'Good Lord!' said Mr Pinsent testily. 'Did I ever call midnight robbery a laughing matter?'
'No—o,' answered Mrs Salt, yet as one not altogether sure.
'And I dare say your bein' mayor makes you take a serious view.'
Breakfast over, the mayor took hat and walking-stick for his customary morning stroll along the street to Butcher Trengrove's to choose the joint for his dinner and pick up the town's earliest gossip. It is Troy's briskest hour; when the dairy carts, rattling homeward, meet the country folk from up-the-river who have just landed at the quays and begun to sell from door to door their poultry and fresh eggs, vegetables, fruit, and nosegays of garden flowers; when the tradesmen, having taken down their shutters, stand in the roadway, admire the effect of their shop-windows and admonish the apprentices cleaning the panes; when the children loiter and play at hop-scotch on their way to school, and the housewives, having packed them off, find time for neighbourly clack over the scouring of door-steps.
It might be the mayor's fancy and no more, but it certainly appeared to him that the children smiled with a touch of mockery as they met him and saluted. For aught he knew any one of these grinning imps— confound 'em!—might be implicated in the plot. The townsmen gave him 'good-morning' as usual, and yet not quite as usual. He felt that news of the raid had won abroad; that, although shy of speaking, they were studying his face for a sign. He kept it carefully cheerful; but came near to losing his temper when he reached Trengrove's shop to find Mr Garraway already there and in earnest conversation with the butcher.
'Ah! good-mornin' again! I was just talkin' about you and your pigeons,' said Mr Garraway, frankly.
'Good-morning, y'r Worship,' echoed Butcher Trengrove. 'And what can I do for y'r Worship this fine morning? I was just allowin' to Mr Garraway here that, seein' the young dare-devils had left you a bird with their compliments, maybe you'd fancy a nice cut of rumpsteak to fill out a pie.'
'This isn't exactly a laughing matter, Mr Trengrove.'
'No, no, to be sure!' Butcher Trengrove composed his broad smile apologetically. But, after a moment, observing Mr Pinsent's face and that (at what cost he guessed not) it kept its humorous twist, he let his features relax. 'I was allowin' though, that if any man could get even with a bit of fun, it would be y'r Worship.'
'Oh, never fear but I'll get even with 'em,' promised his Worship, affecting an easiness he did not feel.
'Monstrous, though! monstrous!' pursued the butcher. 'The boys of this town be gettin' past all control. Proper young limbs, I call some of 'em.'
'And there's the fellow that's to blame,' put in Mr Garraway, with a
nod at a little man hurrying past the shop, on the opposite pavement.
This was Mr Lupus, the schoolmaster, on his way to open school.
'Hi! Mr Lupus!'
Mr Lupus gave a start, came to a halt, and turned on the shop door a pair of mildly curious eyes guarded by moon-shaped spectacles. Mr Lupus lived with an elderly sister who kept a bakehouse beside the Ferry Landing, and there in extra-scholastic hours he earned a little money by writing letters for seamen. His love-letters had quite a reputation, and he penned them in a beautiful hand, with flourishes around the capital letters; but in Troy he passed for a person of small account.
'I—I beg your pardon, gentlemen! Were you calling to me?' stammered
Mr Lupus.
'Good-morning, Lupus!' The mayor nodded to him. 'We were just saying that you bring up the boys of this town shamefully. Yes, sir, shamefully.'
'No, indeed, your Worship,' protested Mr Lupus, looking up with a timid smile, as he drew off his spectacles and polished them. 'Your Worship is pleasant with me. I do assure you, gentlemen, that my boys are very good boys, and give me scarcely any trouble.'
'That's because you sit at school in your daydreams, and don't take note of the mischief that goes on around you. A set of anointed young scoundrels, Mr Lupus!'
'You don't mean it, sir. Oh, to be sure you don't mean it! Your Worship's funny way of putting things is well known, if I may say so. But they are good boys, on the whole, very good boys; and you should see the regularity with which they attend. I sometimes wish—meaning no offence—that you gentlemen of position in the town would drop in upon us a little oftener. It would give you a better idea of us, indeed it would. For my boys are very good boys, and for regularity of attendance we will challenge any school in Cornwall, sir, if you will forgive my boasting.'
Now this suggestion of Mr Lupus, though delicately put, and in a nervous flutter, ought by rights to have hit the mayor and Mr Garraway hard; the pair of them being trustees of the charity under which the Free Grammar School was administered. But in those days few public men gave a thought to education, and Mr Lupus taught school, year in and year out, obedient to his own conscience, his own enthusiasms; unencouraged by visitation or word of advice from his governors.
The mayor, to be sure, flushed red for a moment; but Mr Garraway's withers were unwrung.
'That don't excuse their committing burglary and stealing his
Worship's pigeons,' said he. Briefly he told what had happened.
Mr Lupus adjusted and readjusted his spectacles, still in a nervous flurry.
'You surprise me, gentlemen. It is unlike my boys—unlike all that I have ever believed of them. You will excuse me, but if this be true, I shall take it much to heart. So regular in attendance, and— stealing pigeons, you say? Oh, be sure, sirs, I will give them a talking-to—a severe talking-to—this very morning.'
The little schoolmaster went his way down the street in a flutter.
Mr Pinsent stared after him abstractedly.
'That man,' said he, after a long pause, 'ought to employ some one to use his cane for him.'
With this, for no apparent reason, his eye brightened suddenly. But the source of his inspiration he kept to himself. His manner was jocular as ever as he ordered his steak.
On his way home he knocked at the door of the town sergeant, Thomas Trebilcock, a septuagenarian, more commonly known as Pretty Tommy. The town sergeant was out in the country, picking mushrooms; but his youngest granddaughter, who opened the door, promised to send him along to the mayor's office as soon as ever he returned.
At ten o'clock, or a little later, Pretty Tommy presented himself, and found Mr Pinsent at his desk engaged in complacent study of a sheet of manuscript, to which he had just attached his signature.
'I think this will do,' said Mr Pinsent, with a twinkle, and he recited the composition aloud.
Pretty Tommy, having adjusted his horn spectacles, took the paper and read it through laboriously.
'You want me to cry it through the town?'
'Certainly. You can fetch your bell, and go along with it at once.'
'Your Worship knows best, o' course.' Pretty Tommy appeared to hesitate.
'Why, what's wrong with it?'
'Nothin',' said Tommy, after a slow pause and another perusal, 'only 'tis unusual—unusual, and funny at the same time; an' that's always a risk.' He paused again for a moment, and his face brightened. 'But there!' he said, ''tis a risk you're accustomed to by this time.'
Half an hour later the sound of the town sergeant's bell at the end of the street called tradesmen from their benches and housewives from their kitchens to hear the following proclamation, to which Tommy had done honour by donning his official robe (of blue, gold-laced) with a scarlet pelisse and a cocked hat. A majestic figure he made, too, standing in the middle of the roadway with spectacles on nose, and the great handbell tucked under his arm—
'O YES! O YES! O YES!
'Take you all notice: that whereas some evil-disposed boys did last night break into the premises of Samuel Pinsent, Worshipful Mayor of this Borough, and did rob His Worship of several valuable pigeons; His Worship hereby offers a reward of Five Shillings to the parent or parents of any such boy as will hand him over, that the Mayor may have ten minutes with him in private. Amen.
'GOD SAVE THE KING!'
