But she had given her promise: perhaps, as Jane put it, she could not do otherwise. And on the morning after the wedding she went over to Timberdale. I was sliding in the Ravine—for there was ice still in that covered spot, though the frost had nearly disappeared elsewhere—when I saw Mrs. Coney come down the zigzag by the help of her umbrella, and her everyday brown silk gown on.
“Are you here, Johnny! Shall I be able to get along?”
“If I help you, you will, Mrs. Coney.”
“Take care. I had no idea it would be slippery here. But it is a long way round to walk by the road, and the master has taken out the pony-chaise.”
“What wind is blowing you to Timberdale to-day?”
“An errand that I’m not at all pleased to go upon, Johnny; only Jane made a fuss about it before leaving yesterday. If I told the master he would be in a fine way. I am going to see the woman that you boys found in the shed.”
“I fancied Jane seemed to think a good deal about her.”
“Jane did think a good deal about her,” returned Mrs. Coney. “She has not had the experience of this sort of people that I have, Johnny; and girls’ sympathies are so easily aroused.”
“There was a romance about it, you see.”
“Romance, indeed!” wrathfully cried Mrs. Coney. “That’s what leads girls’ heads away: I wish they’d think of good plain sense instead. It was nothing but romance that led poor Lucy Ashton to marry that awful man, Bird.”
“Why does Lucy not leave him?”
“Ah! it’s easier to talk about leaving a man than to do it, once he’s your husband. You don’t understand it yet, Johnny.”
“And shall not, I suppose, until I am married myself. But Lucy has never talked of leaving Bird.”
“She won’t leave him. Robert has offered her—— Goodness me, Johnny, don’t hurry along like that! It’s nothing but ice here. If I were to get a tumble, I might be lamed for life.”
“Nonsense, Mrs. Coney! It would be only a Christmas gambol.”
“It’s all very well to laugh, Johnny. Christmas gambols mean fun to you young fellows with your supple limbs; but to us fifty-year-old people they may be something else. I wish I had tied some list round my boots.”
We left the ice in the Ravine, and she came up the zigzag path easily to the smooth road. I offered to take the umbrella.
“Thank you, Johnny; but I’d rather carry it myself. It’s my best silk one, and you might break it. I never dare trust my umbrellas to Tom: he drives them straight out against trees and posts, and snaps the sticks.”
She turned into Timberdale Court, and asked to see Mrs. Broom. Mrs. Broom appeared in the parlour with her sleeves turned up to the elbow, and her hands floury. She had been housekeeper during old Mr. Ashton’s time.
“Look here,” said Mrs. Coney, dropping her voice a little: “I’ve come to ask a word or two about that woman—from the shed, you know. Who is she?—and what is she?”
But the dropping of Mrs. Coney’s voice was as nothing to the dropping of the housekeeper’s face. The questions put her out uncommonly.
“I wish to my very heart, ma’am, that the woman—she’s but a poor young thing at best!—had chosen any part to fall ill in but this! It’s like a Fate.”
“Like a what?” cried Mrs. Coney.
“And so it is. A Fate for this house. ’Tis nothing less.”
“Why, what do you mean, Broom?”
Mother Broom bent her head forward, and said a word or two in Mrs. Coney’s ear. Louder, I suppose, than she thought for, if she had intended me not to hear.
“Raves about Captain Bird!” repeated Mrs. Coney.
“He is all her talk, ma’am—George Bird. And considering that George Bird, blackleg though he has turned out to be, married the young lady of this house, Miss Lucy Ashton, why, it goes against the grain for me to hear it.”
Mrs. Coney sat down in a sort of bewilderment, and gave me the silk umbrella. Folding her hands, she stared at Mother Broom.
“It seems as though we were always hearing fresh news about that man, Broom; each time it is something worse than the last. If he took all the young women within his reach, and—and—cut their heads off, it would be only like him.”
“‘George!’ she moans out in her sleep. That is, in her dreaming, or her fever, or whatever it is. ‘George, you ought not to have left me; you should have taken care of me.’ And then, ma’am, she’ll be quiet a bit, save for turning her head about; and begin again, ‘Where’s my baby? where’s my baby?’ Goodness knows ’twould be sad enough to hear her if it was anybody’s name but Bird’s.”
“There might be worse names than his, in the matter of giving us pain,” spoke Mrs. Coney. “As to poor Lucy—it is only another cross in her sad life.”
“I’ve not told this to anybody,” went on Mother Broom. “Jael Batty’s three parts deaf, as the parish knows, and may not have caught Bird’s name. It will vex my master frightfully for Miss Lucy’s sake. The baby is to be buried to-day. Mr. Charles has stayed to do it.”
“Oh, indeed!” snapped Mrs. Coney, and got up, for the baby appeared to be a sore subject with her. “I suppose the girl was coming across the country in search of Bird?”
Broom tossed her head. “Whether she was or not, it’s an odd thing that this house should be the one to have to succour her.”
“I am going,” said Mrs. Coney, “and I half wish I had never come in. Broom, I am sorry to have hindered you. You are busy.”
“I am making my raised pies,” said Broom. “It’s the second batch. What with master’s coming marriage, and one thing and another, I did not get ’em done before the new year. Your Molly says hers beat mine, Master Ludlow; but I don’t believe it.”
“She does, does she! It’s just like her boasting. Mrs. Todhetley often makes the pork-pies herself.”
“Johnny,” said Mrs. Coney, as we went along, she in deep thought: “that poor Lucy Bird might keep a stick for cutting notches—as it is said some prisoners used to do, to mark their days—and notch off her dreadful cares, that are ever recurring. Why, Johnny, what’s that crowd for?”
The church stood on the right between Timberdale Court and the village. A regular mob of children seemed to be pressing round the gate of the churchyard. I went to look, leaving Mrs. Coney standing.
Charles Ashton was coming out of the church in his surplice, and the clerk, old Sam Mullet, behind him, carrying a little coffin. The grave was in the corner of the burial-ground, and Mr. Ashton went straight to it, and continued the service begun in the church. If it had been a lord’s child, he could not have done it all in better order.
But there were no mourners, unless old Mullet could be called one. He put the coffin on the grass, and was in a frightful temper. I took off my hat and waited: it would have looked so to run away when there was no one else to stand there: and Mrs. Coney’s face, as cross as old Mullet’s, might be seen peering through the hedge.
“It’s come to a pretty pass, when tramps’ brats have to be put in the ground like honest folks’s,” grunted Sam, when Mr. Ashton had walked away, and he began to fling in the spadefuls of earth. “What must he needs go and baptize that there young atom for?—he ain’t our parson; he don’t belong to we in this parish. I dun-no what the world be a-coming to.”
Mr. Ashton was talking to Mrs. Coney when I got up. I told him what a way Sam Mullet was in.
“Yes,” said he. “I believe what I did has not given satisfaction in all quarters; so I waited to take the service myself, and save other people trouble.”
