on that particular day made me torpid and unwary. Anyhow, when a victim came to be sought for, I fell an easy prey, while the others fled scatheless and whooping. Our first visit was to the Larkins. Here ceremonial might be viewed in its finest flower, and we conducted ourselves, like Queen Elizabeth when she trod the measure, ‘high and disposedly.’ In the low oak-panelled parlour cake and currant wine were set forth, and, after courtesies and compliments exchanged, Aunt Eliza, greatly condescending, talked the fashions with Mrs. Larkin; while the farmer and I, perspiring with the unusual effort, exchanged remarks on the mutability of the weather and the steady fall in the price of corn. (Who would have thought, to hear us, that only two short days ago we had confronted each other on either side of a hedge? I triumphant, provocative, derisive? He flushed, wroth, cracking his whip, and volleying forth profanity? So powerful is all-subduing ceremony!) Sabina the while, demurely seated with a _Pilgrim’s Progress_ on her knee, and apparently absorbed in a brightly-coloured presentment of ‘Apollyon Straddling Right across the Way,’ eyed me at times with shy interest; but repelled all Aunt Eliza’s advances with a frigid politeness for which I could not sufficiently admire her.

‘It’s surprising to me,’ I heard my aunt remark presently, ‘how my eldest nephew, Edward, despises little girls. I heard him tell Charlotte the other day that he wished he could exchange her for a pair of Japanese guinea-pigs. It made the poor child cry. Boys are so heartless!’ (I saw Sabina stiffen as she sat, and her tip-tilted nose twitched scornfully.) ‘Now this boy here——’ (my soul descended into my very boots. Could the woman have intercepted any of my amorous glances at the baker’s wife?) ‘Now this boy,’ my aunt went on, ‘is more human altogether. Only yesterday he took his sister to the baker’s shop, and spent his only penny buying her sweets. I thought it showed such a nice disposition. I wish Edward were more like him!’

I breathed again. It was unnecessary to explain my real motives for that visit to the baker’s. Sabina’s face softened, and her contemptuous nose descended from its altitude of scorn; she gave me one shy glance of kindness, and then concentrated her attention upon Mercy knocking at the Wicket Gate. I felt awfully mean as regarded Edward; but what could I do? I was in Gaza, gagged and bound; the Philistines hemmed me in.

The same evening the storm burst, the bolt fell, and—to continue the metaphor—the atmosphere grew serene and clear once more. The evening service was shorter than usual, the vicar, as he ascended the pulpit steps, having dropped two pages out of his sermon-case—unperceived by any but ourselves, either at the moment or subsequently when the hiatus was reached; so, as we joyfully shuffled out I whispered Edward that by racing home at top speed we should make time to assume our bows and arrows (laid aside for the day) and play at Indians and buffaloes with Aunt Eliza’s fowls—already strolling roostwards, regardless of their doom—before that sedately stepping lady could return. Edward hung at the door, wavering; the suggestion had unhallowed charms. At that moment Sabina issued primly forth, and, seeing Edward, put out her tongue at him in the most exasperating manner conceivable; then passed on her way, her shoulders rigid, her dainty head held high. A man can stand very much in the cause of love: poverty, aunts, rivals, barriers of every sort, all these only serve to fan the flame. But personal ridicule is a shaft that reaches the very vitals. Edward led the race home at a speed which one of Ballantyne’s heroes might have equalled but never surpassed; and that evening the Indians dispersed Aunt Eliza’s fowls over several square miles of country, so that the tale of them remaineth incomplete unto this day. Edward himself, cheering wildly, pursued the big Cochin-China cock till the bird sank gasping under the drawing-room window, whereat its mistress stood petrified; and after supper, in the shrubbery, smoked a half-consumed cigar he had picked up in the road, and declared to an awe-stricken audience his final, his immitigable resolve to go into the army.

The crisis was past, and Edward was saved!... And yet ... _sunt lachrymæ rerum_ ... to me watching the cigar-stump alternately pale and glow against the dark background of laurel, a vision of a tip-tilted nose, of a small head poised scornfully, seemed to hover on the gathering gloom—seemed to grow and fade and grow again, like the grin of the Cheshire cat—pathetically, reproachfully even; and the charms of the baker’s wife slipped from my memory like snow-wreaths in thaw. After all, Sabina was nowise to blame: why should the child be punished? To-morrow I would give them the slip, and stroll round by her garden promiscuous-like, at a time when the farmer was safe in the rick-yard. If nothing came of it, there was no harm done; and if on the contrary...!