Mr Pinsent, seated in his office, heard the bell sounding far up the street, and chuckled to himself. He chuckled again, peering through his wire blinds, when Pretty Tommy emerged upon the square outside and took his stand in the middle of it to read the proclamation. It collected no crowd, but it drew many faces to the windows and doorways, and Mr Pinsent observed that one and all broke into grins as they took the humour of his offer.
He rubbed his hands together. He had been angry to begin with; yes— he would confess it—very angry. But he had overcome it and risen to his reputation. The town had been mistaken in thinking it could put fun on him. It was tit-for-tat again, and the laugh still with Samuel Pinsent.
He ate his dinner that day in high good humour, drank a couple of glasses of port, and retired (as his custom was on warm afternoons) to his back-parlour, for an hour's siesta. Through the open window he heard the residue of his pigeons murmuring in their cotes, and the sound wooed him to slumber. So for half an hour he slept, with an easy conscience, a sound digestion, and a yellow bandanna handkerchief over his head to protect him from the flies. A tapping at the door awakened him.
'There's a woman here—Long Halloran's wife, of Back Street—wishes to see you, sir,' announced the voice of Mrs Salt.
'Woman!' said the mayor testily. 'Haven't you learned by this time that I'm not to be disturbed after dinner?'
'She said her business was important, sir. It's—it's about the pigeons,' explained Mrs Salt.
And before he could protest again, Mrs Halloran had thrust her way into the room and stood curtseying, with tears of recent weeping upon her homely and extremely dirty face. Behind her shuffled a lanky, sheepish-eyed boy, and took up his stand at her shoulder with a look half-sullen, half-defiant.
'It's about my Mike, sir,' began Mrs Halloran, in a lachrymose voice, and paused to dab her eyes with a corner of her apron. 'Which I'm sure, sir, we ought to be very grateful to you for all your kindness and the trouble you're takin', and so says the boy's father. For he's growin' up more of a handful every day, and how to manage him passes our wits.'
'Are you telling me, Mrs Halloran, that this boy of yours is the thief who stole my pigeons?'
Mr Pinsent, looking at the boy with a magisterial frown, began to wish he had not been quite so hasty in sending round the town sergeant.
'You did, didn't you, Mike?' appealed Mrs Halloran. And Mike, looking straight before him, grunted something which might pass for an admission. 'You must try to overlook the boy's manner, sir. He's case-hardened, I fear, and it goes sore to a mother's heart that ever I should rear up a child to be a thief. But as Halloran said to me, "Take the young limb to his Worship," Halloran says, "and maybe a trifle of correction by a gentleman in his Worship's position will have some effect," he says. But I hope, sir, you won't visit all the punishment on Mike, for he didn't do it alone; and though I'm not sayin' he don't deserve all he gets, 'tisn't fair to make him the only scapegoat—now is it, sir?'
'My good woman, I—I have no such intention,' stammered the mayor, glancing at the lad again, and liking his appearance worse than ever.
'I thank your Worship.' Mrs Halloran dropped a quick curtsey.
'And so I made free to tell Halloran, who was in doubt of it.
"Mr Pinsent," I said, "is a just-minded man, an' you may be sure," I
said, "he'll mete out the same to all, last as well as first."'
'Yes, yes!' The mayor took her up impatiently and paused for a moment, still eyeing the boy. 'Er—by the way, what age is your son?'
'Rising fifteen, sir; christened fifteen years ago last St Michael's Day, which is the twenty-ninth of September, though little good it done him. He takes after his father, sir. All the Hallorans shoot up tall, like runner beans; and thick in the bone. Or so his father says. For my part, I've never been to Ireland; but by the looks of en you'd say not a day less than seventeen. It seems like blood-money, my takin' five shillin' and handin' the child over—at his tender age—and me his own mother that nursed en!'
Here Mrs Halloran, whose emotions had been mastering her for some moments, broke down in a violent fit of sobbing; and this so affected her offspring that he emitted a noise like the hoot of a dog. As he started it without warning, so abruptly he ended it, and looked around with an impassive face.
It was uncanny. It shook the mayor's nerve. 'My dear Mrs Halloran, if you will let me have a word or two with your son—'
'Oh, I know!' she wailed. 'That's how you put it. But you give me over the money, sir, and let me go quick, before I weaken on it. You never had a child of your own, Mr Pinsent—and more's the pity for the child—but with one of your own you'd know what it feels like!'
Mr Pinsent felt in his trouser-pocket, drew forth two half-crowns, and pressed them into Mrs Halloran's dirty palm. With a sob and a blessing she escaped. He heard her run sobbing down the passage to the front door. Then he turned upon Mike.
The boy had sidled round with his back against the wall, and stood there with his left elbow up and his fists half clenched. For the space of half a minute the mayor eyed him, and he eyed the mayor.
'Sit down, Mike,' said the mayor gently.
'Goo! What d'ye take me for?' said Mike, lifting his hands a little.
'Sit down, I tell you.'
'Huh—yes, an' let you cop me over the head? You just try it—that's all; you just come an' try it?'
'I—er—have no intention of trying it,' said Mr Pinsent. 'It certainly would not become me to administer—to inflict—corporal punishment on a youth of your—er—inches. What grieves me—what pains me more than I can say, is to find a boy of your—er-size and er—development—by which I mean mental development, sense of responsibility—er—mixed up in this disgraceful affair. I had supposed it to be a prank, merely—a piece of childish mischief—and that the perpetrators were quite small boys.' (Here—not a doubt of it—Mr Pinsent was telling the truth.)
'Why,' he went on, with the air of one making a pleasant little discovery, 'I shouldn't be surprised to find you almost as tall as myself! Yes. I declare I believe you are quite as tall! No'-he put up a hand as Mike, apparently suspecting a ruse, backed in a posture of defence—'we will not take our measures to-day. I have something more serious to think about. For you will have noticed that while I suspected this robbery to be the work of small thoughtless boys, I treated it lightly; but now that I find a great strapping fellow like you mixed up in the affair, it becomes my business to talk to you very seriously indeed.'
And he did. He sat down facing Mike Halloran across the table, and read him a lecture that should have made any boy of Mike's size thoroughly ashamed of himself; and might have gone on admonishing for an hour had not Mrs Salt knocked again at the door.
'If you please,' announced Mrs Salt, 'here's the Widow Barnicutt from the Quay to see you, along with her red-headed 'Dolphus.'
'Which,' said the Widow Barnicutt, panting in at her heels and bobbing a curtsey, 'it's sorry I am to be disturbin' your Worship, and I wouldn't do it if his poor father was alive and could give 'em the strap for his good. But the child bein' that out of hand that all my threats do seem but to harden him, and five shillin' a week's wage to an unprovided woman; and I hope your Worship will excuse the noise I make with my breathin', which is the assma, and brought on by fightin' my way through the other women.'
Mr Pinsent gasped, and put up a hand to his brow.
'The other women?' he echoed. 'What other women?'
'The passage is full of 'em,' said Mrs Salt, much as though she were reporting that the house was on fire.
'Ay,' said the widow, 'but my 'Dolphus is the guilty one—I got his word for it.'