“In what name is the dead child registered, Charles?” asked Mrs. Coney.
“Lucy Bird.”
“Lucy Bird! Bird?”
“It was the name the mother gave me in one of her lucid intervals,” answered the clergyman, shortly.
He hastened away, saying he must catch a train, for that his own parish was wanting him; but I fancied he did not care to be further questioned. Mrs. Coney stood still to stare after him, and would have liked to ask him how much and how little he knew.
Lucy Bird! It did sound strange to hear the name—as if it were the real Lucy Bird we knew so well. I said so to Mrs. Coney.
“The impudence of the woman must pass all belief,” she muttered to herself. “Let us get on, Johnny? I would rather run a mile any other way than go to see her.”
Leaving me on the wooden bench outside Jael Batty’s door, she went in. It was remarkably lively: the farrier’s shop opposite to look at, five hay-ricks, and a heap of children who strolled after us from the churchyard, and stayed to stare at me. Mrs. Coney came out again soon.
“It’s of no use my remaining, Johnny. She can’t understand a word said to her, only lies there rambling, and asking people to bring her baby. If she had any sense left in her, she might just go down on her knees in thankfulness that it’s gone. Jael Batty says she has done nothing else but wail for it all the blessed morning.”
“Well, it is only natural she should.”
“Natural! Natural to mourn for that baby! Don’t you say stupid things, Johnny. It’s a great mercy that it has been taken; and you must know that as well as any one.”
“I don’t say it isn’t; babies must make no end of noise and work; but you see mothers care for them.”
“Don’t be a simpleton, Johnny. If you take to upholding tramps and infants dying in sheds, goodness knows what you’ll come to in time.”
At the end of a fortnight, Ashton of Timberdale and his wife came home. It was a fine afternoon in the middle of January, but getting dusk, and a lot of us had gone over to the Court to see them arrive. Jane looked as happy as a queen.
“Johnny,” she whispered, whilst we were standing to take some tea that Mother Broom (with a white cockade in her cap) brought in upon a silver tray, “how about that poor woman? She is not dead, I hope?”
I told Jane that she was better. The fever had gone down, but she was so weak and reduced that the doctor had not allowed her to be questioned. We knew no more of who she was than we had known before. Mrs. Coney overheard what I was saying, and took Jane aside.
There seemed to be a bit of a battle: Mrs. Coney remonstrating with a severe face, Jane holding out and flushing a little. She was telling Jane not to go to Jael Batty’s, and representing why she ought not to go. Jane said she must go—her heart was set upon it: and began to re-tie her bonnet-strings.
“Mother dear, don’t be angry with me in this the first hour of entering on my new home—it would seem like a bad omen for me. You don’t know how strongly I have grown to think that my duty lies in seeing this poor woman, in comforting her if I can. It cannot hurt me.”
“What do you suppose Robert would say? It is to him you owe obedience now, Jane, not to me.”
“To him first, and to you next, my mother; and I trust I shall ever yield it to you both. But Robert is quite willing that I should go: he knows all I think about it.”
“Jane, I wouldn’t have said a word against it; indeed I had made up my mind that it was a good wish on your part; but now that we have discovered she is in some way connected with—with the Birds—why, I don’t think Robert will like you to meddle with it. I’m sure I shrink from telling him.”
Jane Coney—Ashton I mean: one can’t get out of old names all at once—looked down in distress, thinking of the pain it would cause her husband for his sister’s sake. Then she took her mother’s hand.
“Tell Robert what you have told me, mamma. He will still let me go, I think; for he knows how much I wish it.”
They had their conference away from us; Mrs. Coney, Robert Ashton, and Jane. Of course he was frightfully put out; but Jane was right—he said she should go all the same. Mrs. Coney shut her lips tight, and made no further comment.
“I promised her, you see, Mrs. Coney,” he urged. “She has an idea in her head that—I’m sure I scarcely know what it is, except that her going is connected with Gratitude and Duty, and—and Heaven’s blessing. Why, do you know we might have stayed away another week, but for this? I could have spared it; but she would come home.”
“I never knew Jane take a thing up like this before,” said Mrs. Coney.
“Any way, I suppose it is I who shall have to deal with it—for the sake of keeping it from Lucy,” was Robert’s answer. “I wish with all my heart Bird had been at the bottom of the sea before his ill-omened steps brought him to Timberdale! There’s not, as I believe, another such scamp in the world.”
Jane waited for nothing else. Shielded by the dusk of the evening, she went hastening to Jael Batty’s and back again.
“I’ll go down for her presently,” said Robert. But she was back again before he started.
“I came back at once to set the misapprehension right,” said Jane, her eyes bright with eagerness, her cheeks glowing. “Mother dear—Robert—Johnny—listen, all of you: that poor sick woman is George Bird’s sister.”
“Jane!”
“Indeed she is. Captain Bird used to talk to Lucy of his little sister Clara—I have heard you say so, Robert—in the old days when he first came here. It is she who is lying at Jael Batty’s—Clara Bird.”
The company sat down like so many lambs, Mrs. Coney’s mouth and eyes alike opening. It sounded wonderful.
“But—Jane, child—there was still the baby!”
“Well—yes—I’m afraid so,” replied Jane, in an uncomfortable hurry. “I did not like to ask her about that, she cries so. But she is Clara Bird; Captain Bird’s sister, and Lucy’s too.”
“Well, I never!” cried Mrs. Coney, rubbing her face. “Poor misguided young thing—left to the guardianship of such a man as that, he let her go her own way, no doubt. This accounts for what Broom heard her say in the fever—‘George, you should have taken care of me.’”
“Is she being taken care of now in her sickness, down at Jael Batty’s?” spoke up Robert.
“Yes. For Jael, though three-parts deaf, is a kind and excellent nurse.”
Robert Ashton wrote that night to Worcester; a sharp letter; bidding Captain Bird come over and see to his sister. The poor thing took to Jane wonderfully, and told her more than she’d have told any one else.
