THE IDOL OF THE BLIND

THE IDOL
OF THE BLIND

A NOVEL


BY
TOM GALLON
AUTHOR OF
TATTERLY, A PRINCE OF MISCHANCE,
DICKY MONTEITH, ETC.

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1899

Copyright, 1899,
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

All rights reserved.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

It was an old and a very ordinary story; such stories are played out to their bitter end day after day around us. David Willis was poor, and had absolutely no expectations; so far as old Robert Carlaw was concerned he simply did not exist—except as many other people existed, as a part of the world with which he had nothing to do. David, for his part, was as patient and long-suffering as the girl who loved him; and so they solemnly and pitifully plighted their troth, and agreed to wait. Boldness or resource of action was not in either of them; the girl, despite her love for the man, and the sort of humble, patient faithfulness with which she was endowed, would not have risked her father’s anger on any account. So, in a poor, half-ridiculous, half-heroic fashion, they parted and waited.

They waited, strange as it may seem, for nearly twenty years; until the man had entered the forties and the woman was nearing them. She was still a pretty woman, soft-eyed and gentle of voice, with a great mine of tenderness hidden away in her which no one had been able to discover. When, on her father’s death, she married David Willis, there seemed a prospect that the mine would be discovered, but the time had gone past; life had been so long a flat and stale and unprofitable thing that the old fierce heart-beats at the thought of her lover, the old hunger of love for him, had died away into a mere tremulous wonder as to whether he would be good to her, or whether he might have moments of harshness and sternness, like her father. She had hung too long expectant on hope to believe that the world was going to be very good to her now; she was only a little glad, for her lover’s sake, that his time of waiting was ended.

David Willis was a musician and a dreamer; not a very great musician, and certainly a dreamer whose dreams brought him no profit. He had filled the place of organist in one or two minor churches, living simply and contentedly. By the very irony of things, when the woman he loved was able to come to him and put her hands in his, and tell him that there was no further bar to their happiness, he was out of an engagement, and had scarcely a penny in the world. But, with a childlike faith which, even at their years, came near to the sublime, they married first and tried to be worldly afterward. Fortunately for them, her brother was a man of property in a small, old-fashioned town near the coast of Kent; and, having considerable influence in the place, he offered, through the clergyman of the parish, the vacant post of organist in the parish church to David Willis, after first roundly abusing his sister for having married a pauper.

It was a quaint old town, a place of red roofs and winding streets and strange old buildings; a very paradise to the dreamer and the woman who had waited so long for him. Her brother’s house stood at the far end of the town, in the newer part of it; but they saw little of him, and had, indeed, no particular desire to do so. They had their own quiet dwelling-place, a little house nestling under the frowning shadows of the church wherein he worked; a strange old place, with low ceilings and black beams, with a garden of roses stretching right along under the gray old church wall. Her life, for a few months at least, was a sweet and shadowed thing; people said afterward—people who had never known her—that they had seen her sitting often in the old church, with her mild eyes looking upward at a great rose window over the porch, while her husband practised for the services on the wheezy old organ; had seen her wandering in her garden among the roses, singing to herself in a subdued voice—the voice of one who has long been forced to be silent, or to subdue any natural mirth that might be in her.

The summer went by, while David Willis played on his organ, and his wife sang among her roses; and with the autumn came a new light in the eyes of the woman—a light as of one who waits and hopes for something. Poor, trembling, wistful creature, what dreams were hers then! What dreams when she sat by her husband’s side in the twilight, looking out over the town where the lights were beginning to twinkle one by one like sleepy eyes! What dreams of a little life that was to recompense her for all she had missed, and all she never could find in any other way! Childish hands were to draw all that mine of tenderness out of her, as no other hands could have done; childish words were to wake echoing words in her dull heart, and stir it to life again. She dreamed tremblingly of all she would do; of all she would teach the child; saw it walking by her side among the roses; fluttered into church proudly, braving the eyes of younger women with the mite beside her.

Those were dreams which never came true. She had waited, through dull and spiritless years, for her chance of life; it was written, in that book which no man shall read, that her life in that fuller sense was to be but a short one. She gave birth to her child—a boy—and knew her fate even before they told her. She sank slowly, drifting out of life with as little effort to retain it as she had shown throughout her days. Almost the last thing she did was to take her husband’s hand, as he sat speechless with grief beside her, and put it to her lips, and draw it up against her cheek.

“We waited—a long time—Davie,” she whispered. “I wish—I might—have—stayed.” She did not speak again; she held his hand in that position until the last breath fluttered out of her lips.

David Willis was utterly incapable of appreciating anything except the magnitude of his loss. He wandered desolately from room to room, picking up things that had belonged to her and putting his lips to them, and weeping, in a hopeless, despairing fashion, like a child. Fortunately for that other child who had been the direct cause of the disaster, there were kindly people about the place who cared for it, and found a nurse for it—a young and healthy woman who had but just lost a child of her own, and who was installed in the house of David Willis at once. From that big house in the newer part of the town came Mr. Robert Carlaw, the brother of the dead woman, hushing his loud and blustering voice a little as he crossed the threshold of the place of mourning.

He had an air with him, this Robert Carlaw; a sense of saying, when he entered a room, that it was something poorer and meaner than before he came; a magnificent air of proprietorship in every one he honoured by a nod or a handshake; the very town through which he walked became, not a sweet and beautiful old place which seemed to have been dropped clean out of the middle ages, but an awkward, badly built little place in which Robert Carlaw was good enough to live. The swing of him was so fine that the skirts of his coat brushed the houses as he went down the street; other passengers humbly took the roadway.