'There's Maria Bunny,' persisted Mrs Salt, beginning to tick off the list on her fingers, 'Maria Bunny with her Wesley John, and Mary Polly Polwarne with her Nine Days' Wonder, and Amelia Trownce with the twins, and Deb Hicks with the child she christened Nonesuch, thinkin' 'twas out of the Bible; and William Spargo's second wife Maria with her step-child, and Catherine Nance with her splay-footed boy that I can never remember the name of—'
'Oh! send 'em away!' bawled Mr Pinsent. 'Send 'em away before their husbands come home from work and raise a riot!' Then he recollected himself. 'No, fetch 'em all in here, from the street,' said he, dropping into a chair and taking his head in both hands. 'Fetch 'em all in, and let me deal with 'em!'
The town, when it laughed over the story next day, found the cream of the joke in this—Bester Pinsent, in promising Mrs Halloran that her boy should but share punishment with the rest, had forgotten in his agitation of mind to stipulate that the reward should also be divided. As it was, he had paid her the full five shillings, and the rest of the women (there were twenty-four) would be content with nothing less.
But it was really little Mr Lupus, the schoolmaster, that—all unconsciously—had the last word. Trotting past Butcher Trengrove's shop next morning, on his way to open school, Mr Lupus caught sight of his Worship standing within the doorway, halted, and came across the street with a nervous flush on his face.
'Mr Mayor, sir, if I may have a word with you? Begging your pardon, sir, but it lies on my conscience—all night, sir, it has been troubling me—that I boasted to you yesterday of my boys' good attendance. Indeed, sir, it has been good in the past. But yesterday afternoon! Oh, sir, I fear that you were right, after all, and something serious is amiss with the boys of this town!'
I regret that I cannot report here the precise words of Mr Pinsent's reply.
NEWS FROM TROY!
Troy—not for the first time in its history—is consumed with laughter; laughter which I deprecate, while setting down as an impartial chronicler the occasion and the cause of it.
You must know that our venerable and excellent squire, Sir Felix Felix-Williams, has for some years felt our little town getting, as he puts it, 'beyond him.' He remembers, in his father's time, the grass growing in our streets. The few vessels that then visited the port brought American timber-props for the mines out of which the Felix-Williams estate drew its royalties, and shipped in exchange small cargoes of emigrants whom, for one reason or another, that estate was unable to support. It was a simple system, and Sir Felix has often in talk with me lamented its gradual strangulation, in his time, by the complexities of modern commerce.—You should hear, by the way, Sir Felix pronounce that favourite phrase of his 'in my time'; he does it with a dignified humility, as who should say, 'Observe, I am of the past indeed, but I have lent my name to an epoch.'
As a fact the access of a railway to our little port, the building of jetties for the china-clay trade, the development of our harbour which now receives over 300,000 tons of shipping annually—all these have, in ways direct and indirect, more than doubled the old gentleman's income. But to do him justice, he regards this scarcely at all. He sets it down—and rightly—to what he has taken to call on public occasions 'the expansion of our Imperial Greatness'; but in his heart of hearts he regrets his loosening hold on a population that was used to sit under his fig-tree and drink of his cistern. With their growth the working classes have come to prefer self-help to his honest regulation of their weal. There has been no quarrel: we all love Sir Felix and respect him, though now and then we laugh at him a good deal.
There has been no quarrel, I repeat. But insensibly we have lost the first place in his affections, which of late years have concentrated themselves more and more upon the small village of Kirris-vean, around a corner of the coast. By its mere beauty, indeed, any one might be excused for falling in love with Kirris-vean. It lies, almost within the actual shadow of Sir Felix's great house, at the foot of a steep wooded coombe, and fronts with diminutive beach and pier the blue waters of our neighbouring bay. The cottages are whitewashed and garlanded with jasmine, solanum, the monthly rose. Fuchsias bloom in their front gardens; cabbages and runner beans climb the hillside in orderly rows at their backs. The women curtsey to a stranger; the men touch their hats; and the inhabitants are mostly advanced in years, for the young men and maidens leave the village to go into 'good service' with testimonials Sir Felix takes a delight to grant, because he has seen that they are well earned. If you were to stand at the cross-roads in the middle of Eaton Square and say 'Kirris-vean!' in a loud voice, it is odds (though I will not promise) that a score of faces would arise from underground and gaze out wistfully through area-railings. For no one born in Kirris-vean can ever forget it. But Kirris-vean itself is inhabited by grandparents and grandchildren (these last are known in Eaton Square as 'Encumbrances'). It has a lifeboat in which Sir Felix takes a peculiar pride (but you must not launch it unless in fine weather, or the crew will fall out). It has also a model public-house, The Three Wheatsheaves, so named from the Felix-Williams' coat of arms. The people of Troy believe—or at any rate assert—that every one in Kirris-vean is born with a complete suit of gilt buttons bearing that device.
Few dissipations ripple the gentle flow—which it were more descriptive perhaps to call stagnation—of life in that model village. From week-end to week-end scarcely a boat puts forth from the shelter of its weed-coated pier; for though Kirris-vean wears the aspect of a place of fishery, it is in fact nothing of the kind. Its inhabitants—blue-jerseyed males and sun-bonneted females—sit comfortably on their pensions and tempt no perils of the deep. Why should they risk shortening such lives as theirs? A few crab-pots—'accessories,' as a painter would say—rest on the beach above high-water mark, the summer through; a few tanned nets hang, and have hung for years, a-drying against the wall of the school-house. But the prevalent odour is of honeysuckle. The aged coxswain of the lifeboat reported to me last year that an American visitor had asked him how, dwelling remote from the railway, the population dealt with its fish. 'My dear man,' said I, 'you should have told him that you get it by Parcels' Post from Billingsgate.'
I never know—never, in this life shall I discover—how rumour operates in Troy, how it arrives or is spread. Early in August a rumour, incredible on the face of it, reached me that Kirris-vean intended a Regatta! . . . For a week I disbelieved it; for almost another week I forgot it; and then lo! Sir Felix himself called on me and confirmed it.
A trio of young footmen (it appeared) had arrived in Kirris-vean to spend a holiday on board-wages—their several employers having gone northward for the grouse, to incommodious shooting-boxes where a few servants sufficed. Finding themselves at a loose end (to use their own phrase for it) these three young men had hit on the wild—the happy—the almost delirious idea of a Regatta; and taking their courage in their hands had sought an interview with Sir Felix, to entreat his patronage for the scheme. They had found him in his most amiable mood, and within an hour—the old gentleman is discursive—he had consented to become Patron and President and to honour the gathering with his presence. But observe; the idea cannot have originated before August the 12th, on which day the trio arrived from London; yet a whisper of it had reached me on the 2nd or 3rd. I repeat that I shall never understand the operation of rumour in Troy.
Sir Felix, having somewhat rashly given his consent, in a cooler hour began to foresee difficulties, and drove into Troy to impart them to me. I know not why, on occasions of doubt and embarrassment such as this, he ever throws himself (so to speak) on my bosom; but so it is. The Regatta, he explained, ought to take place in August, and we were already arrived at the middle of the month, Tuesday the 24th had been suggested—a very convenient date for him: it was, as I might remember, the day before Petty Sessions, immediately after which he had as good as promised to visit his second son in Devonshire and attend the christening of an infant grandchild. But would ten days allow us time to organise the 'events,' hire a band, issue the necessary posters, etc.?
I assured him that, hard as it might drive us, the thing could be done. 'I shall feel vastly more confident,' he was good enough to say, 'if you will consent to join our Committee.' And I accepted, on the prospect of seeing some fun. But ah! could I have foreseen what fun!