“I am twenty,” she said, “and George is six-and-thirty; there is all that difference between us. Our father and mother were dead, and I lived with my aunt in Gloucestershire: where George lived, I did not know. He had been adopted by a wealthy relative in London, and went into the army. My mother had been a lady, but married beneath her, and it was her family who took to George and brought him up a gentleman. Mine was a hard, dull life. My aunt—she was my father’s sister—counted ever-so-many children, and I had to nurse and see to them. Her husband was a master plumber and glazier. One day—it is fifteen months ago now—I shall never forget it—my brother George arrived. I did not know him: I had not seen him since I was thirteen, and then he was a fine handsome gentleman in an officer’s regimentals. He was rather shabby now, and he had come to see if he could borrow money, but my aunt’s husband would not lend him any; he told him he had much ado to keep his own family. I cried a good deal, and George said he would take me to London to his wife. I think he did it to spite them, because of their not lending the money, as much as to please me—he saw that I should be a loss there. We went up—and oh how nice I thought his wife! She was a kind, gentle lady, formerly Miss Lucy Ashton; but nearly always ailing, and afraid of George. George had gay acquaintances, men and women, and he let me go to theatres and balls with them. Lucy said it was wrong, that they were not nice friends for me; but I grew to like the gaiety, and she could do nothing. One night, upon going home from church, I found both George and Lucy gone from the lodgings. I had been spending the Sunday with some people they knew, the quietest of all their friends. There lay a note on the table from Lucy, saying they were obliged to leave London unexpectedly, and begging me to go at once—on the morrow—back to Gloucestershire, for which she enclosed a sovereign. I did not go: one invited me, and another invited me, and it was two months, good, before I went down. Ah me! I heard no more of George; he had got into some trouble in London, and was afraid to let it be known where he was. I have never heard of him or his wife to this hour. My aunt was glad to see me for the help I should be to her; but I felt ill always and could not do so much as I used. I didn’t know what ailed me; I didn’t indeed; I did not think it could be much; and then, when the time went on and it all happened, and they knew, and I knew, I came away with the baby because of the reproach and the shame. But George ought not to have left me to myself in London.”
And when Jane Ashton repeated all this to Robert, he said Bird deserved to be hanged and quartered.
There came no answer from Captain Bird. Perhaps Ashton of Timberdale did not really expect any would come.
But on the Sunday afternoon, from the train that passed Timberdale from Worcester about the time folks came out of church, there descended a poor, weak woman (looking like a girl too) in a worn shawl that was too thin for the weather. She waited until the roads should be clear, as if not wanting to be seen, and then wrapped the shawl close around her arms and went out with her black veil down. It was Lucy Bird. And she was so pretty still, in spite of the wan thin cheeks and the faded clothes! There were two ways of getting to Jael Batty’s from the station. She took the long and obscure one, and in turning the corner of the lane between the church and Timberdale Court, she met Robert Ashton.
But for her own movement, he might never have noticed her. It was growing dusk; and when she saw him coming, she turned sharp off to a stile and stood as if looking for something in the field. There’s not much to stare at in a ploughed field at dusk, as Ashton of Timberdale knew, and he naturally looked at the person who had gone so fast to do it. Something in the cut of the shoulders struck him as being familiar, and he stopped.
“Lucy! Is it you?”
Of course it was no use her saying it was not. She burst into tears, trembling and shaking. Robert passed round her his good strong arm. He guessed what had brought her to Timberdale.
“Lucy, my dear, have you come over from Worcester?”
“Yes,” she sobbed. “I shall be better in a minute, Robert. I am a little tired, and the train shook me.”
“You should have sent me word, and I would have had a fly at the station.”
Sent him word! It was good of Robert to pretend to say that; but he knew that she wouldn’t have presumed to do it. It was that feeling on Lucy’s part that vexed him so much. Since Bird had turned out the villain that he had, Lucy acted, even to her own family, as though she had lost caste, identifying herself with her husband, and humbling herself to them. What though she was part and parcel with the fellow, as Robert said, she was not responsible for his ill-doings.
“Lean on me, Lucy. You must have a good rest.”
“Not that way,” she said at the bottom of the lane, as he was turning to the Court. “I am going to Jael Batty’s.”
“When you have had some rest and refreshment at home.”
“I cannot go to your home, Robert.”
“Indeed but you can; and will,” he answered, leading her on.
“I would rather not. Your wife may not care to receive me.”
“Come and try her.”
“Robert, I am not fit to see any one: I am not indeed. My spirits are low now, and I often burst into tears for nothing. I have been praying, all the way over, not to meet you. After what was done to you at our house but a week or two ago, I did not expect ever to have been noticed by you again. Jane must hate me.”
“Does she! Jane and I have been concocting a charming little plot about you, Lucy. We are going to have your old room made ready, and the sweet-scented lavender sheets put on the bed, and get you over to us. For good, if you will stop; long enough to recruit your health if you will not. Don’t you remember how you used to talk in the holidays about the home sheets; saying you only got them smelling of soap at school?”
A faint smile, like a shade, flitted over Lucy Bird’s face at the reminiscence.
“I should not know the feel of fine white linen sheets now: coarse calico ones have had to content me this many a day. Let me turn, Robert! For my own sake, I would rather not meet your wife. You cannot know how I feel about seeing old friends; those who—who——”
Those who once knew me, she meant to say; but broke down with a sob. Robert kept walking on. Lucy was a great deal younger than he, and had been used to yield to him from the time she was a child. Well for her would it have been, that she had yielded to his opinion when Captain Bird came a-courting to Timberdale.
“You have company at your house, perhaps, Robert?”
“There’s not a soul but Jane and me. The Coneys asked us to dine there to-day, but we thought we’d have the first Sunday to ourselves. We went to church this morning; and I came out after dinner to ask after old Arkwright: they fear he is dying.”
She made no further opposition, and Robert took her into the Court, to the warm dining-room. Jane was not there. Robert put her into the arm-chair that used to be their father’s, and brought her a glass of wine.
“No, thank you,” she faintly said.
“You must take it, Lucy.”
“I am afraid. My head is weak.”
“A sign you want something good to strengthen it,” he urged; and she drank the wine.
“And now take off your bonnet, Lucy, and make yourself at home, whilst I go to seek Jane,” said he.
“Lucy is here,” he whispered, when he had found his wife. “The merest shadow you ever saw. A wan, faded thing that one’s heart bleeds to look upon. We must try and keep her for a bit, Jane.”
“Oh, Robert, if we can! And nurse her into health.”
“And deliver her from that brute she calls husband—as I should prefer to put it, Jane. Her life with him must be something woeful.”
When they got in, she was leaning forward in the chair, crying silently. In the clear old room, with all its familiar features about her, memory could only have its most painful sway. Her grand old father with his grand old white hair used to sit where she was sitting; her brothers had each his appointed place; and she was a lovely bright child amongst them, petted by all; the sentimental girl with her head as brimful of romance as ever the other Lucy Ashton’s had been, when she went out to her trysts with the Master of Ravenswood. Which had been the more bitter fate in after-life—that Lucy’s or this one’s?
Mrs. Ashton went quietly up, put her arms round Lucy, and kissed her many times. She untied the bonnet, which Lucy had not done, and gave it with the shawl to Robert, standing behind. The bright hair fell down in a shower—the bonnet had caught it—and she put her feeble hand up as if to feel the extent of the disaster. It made her look so like the sweet young sister they had all prized, that Robert turned to the window and gave a few stamps, as if his boots were cold.
How she cried!—tears that came from the very heart. Putting her face down on the arm of the chair, she let her grief have its way. Jane held her hand and stroked it lovingly. Robert felt inclined to dash his arms through the dark window-panes on which the fire-light played, in imaginary chastisement of the scamp, Bird.
“Could you lend me a shawl of your own, Jane?” she asked, by-and-by, when Robert said they would have tea in—and she glanced down at her shabby brown gown. “I don’t wish the servants to see me like this.”
