When he became gardener to friends of mine, he was old and they were young. His progress was slow and dignified, so were his manners. He could wither a budding enthusiasm with a slow smile charged full of scorn as effectually as a May frost withers the peach blossom. His own omniscience was emphasised in such fashion as to make his employers acutely conscious of their youth and ignorance. It is true that his master was not so excessively young, but then neither was he particularly well instructed in matters horticultural, and Williams had but a poor opinion of a man who, while he could tell you the long Latin name of every grass in the field and every weed in the hedgerow, had but small appreciation of carpet bedding, and had been heard to remark that a cabbage moth was really much prettier than a cabbage. Moreover, the said master extended his liking for moths and butterflies to other "hinsekses" of various and inferior sorts, and collected the same in small glass tubes, of which he carried numbers in his pockets. When a man is addicted to such "curus fads" as these, it is not to be expected that an elderly and experienced gardener should so much as consult him about things connected with his own craft.Towards his mistress Williams showed an indulgent toleration; not that he ever did what she asked him—oh dear, no! But still he permitted her to "come anigh him," and shout her behests into his ear. He was decidedly deaf at the best of times, and when suggestions were made of which he disapproved his infirmity increased ten-fold.Sometimes the "young missus"—she was really young, being still in her teens—attempted a little gardening on her own account, as when she planted crocus bulbs on a grassy bank facing the drawing-room windows. She had hoped that Williams would not notice them, as that bank was never mown till well on in the spring. But Williams not only noted but disapproved their very earliest appearance. "A grass bank be a grass bank," he asserted, "and bulbs a-growing be out of place," so he mowed the grass assiduously and the crocuses came to nought."He really is a most aggravating man," exclaimed the young missus; "he won't let one have a thing one wants."However, the absolute monarchy of Williams was not destined to continue. Even as he had ruled his master and mistress there arose another who ruled not only them but Williams also. Where the young missus had meekly suggested that certain things might be done in such a way as they never were done, this personage had but to point a diminutive forefinger in the direction of anything he coveted when Williams would hasten to procure it for him with the greatest alacrity. He was not of imposing stature, this new autocrat. When he first began to tyrannise over Williams, he stood just about as high as that worthy's knee, and his walk, in its uncertainty, strongly resembled that of Williams himself on the night of the last election, when the Tory candidate was returned by a majority of two votes.But to return to the autocrat. He certainly interfered with Williams's work, causing him to waste whole hours in hovering about near the drive gate that he might catch a glimpse of his equipage as he set out for an airing in a fine white coach propelled by a white-clad attendant. Williams would not have been averse from occasional parleyings with the attendant. She was young and pretty; but she had other and more lively fish to fry, and would have scorned to do more than exchange the most formal of passing courtesies with "that there deaf old gardener"—who, however, was never so deaf but that the clear little voice calling "Wee-ams" attracted immediate attention.As time went on and the autocrat's steps grew steadier, the white coach was abandoned, and whenever he could the late occupant thereof escaped from the white-clad attendant and assisted Williams in his horticultural operations—a course which he found infinitely preferable to going walks with his nurse upon the high road. He upset all Williams's most cherished theories, and, not infrequently, his practice. He insisted upon helping to wheel manure from the stable-yard to the potato patch, and fell into the manure-heap. He hung on to a big water-can that Williams was carrying with such force that he spilled most of the contents over himself, and he persisted in digging in such close proximity to Williams that the senior gardener was fain to rest upon his spade and admire his assistant. He possessed a garden of his own, a chaotic piece of ground in which might be found specimens of everything growing in the larger garden all mixed up anyhow. That Williams, who but a few short years ago had objected to innocent crocuses upon a green bank, should, with his own hands, have planted a beetroot cheek by jowl with a Michaelmas daisy, and allowed a potato to flower in close proximity to a columbine, seems incredible. But so it was."Bless 'is 'eart, 'e do like a bit of everythink," Williams would say, wagging his head and beaming at the autocrat, who chattered incessantly in the high, clear little voice that Williams found so easy to hear. The young missus profited by the subjugation of Williams to do sundry bits of gardening on her own account which he never discovered. As for the "professor gen'leman," as the cottage children called him, he bowed beneath the yoke of the autocrat with equal meekness. It is said that a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind, and it is certain that Williams and his master understood each other perfectly as regards this one subject.In exchange for his instruction in gardening the autocrat occasionally essayed to teach Williams grammar."You mustn't say 'he were,' Williams; you must say 'he was.' It's 'he was; we were.' Do you understand?""Well, no, Mazter Billy, I can't say as I do; but I'll say 'we was' if it do please you.""No, no, Williams. 