He was very kind and sympathetic with David Willis, with the kindness and sympathy of a patron to a dependent who has suffered a loss; he had scarcely seen his sister since she was a child, and knew absolutely nothing of her. He seated himself in an armchair—the chair which had been hers—opposite to where David Willis sat with his head bowed in his hands; he coughed, with a little shade of annoyance in the cough, as of one who is not receiving proper attention. David Willis looked up without speaking.

“Bad business, this,” said Mr. Carlaw, with a jerk of the head which was meant to convey that he referred to what was lying upstairs. “A man feels these things; I know I did. Cut me up dreadfully.”

“Yes,” said David, in a low voice.

“She was never strong, you know,” went on the brother; “not like the others, I mean. And then she married late, which tries a woman, I’m told.”

“Yes,” replied the other again in the same tone.

“She was just the sort that would give in without making what I call a kick for it. Hadn’t half enough of the devil in her. Not a bit like her brother in that respect. Why, I assure you, they’ve positively tried to kill me, half a dozen times; given me over for dead. But they didn’t know Bob Carlaw; he’s always proved one too many for ’em. There’s a lot of life in Bob.”

David Willis got up slowly. “Would you like to see her?” he asked.

“No, no; I don’t think so. It wouldn’t—wouldn’t do any good, and the sight of any one dead always upsets me. No, I don’t think I’ll see her; I only—only called in case I could do anything. A man needs sympathy at such a time.” He got up and took his hat, and swung toward the door. Turning there, he said abruptly, “What about the kid?”

“The——” said David, looking at him blankly.

“The child; is it alive?”

“Yes,” replied David; “doing well, they tell me.”

“Ah—that’s bad—for you, I mean.” He paused a moment, coughed uncomfortably, and stuck his hat sideways on his head; then remembered himself, and took it off and frowned at it. Finally he got out of the door awkwardly, and swung himself out through the garden of the roses and went up the street, trying hard not to whistle.

It was on the day of the funeral that David Willis first seemed to grasp the idea of his responsibility in regard to his infant son. He had had no thought of that before; had listened to the sympathizing remarks of the few friends he had with indifference, and had scarcely appeared to realize that there was a new element in his life at all. He grasped things slowly at all times, and required time to digest them; he had room for nothing else in his mind then but the thought of his loss. The day that saw her committed to the earth in the old churchyard within sight of the garden where she had walked was a day which passed for him like a troubled dream; he had a vague remembrance that people were very kind to him, and helped him, and told him what to do and where to stand. It was while he stood beside the grave that some words from the burial service broke upon his ears as though nothing had been said before; he saw in them something new and fresh and hopeful.

“Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up and——”

He lost all that followed; with those final words came a new thought into his mind. The woman he had loved, for whom he had waited and hungered so patiently, was to sleep her last sleep in that quiet place, to sleep as calmly and as gently as she had lived. But there was something more than this, something to comfort him. God had, after all, been very merciful; so, in his simple mind, he told himself. The poor, frail woman was gone; in her place had come a little child. The words were true; he applied them at once to the baby. “He cometh up—like a flower.” Surely that was true; his eyes brightened as he thought of it; the bitterness fell away from his heart; he almost longed to leave her sleeping there and to get back to the child. He scarcely seemed to have seen the child yet—to know what it was like.

As he crossed the churchyard to his house the thing was forced more clearly and strongly upon him; he saw, with the fine instinct of love, that this was what she would have wished, that the child must grow up to think well of her, and to take her place. A man of rare singleness of life and purpose, he had been capable only of single emotions; and those emotions must, of necessity, be great. His dogged patience in waiting for one woman through all the best years of his life had had in it much of heroism; that was ended, and he turned now to something else to fill his days. The child should do it; the child had been sent for that very purpose. Over and over again the words came back to him, “He cometh up—like a flower.” That was very beautiful; it seemed strange that he had not thought of that before. He dreamed a dream, even as the woman had done, of all that the child was to be to him.

He went into the room where the scrap of humanity lay sleeping against the strange woman’s breast; the woman glanced up at him almost resentfully as he bent over the child; just such another child had lain warm against her, and this one filled the void in her heart a little. She was a humble creature, of no subtle emotions whatever; her sense of motherhood, so recently awakened, was the strongest feeling in her.

The man touched the baby’s cheek with a hesitating forefinger, and then turned away and walked out of the room. He saw quite clearly how the child would grow up, knowing only him, desiring no one else to fill its world. Before another hour had passed, the solitary man had mapped out the seat the child should take in the house and in church; had wandered in fancy over the fields through which the child should accompany him. There was no disloyalty to the dead woman in all this; the child had sprung out of the woman, in every sense, and took her place quite naturally in the deep heart of the man.

That evening David Willis received an unexpected visitor. The visitor came slowly and timidly, and yet with a certain forced air of defiance upon him, up the garden path, and knocked at the door of the little house. The one servant the house boasted, and who did not sleep there, had gone to her own home at the other end of the town; David Willis opened the door, and stared out into the twilight at the visitor.

The caller was a little man—very alert and very upright, with a tightly buttoned frock coat, and an old-fashioned silk hat with a curly brim. He carried something in one hand behind him. David Willis remembered to have seen him once or twice in the streets, walking very erect, and swinging a cane with a tassel attached to it; and always in church on Sundays, where he occupied a little odd pew in one corner, and gave the responses in a very loud and sonorous voice not at all fitting to his stature. David held the door in one hand, and looked out wonderingly at the little man.

“My name is Garraway-Kyle—Captain Garraway-Kyle—late of her Majesty’s service. You are in trouble, sir, your wife”—he stopped abruptly and coughed and frowned, and tugged at one end of his white mustache with his disengaged hand—“your wife, sir, was good enough to admire my flowers; used to stop sometimes to look at them. I thought perhaps——” His sunburned face took on a deeper tinge, and he brought his hand from behind him and showed a carefully arranged bunch of flowers.