'You relieve my mind, indeed. . . . And—er—perhaps you might also help us by officiating as starter and—er—judge, or timekeeper?'
'Willingly,' said I; 'in any capacity the Committee may wish.'
'They will be more inclined to trust the decisions of one who—er— does not live among them.'
'Is that so?' said I. 'In Kirris-vean, one would have thought—but, after all, I shall have to forgo whatever public confidence depends on the competitors being unacquainted with me, since two-thirds of them will come to you from Troy.'
'You are sure?'
'Quite. Has it not struck you, Sir Felix, that Kirris-vean—ideal spot for a regatta—has in itself neither the boats nor the men for one?'
'We might fill up with a launch of the lifeboat,' he hazarded.
'If one could only be certain of the weather.'
'And a public tea, and a procession of the school children.'
'Admirable,' I agreed. 'Never fear, we will make up a programme.'
'Oh, and—er—by the way, Bates of the Wheatsheaf came to me this morning for an Occasional Licence. He proposes to erect a booth in his back garden. You see no objection?'
'None at all.'
'A most trustworthy man. . . . He could not apply, you see, at our last Petty Sessions because he did not then know that a regatta was contemplated; and the 25th will, of course, be too late. But the licence can be granted under these circumstances by any two magistrates sitting together; and I would suggest that you and I—'
'Certainly,' said I, and accompanied Sir Felix to the small room that serves Troy for an occasional courthouse, where we solemnly granted Bates his licence.
There is a something about Sir Felix that tempts to garrulity, and I could fill pages here with an account of our preparations for the Regatta; the daily visits he paid me—always in a fuss, and five times out of six over some trivial difficulty that had assailed him in the still watches of the night; the protracted meetings of Committee in the upper chamber of the lifeboat-house at Kirris-vean. But these meetings, and the suggestions Sir Felix made, and the votes we took upon them, are they not recorded in the minute-book of the First and Last Kirris-vean Regatta? Yes, thus I have to write it, and with sorrow: there will never be another Regatta in that Arcadian village.
Sir Felix, good man, started with a fixed idea that a regatta differed from a Primrose Fete, if at all, then only in being non-political. He could not get it out of his head that public speeches were of the essence of the festivity; and when, with all the tact at my command, I insisted on aquatics, he countered me by proposing to invite down a lecturer from the Navy League! As he put it in the heat of argument, 'Weren't eight Dreadnoughts aquatic enough for anybody?' But in the voting the three young footmen supported me nobly. They wanted fireworks, and were not wasting any money on lecturers: also there was a feeling in Kirris-vean that, while a regatta could scarcely be held without boat-racing, the prizes should be just sufficient to attract competitors and yet on a scale provoking no one to grumble at the amount of subscribed money lost to the village. A free public tea was suggested. I resisted this largesse; and we compromised on 'No Charge for Bona-fide Schoolchildren'—whatever that might mean—and 'Fourpence a head for Adults.'
The weather prospects, as the moment drew near, filled us with anxious forebodings, for the anti-cyclonic spell showed signs of breaking, and the Sunday and Monday wore lowering faces. But Tuesday dawned brilliantly; and when after a hasty breakfast I walked over to Kirris-vean, I found Sir Felix waiting for me at the top of the hill in his open landau, with a smile on his face, a rose in his button-hole, and a white waistcoat that put all misgivings to shame. 'A perfect day!' he called out with a wave of the hand.
'A foxy one,' I suggested, and pointed out that the wind sat in a doubtful quarter, that it was backing against the sun, that it was light and might at any time die away and cheat us of our sailing matches.
'Always the boats with you!' he rallied me; 'my dear sir, it is going to be perfect. As the song says, "We've got the ships, we've got the men, and we've got the money too." An entire success, you may take my word for it!'
We descended the hill to find the village gay with bunting, the competing boats lying ready off the pier, a sizeable crowd already gathered, and the Committee awaiting us at the beach-head. Each committee-man wore a favour of blue-and-white ribbon, and upon our arrival every hat flew off to Sir Felix, while the band played 'See the Conquering Hero Comes!'
It was, not to put too fine a point on the description, an atrocious band. It had come from afar, from one of the inland china-clay villages, and in hiring it the Committee had been constant to its principle that no more money than was necessary should be allowed to go out of Kirris-vean. Report—malicious, I feel sure—reached me later, that, at the first note of it, an aloe in Sir Felix's gardens, a mile away—a plant noted for blossoming once only in a hundred years-burst into profuse and instantaneous bloom. Sir Felix himself, who abounded all day in happy turns of speech, said the best thing of this band. He said it was sui generis.
He was magnificent throughout. I am not going to describe the Regatta, for sterner events hurry my pen forward. So let me only say that the weather completely justified his cheery optimism; that the breeze, though slight, held throughout the sailing events, and then dropped, leaving the bay glassy as a lake for the rowers; that sports ashore—three-legged races, egg-and-spoon races, sack races, races for young men, races for old women, donkey races, a tug-of-war, a greasy pole, a miller-and-sweep combat—filled the afternoon until tea-time; that at tea the tables groaned with piles of saffron cake and cream 'splitters'; and that when the company had, in Homeric phrase—the only fit one for such a tea—put aside from them the desire of meat and drink, Sir Felix stood up and made a speech.
'It was an admirable speech too. It began with 'My dear friends,' and the exordium struck at once that paternal note which makes him, with all his foibles, so lovable. 'They' must excuse him if he now took his departure; for he had arrived at an age to feel the length of a long day—even of a happy summer's day such as this had been. To be innocently happy—that had used to be the boast of England, of "Merry England "; and he had ever prized happy living faces in Kirris-vean above the ancestral portraits—not all happy, if one might judge from their expressions—hanging on his walls at home.' (Prolonged applause greeted this; and deservedly, for he spoke no more than he meant.) He became reminiscential, and singling out a school-child here and there, discoursed of their grandparents, even of their great-grandparents; recalled himself to pay a series of graceful tributes to all who had contributed to make the day a success; and wound up by regretting that he could not stay for the fireworks.
Dear honest Sir Felix! I can see him now, bareheaded, his white hairs lightly fluttered by the evening breeze that fluttered also the flags above Mr Bates's booth immediately in his rear; the sunset light on his broad immaculate waistcoat; the long tea-tables, with their rows of faces all turned deferentially towards him; the shadows slanting from the trees; the still expanse of the bay, and far across the bay a bank of clouds softly, imperceptibly marshalling.
We cheered him to the echo, of course. At his invitation I walked some way up the hill with him, to meet his carriage. He halted three or four times in the road, still talking of the day's success. He was even somewhat tremulous at parting.
'I shall see you to-morrow, at Tregantick?'—Tregantick is the centre of the eight parishes included in our Petty Sessional Division, and the seat of such justice as I and seven others help Sir Felix to administer.
'Oh, assuredly,' said I.
I watched his carriage as it rounded the bend of the road, and so faced about to return to the village. But I took second thought at sight of the clouds massing across the bay and coming up—as it seemed to me against the wind. They spelt thunder. In spite of my early forebodings I had brought no mackintosh; my duties as a Committee-man were over: and I have reached an age when fireworks give me no more pleasure than I can cheerfully forgo or take for granted. I had, having coming thus far on my homeward way, already more than half a mind to pursue it, when the band started to render the 'Merry Duchess' waltz, with reed instruments a semitone below the brass. This decided me, and I reached my door as the first raindrops fell.