Jane flew out and brought one. A handsome cashmere of scarlet and gold-colour, that her mother had given her before the wedding.
“Just for an hour or two, until I leave,” said Lucy, as she covered herself up in it.
“You will not go out of this house to-night, Lucy.”
“I must, Robert. You can guess who it was I came to Timberdale to see.”
“Of course I can. She is going on all right and getting stronger; so there’s no immediate haste about that. Mr. Bird would not—not come, I suppose.”
Lucy did not answer. Robert was right—Bird would not come: his young sister might die where she was or be sheltered in the workhouse, for all the concern he gave himself. For one thing, the man was at his wits’ end for money, and not too sure of his own liberty. But Lucy’s conscience had not let her be still: as soon as she had scraped together the means for a third-class ticket, she came over.
“The poor girl has lain like a weight upon my mind, since the time when we abandoned her in London,” confessed Lucy.
“Why did you abandon her?”
“It was not my fault,” murmured Lucy; and Robert felt vexed to have asked the hasty question. “I hoped she went home, as I desired her; but I did not feel sure of it, for Clara was thoughtless. And those unsuspicious country girls cannot take care of themselves too well. Robert, whatever has happened I regard as our fault,” she added, looking up at him with some fever in her eyes.
“As Mr. Bird’s fault; not yours,” corrected Robert—who, strange perhaps to say, observed courtesy of speech towards Bird when talking with Lucy: giving him in general a handle to his name. It might have sounded ironical, but that he couldn’t help. “Did you never write to ascertain what had become of her, Lucy?”
“My husband would not let me. He is often in difficulties: and we never have a settled home, or address. What will be done with her, Robert?”
“She will stay where she is until she is strong; Jane wishes it; and then we shall see about the future. Something will turn up for her in some place or other, I’ve little doubt.”
Jane glanced at her husband and smiled. Robert had given her a promise to help the girl to an honest living. But, as he frankly told his wife, had he known it was a sister of Bird’s, he might never have done so.
“About yourself, Lucy; that may be the better theme to talk of just now,” he resumed. “Will you remain here for good in your old home?”
The hot tears rushed to her eyes, the hot flush to her cheeks. She looked deprecatingly at both, as if craving pardon.
“I cannot. You know I cannot.”
“Shall I tell you what Bird is, Lucy? And what he most likely will be?”
“To what end, Robert?” she faintly asked. “I know it without.”
“Then you ought to leave him—for your own sake. Leave him before you are compelled to do so.”
“Not before, Robert.”
“But why?”
“Oh, Robert, don’t you see?” she answered, breaking down. “He is my husband.”
And nothing else could they get from her. Though she cried and sobbed, and did not deny that her life was a fear and a misery, yet she would go back to him; go back on the morrow; it was her duty. In the moment’s anger Robert Ashton said he would wash his hands of her as well as of Bird. But Jane and Lucy knew better.
“What can have induced you and Robert to take up this poor Clara in the way you are doing—and mean to do?” she asked when she was alone with Jane at the close of the evening.
“I—owe a debt of gratitude; and I thought I could best pay it in this way,” was Mrs. Ashton’s timid and rather unwilling answer.
“A debt of gratitude! To Clara?”
“No. To Heaven.”
VII.
CHARLES VAN RHEYN.
I shall always say it was a singular thing that I should chance to go back to school that time the day before the quarter opened. Singular, because I heard and saw more of the boy I am going to tell of than I otherwise might have heard and seen. I was present at his arrival; and I was present at his—well, let us say, at his departure.
The midsummer holidays were nearly up when Hugh was taken ill. Duffham was uncertain what the illness was going to be: so he pitched upon scarlatina. Upon that, the Squire and Mrs. Todhetley packed me back to school there and then. Not from any fear of my taking it; I had had it, and Tod too (and both of us were well again, I recollect, within a week or so); but if once the disease had really shown itself, Dr. Frost would not have liked us to return lest we might convey it to the school. Tod was in Gloucestershire. He was written to, and told not to return home, but to go straight to school.
Dr. Frost was surprised to see me. He said my coming back was quite right; and I am sure he tried to put me at ease and make me comfortable. Not a single boy had stayed the holidays that summer, and the doctor and I were alone. The school would open the following day, when masters and boys were alike expected to return. I had dinner with the doctor—he usually dined late during the holidays—and we played at chess afterwards.
Breakfast was just over the next morning when the letters came in. Amongst them was one from France, bearing the Rouen post-mark. Now the doctor, learned man though he was in classics and what not, could make nothing of French. Carrying the letter to the window, turning its pages over and back again, and staring at it through his spectacles, he at last brought it to me.
“You are a pretty good French scholar, Johnny; can you read this? I can’t, I confess. But the paper’s so thin, and the ink so pale, and the writing so small, I could scarcely see it if it were English.”
And I had to go over it twice before I could make it out. As he said, the ink was pale, and it was a frightfully small and cramped handwriting. The letter was dated Rouen, and was signed curtly, “Van Rheyn,” French fashion, without the writer’s Christian name. Monsieur Van Rheyn wrote to say that he was about to consign his son, Charles Aberleigh Van Rheyn, to Dr. Frost’s care, and that he would arrive quickly after the letter, having already departed on his journey under the charge of a “gentilhomme Anglais.” It added that the son would bring credentials with him; that he spoke English, and was of partly English descent, through his mother, the late Madame Van Rheyn, née Aberleigh.
“Rather a summary way of consigning a pupil to my charge,” remarked Dr. Frost. “Aberleigh?—Aberleigh?” he continued, as if trying to recollect something, and bending his spectacles over the letter. “She must have been one of the Aberleighs of Upton, I should think. Perhaps Hall knows? I have heard her mention the Aberleighs.”
Ringing the bell, the housekeeper was sent for. Dr. Frost asked her what she knew of the Aberleighs of Upton.
“There’s none of them left now to know, sir,” answered Hall. “There never was but two—after the old mother died: Miss Aberleigh and Miss Emma Aberleigh. Good fortunes the young ladies had, sir, and both of them, I remember, married on the same day. Miss Aberleigh to Captain Scott, and Miss Emma to a French gentleman, Mosseer Van Rheyn.”
“I should think, by the name, he was Dutch—or Flemish; not French,” remarked the doctor.
“Anyway, sir, he was said to be French,” returned Hall. “A dark sallow gentleman who wore a braided coat. The young ladies never came back to their home after the wedding-day, and the place was sold. Captain Scott sailed with his wife for Injee, and Mosseer Van Rheyn took Miss Emma off to his house in France.”
“Do you recollect where his home was? In what part of France?”
“No, sir. And if I did, I should never be able to speak the name. Not long ago I heard it said that poor Miss Emma was dead—Mrs. Van Rheyn that is. A nice quiet girl, she was.”
“Then I conclude the new pupil spoken of to me, must be the son of Monsieur Van Rheyn and Miss Emma Aberleigh,” remarked the doctor, when Hall was dismissed. “You must help to make things pleasant for him, Johnny: it will be a change at first from his own home and country. Do you remember that other French boy we had here?”