David Willis came out into the little path, and closed the door behind him; his voice was rather unsteady when he spoke. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “Would you like me to go with you and point out the—the grave?”

“I know it. I was there this afternoon,” replied the captain, shortly. “But I should like you to come with me.” So the two men went in silence out of the garden, and by the little gate into the churchyard, David Willis having no hat, and the captain carrying his in his hand.

At the grave the captain knelt stiffly, as though it were an effort for him to do so, and put the flowers at the head of the new mound. He remained for nearly half a minute kneeling, and then drew himself up and faced the other. “She was a sweet and gentle woman, sir; I have seen her often; I have ventured to peep over the wall when she was in her own garden. She was very fond of flowers.”

“Yes,” replied David, “very.”

“I wished sometimes that I might have offered her some of mine, the finest garden in the town, sir. But, of course, I did not know her. I am sorry to have had to give them to her like this.”

“You are very good,” said David, softly.

Captain Garraway-Kyle turned away and looked up for a moment at the sombre church which rose above them. “You had not been married long, I think, Mr. Willis?”

“Not quite a year,” replied David.

“Ah! The child lives, I think?”

“Yes.”

They walked back together to the gate which led to the cottage; and there the captain held out his hand. “Thank you,” he said, stiffly; and then, “I am very sorry. By the way—boy or girl?”

“Oh, it’s a boy,” replied David.

The captain had gone a few paces down the street when he turned on his heel and came back again. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Willis, but what will you call him?”

It was almost an idle question, prompted in the captain’s mind for want of something better to say; but it set the old train of thought running in David Willis’s mind as it had run all that afternoon. The words he had heard at the grave-side seemed to sound in his ears again; the sudden thought struck him to give the boy some name that should keep in memory his mother, and the purpose for which he came into the world, and all that he meant to his father. He faced about, and looked at his visitor with a new light in his eyes. “I shall call him ‘Comethup,’” he said, slowly.

“I beg your pardon——” The captain looked a little startled.

“‘Comethup,’” said David again, half to himself. “Yes, that’s the name.”

“Oh, I see; family name, I presume?” said the other.

“Yes,” replied David Willis, “a family name. Good-night.” And he went inside, and sat down in the darkness to think about it.

CHAPTER II.

David Willis stuck to his determination, so suddenly made on that night of the captain’s visit, and the child was duly baptized under the name of Comethup Willis. Simple David Willis chuckled to himself a little over his ingenuity; he grew to like the quaintness of the name, and it was a constant reminder—if such were necessary—of the tragedy which belonged to the boy’s birth. He always spoke the name rapidly when addressing the child or when referring to it to any one else, slurring the cumbrous name that he might hide the secret of it; only to himself did he ever speak it slowly with the added words, “as a flower.” It was a never-ceasing source of joy to him to think how cleverly the name had been conceived; he dwelt upon it lovingly, with the pride of the inventor; and it became on his tongue a caress whenever it was uttered.

Apart from the mere name, the child filled his life and his thoughts to a greater extent than he had ever even dared to hope. He grew rapidly, and shook off the childish ailments which came with his years with greater ease than most children; he had about him, even as a little fellow, the grave, shy tenderness of his mother. Captain Garraway-Kyle murmured once, as he held him at arms’-length and looked critically at him, that he had his mother’s eyes.

It was a strange life for the child, alone with a dreamy man in that old house under the shadow of the church; if he could have written down his impressions of life and those about him at that time, they would have made curious reading. He remembered when it was possible for him, by a great effort, to get both hands up to the door knob, and to twist it round and stagger backward, pulling the door with him; understood fully what a steep and treacherous affair the stone step was which led down to the garden; and what a proud and wonderful day it was when he summoned courage to step straight down upon it, instead of manipulating the descent with one small bare knee on the stone and the foot of the other leg feeling for the earth below. He knew his mother’s garden by heart, and all the wondrous corners of it, where strange things hid which no one saw but himself. He learned early that the roses which grew there, and nodded in a friendly fashion to him as he passed, only grew there for a small boyish nose to be poked up at them to get their scent, and were not to be pulled except on rare occasions, when his father went round the garden with a basket, and gathered the choicest, and tied them into a rude kind of wreath. Comethup knew then that a great expedition was on foot; that they would go out of the gate at the farthest end of the garden, and that he would stumble—holding fast by his father’s hand—through a place where the grass was very soft and very green, and where some of it was raised in long hillocks higher than the rest; a place where large flat stones with curious marks upon them, and little babies’ heads with wings cut on some, cropped up out of the earth. On one of these hillocks the little homely wreath would be laid, and his father would kneel and seem to whisper something behind his hand. He knew that his mother slept there, and that she would never wake up again, and never walk with him, as his father walked, in the garden of the roses. Child though he was, he always felt a little sadness as he stumbled back over the hillocks to the garden gate, because the mother he had never seen lay, an inscrutable mystery, out of his sight under the grass.

There was one never-to-be-forgotten day when he first learned of something outside his own small world. It was Sunday, and the heavy old bells were swinging, and his father had gone out through the sunlight with books under his arm to the church. It struck suddenly upon the child that this day was different from all the rest; that the little maid-servant had a cleaner face and a whiter apron, and that his own tiny suit was one which was laid by in a tall old press all the rest of the week. Most of our impressions, whatever age we may be, come to us through the sense of smell, and Comethup’s impression of the day came to him through the scent of the clothes. They bore the same scent as the big best bedroom upstairs—a room in which no one ever slept and into which he had peeped one day when the door was open; just such a scent as that which hung about it had been wafted out to his nostrils then. He began to see that there must be something “best” about this day also, as there was about everything connected with it.