'We were.'""What do us wear, Mazter Billy?" Williams would interpose, resting on his spade and smiling broadly at his own wit; while the autocrat broke into delighted laughter, and the grammar lesson came to an end for that day.When the "professor gen'leman" engaged his gardener, that worthy explained that he "didn't want no reg'lar 'alf-'oliday," but that during the cricket season he would like an occasional afternoon off, as he was an enthusiastic admirer of the national game. On the autocrat's fourth birthday the old gardener presented him with a tiny cricket-bat, and during the summer months gardening was varied by batting practice. Williams was too old and too stiff to bat or run himself; but he bowled to the little boy with a tennis-ball, and gave him gentle catches, and these proceedings delighted Billy as much as they interfered with Williams's proper business.When the Fifth of November came, he made what Billy called a "most 'normous Guy Fawkes"—a real Guy Fawkes, stuffed with straw, and clad in a cast-off coat and trousers of Williams's own, with a mask for a face, the whole crowned by a venerable top-hat. It says much for the depth and sincerity of Williams's affection for the autocrat that he should have thus sacrificed a hat still bearing the smallest outward semblance of such head-gear. For Williams himself never wore any other shape. Winter or summer, his large bald head was protected from rain or sun by a wide-brimmed and generally seedy tall felt hat. On Sundays it was a silk one, carefully brushed, but decidedly smudgy as regarded outline. All the children in the adjacent cottages were bidden to see the guy, as Williams proudly cast it upon a large bonfire that he had been saving for the occasion for many weeks. The professor gentleman let off rockets, and even Billy himself was permitted to fire off several squibs. It was altogether a great occasion, and was regarded in the autocrat's family as a sort of apotheosis of Williams, for shortly afterwards he fell ill, and grew worse so rapidly that he was removed to the cottage hospital in the town. His cottage was very small, and his wife very old, and the doctor is a man who has the very greatest objection to letting people die for lack of proper care and attention.His gentle old wife crept down the hill every day to see him, but her accounts were far from cheering."'E be that deaf 'e can't yer what they do say, and 'e be that weak and low nothin' don't seem to rouse 'im."So Billy's father went down to the hospital to see Williams, and found him lying, gaunt and ashen-coloured and still, in the straight white bed. The ward was clean and sunny and comfortable, but Williams did not seem to mend."He seems to have lost heart," said the cheery matron; "he's not so very old, or so very ill, but that he might get round, but his deafness is against him, and if he isn't roused he'll slip away simply because he doesn't care to stop."Billy's father leant over the bed and laid his hand on the gnarled work-worn hand lying outside the white coverlet. Williams opened his eyes and stared languidly at his master. Presently there lighted in the tired old eyes a gleam of recognition."It be very quiet here," he muttered, "very lonesome and fur aff; them doctors and nusses they mumbles so, I can't yer 'em, and I'd like to yer summut.... I can allays yer Mazter Billy, 'e do talk so sensible——""He shall come and see you," said the visitor, loudly, right into the old man's ear; but Williams shook his head wearily, and closed his eyes again."What's the best time?" asked Billy's father of the matron. "I'll bring the little lad—it might rouse him; he has always been so fond of him.""The morning's the best time," she answered. "He sleeps so much. We can but try it, sir."Next day the autocrat—his rosy face very solemn, and his little soul oppressed by the solemnity of the occasion—pattered across the parqueted floor to the bedside of old Williams. The occupants of the three other beds in the men's ward—it is quite a little hospital—raised themselves and watched the pretty child with interest as he put out his little gloved hand timidly to touch this strange new Williams, lying so white and still in the clean, straight bed."Speak to him, sonnie!" said a voice at his ear."Williams!" whispered the child very low and timidly. Then, remembering that he never used to speak to Williams like that, he said loudly, "Williams, dear! the celery is very good."Williams opened his eyes, and when he saw Billy a smile broke over his face like the November sunshine itself."Didn't I say as 'e talked sensible?" he asked of the world in general. Then, "So you be come at last, Mazter Billy!""Tell him you want him to 'get well!" whispered Billy's father."I wish you'd make haste and come home, Williams," Billy shouted; "I've got to go walks wiv Nanna nearly every day now, and it's so dull.""Do ee miss Oi, Mazter Billy?""'Course I do. We all do. Please get well, Williams! Aren't you tired of stopping here?