I did. And the remembrance made me laugh. He used to lament every day that he had not a plate of soup for dinner, and to say the meat was tough.
Strolling out at the front iron gates in the course of the morning, wondering how long the boys were going to be before some of them put in an appearance, I caught sight of the first. He was walking up from the Plough and Harrow Inn, and must have come by the omnibus that plied backwards and forwards between the inn and the station. The Plough and Harrow man-of-all-work followed behind, carrying a large trunk.
Of all queer figures that boy looked the queerest. I wondered who he was, and whether he could really be coming as a pupil. His trousers and vest were nankeen, his coat was a sort of open blouse, and flew out behind him; the hat he wore was a tall chimney-pot with a wide brim. Off went the hat with a bow and a flourish of the arm, as he reached me and the gates.
“I ask your pardon, sir. This is, I believe, the pension of Dr. Frost?”
The French accent, though that was slight, the French manners, the French turn of the words, told me who it was. For a minute or two I really could not answer for staring at him. He seemed to have arrived with a shaved head, as if just out of gaol, or of brain-fever.
The hair was cut as closely as it could be cut, short of shaving: his face was red and round and covered with freckles: you could not have put a pin’s point between them. Really and truly it was the most remarkable figure ever seen out of a picture. I could not guess his age exactly: something perhaps between twelve and fourteen. He was slender and upright, and to all appearance strong.
“I think you must be Charles Van Rheyn,” I said then, holding out my hand to welcome him. “Dr. Frost is expecting you.”
He put his hand into mine after a moment’s hesitation, not seeming quite to understand that he might: but such a brightness came into his rather large and honest grey eyes, that I liked him from that hour, in spite of the clothes and the freckles and the shorn head. He had crossed to Folkestone by the night boat, he said, had come on to London, and the gentleman, who was his escort so far, had there put him into an early train to come on to his destination.
Dr. Frost was at the window, and came to the door. Van Rheyn stood still when within a yard of him, took his hat off with the most respectful air, and bowed his head half-way to the ground. He had evidently been brought up with a reverence for pastors and masters. The doctor shook hands. The first thing Van Rheyn did on entering the reception-parlour, was to produce from some inner pocket a large, square letter, sealed with two flaming red seals and a coat of arms; which he handed to the doctor. It contained a draft for a good sum of money in advance of the first three months’ payment, and some pages of closely-written matter in the crabbed hand of Monsieur Van Rheyn. Dr. Frost put the pages aside to await the arrival of the French master.
“My father was unable to remit the exact amount of money for the trimestre, sir, not knowing what it would be,” said young Van Rheyn. “And there will be the extra expenses besides. He will arrange that with you later.”
“The end of the term would have been time enough to remit this,” said the doctor, smiling. “It is not our custom to receive payment in advance.”
“It is the custom in France, sir, I assure you. And, besides, I am to you a stranger.”
“Not altogether a stranger; I believe I know something of your mother’s family,” said Dr. Frost. “How came your father to fix upon my school for you?”
“My mother knew of your school, sir: she and my father used to talk of placing me at it. And an English gentleman who came lately to Rouen spoke of it—he said he knew you very well. That again put into my father’s head to send me.”
It was the same Van Rheyn that they had thought—the son of Miss Emma Aberleigh. She had been dead two years.
“Are you a Protestant or a Roman Catholic?” questioned Dr. Frost.
“I am Protestant, sir: the same that my mother was. We attended the église of Monsieur le Pasteur Mons, of the Culte Evangélique.”
The doctor asked him if he would take anything before dinner, and he chose a glass of eau sucrée. The mal-de-mer had been rather bad, he said, and he had not been able to eat since.
Evidently Hall did not approve of eau sucrée. She had never made eau sucary, she said, when sent to for it. Bringing in the water and sugar, she stood by to watch Van Rheyn mix it, her face sour, her lips drawn in. I am sure it gave her pleasure, when he asked for a few drops of orange-flower water, to be able to say there was not such a thing in the house.
“This young gentleman is the son of the Miss Emma Aberleigh you once knew, Hall,” spoke the doctor, with a view no doubt to putting her on good terms with the new pupil.
“Yes, sir,” she answered crustily. “He favours his mamma about the eyes.”
“She must have had very nice eyes,” I put in.
“And so she had,” said Van Rheyn, looking at me gratefully. “Thank you for saying so. I wish you could have known her!”
“And might I ask, sir, what has become of the other Miss Aberleigh?” asked Hall of Van Rheyn. “The young lady who went off to Injee with her husband on the wedding-day.”
“You would say my Aunt Margaret,” he rejoined. “She is quite well. She and the major and the children will make the voyage to Europe next year.”
After the eau sucrée came to an end, the doctor turned him over to me, telling me to take care of him till dinner-time, which that day would be early. Van Rheyn said he should like to unpack his box, and we went upstairs together. Growing confidential over the unpacking, he gave me scraps of information touching his home and family, the mention of one item leading to another.
His baptismal name in full, he said, was Charles Jean Aberleigh; his father’s was Jean Marie. Their home was a très joli château close to Rouen: in five minutes you could walk there. It was all much changed since his mother died (he seemed to have loved her with a fervent love and to revere her memory); the last thing he did on coming away for England was to take some flowers to her grave. It was thought in Rouen that his father was going to make a second marriage with one of the Demoiselles de Tocqueville, whom his Aunt Claribelle did not like. His Aunt Claribelle, his father’s sister, had come to live at the château when his mother died; but if that Thérèsine de Tocqueville came into the house she would quit it. The Demoiselles de Tocqueville had hardly any dot,—which would be much against the marriage, Aunt Claribelle thought, and bad for his father; because when he, Charles, should be the age of twenty-one, the money came to him; it had been his mother’s, and was so settled: and his father’s own property was but small. Of course he should wish his father to keep always as much as he pleased, but Aunt Claribelle thought the English trustees would not allow that. Aunt Claribelle’s opinion was, that his father had at length decided to send him to a pension in England while he made the marriage; but he (Charles) knew that his mother had wished him to finish his education in England, and to go to one of the two colleges to which English gentlemen went.
“Here comes old Fontaine,” I interrupted at this juncture, seeing his arrival from the window.
Van Rheyn looked up from his shirts, which he was counting. He seemed to have the tidiest ways in the world. “Who is it that you say? Fontaine?”
“Monsieur Fontaine, the French master. You can talk away with him in your native tongue as much as you like, Van Rheyn.”
“But I have come here to speak the English tongue, not the French,” debated he, looking at me seriously. “My father wishes me to speak and read it without any accent; and I wish it also.”
“You speak it very well already.”
“But you can hear that it is not my native tongue—that I am a foreigner.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I must learn to speak it without that—as the English do. It will be necessary.”
I supposed he might allude to his future life. “What are you to be, Van Rheyn?” I inquired.