THE BURGLARS

IT was much too fine a night to think of going to bed at once, and so, although the witching hour of nine P.M. had struck, Edward and I were still leaning out of the open window in our nightshirts, watching the play of the cedar-branch shadows on the moonlit lawn, and planning schemes of fresh devilry for the sunshiny morrow. From below, strains of the jocund piano declared that the Olympians were enjoying themselves in their listless impotent way; for the new curate had been bidden to dinner that night, and was at the moment unclerically proclaiming to all the world that he feared no foe. His discordant vociferations doubtless started a train of thought in Edward’s mind, for he presently remarked, _à propos_ of nothing whatever that had been said before, ‘I believe the new curate’s rather gone on Aunt Maria.’

I scouted the notion; ‘Why, she’s quite old,’ I said. (She must have seen some five-and-twenty summers.)

‘Of course she is,’ replied Edward scornfully. ‘It’s not her, it’s her money he’s after, you bet!’

‘Didn’t know she had any money,’ I observed timidly.

‘Sure to have,’ said my brother with confidence. ‘Heaps and heaps.’

Silence ensued, both our minds being busy with the new situation thus presented: mine, in wonderment at this flaw that so often declared itself in enviable natures of fullest endowment,—in a grown-up man and a good cricketer, for instance, even as this curate; Edward’s (apparently) in the consideration of how such a state of things, supposing it existed, could be best turned to his own advantage.

‘Bobby Ferris told me,’ began Edward in due course, ‘that there was a fellow spooning his sister once——’

‘What’s spooning?’ I asked meekly.

‘O _I_ dunno,’ said Edward indifferently. ‘It’s—it’s—it’s just a thing they do, you know. And he used to carry notes and messages and things between ’em, and he got a shilling almost every time.’

‘What, from each of ’em?’ I innocently inquired.

Edward looked at me with scornful pity. ‘Girls never have any money,’ he briefly explained. ‘But she did his exercises, and got him out of rows, and told stories for him when he needed it—and much better ones than he could have made up for himself. Girls are useful in some ways. So he was living in clover, when unfortunately they went and quarrelled about something.’

‘Don’t see what that’s got to do with it,’ I said.

‘Nor don’t I,’ rejoined Edward. ‘But any how the notes and things stopped, and so did the shillings. Bobby was fairly cornered, for he had bought two ferrets on tick, and promised to pay a shilling a week, thinking the shillings were going on for ever, the silly young ass. So when the week was up, and he was being dunned for the shilling, he went off to the fellow and said: “Your broken-hearted Bella implores you to meet her at sundown. By the hollow oak as of old, be it only for a moment. Do not fail!” He got all that out of some rotten book, of course. The fellow looked puzzled and said:

‘“What hollow oak? I don’t know any hollow oak.”

‘“Perhaps it was the Royal Oak?” said Bobby promptly, ’cos he saw he had made a slip, through trusting too much to the rotten book; but this didn’t seem to make the fellow any happier.’

‘Should think not,’ I said, ‘the Royal Oak’s an awful low sort of pub.’

‘I know,’ said Edward. ‘Well, at last the fellow said, “I think I know what she means: the hollow tree in your father’s paddock. It happens to be an elm, but she wouldn’t know the difference. All right: say I’ll be there.” Bobby hung about a bit, for he hadn’t got his money. “She was crying awfully,” he said. Then he got his shilling.

‘And wasn’t the fellow riled,’ I inquired, ‘when he got to the place and found nothing?’

‘He found Bobby,’ said Edward indignantly. ‘Young Ferris was a gentleman, every inch of him. He brought the fellow another message from Bella: “I dare not leave the house. My cruel parents immure me closely. If you only knew what I suffer. Your broken-hearted Bella.” Out of the same rotten book. This made the fellow a little suspicious, ’cos it was the old Ferrises who had been keen about the thing all through. The fellow, you see, had tin.’

‘But what’s that got to——’ I began again.

‘O _I_ dunno,’ said Edward impatiently. ‘I’m telling you just what Bobby told me. He got suspicious, anyhow, but he couldn’t exactly call Bella’s brother a liar, so Bobby escaped for the time. But when he was in a hole next week, over a stiff French exercise, and tried the same sort of game on his sister, she was too sharp for him, and he got caught out. Somehow women seem more mistrustful than men. They’re so beastly suspicious by nature, you know.’

‘_I_ know,’ said I. ‘But did the two—the fellow and the sister—make it up afterwards?’