When I awoke next morning it was still raining, and raining hard. The thunderstorm had passed; but a westerly wind, following hard on it, had collected much water from the Atlantic, and the heavens were thick as a blanket. A tramp in the rain, however, seldom comes amiss to me, and I trudged the three miles to the court-house in very cheerful mood, now smoking, now pocketing my pipe to inhale those first delicious scents of autumn, stored up by summer for a long day of downpour.
Our Court meets at 11.15, and I timed myself (so well I know the road in all weathers) to reach the magistrates' door on the stroke of the quarter. Now Sir Felix, as Chairman, makes a point of arriving ten or fifteen minutes ahead of time, for a preliminary chat with the Clerk over the charge-sheet and any small details of business. I was astonished, therefore, when, turning at the sound of wheels, I beheld Sir Felix's carriage and pair descending the street behind me. 'Truly the Regatta must have unsettled his habits,' I murmured; and then, catching the eye of one of the pair of constables posted at the door, I gazed again and stood, as some of my fellow-novelists say, 'transfixed.' For the driver on the box was neither Sir Felix's coachman, nor his second coachman, nor yet again one of his stablemen; but a gardener, and a tenth-down under-gardener at that; in fact, you could scarcely call him even an under-gardener, though he did odd jobs about the gardens. To be short, it was Tommy Collins a hydrocephalous youth generally supposed to be half-baked, or, as we put it in Cornwall, 'not exactly'; and on his immense head, crowning a livery suit which patently did not belong to him, Tommy Collins wore a dilapidated billycock hat.
As the carriage drew up I noted with a lesser shock that the harness was wrongly crossed: and with that, as one constable stepped forward to open the carriage door, I saw the other wink and make a sign to Tommy, who—quick-witted for once—snatched off his billycock and held it low against his thigh on the off-side, pretending to shake off the rain, but in reality using this device to conceal the horrid thing. At the same time the other constable, receiving an umbrella which Sir Felix thrust forth, opened it with remarkable dexterity, and held it low over my friend's venerable head, thus screening from sight the disreputable figure on the box. As a piece of smuggling it was extremely neat; but as I turned to follow I heard Tommy Collins ask, and almost with a groan,—
'Wot's the use?'
Four of our fellow-magistrates were already gathered in the little room at the rear of the court-house: of whom the first to greet our Chairman was Lord Rattley. Lord Rattley, a peer with very little money and a somewhat indecorous past, rarely honours the Tregantick bench by attending sessions; but for once he was here, and at once started to banter Sir Felix on his unpunctuality.
'Very sorry, gentlemen; very sorry—most inexplicable,' stuttered Sir Felix, who suffers from a slight impediment of the speech when hurried. 'Servants at home seemed—conspired—detain me. Jukes'— Jukes is Sir Felix's butler, an aged retainer of the best pattern— 'Jukes would have it, weather too inclement. Poof! I am not too old, I hope, to stand a few drops of rain. Next he brings word that Adamson'—Adamson is (or was) Sir Felix's trusted coachman— 'is indisposed and unable to drive me. "Then I'll have Walters," said I, losing my temper, "or I'll drive myself." Jukes must be failing: and so must Walters be, for that matter. We might have arrived ten minutes ago, but he drove execrably.'
'Reminds me—' began Lord Rattley, when Sir Felix—who is ever nervous of that nobleman's reminiscences, and had by this time divested himself of his Inverness cape, turned to the Clerk and demanded news of a lad discharged at the last Sessions on his own and parents' recognisances, to be given another chance under the eye of our new Probation Officer.
'—Of a coachman I once had called Oke—William Oke,' continued Lord Rattley imperturably. 'Drunken little sot he was, but understood horses. One night I had out the brougham and drove into Bodmin to mess with the Militia. The old Royal Cornwall Rangers messed at the hotel in those days, in the long room they used for Assemblies. About eleven o'clock I sent for my carriage, and along it came in due course. Well, I dare say at that hour I wasn't myself in a condition to be critical of Oke's—'
Sir Felix pulled out his watch, and asked me what I made the time.
'Off we drove,' pursued Lord Rattley, ignoring this hint, 'and I must have dropped asleep at once. When I awoke the blessed vehicle had come to a standstill. I called to Oke—no answer: so by-and-by I opened the carriage door and stepped out. The horses had slewed themselves in towards the hedge and were cropping peaceably: but no Oke was on the box and still no Oke answered from anywhere when I shouted. He had, as a fact, tumbled clean off the box half a mile astern, and was lying at that moment in the middle of the road. At that hour I had no mind to look for him, so I collected the reins somehow, climbed up in front, and drove myself home. I had a butler then by the name of Ibbetson—a most respectable man, with the face of a Bible Christian minister; and, thought I, on my way up the drive, "I'll give Ibbetson a small scare." So coming to the porch, when Ibbetson heard the wheels and cast the door open, I kept my seat like a rock. Pretty well pitch dark it was where I sat behind the lamps. Ibbetson comes down the steps, opens the carriage door and stands aside. After a moment he begins to breathe hard, pops his head into the brougham, then his arm, feels about a bit, and comes forward for a lamp. "My God, Bill!" says Ibbetson, looking up at me in the dark. "What have you done with th' ould devil?"'
'I really think,' suggested Sir Felix hurriedly, 'we ought not to keep the Court waiting.'
So in we filed, and the Court rose respectfully to its feet and stood while we took our seats. The Superintendent of Police—an officer new to our Division—gazed at me with a perfectly stolid face across the baize-covered table. Yet somehow it struck me that the atmosphere in Court was not, as usual, merely stuffy, but electrical; that the faces of our old and tried constabulary twitched with some suppressed excitement; and that the Clerk was fidgeting with an attack of nerves.
'Certain supplementary cases, your Worship,' said he, taking a small sheaf of papers from the hands of his underling, 'too late to be included on the charge-sheet issued.'
'Eh?—Oh, certainly—certainly!' Sir Felix drew his spectacle case from his waistcoat pocket and laid it on the table; took the paper handed to him, and slipped it methodically beneath the sheet of agenda; resumed the business of extracting his spectacles, adjusted them, and gravely opened business.
He had it all to himself. For me, as I, too, received the paper of supplementary cases, my first thought was of simple astonishment at the length of the list. Then my gaze stiffened upon certain names, and by degrees as I recognised them, my whole body grew rigid in my chair. Samuel Sleeman—this was the Superintendent's name—appellant against Isaac Adamson, drunk and disorderly; Ditto against Duncan McPhae, drunk and disorderly; Ditto against Henry James Walters, drunk and disorderly; Ditto against Selina Mary Wilkins, drunk on licensed premises; Ditto against Mary Curtis, drunk on licensed premises; Ditto against Solomon Tregaskis, drunk on highway. . . . There were no less than twenty-four names on the list; and each was the name of a retainer or pensioner of Sir Felix—those aged Arcadians of Kirris-vean.
I glanced along the table and winced as I met Sir Felix's eyes. He was inclining towards me. 'Five shillings and costs will meet this case, eh?' he was asking. I nodded, though without a notion of what case we were hearing. (It turned out to be one of cattle-straying, so no great harm was done.) Beyond him I saw Lord Rattley covering an infernally wicked grin with his arched palm; beyond Lord Rattley two estimable magistrates staring at that fatal supplementary paper as though they had dined and this was a bill they found themselves wholly unable to meet.