—though it's very pretty," he added hastily, fearing lest he had said something rude; "but Mrs. Williams is very lonely, and so am I.""I be main tired, Mazter Billy. I don't seem to 'ave no sart o' stren'th in me, I be a hold man——""There's such a lot of chrysanthemums in the drive, Williams, and in your garden too," Billy continued, remembering his instructions to "interest" the sick man, "and Trimmie has scratched up such a lot of bulbs in the bed in the middle of the front lawn, and thrown the earth all over the place."Trimmie was the autocrat's fox-terrier, and his misdeeds were the only subject upon which Williams ventured to disagree with that gentleman—on occasion expressing a strong desire to thrash "that there varmint of a dog" for sundry scratchings which his master only regarded with admiring amusement.For the first time for a whole long week Williams raised his head quite two inches from the pillow, exclaiming:"That there dog'll 'ave to be beat, scrattin' and scramblin' and spilin' my garden——" and Williams dropped his head on the pillow again with an emphatic bump.Here the nurse interfered, and the autocrat, having succeeded in rousing the patient rather more effectually than the authorities either anticipated or desired, was led away.Half an hour later the nurse approached his bedside."Here's your beef-tea, Mr. Williams!" she almost shouted; "you must try and take it.""Who be you a-hollerin' at?" growled the patient. "I'll take the messy stuff without so much noise about it.""I don't believe the old image is half so deaf as he makes out," whispered the nurse to the matron, feeling rather nettled at this unexpected retort.The old image kept muttering to himself all that day, and those who listened heard remarks to the effect that there was no rest to be expected this side of the grave, that he simply couldn't lie there and think of his garden going to "wrack and rewing, all along of a slippety varmint of a tarrier. Just let me catch him a-scrattin' in my borders, and I'll give 'im what for."The ultimate result of these mutterings being that, in another week, Williams was discharged as convalescent, and by Christmas was well enough to dictate to his mistress as to what greenery she might cut for the decoration of the house."Ladies, they did cum," said he to his wife, "and did read in that there 'orspital, but they did spake so secret-like and quiet, I couldn't never yer what it were all about; and the doctor 'e cum, and passun 'e cum, but I didn't seem to take no sort of delight in none of 'em. Then Mazter Billy 'e cum, and did talk the most sensiblest of the lot.... And, in spite of that there influinzy, yer Oi be!"III"ESPECIALLY THOSE"They did not know that Billy had so many friends until he lay a-dying. Then they knew.It takes some of us more than four years to make one friend. Billy had only lived four years altogether, but every one he knew was his friend, and he knew every one in his little world."I want some ice for Master Billy's head!" said the parlour-maid. "He's that feverish, doctor says it's to be kept on all the time."Mr. Stallon, the fishmonger, looked grave."I haven't a bit of ice on the premises. It's ordered, but it won't be here till to-morrow. Dear! dear! and to think as the little gentleman's so bad!"Mr. Stallon was a stout, seafaring-looking man, with a short brown beard. He shook his head, and looked really sorry."Whatever shall we do?" cried the parlour-maid. "Whatever shall we do?""Do!" echoed Mr. Stallon. "Do! why, get some, to be sure. I'll go to Farenam for it myself. Tell your lady she shall have it in a' hour or so."Mr. Stallon owned an inn as well as a fish-shop. He crossed the road to his inn yard; there he harnessed his horse to his spring cart, and he drove to Fareham for the ice. Billy's town is a very little one, but Fareham, six miles off, is big, and Mr. Stallon got the ice. I'm afraid that he drove furiously, and beat his horse. But he quite forgot to charge for the ice, and no one ever thanked him for getting it. He didn't mind, he was one of Billy's friends.The Earl was another. The Earl is young, fresh-coloured, and chubby, and somewhat lacking in dignity. He is an M.F.H. for all that, and Billy was wont to go with him to the kennels, and knew all the old hounds by name.The Earl and Billy held long conversations on the subject of poachers. Billy's sympathies were apt to go with the poachers; but that was the fault of the Radical curate.As for the curate, he and Billy were dear friends. He would spend long sunny afternoons bowling slows, and twisters, and overhands to Billy, and he could sing such charming songs.One of Billy's peculiarities was that he exacted songs from all his friends. Then he learnt them himself, and sang them in his turn. The curate's favourite song was "For it's My Delight, On a Shiny Night." It was this song that caused Billy's predilection for poachers.The Earl could sing too. Of his répertoire the favourite was—"She went and got married, that 'ard-'earted girl,And it was not to a Wicount, and it was not to a Hearl."Here Billy always interrupted, exclaiming delightedly, "That'syou, you know!" and demanded the verse again.There was one friend from whom Billy exacted no songs. This was old Williams, the gardener. He was a very good gardener, but deaf. Billy was the only person whom he could hear well. He really had no notion of singing, that gardener. So he told Billy tales in broad Gloucestershire instead, and Billy trotted after him, assisting in all his horticultural operations, and they loved each other.But the fever had got a hold upon Billy, it was such a hot July.At last a Sunday came, when those who loved him best feared that he could not last through the day. At morning service the curate gave it out that "the prayers of the congregation, are desired for William Wargrave Ainger"; then he paused, and with a ring of supplication in his voice, which startled the listening people, said, "little Billy Ainger, whom we love—who lies grievously sick.""William Wargrave Ainger" had fallen on inattentive ears, but the familiar name struck home, and the congregation prayed.In the pause which followed the words "especially those for whom our prayers are desired," the deaf gardener's voice was heard to say "Amen"; but no one smiled at him that Sunday.The Earl had no surplice to take off, so he reached Billy's house first; but the curate caught him at the drive gate, for the curate ran.There was no