Piccino, and other child stories

IN BOYHOOD AND NOW

As a travelling companion what a success he was! How he made friends in the train, at railway stations, on steamers! How, if one lost sight of him for a moment, he invariably reappeared full of delight, with the information that he had “found a friend.”

As I was struggling in the usual manner up the crowded gangway of an ocean steamer on one occasion, his flushed and radiant countenance appeared over the rail, where he had climbed.

“Dearest, dearest,” he said, “I’ve found a friend. He’s a French gentleman and can’t speak English.” He had found him on the tug, and they had apparently sworn eternal amity between the wharf and the steamer, though how this had been accomplished I was never quite able to determine, as he had only just begun to attack valiantly a verb or so of the first conjugation. But with the assistance of “donner,” “aller,” “aimer,” and a smile like his, nothing was impossible.

His circle of acquaintances during an ocean voyage was choice and large. And one languid passenger, lying in her steamer chair with cushions behind her and fur robes over her, was never passed without the affectionate, inquiring smiles of a protector, and at intervals through all the day he presented himself to “look after” her.

“Are you all right, dearest?” he would say. “Do you want your feet tucked in? Did the deck steward bring you your lunch? Are your cushions comfortable?” And these matters being attended to he would kiss her gayly and run off to explore engines, or gather valuable information about walking-beams.

On several occasions he and his brother made some rather long railroad journeys alone. It was quite safe to send them. If they had not been able to take care of themselves, half the world would have taken care of them. Conductors conversed with them, passengers were interested in them, and they arrived at the end of their travels laden with tribute. After one such journey, taken together between Washington and Boston, with what joy they performed their toilets through an entire summer with the assistance of a large box of wonderful soaps and perfumes, sent to them by an acquaintance made en voyage.

“He was Lionel’s friend,” Vivian explained. “I think he said he was a drummer. He was so nice to us. My friend that I made was a professor in a college, I believe, and he gave me this to remember him by.”

“This” was a pretty nugget of gold, and was accompanied by a card on which the donor had written the most affectionately kind things of the pleasure he had had in his brief acquaintance with his young travelling companion, whose bonne mine he should not soon forget.

One could always be quite sure that he would give no trouble during a journey, that he would always be ready to perform any service, that no railroad nor ocean boat official could withstand him when he presented himself with a smiling request.

It is easy to call to mind, at any moment, some memory of him, his face flushed, his hair damp on his forehead, his eyes courageous, as he struggled with something too big for him, he had felt it his duty to take charge of, as he swayed with the crowd down the gangway of some steamer at Southampton or some paquebot at Calais.

“It is too heavy for you, darling,” one would say. “You look so hot. Let me carry it.”

“Oh, no,” would be his valiant answer. “I’m all right, dearest. It’s rather a warm day, but a boy doesn’t mind being warm.”

Even foreign languages did not appall him.

“I’m only a little boy, you know,” he would say, cheerfully. “It doesn’t matter if it does sound funny, just so that they understand me. I like to talk to them.”

So he conversed with Annunciata in the kitchen, and Luigi in the dining-room, as it had been his habit to converse with Carrie and Dan years before, for by this time his love-locks had been cropped and had changed to brown, but he still remained the same charming and engaging little person.

“Boys are sometimes a great trouble,” commented Luigi, in referring to him and his brother, “but these—they are little signorini.”

Fauntleroy had “occurred” nearly four years before the time when he exhausted all the resources of the Paris Exposition, but it was still Fauntleroy, though a taller one, in schoolboy suit and Eton collar, and shorn of his boucles blondes, who marched off at nine o’clock every morning for two weeks, and spent the day exploring the treasures of the exhibition. Sometimes he was quite alone, sometimes he had appointments with some “friends” he had made in the passage from New York to Havre—three interesting men whose connection with the electrical exhibit inspired him with admiration and delight. My impression is that they did not speak French, and that it enraptured him to place his vocabulary at their disposal.

“They are so kind to me, dearest,” he said, just as he had said it at three years old, when he visited his “friend Mrs. Wilkins.”

“It must be an entertaining spectacle,” I often thought, “to see him walk into the restaurant quite unattended, order his little déjeuner à la fourchette, dispose of it in dignified solitude at a small table, and present the garçon with a pourboire as if he were forty. I should like to be a spectator from afar. No doubt the waiters know him and make jocular remarks among themselves.”

But it was when he was only seven that Fauntleroy really occurred. He had been so amusing and interesting that summer, and I had reflected upon him so much! Every few days I heard some delightful anecdote about him, or saw him do something incomparably quaint. What led me most into speculation was the effect he invariably produced upon people, touching little fascinations he exercised.

“Do you know, I never saw a child like him!” said a clever man of the world who had spent an hour talking to him.