Sir Felix from time to time finds his awards of justice gently disputed. No one disputed them to-day. Lord Rattley, whose language is younger than his years, declared afterwards—between explosions of indecent mirth—that we left the floor to the old man, and he waltzed. He fined three parents for not sending their children to school, made out an attendance order upon another, mulcted a youth in five shillings for riding a bicycle without a light, charged a navvy ten shillings and costs for use of indelicate language (total, seventeen and sixpence), and threatened, but did not punish, a farmer with imprisonment for working a horse 'when,' as the charge put it ambiguously, 'in an unfit state.' He wound up by transferring an alehouse licence, still in his stride, beamed around and observed 'That concludes our business, I think—eh, Mr Clerk?'
'Supplementary cases, y'r Worship,' murmured the Clerk. 'If I may remind—paper handed to y'r Worship—'
'Eh? Yes, to be sure—'
'Number of cases, drunk and disorderly: arising—as I understand—out of Regatta held yesterday at Kirris-vean.'
The Superintendent arose. He is an amazingly tall man, and it seemed to me that he took an amazingly long time in arising to his full height.
'Impossible to accommodate them all in the cells, y'r Worship. If I may say so, the police were hard worked all night. Mercifully'—the Superintendent laid stress on the word, and I shall always, when I think of it, remember to thank him—'the most of 'em were blind. We laid 'em out on the floor of the charge-room, and with scarcely an exception, as I am credibly informed, they've come to, more or less.'
'Kirris-vean?' I saw Sir Felix's hands grip the arms of his chair. Then he put them out and fumbled with his papers. Lord Rattley obligingly pushed forward his copy of the list.
'Shall I have the defendants brought into Court at once?' asked the Superintendent. 'The constables tell me that they are—er—mostly, by this time, in a condition to understand, for all practical purposes, the meaning of an oath.'
Sir Felix has—as I have hinted—his foibles. But he is an English gentleman and a man of courage. He gasped, waved a hand, and sat up firmly.
He must have needed courage indeed, as the sorry culprits filed into Court: for I verily believe he felt more shame than they, though their appearance might be held to prove this impossible. The police at about eleven o'clock had raided the booth of that respectable landlord, Mr Bates ('Which,' observed the Superintendent, stonily, 'we may 'ave somethink to say to 'im, as it were, by-and-by') and had culled some of them—even as one picks the unresisting primrose, others not without recourse to persuasion. 'Many of 'em,' the Superintendent explained, 'showed a liveliness you wouldn't believe. It was, in a manner of speaking, beyond anythink y'r Worships would expect.' He paused a moment, cleared his throat, and achieved this really fine phrase: 'It was, for their united ages, in a manner of speaking, a knock-out.'
I see them now as they filed into court—yellow in the gills, shaking between present fear and the ebb of excess. But I see Sir Felix also, a trifle red in the face, gripping the arms of his chair, bending forward and confronting them.
For a moment I imagined he meant to address them as a crowd. But his fine sense of business prevailed, and he signed to the Clerk to read the first charge.
He dealt with the charges, one by one, and in detail. Alone he inflicted the fines, while we sat and listened with eyes glued upon the baize table. And the fines were heavy—too heavy. It was not for us to interfere.
At the end I expected some few words of general rebuke. I believe the culprits themselves would have been glad of a tongue-lashing. But he uttered none. To the end he dealt out justice, none aiding him; and when the business was over, pushed back his chair.
We filed out after him. I believe that he has paid all the fines out of his own pocket.
And Troy laughs. But I believe it is safe to say that, while Sir
Felix lives, Kirris-vean will not hold a second Regatta.
COLONEL BAIGENT'S CHRISTMAS.
Outside the railway station Colonel Baigent handed his carpet-bag to the conductor of the hotel omnibus, and stood for a moment peering about in the dusk, as if to take his bearings.
'For The Dragon, sir?' asked the conductor.
'The Dragon?' Yes, certainly,' echoed Colonel Baigent, aroused by the name from the beginnings of a brown study. 'So The Dragon is still standing, eh?'
''Twas standing all right when I left it, twenty minutes ago,' the man answered flippantly; for to-night was Christmas Eve, and English hotel servants do not welcome guests who stay over Christmas.
But the colonel remarked nothing amiss in his tone. In fact, he was not listening. He stared out into the mirk beyond the flare of gas in the entrance-way, slowly bringing his mind to bear on the city at his feet, with its maze of dotted lights. The afternoon had been cold and gusty, with now and then a squall of hail from the north-west. The mass of the station buildings behind him blotted out whatever of daylight yet lingered. Eastward a sullen retreating cloud backed the luminous haze thrown up from hundreds of street-lamps and shop-windows—a haze that faintly silhouetted the clustered roofs. The roofs were wet. The roadway, narrowing as it descended the hill, shone with recent rain.
'You may carry down my bag,' said the colonel. 'I will walk. Somewhere to the right here should be a road leading to Westgate, eh?'
'Tisn't the shortest way,' the conductor objected.
'I have plenty of time,' said the colonel mildly.
Indeed, a milder-looking man for a hero—he had earned and won his V.C.—or a gentler of address, could scarcely be conceived; or an older-fashioned. His voice, to be sure, had a latent tone of command. But the patient face, with its drooping moustache and long gray side-whiskers; the short yet attenuated figure, in a tweed suit of no particular cut; the round felt hat, cheap tie, and elastic-sided boots—all these failed very signally to impress the conductor, who flung the carpet-bag inside the omnibus with small ceremony, and banged the door.
'Right, Bill!' he called.
''Oo is it?' asked the driver, slewing round in the light of his near-side lamp.
'Might be a commercial—if 'twasn't for his bag, and his way of speakin'.'
The omnibus rattled off and down the hill. Colonel Baigent gazed after it, alone beneath the gas-lamp; for the few passengers who had alighted from his train had jostled past him and gone their ways, and his porter had turned back wearily into the station, where express and excursion trains had all day been running the Christmas traffic down to its last lees.
Colonel Baigent gazed after the omnibus, then back through the passage-way leading past the booking-office to the platform. All this was new to him. There had been no such thing as railway or railway station thirty-five years ago, when, a boy of seventeen just emancipated from school, he had climbed to the box-seat of the then famous 'Highflyer' coach, and been driven homewards to a Christmas in which the old sense of holiday mingled and confused itself with a new and wonderful feeling that school was over and done with for ever.
During his Indian exile he had nursed a long affection for the city; had collected and pored over books relating to it and its antiquities; and now, as he left the station and struck boldly into the footway on the right, he found himself surprisingly at home. The path led him over a footbridge, and along between high garden walls. But it led him surely enough to Westgate, and the spot occupied in Norman times (as he recalled) by five bordels or shanties, where any belated traveller ('such as I to-night,' thought the colonel) arriving after the gates were shut, might find hospitality for the love of God. The suburb here lay deserted. He halted, and listened to a footfall that died away into the darkness on his right. He felt at home again—here, wrapped around by the ghostly centuries as by the folds of a mantle, and warm within the folds.
Strange to say, the chill came on him as he passed under the arch of Westgate, and into view of the busy High Street, the lit shops, the passers-by jostling upon the pavements, the running newsboys, the hawkers with their barrows, the soldiers strolling five abreast down the middle of the roadway. Here was the whole city coming and going. Here, precisely as he had left it thirty-five years ago, it sprang back into life again, like an illuminated clockwork. No; he was wrong, of course. It had been working all the while, and without intermission, absorbed in its own business—buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage. He had dropped out, that was all.