When David Willis came back from church, the child had got his questions ready, and knew exactly what answers he required, as a child always unerringly does. He asked why all the shops along the other side of the street were closed, and why the bells rang on that day, and why the people sang in the big church which loomed above them. And then he heard for the first time of that other world into which we try so hard to peer; of that dread Presence—dread to a child—beyond the skies that shuts in our vision. He was puzzled to understand how his mother could be right above him, watching to see if he were a good boy or a bad; and why, in that case, those flowers were put upon that grass-covered bed of hers out in the churchyard. He pondered the matter deeply, and was much disconcerted to think that the God of whom every one seemed so much afraid was all round him and could see everything he did.

He went one day into the church with his father—an experience indeed! It was quite empty, save for themselves, and the first thought that occurred to him was to wonder where the roof was; and why his voice rumbled and rattled and sprang at him from far above when he incautiously spoke in his usual shrill treble. The phrase which his father used—“the house of God”—awed him; he understood why the roof was so much higher than that of their own house. A lovely pattern of many colours on the stone pavement at his feet arrested his attention. He followed the shafts of light upward to the great rose window high up in the wall over the porch. His heart went a little quicker, and he gripped his father’s hand with his baby fingers. That surely must be the eye of God looking down at him.

He went home tremblingly to think the matter over; saw in the childish wonder of discovery something that no one had found before; screwed his courage to make further inquiries of his father concerning this dread Being. It was a terror to him to learn that the Being was everywhere, not alone in the great place where people went in their best clothes to worship him. He crept up to his tiny bedroom under the roof that night, and hurriedly closed the door and drew the curtains, and lay in bed quakingly triumphant at the thought that he had shut It out, only to wake up with a start in a little while at the remembrance that It must have been in the room before his precautions were taken. He climbed out of bed, and pattered across to the window; pulled back the curtains, and pushed open the casement. All the benign influence of a summer starlight night was about him; the lights were twinkling sleepily and safely down in the town; and he could hear calm, slow country voices in the street beyond the garden. Life—great and wonderful to his childish mind, although bounded by so narrow a horizon—seemed beautiful and good and secure; he smiled, and dropped his sleepy head on his arms on the window ledge, and slept there calmly till the morning came.

The world is always a place of giants to us when we are very little; therein lies the tragedy and the terror of it. We are always told that childhood is such a happy time; we cry always how gladly we would return to it. But we know well that we would not return to it with the ignorance with which we left it; that we should go back to its delights and its irresponsibilities with the magician’s wand of Experience in our hands to make it a fairyland. To a lonely child the world in which he lives is a place of terrors, with no one who understands his needs to explain to him all he craves so desperately to know.

Comethup was left pretty much to his own devices in those early days. David Willis liked to have the boy near him, liked to see him moving about the house. But, in his dreamy fashion, he took but scant notice of the child as a child; he painted to himself glowing pictures of what the boy would be when he had grown older and was ripe for companionship; for the present, he waited a little impatiently for that time to come. So it happened that Comethup explored his world alone.

The seasons seemed always to come suddenly. He would wake up, bright and alert, on a glorious morning of sunshine, with an endless prospect of sunny days before him; fires were things of the past, and the garden was no more a sealed place, wherein he must not run for fear of splashing his little white legs with mud. In just the same way there seemed no intermediate time between the summer, with its glorious abundance of roses and its long, hot afternoons, and the time when the roses were gone, and he was curled up like a little comfortable animal on the hearthrug before the parlour fire. That was the time, too, for going to bed in the dark, when the dreadful hour crept inexorably on; when he must leave the warmth and brightness of the lower room and climb with reluctant feet into a colder atmosphere, where grim shadows lurked on the landing, and the pale moon grinned in at him through an uncurtained window, like a queer face all on one side.

The church grew, quite naturally, from its mystic qualities, to be his chief delight. Everything about it was wonderful, from the long flight of stone steps which led up to the organ-loft where his father played, to the great brown wooden bird, with its beak open, and with outstretched wings, which stood on a carved pillar before the altar. Its seats were a never-failing source of delight to the shy child—places in which one could hide, secure from every one, and look up at the great roof, and at the sunlight slanting in through the windows. But perhaps it was best of all to sit up in the organ-loft, as he sometimes did with his father; to draw a huge hassock close up against the old-fashioned wooden partition, and sit there and look down, unseen and unsuspected, at the people below. Comethup always stood up at the proper places on those occasions, and sat down when the people rustled into their seats; he tried, too, to murmur something which sounded a little like the responses which rumbled up from below.

His world widened out a little as the placid years flowed on. The garden of the roses no longer bounded his horizon; the gate ceased to be a barrier which must not be passed. The spirit of adventure was strong in Comethup one summer afternoon, when his father was sleeping peacefully on the hard horsehair sofa in the parlour, and the little maid who waited upon them was busied in the kitchen. The garden had been all explored; on such a day as this, when the air was heavy and still, the very scent of the roses hung heavily. Poor Comethup was a little tired of roses—a little tired even of that wonderful garden, every corner of which, every stick and stone, he knew by heart. And then, just as he clung to the iron railings of the gate, and looked out disconsolately into the quiet street, there came a playmate.

It was a dog; a mere boisterous, happy-go-lucky, tumbling, joyous puppy of a few months; a thing of comical crinkled mouth and serious eyes, a delightful romping rascal that loved the world and hailed every creature friend. It stopped opposite the gate where Comethup stood, and backed itself upon its ridiculous little haunches and inch of tail, and barked deliriously; then dashed off a foot or two in excited chase of something which didn’t exist; and then, suddenly remembering Comethup, returned madly to the assault, thrusting its little black nose under the gate in a frantic endeavour to bite Comethup’s little white socks.