sound in the house but the voice of Billy's mother, singing to him, over and over again, the same old nursery rhyme. It ran:"O do not come, but go away—Away with your eyes that peep;O do not come to Billy's house,For Billy is going to sleep."It has a quaint lilting tune, and Billy loved it, but he could not sleep.His father came down to the Earl and the curate, and silently they followed him up into the darkened nursery. Billy smiled when he saw them. He could not speak, he was so tired.His mother knelt at the head of his bed, singing tirelessly. His father knelt down at the other side, devouring the thin, flushed, little face with loving, sorrowful eyes. The curate knelt down at the foot of the bed, and the Earl, who made no attempt to wipe the tears from off his ruddy cheeks, knelt by a chair. By the darkened window sat the pretty hospital nurse, in her white cap and apron."O do not come to Billy's house," the mother's voice went on. Then she sang more softly, and suddenly there was silence:Billy had gone to sleep.The drive gate clicked, a quick step sounded on the gravel outside. It was the doctor. He came hastily into the room, and, stepping softly over to Billy's mother, lifted her up, and set her in a chair.He took her place, laying his hand on the child's pulse, and on his forehead. Then he said in a whisper, "He'll do, he's gone to sleep."The three men rose from their knees, as Billy's mother fell on hers, with the first tears she had shed, in all that weary week.They followed the doctor out of the room, and crept downstairs into the hall. The doctor pushed Billy's father into the dining-room, saying, "You must give me some lunch. I want to see the little chap again, in twenty minutes or so—what the deuce was the matter with you all? Did you think he was dead?""Idid," said the Earl, in an awestruck whisper."Go away!" said the doctor testily; "go away, you long-faced lunatics, and leave us in peace!"The two young men turned and went into the drive, where they found Williams, waiting for news. The Earl went up to the old man, and put his mouth to his ear, saying loudly, and with pauses between each word—"He—is better—he's asleep—the doctor—says—he'll do."Williams blew his nose noisily, in a large red handkerchief; then said huskily, "The Lard be praised! your lardship, the Lardbepraised!"Then the Earl and Williams shook hands; and the curate and Williams shook hands. The two young men shut the gate softly, and went down the road.The curate went to lunch with the Earl. They had champagne, and the Earl grew frivolous, as his manner is; he has not much dignity, and he and the curate are old friends, for they were at Eton and "the House" together."I say, old chap!" said the Earl confidentially, "you were jolly careful that the Almighty should make no mistake, this morning."The curate leaned back in his chair, and with more than a reminiscence of their college tutor in his manner, remarked, "In matters of importance, it is well to be strictly accurate."IVAT BLUE HOUSE LOCKThe life of Dorcas Heaven, who keeps the Blue House Lock, is somewhat lonely and monotonous. Her post is more or less of a sinecure, for but few barges pass along that bit of the canal. Indeed, the canal itself, though winding through the prettiest bit of country in the neighbourhood, is only navigable during a wet season. After a drought it grows so shallow that cows are wont to stand derisively in the very middle of it, cooling their legs.Elijah, husband of Dorcas, is a labourer on a farm some two miles off.As the path alongside the canal leads to nowhere in particular, there is not much traffic; but when a barge does come, Dorcas "bustles her about sharpish," and there is a great to-do. She looks upon herself as more or less the hostess of the occupants of the barge. "They change the weather and pass the time of day," their destination and their business are exhaustively discussed, and when at length stillness settles down over the Blue House, when there is no sound but the cry of a peewit or the rustle of a water-rat in the rushes, Dorcas fetches a chair into the doorway and sinks upon it, exclaiming, "'Law! what a paladum it have been, to be sure!"On Sunday mornings Dorcas does not go to church, for "Elijah do like a bit o' meat of a Sunday," and Dorcas is a good wife first and a good churchwoman second. She therefore defers her attendance until evening, when Elijah accompanies her. While the bit o' meat is in course of preparation he strolls round for "a bit of a talk" with one "Ethni Harman, licensed to sell beer and tobacco," whose house of cheer lies on the outskirts of the town, and where the very latest electioneering news is to be had. Elijah has been heard to express an opinion to the effect that "there ain't no 'arm in going to church twice, for them as it suits, but once, along of my missus, be enough for I."Had it been in Elijah's nature to be astonished at anything, he would have felt some surprise at the amiability with which Dorcas had lately speeded him on his way to "The Cat and Compasses" on Sunday mornings. She had at one time been rather given to inconvenient suggestions as that "them peas want sticking, and the salery be ready for banking," when Elijah would fain have been sunning himself upon the bench outside Ethni Harman's hospitable door, a mug of cider and like-minded friend beside him. He usually fell in with his wife's suggestions, for he was a man who loved a quiet life, and Dorcas—when annoyed on Sunday—was apt to carry on her domestic duties with unnecessary vigour far into the night on Monday.The fact was that, of late, Sunday mornings had become for Dorcas the corner-stone of her week, and in this wise: it did not as a rule take long to get Elijah's dinner under way; this done, Dorcas