“What profession, do you ask? I need not be any: I have enough fortune to be a rentier—I don’t know what you call that in English; it means a gentleman who lives on his money. But I wish, myself, to be an English priest.”
“An English priest! Do you mean a parson?”
“Yes, I mean that. So you see I must learn the English tongue. My mother used to talk to me about the priests in her land——”
“Parsons, Van Rheyn.”
“I beg your pardon: I forget. And I fear I have caught up the French names for things since my mother died. It was neither priest nor parson she used to call the English ministers.”
“Clergymen, perhaps.”
“That was it. She said the clergymen were good men, and she should like me to be one. In winter, when it was cold, and she had some fire in her chamber, I used to sit up there with her, after coming home from classe, and we talked together, our two selves. I should have much money, she said, when I grew to be a man, and could lead an idle life. But she would not like that: she wanted me to be a good man, and to go to heaven when I died, where she would be; and she thought if I were a clergyman I should have serious thoughts always. So I wish to be a clergyman.”
He said all this with the utmost simplicity and composure, just as he might have spoken of going for a ride. There could be no mistaking that he was of a thoroughly straightforward and simple-minded nature.
“It might involve your living over here, Van Rheyn: once you were in Orders.”
“Yes, I know. Papa would not mind. England was mamma’s country, and she loved it. There was more peace in England than in France, she thought.”
“I say, she must have been a good mother, Van Rheyn.”
In a moment his grey eyes were shining at me through a mist of tears. “Oh, she was so good, so good! You can never know. If she had lived I should never have had sorrow.”
“What did she die of?”
“Ah, I cannot tell. She was well in the morning, and she was dead at night. Not that she was strong ever. It was one Dimanche. We had been to the office, she and I——”
“What office?”
“Oh, pardon—I forget I am speaking English. I mean to church. Monsieur Mons had preached; and we were walking along the street towards home afterwards, mamma talking to me about the sermon, which had been a very holy one, when we met the Aunt Claribelle, who had come into the town for high mass at St. Ouen. Mamma asked her to come home and dine with us; and she said yes, but she must first go to say bon-jour to old Madame Soubitez. As she parted from us, there was suddenly a great outcry. It was fête at Rouen that Sunday. Some bands of music were to play on the estrade in the public garden, competing for a prize, consequently the streets were crowded. We looked back at the noise, and saw many horses, without riders, galloping along towards us; men were running after them, shouting and calling; and the people, mad with fright, tumbled over one another in the effort to get away. Later, we heard that these horses, frightened by something, had broken out of an hotel post-yard. Well, mamma gave just a cry of fear and held my hand tighter, as we set off to run with the rest, the horses stamping wildly after us. But the people pushed between us, and I lost her. She was at home before me, and was sitting at the side of the fountain, inside the château entrance-gate, when I got up, her face all white and blue, and her neck and throat beating, as she clung to the nearest lion with both hands. It alarmed me more than the horses had, for I had never seen her look so. ‘Come in, mamma,’ I said, ‘and take a little glass of cordial;’ but she could not answer me, she did not stir. I called one of the servants, and by-and-by she got a little breath again, and went into the house, leaning upon both of us, and so up to her chamber. Quite immediately papa came home: he always went into town to his club on the Sunday mornings, and he ran for Monsieur Petit, the médecin—the doctor. By seven o’clock in the evening, mamma was dead.”
“Oh dear! What was the cause?”
“Papa did not tell me. He and Monsieur Petit talked about the heart: they said it was feeble. Oh, how we cried, papa and I! He cried for many days. I hope he will not bring home Thérèsine de Tocqueville!”
The dinner-bell rang out, and we went down. Dr. Frost was putting up the letter which old Fontaine had been translating to him. It was full of directions about Van Rheyn’s health. What he was to do, and what not to do. Monsieur Van Rheyn said his son was not strong: he was not to be allowed to do gymnastics or “boxing,” or to play at rough games, or take violent exercise of any kind; and a small glass of milk was to be given him at night when he went to bed. If the clothes sent over with him were not suitable to the school, or in accordance with the English mode, Dr. Frost was prayed to be at the trouble of procuring him new ones. He was to be brought well on in all the studies necessary to constitute the “gentilhomme,” and especially in the speaking and reading of English.
Dr. Frost directed his spectacles to Charles Van Rheyn, examining him from top to toe. The round, red face, and the strongly-built frame appeared to give nothing but indications of robust health. The doctor questioned him in what way he was not strong—whether he was subject to a cough, or to want of appetite, and other such items. But Van Rheyn seemed to know nothing about it, and said he had always been quite well.
“The father fears we should make him into a muscular Englishman, hence these restrictions,” thought Dr. Frost.
In the afternoon the fellows began to come in thick and threefold: Tod amongst them, who arrived about tea-time. To describe their amazement when they saw Van Rheyn is quite beyond me. It seemed that they never meant to leave off staring. Some of them gave him a little chaff, even that first night. Van Rheyn was very shy and silent. Entirely at his ease as he had been with me alone, the numbers seemed to daunt him; to strike him and his courage into himself.
On the whole, Van Rheyn was not liked. Once let a school set itself against a new fellow at first—and Van Rheyn’s queer appearance had done that much for him—it takes a long time to bring matters round—if they ever are brought round at all. When his hair began to sprout, it looked exactly like pig’s bristles. And that was the first nickname he got: Bristles. The doctor had soon changed his style of coat, and he wore jackets, as we did.
Charles Van Rheyn did not seem inclined to grow sociable. Shy and silent as he had shown himself to them that first evening, so he remained. True, he had no encouragement to be otherwise. The boys continually threw ridicule on him, making him into an almost perpetual butt. Any mistake in the pronunciation of an English word—Van Rheyn never made a mistake as to its meaning—they hissed and groaned at. I shall never forget one occasion. Being asked when that Indian lot intended to arrive (meaning the Scotts), and whether they would make the voyage in a palanquin (for the boys plied him with questions purposely) he answered, “Not in a palanquin, but in a sheep”—meaning ship. The uproar at that was so loud, that some of the masters looked in to know what was up.
Van Rheyn, too, was next door to helpless. He did not climb, or leap, or even run. Had not been used to it, he said. What had he been used to do, then, he was asked one day. Oh, he had sat out in the garden with his mother; and since her death, with Aunt Claribelle, and gone for an airing in the carriage three times a week. Was he a girl? roared the boys. Did he do patchwork? Not now; he had left off sewing when he was nine, answered Van Rheyn innocently, unconscious of the storm of mockery the avowal would invoke. “Pray, were you born a young lady?—or did they change you at nurse?” shouted Jessup, who would have kept the ball rolling till midnight. “I say, you fellows, he has come to the wrong school: we don’t take in girls, do we? Let me introduce this one to you, boys—‘Miss Charlotte.’” And, so poor Charley Van Rheyn got that nickname as well as the other. Miss Charlotte!