And, curiously enough, it was exactly the idea expressed by an old colored aunty years before. “Dat chile,” she said, “he suttanly ain’t like no other chile. ’Tain’t jest dat he’s smart—though cose he’s smart, smart as they make ’em. It’s sump’n else. An’ he’s the frien’liest little human I ever seed—he suttanly is!”

I had been ill that year and the year before it, and of that illness I have many memories which are beautiful and touching things. One is of many disturbed and weary nights, when the door of my room opened quietly and a little figure entered—such an adorable little figure, in a white nightgown, and with bright hair, tumbled by sleep, falling about a serious, small face.

“I’ve come to take care of you, dearest,” he would say, with his indescribable protecting and comforting air. “I’ll sit by you and make you go to sleep.”

And somehow there seemed to emanate from his childish softness a sort of soothing which could not have been put into words.

It was his special province to put me to sleep when I was restless. He assumed it as a sacred duty, and had the utmost confidence in his power to do it.

“I’ll put you to sleep,” he would say. “I will just sit by you and hold your hand and make you quiet.”

How long had he sat by me on that one night which I shall always remember? I do not know. But he had been so quiet, and had sat holding my hand so long, that I could not find it in my heart to let him know that the charm had not worked and that I was not really asleep. I pretended that I was, lying very still, and breathing with soft regularity.

He stayed quite a long time after I knew he thought I was quiet for the night, he was so determined to be quite sure that nothing would disturb me. At last he began with the most cautious softness to take his hand away. When he had been a baby I had sometimes laid him down to sleep with just such cautious movement. How gradually and softly the small fingers released themselves one by one, how slowly, with what infinite precaution of slowness, the warm, kind little palm was detached from mine. Then there was a mysterious, careful movement, and I knew he was leaving his chair. I dared not open my eyes for fear he would see me, and be heartbroken because I was awake. What was he doing? There were no footsteps, and yet he was moving a little—a very little, it seemed. And the movement was so slow, and interrupted by such pauses, that the length of time it lasted added to my curiousness. What idea had he been inspired by? Whatsoever he was doing he was putting his entire soul into, and he should not be crushed by the thought that it was all in vain. When I could hear that he had reached the door I opened an eye very cautiously. The opening of the door was as clever and quiet as the mysterious movement. It was opened only a little, there was more careful movement, and then it was drawn to. But though I had been looking directly at the slip of light I had not seen him. Somehow he had passed through without coming within my line of vision.

I lay mystified. The incomprehensibleness of it gave me something to think about. His room was near my own, and I knew that he went to it and got into bed. I knew, also, that he would be asleep as soon as his curly head touched the pillow.

He had been asleep perhaps an hour when his brother came in. He had been spending the evening at the house of a friend. He was usually a tender and thoughtful thing himself, but this night the excitement of festivity had intoxicated him and made him forgetful. He came up the staircase and ran into the bedroom with a childish rush.

Exactly what happened I could only guess at. I had reason to suppose that my young protector and medical attendant was wakened with some extra sense of flurry taking place. He evidently sat up in bed in reproachful despair.

“What have I done?” said his brother. “What is the matter?”

I heard tears in the plaintive little voice that answered—actual tears.

“Oh!” he said, “I know you’ve wakened her! I know you have! It was so hard to get her to sleep. And at last I did, and then I was so afraid of wakening her that I went down on the floor and crawled out of the room on my hands and knees. And I think it took an hour.”

“Darling,” I murmured, in the drowsiest possible tone, when he crept into the room to look at me, “I’ve had a lovely sleep, and I’m going to sleep again. You made me so quiet.” But with the most serious difficulty I restrained myself from clutching him in my arms with a force which would have betrayed to him all my adoring duplicity.

It was things such as these I remembered when he was so deliciously amusing, and I heard stories of him every day.

Sometimes, when swinging in my hammock on the piazza, I caught sight of him flying on his small bicycle down the tree-shaded avenue, a delightful, animated picture, his strong, graceful child body beautifully defined in his trim, closefitting Jersey suit, his red scarf and fez brilliant touches of color, his waving, flying hair brightened to gold as he darted through the sunshine and into the shade. I used to say to myself: “He is so good to look at! He is so pretty! That is why every one likes him so.” And then, when I heard him say some quaint thing which was an actual delight through its droll ingenuousness, I said: “It is because he is so amusing!”

So I studied him day after day, often trying to imagine the effect his fearless candor and unsophisticated point of view would have upon certain persons who did not know his type.

I was convalescing from my long illness, and had plenty of time to amuse myself with such speculations. He was such a patriotic young American; he was so engaged in an impending presidential election at the time; his remarks were so well worth hearing. I began, among other fancies about him, to imagine his making them with that frankly glowing face to conservative English people. He had English blood in his veins, and things more unheard-of had occurred than that, through a combination of circumstances, he might be surrounded by things very new to him.