would take her chair into the doorway, and read her Bible. She generally chose the Book of Revelation, carefully forming the words with her lips and following each with gnarled and work-worn forefinger. With Dorcas, as with many people whose lives are somewhat hard and monotonous, the prospect of a suite of rooms in one of the many mansions was extremely pleasant. Moreover, the Cotswold peasant dearly loves any form of spectacle, and although Dorcas could not pronounce, far less understand, many of the words she met with, there was a sense of pageant all around her as she read; while her appreciation of the city which has "no need of the sun, neither of the moon to shine in it," was as purely sensuous as that of any disciple of Wagner himself."And now, a little wind and shy" scattered the apple-blossoms over the path, and the Sunday silence was broken by a clear child-voice. To Dorcas such sound was as the skirl of the pipes to a Highlander in a far country; her heart beat quick and her cheeks grew redder, and she rushed out to see who "was a-comin'"; for Dorcas had "put away four" in the "cemetrary" on the Fletborough road, and one had lived to be four years old. Besides, to let any one pass the Blue House without "givin' of 'em good-day!" was a thing she had never done—"not once in twenty year." So she laid her Bible on the chair, covering it with a clean white handkerchief, and crossed the few feet of garden which lay between her cottage and the towing-path.A sturdy little boy, in reefer coat and muffin cap, with round, fresh little face, and cheeks pink as the petals of the apple-blossom nearest the calyx, danced with excitement on the bank as he watched his father gathering some yellow "flags" which grew at the water's edge. The attendant father—parents and such were always a secondary consideration with Dorcas—was not very successful, as the ground was soft and slippery."Is it wet down there, dad? Can I come? Oh, get that big one just over there! Won't muth be pleased? What dirty boots you'll have! Shall I hold your stick for you to cling on to?"Then he noticed Dorcas. "Good-morning!" said he with gay courtesy. "Isn't it a fine May morning?""It be that surely, little master!" answered Dorcas in high delight. Then "the little gentleman's dada"—he never achieved a separate identity in the mind of Dorcas—scrambled up from the swamp in which he had been standing. He, too, proved most approachable, and she learned that the youthful potentate in the reefer jacket had never walked so far before, that the "scroped out old quarry" just beyond the Blue House was his destination, and that he would probably come again next Sunday.He came every Sunday morning all through that summer, and always with his dad. Sometimes they went tapping for fossils in the disused quarry, sometimes they came with butterfly-nets and caught "Tortoiseshells" and "Wall-Browns," and upon one great occasion a "Fritillary." But whatever they sought or whatever they caught, Dorcas was always, as who should say, "in at the death," and shared the excitement and the triumph with them.The little gentleman was very friendly—a child is quick to recognise an admirer as any pretty woman—and it is possible that the attendant father understood and indulged the childless woman's craving for a child's affection. Sometimes Dorcas felt a qualm of conscience, and wondered whether her adored young gentleman ought not rather to be in church these sunny Sunday mornings; though had he been in church he certainly could have been nowhere in the neighbourhood of the Blue House. But she was comforted when she heard that he went with his mother to a children's service in the afternoon. Henceforth she gave herself up to the study of natural history and the worship of her dear "little gentleman" with a light heart.Even in winter he sometimes came "of a fine Sunday," and Dorcas would spend many hours of the following week vainly trying to determine whether she admired him most in a sailor suit, or in the breeches and gaiters of which he was so proud. One never-to-be-forgotten day the rain came down in torrents just as her sultan and his grand vizier reached the Blue House. They took shelter with Dorcas, and the sultan was graciously pleased to be lifted up that he might reach a certain mug from the top shelf of the dresser—a mug which had belonged to "'im as wer gone." Dorcas made gingerbread cats and ducks, and her artistic efforts went so far as to attempt a king "with a crown upon 'is 'ead." After regaling himself with these delicacies her sultan would hold up a rosy face, ornamented by sundry sticky streaks, to be kissed in farewell; and when she had watched him round the bend of the canal her eyes would grow dim, and she would go back to the Book of Revelation, murmuring another favourite quotation to herself, "The Lard gave and the Lard 'ave took away. Blessed be the name of the Lard."Of course the many charms of the "little gentleman" were duly reported to Elijah, and the residence of Ethni Harman took on a reflected glory from the fact that it was but a stone's throw from that of her sultan.It was a wet summer, and there came four wet Sundays one after the other. Vainly did Dorcas try to fix her mind on the streets of jasper, while all the time she was straining her ears for the sound of the little voice that never chimed into the stillness. She grew to hate the patter of the rain, on the path outside; even the fact that the canal, for once, was full, and three barges passed in one week, did not console her. The gingerbread animals grew stale and crumbly between two plates, and the gorgeous mug, "A Present from Fairford," was put back on the top shelf of the dresser again.The weather changed, and there came a lovely Sunday. Elijah set off