‘I don’t remember about that,’ replied Edward indifferently; ‘but Bobby got packed off to school a whole year earlier than his people meant to send him. Which was just what he wanted. So you see it all came right in the end!’

I was trying to puzzle out the moral of this story—it was evidently meant to contain one somewhere—when a flood of golden lamplight mingled with the moon-rays on the lawn, and Aunt Maria and the new curate strolled out on the grass below us, and took the direction of a garden-seat which was backed by a dense laurel shrubbery reaching round in a half-circle to the house. Edward meditated moodily. ‘If we only knew what they were talking about,’ said he, ‘you’d soon see whether I was right or not. Look here! Let’s send the kid down by the porch to reconnoitre!’

‘Harold’s asleep,’ I said; ‘it seems rather a shame——’

‘O rot!’ said my brother; ‘he’s the youngest, and he’s got to do as he’s told!’

So the luckless Harold was hauled out of bed and given his sailing-orders. He was naturally rather vexed at being stood up suddenly on the cold floor, and the job had no particular interest for him; but he was both staunch and well disciplined. The means of exit were simple enough. A porch of iron trellis came up to within easy reach of the window, and was habitually used by all three of us, when modestly anxious to avoid public notice. Harold climbed deftly down the porch like a white rat, and his night-gown glimmered a moment on the gravel walk ere he was lost to sight in the darkness of the shrubbery. A brief interval of silence ensued; broken suddenly by a sound of scuffle, and then a shrill long-drawn squeal, as of metallic surfaces in friction. Our scout had fallen into the hands of the enemy!

Indolence alone had made us devolve the task of investigation on our younger brother. Now that danger had declared itself, there was no hesitation. In a second we were down the side of the porch, and crawling Cherokee-wise through the laurels to the back of the garden-seat. Piteous was the sight that greeted us. Aunt Maria was on the seat, in a white evening frock, looking—for an aunt—really quite nice. On the lawn stood an incensed curate, grasping our small brother by a large ear, which—judging from the row he was making—seemed on the point of parting company with the head it completed and adorned. The gruesome noise he was emitting did not really affect us otherwise than æsthetically. To one who has tried both, the wail of genuine physical anguish is easily distinguishable from the pumped-up _ad misericordiam_ blubber. Harold’s could clearly be recognised as belonging to the latter class. ‘Now you young—’ (whelp, _I_ think it was, but Edward stoutly maintains it was devil), said the curate sternly; ‘tell us what you mean by it!’

‘Well leggo of my ear then!’ shrilled Harold, ‘and I’ll tell you the solemn truth!’

‘Very well,’ agreed the curate, releasing him, ‘now go ahead, and don’t lie more than you can help.’

We abode the promised disclosure without the least misgiving; but even we had hardly given Harold due credit for his fertility of resource and powers of imagination.

‘I had just finished saying my prayers,’ began that young gentleman slowly, ‘when I happened to look out of the window, and on the lawn I saw a sight which froze the marrow in my veins! A burglar was approaching the house with snake-like tread! He had a scowl and a dark lantern, and he was armed to the teeth!’

We listened with interest. The style, though unlike Harold’s native notes, seemed strangely familiar.

‘Go on,’ said the curate grimly.

‘Pausing in his stealthy career,’ continued Harold, ‘he gave a low whistle. Instantly the signal was responded to, and from the adjacent shadows two more figures glided forth. The miscreants were both armed to the teeth.’

‘Excellent,’ said the curate; ‘proceed.’

‘The robber chief,’ pursued Harold, warming to his work, ‘joined his nefarious comrades, and conversed with them in silent tones. His expression was truly ferocious, and I ought to have said that he was armed to the t——’

‘There, never mind his teeth,’ interrupted the curate rudely; ‘there’s too much jaw about you altogether. Hurry up and have done.’

‘I was in a frightful funk,’ continued the narrator, warily guarding his ear with his hand, ‘but just then the drawing-room window opened, and you and Aunt Maria came out—I mean emerged. The burglars vanished silently into the laurels, with horrid implications!’

The curate looked slightly puzzled. The tale was well sustained, and certainly circumstantial. After all, the boy might really have seen something. How was the poor man to know—though the chaste and lofty diction might have supplied a hint—that the whole yarn was a free adaptation from the last Penny Dreadful lent us by the knife-and-boot boy?

‘Why did you not alarm the house?’ he asked.

‘Cos I was afraid,’ said Harold sweetly, ‘that p’raps they mightn’t believe me!’

‘But how did you get down here, you naughty little boy?’ put in Aunt Maria.