It was irresistible. Comethup cautiously pulled open the gate, trembling at his daring as he did so, and went down on the gravel on his knees, clapping his hands, and doing all in his power to induce the puppy to come to him.

But that wary animal knew better than that. He backed away, moving his stump of tail convulsively, and, as Comethup followed on hands and knees, backed away farther still out of reach. Finally the puppy scrambled off sideways, going through the most extraordinary gyrations and looking back at the child with one ear cocked up, and then dashing off again sideways, tripping himself up occasionally in his haste. Comethup got to his feet and set off down the pavement after the puppy, leaving the garden gate wide open.

The sternness of the chase awoke in Comethup’s blood; he determined to have that puppy at all costs—to feel the soft, warm, live, struggling thing in his arms. Twice he was certain he had it; had dropped all over it, so to speak, in a frantic endeavour to clasp it. But the thing slid from under his arms and impudently snapped at his very nose, and was off again. At last, however, he ran it to earth in a corner, where it promptly rolled over on its back, with its four legs in the air, and surrendered.

By that time Comethup had lost his way; but that fact was of the smallest possible moment. He was in a glorious city he had not seen before; a place of curious old houses bending their upper windows toward each other as though to whisper; of long, quaint gardens thick with Old-World flowers—stocks and hollyhocks, and others beloved of our grandmothers; with another church, not so magnificent or so large as the one he knew, but older and quainter, with a great brass dial up on one wall from which a brass finger projected to show the shadow of the afternoon sun. The puppy was struggling in his arms, jerking itself frantically upward to lick his round, baby face, and to softly bite his chin. That of course was disconcerting; but Comethup managed to take in a great deal with his eyes nevertheless.

He managed, among other things, to take in the figure of an upright old gentleman with a heavy gray mustache, who was clipping and trimming with a pair of scissors in one of the gardens. Comethup had just stopped, out of the politest curiosity, to watch him, when the old gentleman swung round and marched toward the gate, and cried violently, pointing a finger at the child, “What the devil are you doing with my dog, boy?”

Poor Comethup had never been spoken to in that fashion before; he began to see in the old gentleman retributive justice sweeping down upon him for having left his father’s garden—above all, for having left the gate open, an unpardonable thing. He would have liked to drop the puppy, but remembered in time that he might hurt it; so he lowered it gently to the ground, where it at once commenced tugging at his shoestrings. With as much dignity as he could command under the circumstances, Comethup tremblingly began to explain that he had found it.

Before he had finished a half-dozen words, however, the little old gentleman, with an exclamation, had pulled the gate open, and had come out upon the pavement. Comethup began to tremble very much indeed, but the old gentleman took him—not unkindly—by the chin, and turned his face up so that he might look at it. Comethup must have looked very appealing indeed, for the old gentleman suddenly smiled, and exclaimed, “Why, it’s little Comethup!”

“Yes,” said Comethup humbly.

The captain, without a word, picked up the puppy with one hand and offered the other to the child. They went up the garden path together, into a quaint little room, where everything was very bright and very straight and very orderly; very poor, too, if Comethup had but known. There the old gentleman lifted him into a chair, and rang the bell. Then he turned round, in his abrupt fashion, and held out the struggling puppy with one hand toward Comethup. “You like this dog?” he asked.

Comethup faintly admitted that he did.

The old gentleman thrust it into his arms. “Take it,” he said. “Be good to it, and feed it well.”

Comethup tried to thank him, but at that moment the puppy had taken him at a mean disadvantage, and was dancing about frantically in his arms, and dabbing a tongue much too large for it against his face, so that speech was difficult. And just then a man came in, taller than the old gentleman, and much more erect; and put the back of his hand quite suddenly up to his forehead, and held it there for a moment, and then brought the hand down smartly with a smack against the side of his leg.

Comethup became vastly interested in a moment; he almost dropped the puppy in his excitement. He knew that only one class of people did that kind of thing; the little maid at home, whose sweetheart was a soldier from Canterbury, had told him all about it. He began to speculate on what wonderful house this could be, where this sort of thing went on quite as a matter of course, and no one seemed to think anything of it. In a vague way he wondered if he could persuade his father to let the little maid move her hand and arm like that whenever she came into the parlour at home; it would be something to look forward to—something to ring the bell for.

The old gentleman ordered tea, and the man who had stood stiffly by the doorway went through the same wonderful performance again and disappeared. Comethup’s curiosity swept away every other consideration.

“Sir,” he said, in an awed voice, “he’s a soldier.”

“He was,” returned the old gentleman, shortly. Then stooping near to the boy, with both hands resting on the table, he asked, with a curious tenderness in his voice, “Where did you get those eyes, boy?”

Comethup did not remember the other occasion on which Captain Garraway-Kyle had said that he had the eyes of his dead mother; he did not even know that this old gentleman was Captain Garraway-Kyle. He looked up innocently, and smiled, and said he didn’t know.

“You got ’em from your mother, boy,” said the captain, almost in a whisper, still looking at him earnestly.

“My mother’s in heaven,” said Comethup.

“True, boy, true,” said the old gentleman, patting him gently on the shoulder and turning away. “That’s very true. Your mother was a saint.”

Comethup had not the least idea what a saint was, but he knew it must be something very good, because the old gentleman looked so serious. The arrival of tea put an end to further conversation, and Comethup looked out eagerly for the man to go through his performance, which he did, to the child’s great delight, as he was leaving the room.