to the "Cat and Compasses" as usual; Dorcas bustled about with a pleasant sense of expectation and went and stood on the towing-path, her eyes fixed on the distant bridge. Some boys went by to bathe beyond the second bend, with laughter and shouting. Then the only sound was the hum of bees settled on the purple scabious growing a-top the crumbling Cotswold wall.On Monday Dorcas could bear it no longer. "I be that tewey and narvous, I don't know what I be about," she remarked, as she locked the door of the Blue House and hid the key under the mat. Should a barge come—well, it must manage somehow! Barges were never in a hurry. She had come to a momentous decision. She was going to inquire after her "little gentleman." Whether he was ill or gone for a holiday, or was merely forgetful, she would find out and end this dreadful suspense. She was a very simple-minded woman, but in her heart of hearts she felt a little sore with the grand vizier, for she had a notion that he was by no means ignorant of what these Sunday visits meant to her."I believe 'e'd 'ave come afore this if 'e'd been let. 'A be that meek-'earted 'a wouldn't 'urt a vloi, let alone a 'oman," she said to herself with a half sob. She was convinced that her sultan could not forget so utterly the humblest of his slaves. So she put on her best clothes and tight elastic-sided boots, with lots of little white buttons adorning the fronts.At the Blue House, Dorcas was never either self-conscious or shy; but when she reached her sultan's palace, having timidly pushed open the drive gate, she became aware that the new boots creaked horribly, and that perspiration was dropping from her eyebrows into her eyes. Having mopped her face, and generally pulled herself together, she managed to reach the front door, though her knees trembled, and her heart fluttered like a caged bird.Never was such a noisy bell! It clanged and echoed in most alarming fashion; she wished that the stone steps would open and swallow her up. What would they think of her for daring to make such a clatter? Besides—and at the dreadful thought she nearly cried out—of course she ought to have gone to the back door.For full five minutes she stood on the steps, listening for any sound inside the house, but all was perfectly quiet. She turned and went into the drive, meaning to go round to the back door, when it occurred to her to look back at the house; she had been far too nervous to do so as she came in. The lower windows were shuttered, and all the blinds were down.They had gone then! and it was empty. "And they never didn't bring 'im for to say good-bye to me."Life's little tragedies generally happen to the lonely. What in a full and happy life ranks but as an episode, becomes an epoch in the sad-coloured days of lean monotony. Dorcas wiped her eyes more than once, on her way home, and went heavily for many days. Elijah saw that she was fretting, and tried to distract her by news from the town, and occasional suggestions that she should go over "and see sister-law" in an adjacent village; but beyond her necessary journeys to the town to buy such stores as she could afford, Dorcas never left home. She scrubbed the kitchen table till she grudged to sully its whiteness by so much as a yellow bowl, and she made herself a warm new winter dress, but, for all her industry, the time hung heavy on her hands, and she never forgot her "little gentleman." The wet season was followed by an Indian summer of exceptional beauty. "The spirit of October, mild and boon," was in the air; the tottering Cotswold wall, which laid its wayward length on the far side of the footway, was covered by sprays of crimson blackberry, mingled with the fluffy greyness of "old man's beard." Dorcas no longer stared hungrily down the towing-path on Sunday morning, but she did not forget; and, in token of her remembrance, the twenty-first chapter of the Book of Revelation was marked in her Bible by a little woollen glove with a large hole in the thumb. Her sultan had dropped it during his last visit.The birds sang as though it were spring, and Dorcas began to read aloud to herself to keep her thoughts from wandering. "And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes," whispered the kind Gloucestershire voice, when suddenly, above the triumphant voices of the birds, above the soft wash of the water among the yellowing reeds, rang that clear sound for which the soul of Dorcas had hungered so cruelly."I wonder if the lady at the Blue House will know me again, Dad!"* * * * *It seemed as though the grand vizier had not been so greatly to blame after all. He had been suddenly called away to the north of Scotland; and although he had left directions that before the sultan and the household followed him that potentate was to be taken to say good-bye "to the lady at the Blue House," although the sultan himself had repeatedly suggested the propriety of such a pilgrimage, his nurse had always considered the road too muddy."I thought, sir, as you was all gone fur good and all," said Dorcas, with a catch in her voice; "and I were that taken to I never made no inquiries."On his way home the grand vizier was rather silent. Once or twice he made a queer little face, and seemed to swallow something in his throat. At last he quoted, but not to the sultan, "By heavens, it is pitiful, the bootless love of women for children in Vanity Fair." The rosy-faced child, who had been wondering why the usual Sunday service of gingerbread had been omitted, was rather surprised, but nevertheless asked curiously, "Are you thinking of the Blue House lady, Dad?"His father stooped down hastily and kissed him.VKETURAHOn Mondays the doctor stayed at the surgery to see patients from two till seven. He did not live at the surgery, oh, dear