Harold was hard pressed—by his own flesh and blood, too!

At that moment Edward touched me on the shoulder and glided off through the laurels. When some ten yards away he gave a low whistle. I replied with another. The effect was magical. Aunt Maria started up with a shriek. Harold gave one startled glance around, and then fled like a hare, made straight for the back-door, burst in upon the servants at supper, and buried himself in the broad bosom of the cook, his special ally. The curate faced the laurels—hesitatingly. But Aunt Maria flung herself on him. ‘O Mr. Hodgitts!’ I heard her cry, ‘you are brave! for my sake do not be rash!’ He was not rash. When I peeped out a second later, the coast was entirely clear.

By this time there were sounds of a household timidly emerging; and Edward remarked to me that perhaps we had better be off. Retreat was an easy matter. A stunted laurel gave a leg-up on to the garden wall, which led in its turn to the roof of an out-house, up which, at a dubious angle, we could crawl to the window of the box-room. This overland route had been revealed to us one day by the domestic cat, when hard pressed in the course of an otter-hunt, in which the cat—somewhat unwillingly—was filling the title _rôle_; and it had proved distinctly useful on occasions like the present. We were snug in bed—minus some cuticle from knees and elbows—and Harold, sleepily chewing something sticky, had been carried up in the arms of the friendly cook, ere the clamour of the burglar-hunters had died away.

The curate’s undaunted demeanour, as reported by Aunt Maria, was generally supposed to have terrified the burglars into flight, and much kudos accrued to him thereby. Some days later, however, when he had dropped in to afternoon tea, and was making a mild curatorial joke about the moral courage required for taking the last piece of bread-and-butter, I felt constrained to remark dreamily, and as it were to the universe at large: ‘Mr. Hodgitts! you are brave! for my sake, do not be rash!’

Fortunately for me, the vicar also was a caller on that day; and it was always a comparatively easy matter to dodge my long-coated friend in the open.

A HARVESTING

THE year was in its yellowing time, and the face of Nature a study in old gold. ‘A field _or_, _semée_ with garbs of the same:’ it may be false Heraldry—Nature’s generally is—but it correctly blazons the display that Edward and I considered from the rickyard gate. Harold was not on in this scene, being stretched upon the couch of pain: the special disorder stomachic, as usual. The evening before, Edward, in a fit of unwonted amiability, had deigned to carve me out a turnip lantern, an art-and-craft he was peculiarly deft in; and Harold, as the interior of the turnip flew out in scented fragments under the hollowing knife, had eaten largely thereof: regarding all such jetsam as his special perquisite. Now he was dreeing his weird, with such assistance as the chemist could afford. But Edward and I, knowing that this particular field was to be carried to-day, were revelling in the privilege of riding in the empty waggons from the rickyard back to the sheaves, whence we returned toilfully on foot, to career it again over the billowy acres in these great galleys of a stubble sea. It was the nearest approach to sailing that we inland urchins might compass: and hence it ensued, that such stirring scenes as Sir Richard Grenville on the _Revenge_, the smoke-wreathed Battle of the Nile, and the Death of Nelson, had all been enacted in turn on these dusty quarter-decks, as they swayed and bumped afield.

Another waggon had shot its load, and was jolting out through the rickyard gate, as we swung ourselves in, shouting, over its tail. Edward was the first up, and, as I gained my feet, he clutched me in a death-grapple. I was a privateersman, he proclaimed, and he the captain of the British frigate _Terpsichore_, of—I forget the precise number of guns. Edward always collared the best parts to himself; but I was holding my own gallantly, when I suddenly discovered that the floor we battled on was swarming with earwigs. Shrieking, I hurled free of him, and rolled over the tail-board on to the stubble. Edward executed a war-dance of triumph on the deck of the retreating galleon; but I cared little for that. I knew _he_ knew that I wasn’t afraid of him, but that I was—and terribly—of earwigs: ‘those mortal bugs o’ the field.’ So I let him disappear, shouting lustily for all hands to repel boarders, while I strolled inland, down the village.

There was a touch of adventure in the expedition. This was not our own village, but a foreign one, distant at least a mile. One felt that sense of mingled distinction and insecurity which is familiar to the traveller: distinction, in that folk turned the head to note you curiously; insecurity, by reason of the ever-present possibility of missiles on the part of the younger inhabitants, a class eternally Conservative. Elated with isolation, I went even more nose-in-air than usual: and ‘even so,’ I mused, ‘might Mungo Park have threaded the trackless African forest and....’ Here I plumped against a soft, but resisting body.