The Christmas decorations, the jollity in the voices exchanging Christmas salutations, aggravated the poor colonel's sense of homelessness, and seemed to mock it. One window displayed a huge boar's head, grinning, with a lemon in its mouth. The proprietor of another had hung his seasonable wares on a small spruce fir, and lit it all over with coloured candles. A poulterer, three doors away, had draped his house-front, from the third story down, with what at first glance appeared to be a single heavy curtain of furs and feathers—string upon string of hares, of pheasants, of turkeys, fat geese, wild ducks.
This prevailing superabundant good cheer did not, however, extend to the visitor, as the colonel discovered, within the doorway of The Dragon. Nor was that doorway the old hospitable entrance through which the stage-coaches had rattled into a paved court lined with red-windowed offices. The new proprietor had blocked all this up with a flight of steps, and an arrangement of mahogany and plate-glass. There remained but the arch under which, these years ago, the stout coachman, as he swung his leaders sharp round to the entry, had warned passengers to duck their heads. The colonel was staring up at it when he became aware of a liveried boots holding the mahogany door open for him at the head of the steps, and with an expression that did not include 'Welcome!' among the many things that it said.
The boots too plainly was sullen, the young lady in the office curt and off-hand, the second and only waiter as nearly as possible mutinous. 'All his blooming companions,' he explained (though not precisely in these words), had departed to spend Christmas in the bosom of their families. He spoke cockney English, and, in reply to a question (for the colonel tried hard to draw him into conversation and dissipate his gloom), confessed that he came from Brixton.
Further than this he would not go. In a mortuary silence, the colonel, seated beneath a gasalier adorned (the mockery of it!) with a sprig of mistletoe, sipped his half-pint of sherry, and ate his way through three courses of a sufficiently good dinner. But better, says Solomon, is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.
Every time he raised his eyes they rested on the table at which he had dined with his father on the eve of being entered at school. The same table, the same heavy mahogany chairs—he recalled the scroll pattern on their backs. He could see himself there in the corner—a small boy, white in the face and weary with travel, divided between surmise of the morrow and tears for the home left behind. He could see his father seated there in profile, the iron-gray hair, the remembered stoop. Well, they were all gone now—all, missing whom that night he had come so near to breaking down and weeping. . . . Mother, sisters, brother, gone one by one during the years of his Indian exile, and himself now left the last of his race, unmarried, and never likely to marry. Why had he come? To revisit his old school? But the school would be closed for the Christmas holidays, the children dispersed to their homes and happy.
Limen amabile
Matris et oscula . . .
He had ordered claret—a bottle of Lafitte, the best the house could produce—and the waiter, impressed a little by the choice, now appeared noiselessly, almost deferentially, at his elbow, and poured out a first glassful of the wine.
'Waiter!'
'Yessir!'
'Where does that music come from?'—for the sound of an antiquated piano had been thrumming for some minutes from a distant room. The music was not ambitious—an old set of quadrille tunes. The colonel did not recognise it. He had no ear at all for music, and could just distinguish the quickstep of his regiment from 'God save the Queen.' In fact, when he paid any attention at all to music (and this was rare), it gave him no sensation beyond a vague discomfort.
'It comes from the Assembly Room, sir, at the back of the Court.'
'Ah! yes, I remember the old Assembly Room. Some one is giving a ball to-night?'
The waiter smiled indulgently. 'Oh no, sir! It's Miss Wallas's dancing-class breaking up—that's all.'
'Breaking up?' echoed the colonel, whose mind was sometimes a trifle slow in the uptake.
'She rents the room alternate Fridays, sir, and usually gives 'em a little treat just before Christmas. I don't know,' pursued the waiter, meditatively laying two fingers wide on his chin, 'as many people would call it a treat. But the little 'uns likes dressing up in their evening frocks, and the buns and lemonade is well enough for their time of life. There used to be a fiddle too, as well as the piano; but the class hev fallen off considerable of late. The management don't like it too well. But there's a notion 'twould be unfeelin' to stop it. She's been carrying it on all these years, and her aunt before her. But if it annoys you, sir, I can say a word at the office and get it stopped.'
'Heaven forbid!' said the colonel. But the music made him uncomfortable, nevertheless. It broke off, and started again upon a waltz tune. After the waltz came a mazurka, and after the mazurka another set of quadrilles. And still, as he sipped his claret, the successive tunes wove themselves into old memories haunting the coffee-room—ghostly memories! Yet he had no will to escape them. Outside he could see the crowd jostling to and fro on the opposite pavement. The lights within a chemist's shop, shining through bottles of coloured water in its window, threw splashes of colour— green, crimson, orange—on the eager faces as they went by. Colonel Baigent rose half impatiently, drew down the blind, and, returning to his chair, sat alone with the ghosts.
The waiter brought dessert—a plateful of walnuts and dried figs. He cracked a walnut and peeled it slowly, still busy with his thoughts. For a while these thoughts were all in a far past; but by-and-by a stray thread carried him down to the year 'fifty-seven— and snapped suddenly. His thoughts always broke off suddenly at the year 'fifty-seven—the Mutiny year. In that year he had won his Victoria Cross and, along with it, a curious tone in his voice, an inexpressible gentleness with all women and children, certain ineradicable lines in his face (hidden though they were by his drooping moustache and absurd old-fashioned whiskers); also a certain very grave simplicity when addressing the Almighty in his prayers. But he never thought of the year 'fifty-seven if he could help it. And as a spider, its thread snapping, drops upon the floor, so Colonel Baigent fell to earth out of his dreaming.
With a sudden impulse of his hands against the table's edge, he thrust back the chair and stood erect. His bottle of claret was all but empty, and he bethought him that he had left his cigar-case upstairs. His bedroom lay on the farther side of the courtyard and on his way to it he passed the tall windows of the Assembly Room close enough to fling a glance inside.
The dancers were all children—little girls of all ages from eight to fourteen, in pretty frocks of muslin—pink, blue, and white; with a sprinkling of awkward boys in various fashion of evening dress. On his way back, having lit his cigar, he paused for a longer look. The piano was tinkling energetically, the company dancing a polka, and with a will. The boys were certainly an awkward lot, so the Colonel decided, and forthwith remembered his own first pair of white kid gloves and the horrible self-consciousness he had indued with them. He went back to the room where the waiter had laid his coffee.
The polka, as it proved, was the last dance on the programme; for the colonel had scarcely settled himself again before the piano strummed out 'God save the Queen'—which, as has been said, was one of the tunes he knew. He stood erect, alone in the empty room, and so waited gravely for the last bar. A rush of feet followed; a pause for robing; then childish voices in the courtyard wishing each other 'Good-night!' and 'A merry Christmas!' Then a very long pause, and the colonel supposed that all the young guests were gone.
But they were not all gone; for as he resumed his seat, and reached out a hand for his case, to choose another cigar, he happened to throw a glance towards the doorway. And there, in the shadow of a heavy curtain draping it, stood a little girl.
She might have passed for a picture of Red Riding-Hood; for she wore a small scarlet cloak over her muslin frock, and the hood of it had been pulled forward and covered all but a margin of hair above the brows. The colour of her hair was a bright auburn, that of her eyebrows so darkly brown as to seem wellnigh black; and altogether she made a remarkable little figure, standing there in the doorway, with a pair of white satin dancing-shoes clutched in her hand.