The abrupt old captain was as gentle as a woman with the child; busied himself to mix milk and water for him, and to spread jam on bread. It was only toward the end of the meal that Comethup suddenly remembered the chief adventure of the afternoon; that he had left the safe line which bounded his daily life, and was with strangers in an altogether different world. Even the possession of the puppy could not wholly console him; his lips began to quiver, and it was with some difficulty that he made the captain understand. The captain assured him, with much earnestness, that he knew the garden where the roses were, and that he knew Comethup’s father, and the little maid, and the church, and everything. Comethup was comforted, and the strange spectacle was presented to the town, about half an hour later, of Captain Garraway-Kyle, as closely buttoned as ever, and with his hat a little more fiercely tilted than usual, holding Comethup by the hand, on the way to David Willis’s house; Comethup, for his part, clutching the puppy with difficulty but with determination.

CHAPTER III.

From the captain’s standpoint, also, the friendship was a good thing. The old man bore himself as erectly as he had ever done; only to Comethup he relaxed somewhat the hard and unbending set of laws which hitherto had governed his days. The stern old face broke up into something of tenderness at the sight of the child; he prepared, out of his scanty means, little treats and relishes for the boy’s entertainment. David Willis he never quite understood; saw in him something out of the normal—a creature sent into the world, he sincerely trusted, for some good purpose; only the captain had not been able to make up his mind what that purpose was. The captain liked him, even pitied him a little, as he had pitied him on the first night of their meeting; but the man was beyond his range of vision. When, in church sometimes, he heard the organ pealing out above him, he would glance round at the child (for Comethup came in time to occupy a seat in the captain’s pew), and a little curious look of anxiety would gather on his brow and settle there—anxiety as to what the boy would do in the years that were coming to him, and how his father would help to equip him for the world. But, for the most part, the captain was willing to let the happy present time go on, grateful that, in the last of his years, this little child should have come to sweeten them.

Great excursions were planned in those early days of Comethup’s life. It was a wonderful thing to see Comethup do what no other living creature in the town dared do so boldly—open the gate of the captain’s garden, and march straight up the trim little path which led to the front door of the house. He had been taught, when an expedition was afoot, to be punctual to the minute; and he always found the captain coming out of the cottage as he reached it, glancing generally at his watch with a quick nod of approval. Then would the captain, with hat a-tilt and cane swinging, and with pride in his heart, sally forth with Comethup to make new discoveries on a prearranged plan. For the old town, which had once been a mere resting-place for the captain’s declining years, took on a new aspect, when viewed through the eyes of this child.

It was an old town—a beautiful old town; the captain read up a complete history of it, and proved—to Comethup’s entire satisfaction as well as to his own—that something extraordinary had happened in nearly every house it contained. It had been a town of great deeds; had once touched the sea, and had helped to defend that part of the coast line during some of the country’s stormiest times. The sea had long since retreated, and left the little place lying high and dry, to sleep in peace, and dream about its deeds.

It had been a walled town, too; indeed, the old wall still remained, only that, in the very place and beauty of less stirring times, the wall had become a mere grass-grown bank, with flowers and shrubs growing all about it. But here the captain was in his element; he could point out how the town would be attacked from this direction, or how an invading force would come from there; would draw sketches in the gravel with the point of his cane to illustrate exactly how he would have defended it, had he been alive in those times, and how he would have made it absolutely impregnable. Comethup, gazing at him with delighted eyes, came to believe that he was absolutely the greatest general and master of the art of war that had ever existed, instead of a poor little half-pay captain whose name had never been heard of.

There was a quiet and sleepy little river, too, which ran just outside the town under a stone bridge; and the captain used to lean over the parapet of the bridge, on sunny afternoons, while Comethup sat on the stonework beside him, and they used to fish for the bright, gleaming, darting little creatures in the river below. They very rarely caught anything: it was a great event when they did; but the captain used to explain exactly how various kinds of fishing could be accomplished with the minimum of ease and the maximum of success. The captain always seemed to know how to tell one the best way of doing a variety of clever things, but he never seemed to have accomplished very much in a practical sense; Comethup used to think sadly, in after years, that if the captain had only been able to do half the things he could tell other people how to do, he might have been a general at the very least, with his breast ablaze of medals and orders. But Comethup loved him devotedly, just as he was, and would not have had him changed for the wide world.

A great wide expanse of sandy, marshy land lay between the little town and the sea, and this was their playground. It was a wonderful place—a place they seemed never to be able fully to explore. The captain never quite lost his dignity; but away from the town and under the influence of Comethup he relaxed considerably. It is always possible that he comforted himself with the reflection that, whatever species of amusement they sought, it was of an educational character, and would assist the boy’s future. But the Captain Garraway-Kyle who marched out of the little town, holding the child by the hand and swinging his cane, was a very different person indeed from the light-hearted old gentleman who imperilled the knees of his tight trousers in stooping over sand forts and anxiously superintending the erection of fortifications. The puppy—grown a little older and wiser and more staid now—usually accompanied them on these expeditions, and was not always to be trusted when a delicate matter of building was on hand, having a propensity for playing the enemy and levelling earthworks and forts and everything else in one indiscriminate heap. So pleasant days went by, each filled full to the last sleepy hour with new experiences for Comethup; and the captain seemed to grow younger as Comethup inevitably grew older.

It has been said that Comethup often occupied a seat in the captain’s pew in church; it became quite a regular thing for him to do so after a time. The child had drawn two lonely men together, and, although the captain did not understand David Willis, while David, for his part, stood a little in awe of the captain’s brusqueness, the two men often met, and it became quite an ordinary thing for them to sit chatting in David Willis’s modest parlour long after Comethup was tucked up in his little bed at the top of the house. They were both inordinately fond of the child; probably the captain excelled in that particular. They never had very much to say to each other, and when they spoke at all it was generally about that one subject of their thoughts. The captain would recount some bright speech of the boy’s that he had caught during the day, and David Willis would nod in sympathy and smile. Then the captain, after a puff or two at his pipe, would exclaim half sternly: “Fine boy, fine boy, Willis. Make a man of him some day.” And on Sunday mornings the captain would come marching down the street, and his eyes would gleam a little at sight of a tiny figure drawn up erect at the salute inside the open gateway of David Willis’s garden. The captain would return the salute, to Comethup’s intense delight, and the two would go gravely round the corner and through the churchyard into the church.