Latin was a stumbling-block. Van Rheyn had learnt it according to French rules and French pronunciation, and he could not readily get into our English mode. “It was bad enough to have to teach a stupid boy Latin,” grumbled the under Latin master (under Dr. Frost), “but worse to have to un-teach him.” Van Rheyn was not stupid, however; if he seemed so, it was because his new life was so strange to him.
One day the boys dared him to a game at leap-frog. Some of them were at it in the yard, and Van Rheyn stood by, looking on.
“Why don’t you go in for it?” suddenly asked Parker, giving him a push. “There is to be a round or two at boxing this evening, why don’t you go in for that?”
“They never would let me do these rough things,” replied Van Rheyn, who invariably answered all the chaffing questions civilly and patiently.
“Who wouldn’t? Who’s ‘they’?”
“My mother and my Aunt Claribelle. Also, when I was starting to come here, my father said I was not to exert myself.”
“All right, Miss Charlotte; but why on earth didn’t the respectable old gentleman send you over in petticoats? Never was such a thing heard of, you know, as for a girl to wear a coat and pantaloons. It’s not decent, Miss Charlotte; it’s not modest.”
“Why do you say all this to me for ever? I am not a girl,” said poor Van Rheyn.
“No? Don’t tell fibs. If you were not a girl you’d go in for our games. Come! Try this. Leap-frog’s especially edifying, I assure you: expands the mind. Won’t you try it?”
Well, the upshot was, that they dared him to try it. A dozen, or so, set on at him like so many wolves. What with that, and what with their stinging ridicule, poor Van Rheyn was goaded out of his obedience to home orders, and did try it. After a few tumbles, he went over very tolerably, and did not dislike it at all.
“If I can only learn to do as the rest of you do, perhaps they will let me alone,” he said to me that same night, a sort of eagerness in his bright grey eyes.
And gradually he did learn to go in for most of the games: running, leaping, and climbing. One thing he absolutely refused—wrestling.
“Why should gentlemen, who were to be gentlemen all their lives, fight each other?” he asked. “They would not have to fight as men; it was not kind; it was not pleasant; it was hard.”
The boys were hard on him for saying it, mocking him fearfully; but they could not shake him there. He was of right blue blood; never caving-in before them, as Bill Whitney expressed it one day; he was only quiet and endured.
Whether the native Rouen air is favourable to freckles, I don’t know; but those on Van Rheyn’s face gradually disappeared over here. His complexion lost its redness also, becoming fresh and fair, with a brightish colour on the cheeks. The hair, growing longer, turned out to be of a smooth brown: altogether he was good-looking.
“I say, Johnny, do you know that Van Rheyn’s ill?”
The words came from William Whitney. He whispered them in my ear as we stood up for prayers before breakfast. The school had opened about a month then.
“What’s the matter with him?”
“Don’t know,” answered Bill. “He is staying in bed.”
Cribbing some minutes from breakfast, I went up to his room. Van Rheyn looked pale as he lay, and said he had been sick. Hall declared it was nothing but a bilious attack, and Van Rheyn thought she might be right.
“Meaning that you have a sick headache, I suppose?” I said to him.
“Yes, the migraine. I have had it before.”
“Well, look here, Charley,” I went on, after thinking a minute; “if I were you, I wouldn’t say as much to any of them. Let them suppose you are regularly ill. You’ll never hear the last of it if they know you lie in bed for only a headache.”
“But I cannot get up,” he answered; “my head is in much pain. And I have fever. Feel my hand.”
The hand he put out was burning hot. But that went with sick headaches sometimes.
It turned out to be nothing worse, for he was well on the morrow; and I need not have mentioned it at all, but for a little matter that arose out of the day’s illness. Going up again to see him after school in the afternoon, I found Hall standing over the bed with a cup of tea, and a most severe, not to say horror-struck expression of countenance, as she gazed down on him, staring at something with all her eyes. Van Rheyn was asleep, and looked better; his face flushed and moist, his brown hair, still uncommonly short compared with ours, pushed back. He lay with his hands outside the bed, as if the clothes were heavy—the weather was fiery hot. One of the hands was clasping something that hung round his neck by a narrow blue ribbon; it seemed to have been pulled by him out of the opening in his night-shirt. Hall’s quick eyes had detected what it was—a very small flat cross (hardly two inches long), on which was carved a figure of the Saviour, all in gold.
Now Hall had doubtless many virtues. One of them was docking us boys of our due allowance of sugar. But she had also many prejudices. And, of all her prejudices, none was stronger than her abhorrence of idols, as exemplified in carved images and Chinese gods.
“Do you see that, Master Ludlow?” she whispered to me, pointing her finger straight at the little cross of gold. “It’s no better than a relict of paganism.”
Stooping down, she gently drew the cross out of Van Rheyn’s hot clasped hand, and let it lie on the sheet. A beautiful little cross; the face of our Saviour—an exquisite face in its expression of suffering and patient humility—one that you might have gazed upon and been the better for. How they could have so perfectly carved a thing so small I knew not.
“He must be one of them worshipping Romanics,” said Hall, with horror, snatching her fingers from the cross as if she thought it would give her the ague. “Or else a pagan.”
And the two were no doubt alike in Hall’s mind.
“And he goes every week and says his commandments in class here, standing up before all the school! I wonder what the doctor——”
Hall cut short her complaints. Van Rheyn had suddenly opened his eyes, and was looking up at us.
“I find myself better,” he said, with a smile. “The pain has nearly departed.”
“We wasn’t thinking of pains and headaches, Master Van Rheyn, but of this,” said Hall, resentfully, taking the spoon out of the saucer, and holding it within an inch of the gold cross. Van Rheyn raised his head from the pillow to look.
“Oh, it is my little cross!” he said, holding it out to our view as far as the ribbon allowed, and speaking with perfect ease and unconcern. “Is it not beautiful?”
“Very,” I said, stooping over it.
“Be you of the Romanic sex?” demanded Hall of Van Rheyn.
“Am I—— What is it Mrs. Hall would ask?” he broke off to question me, in the midst of my burst of laughter.
“She asks if you are a Roman Catholic, Van Rheyn.”
“But no. Why you think that?” he added to her. “My father is a Roman Catholic: I am a Protestant, like my mother.”
“Then why on earth, sir, do you wear such a idol as that?” returned Hall.
“This? Oh, it is nothing! it is not an idol. It does me good.”
“Good!” fiercely repeated Hall. “Does you good to wear a brazen image next the skin!—right under the flannel waistcoat. I wonder what the school will come to next?”
“Why should I not wear it?” said Van Rheyn. “What harm does it do me, this? It was my poor Aunt Annette’s. The last time we went to the Aunt Claribelle’s to see her, when the hope of her was gone, she put the cross into my hand, and bade me keep it for her sake.”
“I tell you, Master Van Rheyn, it’s just a brazen image,” persisted Hall.