'Oh!' said the colonel. 'Good-evening!'
'O-o-oh!' answered the child, and with a catch, as it were, and a thrill in the voice that astonished him. Her eyes, fixed on his, grew larger and rounder. She came a pace or two towards him on tiptoe, halted, clasped both hands over her dancing-shoes, and exclaimed, with a deeper thrill than before:—
'You are Colonel Baigent!'
'Eh?' The colonel sat bolt upright.
'Yes; and Aunt Louisa will be glad!'
He put a hand up to the crown of his head. 'Good Lord!' he murmured, staring wildly around the room, and then slowly fastening his gaze upon the child—at most she could not be more than nine years old— confronting him. 'Good Lord! Will she?'
'Yes; and so am I!' She nodded, and her eyes seemed to be devouring while they worshipped him. 'But wasn't it clever of me to know you at once?'
'It's—it's about the cleverest thing I've come across in all my born days,' stammered Colonel Baigent, collapsing into his chair, and then suddenly clutching the arms of it and peering forward.
'But, of course, I've known you for ever so long, really,' she went on, and nodded again as if to reassure him.
'Oh! "of course," is it? I—I say, won't you sit down and have a nut or two—or a fig?'
'Thank you.' She gave him quite a grown-up bow, and seated herself. 'I'll take a fig; nuts give you the indigestion at this time of night.' She picked up a fig demurely, and laid it on a plate he pushed towards her. 'I hope I'm behaving nicely?' she said, looking up at him with the most engaging candour; 'because Aunt Louisa says you always had the most beautiful manners. In fact, that's what made her take to you, long—oh! ever so long—before you became famous. And now you're the Bayard of India!'
'But, excuse me—'
She had begun to munch her fig, but interrupted him with another nod.
'Yes, I know what you are going to say. That's the name they give to another general out in India, don't they? But Aunt Louisa declares he won't hold a candle to you—though I don't know why he should want to do anything of the sort.'
'It's uncommonly kind of your Aunt Louisa—' he began again.
'Do you know her?' the child asked, with disconcerting directness.
'That's just the trouble with me' Colonel Baigent confessed.
'She is my great-aunt, really. She lives in Little Swithun, right at the back of Dean's Close; and her name is on a brass plate—a very hard name to pronounce, "Miss Lapenotiere, Dancing and Calisthenics"—that's another hard word, but it means things you do with an elastic band to improve your figure. The plate doesn't azackly tell the truth, because she has been an invalid for years now, and Aunt Netta—that's my other aunt—had to carry on the business. But everybody knows about it, so there really is no deceit. Aunt Netta's name is Wallas, and so is mine. Her mother was sister to Aunt Louisa, and she tells us we come of very good family. She never married. I don't believe she ever wanted to marry anybody but you, and now it's too late. But I call it splendid, your turning up like this. And on Christmas Eve, to!'
'It's beginning to be splendid,' owned the colonel, who had partly recovered himself. 'Unhappily—since you put it so—it is, I fear, a fact that I never met your Aunt Louisa.'
'Oh! but you did—in the street, and once in the post office, when you were a boy at the college.'
'Such impressions are fleeting, my dear, as you will live to prove.
Your other aunt, Miss Netta—'
'Oh! she will have been born after your time,' said the child, with calm, unconscious cruelty. 'But you will see her presently. She has gone to the bar to pay the bill, and when she has finished disputing it she is bound to call for me.'
As if it had been waiting to confirm the prophecy, a voice called,
'Charis! Charis!' almost on the instant.
'That's my name,' said the child, helping herself to another fig, as a middle-aged face, wrinkled, with a complexion of parchment under a mass of tow-coloured hair, peered in at the doorway.
The colonel rose. 'Your niece, madam,' he began, 'has been entertaining me for these ten minutes—'
With that he stopped, perceiving that, after a second glance at him, the eyes of Aunt Netta, too, were growing round in her head.
'Charis, you naughty child! Sir, I do hope—but she has been troubling you, I am sure—' stammered Aunt Netta, and came to a full stop.
Charis clapped her hands, with a triumphant little laugh.
'But I knew him first!' she exclaimed, 'Yes, Aunt Netta, it's him!— it's him, him, HIM! And isn't it just perfectly glorious?'
'You must excuse my niece, sir—that is to say, if you are really
Colonel—'
'Baigent, ma'am. I think you know my name; though how or why that should be, passes my comprehension.'
She bowed to him, timidly, a trifle stiffly. 'It is an honour to have met you, sir. I have an aunt at home, an invalid, who will be very proud when she hears of this. She has followed your career with great interest—I believe I may say, ever since you were a boy at the college. She has talked about you so often, you must forgive the child for being excited. Come, Charis! Thank Colonel Baigent, and say good-night.'
'But isn't he coming with us?' The child's face fell, and her voice was full of dismay. 'Oh! but you must! Aunt Louisa will cry her eyes out if you don't. And on Christmas Eve, too!'
Colonel Baigent looked at Miss Netta.
'I couldn't ask it—I really couldn't,' she murmured.
He smiled. 'The hour is unconventional, to be sure. But if your aunt will forgive a very brief call there is nothing would give me greater pleasure.'
He meant it, too!
He fetched his hat, and the three passed out together—down the High Street, through the passage by the Butter Cross, and along the railed pavement by the Minster Close. On the colonel's ear their three footfalls sounded as though a dream. The vast bulk of the minster, glimmering above the leafless elms, the solid Norman tower with its edges bathed in starlight, were transient things, born of faery, unsubstantial as the small figure that tripped ahead of him clutching a pair of dancing-shoes.
They came to a little low house, hooded with dark tiles and deeply set in a narrow garden. A dwarf wall and paling divided it from the Close, and from the gate, where a brass plate twinkled, a flagged, uneven pathway led up to the front door. So remote it lay from all traffic, so well screened by the shadow of the minster, that the inmates had not troubled to draw blind or curtain. Miss Netta, pausing while she fumbled for the latchkey, explained that her aunt had a fancy to keep the blinds up, so that when the minster was lit for evensong she might watch the warm, painted windows without moving from her couch.
Colonel Baigent, glancing at the pane towards which she waved a hand, caught one glimpse of the room within, and stood still, with a catch of his breath. On the wall facing him hung an Oxford frame, and in the frame was a cheap woodcut, clipped from an old illustrated paper of the Mutiny date, and fastened in that place of honour—his own portrait!
After that, for a few minutes, his head swam. He was dimly aware of what followed: of an open door; of the child running past him and into the room with cries of joy and explanation, a few only articulate; of the little old figure that half rose from the couch and sank back trembling; the flush on the waxen face, the violet ribbons in the cap, the hand that trembled as it reached out, incredulous in its humility, to his own. He took it, and her other hand rested a moment on the back of his, as though it fluttered a blessing.
Yes; and her hands, when he released them—and it seemed that he had been holding an imprisoned bird—yet trembled on the coverlet after her voice had found steadiness.
'An honour—a great honour!' it was saying. 'You will forgive the liberty?' She nodded towards the portrait. 'We are not quite strangers, you see. I have always followed your career, sir. I knew you would grow into a great and worthy man, ever since the day when I dropped a bandbox in the street—a muddy day it was!—and the box burst open just as you were passing with half a dozen young gentlemen from the college. The rest laughed; and when I began to cry—for the ribbons were muddied—they laughed still more. Do you remember?'