Sitting beside the captain, Comethup would have leisure, in the dim light of the place, to examine the old man’s hands as they were folded calmly over his prayer-book on his lap. The child often wondered how they could ever have held a sword, and how many people the captain, in his days of war, had killed; the hands were so soft and white, and their touch on his own small fingers or on his shoulder had always been so light and gentle, that it seemed impossible that they could have been made for any stronger deeds. Comethup was always more desperately fond of the captain on Sundays than on any other days; partly because the captain, in his best black coat, and with his hat off, looked so very small and old and gray and lonely in the big pew, and partly because Comethup was so passionately grateful to him—perfect old gentleman that he was—for his kindly patronage of so very small and insignificant a person as himself. He was quite proud to be seen walking with the captain out of church, and holding his hand; he reflected with pardonable vanity more than once that there were very few people in the world, at least as far as he knew it, who were privileged to go to church every Sunday with so great a warrior.

The pew behind that in which the captain and Comethup sat was usually unoccupied; but on one particular Sunday a little commotion was caused in the quiet old church by the entry of two people into it. They came late, after the service had commenced, and they made some noise in getting into their seats. Comethup saw heads turned, and people whisper among themselves. He would greatly have liked to look round, as others were doing; he was consumed with curiosity. But the captain was looking straight in front of him, and even frowning a little, and Comethup had to do the same.

Comethup came to the conclusion, before the service was ended, that the newcomers behind them, whoever they might be, had not been taught how to behave properly in church. One of them, who seemed to be a man, gave the responses in a very loud key, and sometimes very carelessly quite in the wrong places; he breathed very heavily—Comethup was almost persuaded, but that it seemed so terrible, that he snored—during the sermon; and some one else in the pew moved about a great deal, and dropped books, and kicked and shuffled with his feet. The captain grew more and more stern and frowning as the service went on, so that Comethup was quite afraid at last to look at him.

As they were passing out of church, the people from the pew behind walked in front—a very tall and portly gentleman, whose coat tails seemed to swing very much as he walked, and a boy a year or two older than Comethup. In the porch the gentleman swung on his hat, almost before he had passed through the door, with a flourish; glancing behind him as he went out, he caught sight of the captain, and nodded and spoke: “Aha! captain, delightful day; had no idea you belonged to the good folk. Who’s our young friend?” He indicated Comethup, who was watching him with something of admiration.

The captain did not seem well pleased; he clipped his words very short, in a fashion he had when angry, as he replied, “Don’t you know?”

“Of course not; how should I?”

“Then let me present you,” said the captain, keeping fast hold of Comethup’s hand, and making an ironically elaborate business of the introduction. “Master Comethup Willis—Mr. Robert Carlaw.—Comethup,” he added, his tone changing as he addressed the child, “this is your Uncle Bob.”

The portly gentleman seemed surprised, but passed the thing off easily. “Most extraordinary,” he exclaimed, “though why the devil Willis ever called the unfortunate creature by that outlandish name passes my comprehension.—How do you do, nephew? I suppose I ought to have remembered your existence long since; but I’m such a careless rascal that I leave undone those things which I ought to have done—if you’re a good churchman you’ll know the rest, without my troubling to repeat it. Here’s your cousin Brian; if you’re half as much trouble to your poor old dad as he is to me, I pity that worthy fellow.”

The captain was obviously anxious to get away, but Comethup had been looking at the boy to whom he was now introduced, and had, in a childish, worshipping fashion, been quite fascinated by him. He was rather taller than Comethup, and very well dressed, and was, moreover, an extremely handsome boy. He had a rather high forehead for a child, and very thick, curling brown hair brushed loosely back from it. His eyes were keen and bold and dark, and gave Comethup the odd impression of being able to see a great deal more than the eyes of other people. He held himself very upright, with his legs rather apart, and his hands thrust in his pockets; and he swaggered a little as he walked, like his father. He put out his hand to Comethup, and smiled so beautifully with a smile which made his face glow and change, that Comethup was quite glad to think that he was his cousin; he almost felt that he loved him from that moment.

David Willis came at that moment from the church, with his books under his arm; he gazed in an absent-minded fashion at the little group, and obviously did not quite know what to make of it all. Uncle Bob came blusteringly to the rescue; shook David heartily by the hand and walked off with him, with a hand clapped confidentially upon his shoulder and his head bent down sideways from his greater height to talk to him. The boy Brian walked along on the other side of his father, glancing back over his shoulder now and then with an engaging smile at Comethup, who followed behind with the captain. The captain was ill at ease and in a bad temper; he puffed out his chest as he walked and breathed heavily under his mustache, and made savage little cuts at the air with his cane, as though it had been a sword.

At the gate leading to the garden Mr. Robert Carlaw parted jovially, shaking David heartily by the hand again, and patting Comethup on the top of his best Sunday cap. In the captain he apparently scented an enemy; they bowed to each other stiffly, and the frown did not leave the captain’s face.

“He must come and see us,” said Mr. Carlaw, with a jerk of the head toward Comethup. “They’ll be company for each other; besides, they’re cousins. You’re such quiet folks; I declare I’d forgotten your existence—absolutely forgotten it.” He went swinging away down the street, with the boy swinging beside him, a curious, almost pathetic imitation of the father.