no! but had a fine house, with a carriage drive and a conservatory, right at the other end of the town. The waiting-room was very full on Mondays, people came from all parts to see the doctor; moreover, it was market-day, and the pursuit of health could be combined with that of business.It was getting late, and only two people were left in the waiting-room—a shabby, nervous-looking woman and a handsome lad of sixteen, who had come to consult the doctor about a sprained thumb. "One of the gentry," thought the woman to herself, as she noted the trim riding-breeches and the leather on his shoulders.From time to time she looked anxiously at the clock, clasping and unclasping her thin, work-worn hands.A door banged outside, the consulting-room bell pealed, signifying that an interview was over. It was the lad's turn next. He stretched his long legs preparatory to obeying the expected summons, when the woman rose hastily and came and stood in front of him, saying eagerly, "Sir, will you let me go in out of my turn? I won't keep the doctor a minute; it's to ask him to come to my child who is very ill. I've been away far too long as it is, but I'd no one as I could send.""Of course, of course!" exclaimed the lad, who had risen to his feet when she first spoke, looking very shy and embarrassed, "and I am awfully sorry, you know, but the doctor will be sure to do it good. He's 'A one,' you know——"At this moment the door opened and a voice cried, "Next, please!" and the little woman, casting a grateful look behind her, hurried into the presence of the doctor. He looked up surprised as she entered—poor people generally came on Thursdays."Well?" he demanded. With rich and poor alike the doctor's manners were always somewhat abrupt. He was saving of speech, though it is true that he expanded under the smiles of youth and beauty."Please, sir, could you come and see my little girl? She's bin ill now these three weeks; she don't get no better, and she does nothing but cough, and seems that hot and restless, and is that weak——""What have you done?" interrupted the doctor."I've kep' 'er in bed and giv' 'er 'Dinver's Lung Tonic.' My 'usband, 'e don't 'old with doctors—'e's a Plymouth Brother, and don't seek advice——"The doctor growled out something about "nonsense," prefaced by a somewhat forcible adjective, then "All right! I'll come. Where do you live?"After giving her address, the woman held out to him a little screw of paper. He waved it aside impatiently, saying, "Haven't seen her yet," held the door open, and the woman hurried out."I'll come directly," he shouted after her. His heart was much softer than his manners."These Plimmy brothers are the biggest lunatics going," he said to himself, "with their faith-healing and their providence-mongering. I'd like to dose the lot of them."The doctor was not accurate in his diagnosis of the sect in question, but in his own mind lumped together every sort of religious enthusiasm.* * * * *Matthew Moulder, baker, was an upright, God-fearing man, foreman to the baker—our little town boasts but one. He turned out excellent bread; moreover, he was a good husband, a conscientious if not affectionate father, and a diligent worshipper in that upper room, wherein assembled a handful of people of similar religious views. He indulged himself in few pleasures, and rather wondered at the frivolity of his neighbours, who took life with that cheerful philosophy still to be found in portions of England which yet remain to justify the description "merrie."His wife was meek-hearted, and easily ruled; she never questioned his authority, but having early laid to heart the maxim that "what a man doesn't know can't vex him," she was careful to vex Matthew as seldom as possible.How, then, did these two sedate and respectable persons come by such a child as their daughter Keturah?Keturah of the elf-locks and great wine-coloured eyes. Keturah, who danced and sang and giggled the live-long day; who yawned in sermons and played "handy-pandy" with herself, while her father uplifted his voice in prayer. Who turned up in the hunting-field when she ought to have been safe in school, ever ready to open gates for the "gentry," with dazzling smiles, showing the whitest of white teeth, and with curtsies that suggested drawing-rooms rather than the village lane.At the little school, which she attended with a fitfulness perplexing in the extreme to the worthy mistress, she did her lessons far better and more quickly than anybody else. There was no doubt about it, Keturah was a "character."While there were but few people outside the row of cottages where they lived who even knew Matthew and his wife by sight, everybody knew Keturah. Always in mischief, alwaysen évidence, always doing the unexpected, undaunted by misfortunes and punishments which would have struck terror into the heart of any well-regulated little girl; she had, during her six months' residence in our midst, attained to a notoriety which was apparently as much a matter of indifference to her as it was painful to her parents. Her father looked upon her as a cross to be borne with Christian fortitude. He wrestled in prayer on her behalf, and on occasion with Keturah herself, accentuating his remarks by means of a stick. But, as Thomas Beames, her slave and shadow, remarked on one occasion, when they played truant to attend a meet some seven miles off, "They'll beat we when us do get 'ome; but us'll 'ave our fun fust."Thomas was a round-faced, in no way extraordinarily small boy, who was dominated by Keturah's stronger character; he loved her, why, he himself could not have told. Perhaps because he admired the way she always made sure of her "fun" regardless of consequences—a disregard the stranger in Keturah's case, for Nemesis was