“When a person is a duke,” he had said to me once, “what makes him one? What has he done?” His opinion evidently was that dukedoms were a species of reward for superhuman sweetness of character and brilliant intellectual capacity. I began to imagine the interest that would be awakened in his mind by the contemplation of ducal personages.

It amused me to analyze the subject of what his point of view would be likely to be. I knew it would be productive of immense entertainment to his acquaintances. I was sure that the duke would be subjected to sweet but searching cross-questioning, and that much lively interest would be felt in the subject of coronets. He would regard them as a species of eccentric hat. What questions he would ask, what enthusiasm he would display, when he was impressed by things beautiful or stately and interesting! Would he seem “a cheeky little beggar” to less republican minds than his own? I asked myself this curiously. But no, I was sure he would not. He would be so simple; he would expect such splendor of mind and of noble friendliness that the hypothetical duke would like him as Dan and Carrie did, and he would end by saying “My friend the Duke of Blankshire,” as affectionately as he had said “My friend the milkman.”

It was only a thread of fancy for a while, but one day I had an idea.

“I will write a story about him,” I said. “I will put him in a world quite new to him, and see what he will do. How shall I bring a small American boy into close relationship with an English nobleman—irascible, conservative, disagreeable? He must live with him, talk to him, show him his small, unconscious, republican mind. He will be more effective if I make him a child who has lived in the simplest possible way. Eureka! Son of younger son, separated from ill-tempered noble father because he has married a poor young American beauty. Young father dead, elder brothers dead, boy comes into title! How it would amaze him and bewilder him! Yes, there it is, and Vivian shall be he—just Vivian, with his curls and his eyes, and his friendly, kind little soul. Little Lord Something-or-other. What a pretty title—Little Lord ——, Little Lord —— what?”

And a day later it was Little Lord Fauntleroy. A story like that is easily written. In part, it was being lived before my eyes.

“I can wash myself quite well, thank you,” he said, scrubbing vigorously one day. “I can do it quite well, dearest, if some one will just ’zamine the corners.”

He had always spoken very clearly, but there were a few words his pronunciation of which endeared them inexpressibly to me. On the evening of the day before “Fauntleroy” spent his first morning with “Lord Dorincourt” he brought into my room a parlor base-ball game to show me.

It was a lovely thing to see his delight over it, and to note the care with which he tried to make all technical points clear to an interested but unintelligent parent. What vigorous little attitudes he threw himself into when he endeavored to show me how the ball was thrown in the real game!

“I’m afraid that I am a very stupid little mammy,” I said. “What does the first base do? And what is the pitcher for? I’m very dull, you see.”

“Oh, no!” he said. “No, you’re not, dearest. It’s me, you know. I’m afraid that I’m not a very good ’splainer. And besides, you are a lady, you know, and ladies don’t play base-ball.”

Almost every day I recorded something he had said or suggested.

And how delightful it was to read the manuscript to him and his brother! He used to sit in a large arm-chair holding his knee, or with his hands in his pockets.

“Do you know,” he said to me once, “I like that boy! There’s one thing about him, he never forgets about dearest.”

When the first appearance of the false claimant occurred, he turned quite pale; so did his brother.

“Oh, dearest!” they gasped, “why did you do that? Oh, don’t do it!”

“What will he do?” the occupant of the arm-chair asked. “Won’t he, dearest, be the Earl’s boy any more?”

“‘That other boy,’ said Fauntleroy tremulously to Lord Dorincourt, the next day, ‘he will have to—to be your boy now—as I was—won’t he?’”

‘No,’ answered the Earl, and he said it so fiercely that Cedric quite jumped.

“‘Shall I be your boy even if I’m not going to be an earl?’ he said. ‘Shall I be your boy just as I was before?’”

But it was a real little heart that had beaten at the thought.

He has been considered such an ideal little person—Cedric Errol, Lord Fauntleroy—and he was so real after all. Perhaps it is worth while explaining that he was only a simple, natural thing—a child, whose great charm was that he was the innocent friend of the whole world.

I have reason to believe that an impression exists that the passage of years has produced no effect whatever on the great original, that he has still waving golden hair, and wears black velvet doublets and broad collars of lace. This is an error. He is sixteen. He plays foot-ball and tennis, and battles sternly with Greek. He is anxious not to “flunk” in geometry, and his hair is exceedingly short and brown. He has a fine sense of humor, and his relatives consider it rather a good joke to present him to intimates, as he appears before them, looking particularly cheerful and robust, in the words first heard by Havisham:

“This is—‘Little Lord Fauntleroy.’”

But there are things which do not change with the darkening of golden hair and the passage of boyish years.