It had become the captain’s habit to dine with David Willis every Sunday—quite a simple, homely dinner of a joint and vegetables and a pudding to follow. The captain walked into the cottage now, sat himself stiffly down in a chair near the window, and drew Comethup against his knee and put his arm about him. David Willis was wandering about the room, softly humming to himself a fragment of the voluntary he had played that morning, while the servant-maid laid the table. It was a hot and breathless summer morning; the window of the little parlour was wide open, and Comethup could hear people passing and repassing in the street beyond the garden; could hear the murmur of their talk. There was a high, old-fashioned mahogany bureau on the other side of the room, with curved brass handles to the drawers, and with three leather-bound books, growing gradually smaller in size upward, like a pyramid, on the top of it. Comethup had never seen either the books or the bureau opened; it was curious, therefore, to see his father, with a smile on his face, stroll across there presently and lift the topmost book and open it. “You didn’t know our friend Carlaw was something of a poet, did you?” he asked, addressing the captain.

Disgust sprang suddenly into the captain’s eyes, and into the lines about his mouth. “A poet? Yes, I could have believed even that of him.” The captain chuckled a little grimly at his own humour.

David Willis laughed, and brought the book over toward the window, turning the leaves slowly and looking into it. “Yes,” he said, “he wrote these when he was quite a young man; they were published by subscription. He was a mere youth at the time, and he gave this copy to his sister, my wife. It’s very queer reading, very mad reading some of it. He’s a queer fellow, and a mad fellow.” David Willis laughed good-humouredly and closed the book and carried it back to the bureau.

“Yes, he’s mad enough,” said the captain shortly. “I know the sort of man—met dozens of his kidney. They flash through the world, spreading their feathers in the sun and making such a flutter that no one sees what shame and misery they leave in their track; or, if any one does see it, it’s all excused with the phrase, ‘Oh, he couldn’t help it—he was such a good fellow.’ Bah!” The captain was quite indignant, and the arm that held Comethup shook a little.

“You’re a little hard on our friend,” said David, easily. “He’s really rather a clever sort of fellow; there are lots of things he does quite well, only not quite well enough to make anything of them. He paints a little, writes a little, plays and sings remarkably well. But he never gives his mind to anything. I remember he said to me once: ‘It’s not my fault; they shouldn’t have given me such a name. Think of it! Bob! What can a fellow do with such a name as that, except go to the devil with it? And I’ve tried consistently to go to the devil with it.’ And I really believe he has.”

“Yes, I dare say he has,” replied the captain, a little wearily. “And there you have the whole man in a nutshell.”

Comethup was destined very soon to see more of that fascinating boy, and of his father. But a few days had gone by when the shadow of Robert Carlaw loomed large in the open doorway of the cottage, and he came in, followed by Brian. He seemed to take up an immense amount of room, and to block out the light a great deal, in whatever part of the room he stood. It was immediately after breakfast—David Willis always breakfasted late, a habit he had acquired when living in town—and David was smoking a pipe before setting about those small duties which occupied his day. David Willis had on a very shabby coat and slippers on his feet; Robert Carlaw’s coat was of the finest, his boots shone magnificently, and he smoked a cigar. He announced airily that he had come to carry off his little friend with the extraordinary name; the name, he declared, was too much to pronounce in such weather as that, but he didn’t love him any the less on account of it, and meant to carry him off, for the day at least. So Comethup was duly made ready and went away with a fluttering heart on the other side of Uncle Bob, peeping round his portly person, as he trotted along, to catch a glimpse of that fascinating boy who walked on the farther side of him.

It had been a whim on the part of Mr. Robert Carlaw; he had suddenly made up his mind that he ought to see the child—had suddenly remembered that it was the child of his dead sister, and, in a fashion quite characteristic of him, he had dashed off, hot with the purpose, at the very moment the thought occurred to him.

He even devised schemes as he went along between them for their entertainment. They would do this, they would do that; they would have tea in the garden, or a pony chaise should be hired, and he would take them for a drive. A hundred alluring schemes were in his mind; he seemed to enter joyously and childishly into their world, and to understand exactly what would suit them best. But, by the time he reached his own house with them, the keenness of the business was done, the edge of it had worn off. He rambled with them, in a perfunctory fashion, round the garden, but he was obviously tiring. Quite suddenly, on an excuse, he left them and shut himself up in a room he called his workroom, and they saw no more of him.

Brian did not seem in the least surprised; his lip curled a little disdainfully when Comethup politely inquired whether his father was unwell. Comethup had a curious impression that this boy, although he obviously admired his father very much, and even imitated him, yet saw through him in some way and knew him to be not quite so nice as other people imagined. There was a careless, curt fashion of dismissing his father’s name which Comethup could not have employed in the case of his father for the world, and which made him a little afraid of his cousin in consequence.

The house must have been a very beautiful one at some time; it was filled even now with many beautiful articles of furniture, articles such as Comethup had never seen, and many of which he did not know the use of. But everything was in hopeless confusion and disorder; valuable articles broken and thrust aside, and something equally valuable put in its place to serve its purpose. Books lay about in every room of the house—some of them flung, with wide-open leaves, by impatient hands into corners; fine engravings were stood in their frames against the wall, because no one had ever troubled to hang them up; many of them had their glasses broken, and most of them were smothered in dust, or torn, or otherwise maltreated. Some stood in rolls in the corners of the rooms. It seemed, in every way, the house of a man who meant many things—even meant to live beautifully; but of a man who had never, in anything, got far beyond the mere fluttering resolutions.

But it was nevertheless a house of delights to the child—a place of never-ending wonder. Only, in the midst of their exploration, Comethup suddenly remembered that he had that afternoon made an appointment with Captain Garraway-Kyle, and that that appointment must be kept. There was a sort of tremor at his heart when he remembered how the captain would be standing, just within the door of his cottage, with his watch on his palm, waiting for him at the hour named. He informed Brian that he must really go.