“It is a keepsake,” dissented Van Rheyn. “I showed it to Monsieur Mons one day when he was calling on mamma, and told him it was a gift to me of the poor Tante Annette. Monsieur Mons thought it very pretty, and said it would remind me of the great Sacrifice.”
“But to wear it next your skin,” went on Hall, not giving in. Giving in on the matter of graven images was not in her nature. Or on any matter as far as that went, that concerned us boys. “I’ve heard of poor misdeluded people putting horse-hair next ’em. And fine torment it must be!”
“I have worn it since mamma died,” quietly answered Van Rheyn, who did not seem to understand Hall’s zeal. “She kept it for me always in her little shell-box that had the silver crest on it; but when she died, I said I would put the cross round my neck, for fear of losing it: and Aunt Claribelle, who took the shell-box then, bought me the blue ribbon.”
“That blue ribbon’s new—or almost new—if ever I saw new ribbon,” cried Hall, who was in a mood to dispute every word.
“Oh yes. It was new when I left Rouen. I have another piece in my trunk to put on when this shall wear out.”
“Well, it’s a horrid heathenish thing to do, Master Van Rheyn; and, though it may be gold, I don’t believe Miss Emma Aberleigh would ever have gave countenance to it. Leastways before she lived among them foreign French folks,” added Hall, virtually dropping the contest, as Van Rheyn slipped the cross out of view within his night-shirt. “What she might have come to, after she went off there, Heaven alone knows. Be you going to drink this tea, sir, or be you not?”
Van Rheyn drank the tea and thanked her for bringing it, his gratitude shining also out of his nice grey eyes. Hall took back the cup and tucked him up again, telling him to get a bit more sleep and he would be all right in the morning. With all her prejudices and sourness, she was as good as gold when any of us were ill.
“Not bathe! Not bathe! I say, you fellows, here’s a lark. Bristles thinks he’d better not try the water.”
It was a terribly hot evening, close upon sunset. Finding ourselves, some half-dozen of us, near the river, Van Rheyn being one, the water looked too pleasant not to be plunged into. The rule at Dr. Frost’s was, that no boy should be compelled to bathe against his inclination: Van Rheyn was the only one who had availed himself of it. It was Parker who spoke: we were all undressing quickly.
“What’s your objection, Miss Charlotte? Girls bathe.”
“They would never let me go into cold water at home,” was the patient answer. “We take warm baths there.”
“Afraid of cold water? well I never! What an everlasting pussy-cat you are, Miss Charlotte! We’ve heard that pussies don’t like to wet their feet.”
“Our doctor at Rouen used to say I must not plunge into cold water,” said poor Van Rheyn, speaking patiently as usual, though he must have been nearly driven wild. “The shock would not be good for me.”
“I say, who’ll write off to Evesham for a pair of waterproofs to put over his shoes? Just give us the measure of your foot, Miss Charlotte?”
“Let’s shut him up in a feather-bed!”
“Why, the water’s not cold, you donkey!” cried Bill Whitney, who had just leaped in. “It’s as warm as new milk. What on earth will you be fit for, Bristles? You’ll never make a man.”
“Make a man! What are you thinking of, Whitney? Miss Charlotte has no ambition that way. Girls prefer to grow up into young ladies, not into men.”
“Is it truly warm?” asked Van Rheyn, gazing at the river irresolutely, and thinking that if he went in the mockery might cease.
I looked up at him from the water. “It is indeed, Van Rheyn. Quite warm.”
He knew he might trust me, and began slowly to undress. We had continued to be the best of comrades, and I never went in for teasing him as the rest did; rather shielded him when I could, and took his part.
By the time he was ready to go in—for he did nothing nimbly, and undressing made no exception—some of us were ready to come out. One of Dr. Frost’s rules in regard to bathing was stringent—that no boy should remain in the water more than three minutes at the very extent. He held that a great deal of harm was done by prolonged bathing. Van Rheyn plunged in—and liked it.
“It is warm and pleasant,” he exclaimed. “This cannot hurt me.”
“Hurt you, you great baby!” shouted Parker.
Van Rheyn had put his clothes in the tidiest manner upon the grass; not like ours, which were flung down any way. His things were laid smoothly one upon another, in the order he took them off, though I dare say I should not have noticed this but for a shout from Jessup.
“Halloa! What’s that?”
Those of us who were out, and in the several stages of drying or dressing, turned round at the words. Jessup, buttoning his braces, was standing by Van Rheyn’s heap, looking down at it. On the top of the flannel vest, exposed to full view, lay the gold cross with the blue ribbon.
“What on earth is it?” cried Jessup, picking it up; and at the moment Van Rheyn, finding all the rest out of the water, came out himself. “Is it a charm?”
“It is mine—it is my gold cross,” spoke Van Rheyn, catching up one of the wet towels. The bath this evening had been impromptu, and we had only two towels between us, which Parker and Whitney had brought. In point of fact, it had been against rules also, for we were not expected to go into the river without the presence of a master. But just at this bend it was perfectly safe. Jessup passed the blue ribbon round his neck, letting the cross hang behind. This done, he turned himself about for general inspection, and the boys crowded round to look.
“What do you say it is, Bristles?”
“My gold cross.”
“You don’t mean to tell us to our faces that you wear it?”
“I wear it always,” freely answered Van Rheyn.
Jessup took it off his neck, and the boys passed it about from one to another. They did not ridicule the cross—I think the emblem on it prevented that—but they ridiculed Van Rheyn.
“A friend of mine went over to the tar-and-feather islands,” said Millichip, executing an aggravating war-dance round about Charley. “He found the natives sporting no end of charms and amulets—nearly all the attire they did sport—rings in the nose and chains in the ears. What relation are those natives to you, Miss Charlotte?”
“Don’t injure it, please,” pleaded Van Rheyn.
“We’ve an ancient nurse at home who carries the tip of a calf’s tongue in her pocket for luck,” shrieked Thorne. “And I’ve heard—I have heard, Bristles—that any fellow who arms himself with a pen’orth of blue-stone from the druggist’s, couldn’t have the yellow jaundice if he tried. What might you wear this for, pray?”
“My Aunt Annette gave it me as a present when she was dying,” answered poor helpless Charley, who had never the smallest notion of taking chaff otherwise than seriously, or of giving chaff back again.
He had dressed himself to his trousers and shirt, and stood with his hand stretched out, waiting for his cross.
“In the Worcester Journal, one day last June, I read an advertisement as big as a house, offering a child’s caul for sale,” cried Snepp. “Any gentleman or lady buying that caul and taking it to sea, could never be drowned. Bristles thinks as long as he wears this, he won’t come to be hanged.”
“How’s your grandmother, Miss Charlotte?”
“I wish you would please to let me alone,” said he patiently. “My father would not have placed me here had he known.”
“Why don’t you write and tell him, Bristles?”
“I would not like to grieve him,” simply answered Charley. “I can bear. And he does so much want me to learn good English.”
“This cross is gold, I suppose?” said Bill Whitney, who now had it.
“Yes, it is gold,” answered Van Rheyn.