by no means leaden-footed. As a rule, the punishment was in very truth the other half of the crime.She loved her mother, and regarded her father much in the same light that he regarded her, with this difference that she looked for no change in him, but with a philosophy as pagan as the rest of her conduct accepted his existence as a necessary evil. Indeed, had Matthew but known it, she extracted considerable "fun" out of circumventing him.But Keturah had fallen on evil days. A fishing expedition, during which she tumbled into the canal, and after which she walked about till she was, as she put it, "moderate dry"—"at least not to notice"—had ended in the mysterious illness to which the doctor had just been called.Matthew Moulder had gone that evening to a prayer-meeting in a neighbouring village, where he would stay the night with a hospitable brother; this fact, taken together with the fact that Keturah seemed most alarmingly ill, had given her mother the courage to call in the doctor.He had seen Keturah, had expressed himself with his customary vigour as to the imbecility of people who could treat a case of acute pneumonia with "Dinver's Lung Tonic" for sole remedy, and now he had returned to the little bedroom to have a final look at the child.She was too weak to raise herself on her elbow, but she turned her head on the doctor's entrance. "Shall I go to hell?" she asked, devouring his face with her great fever-bright eyes.The doctor started. She had not volunteered any remark before."God bless my soul, no!" he exclaimed. "You'll go to Weston-super-Mare when you're well enough."Keturah shook her head. "But if I don't get well? Shall I go to hell?"Theology is not one of the doctor's strong points. Being as a rule much concerned with the treatment of the body, he expresses himself with diffidence regarding the ultimate fate of the soul. But on this occasion he shook his head vigorously, holding the hot thin little hand in a firm comforting clasp. "You must ask a parson about these things, my dear, but I am quite sure that no little girls go——but you are going to get well—cheer up! Eh?""Could I ast the young gentleman parson wot plays cricket?" Keturah's voice was hoarse and eager."The very man—couldn't do better. I'll send him round as I go home," and the doctor turned to go. He hurried down the narrow stairs, but stopped at the front door to call back into the house, "She's to live in poultices, mind!Livein 'em."He stopped at the curate's lodgings as he drove home, and went right in, to find the cleric in question resting his slippered feet upon the chimney-piece, while he smoked and read the evening paper."There's a kid down with pneumonia in the Waterlow Cottages, and she fancies she's going to hell. She'd like to see you, so I said I'd send you. Her people are Plymouth Rocks, or some such thing. She's a queer little soul—dying, I fear.""It can't be Keturah?" exclaimed the curate, swinging his feet off the mantelpiece and standing up on his long legs."I believe that is the creature's name.""Oh, you mustn't let Keturah die! She's a genius!""She may be a genius," said the doctor grimly, "but her people are the balliest lunatics in creation, and I rather fancy that geniuses are just as likely to die of neglect as other folk——" But the curate had not waited for the rest of the sentence. He seized his hat and ran into the street, his slippers (down at the heel) going flip, flop, on the wet pavement as he ran."He's a good chap," murmured the doctor as he climbed into his dog-cart. "He's a devilish good chap."He went to see Keturah again that night, and found that his instructions had been carried out to the letter. He also found the curate there, in his shirt-sleeves, assisting Mrs. Moulder to make poultices. He often does such things. His people look upon it as an amiable eccentricity. "'E's a curus gent," they say. "'E'll turn 'is 'and to hany think."He turned his hand to the nursing of Keturah with such success that two days later the doctor said, "She is better, but weak as a kitten. She must have brandy. You must watch for the grey look and give it her then.""Oh, sir!" exclaimed poor Mrs. Moulder, who, since the invasion of the curate, could not call her soul her own, "Oh, sir, I daren't. My 'usband wouldn't 'ave it in the 'ouse. 'E's tee-total, 'e is——""Tell him it is medicine," said the doctor shortly. "She must have it, and here it is. Give it her in milk like this!" and suiting the action to the word, he measured out something into a tea-cup. Something that had a most unmistakable smell.Keturah drank it, and her ashy cheeks grew a shade less grey. Then she turned to the doctor, with one of her dazzling smiles. "I don't think much on the taste of it, but"—with immense conviction—"it do make you feel so cheerful-like, about the knees."Her mother wrung her hands, but the doctor chuckled, and, placing on the table the innocent-looking medicine bottle he had produced from his pocket, nodded at it, remarking, "Every time she looks so grey, mind!"Mrs. Moulder burnt brown paper in the bedroom, for Matthew came home at five. She dared not pour the accursed stuff away, for the doctor and the curate between them had frightened her out of her wits, by threatening legal proceedings if Keturah were in any way neglected. She had been obliged to confess to the visits of the doctor, who might fly in at any moment when Matthew was at home. But she had not felt in any way called upon to tell her husband that the curate had sat up with Keturah the whole night that he was away, helping her poultice, and allaying the child's fears as to eternal punishment so successfully that she fell asleep. It was therefore a shock to Matthew, on his return to tea that afternoon, to hear an undoubtedly clerical voice, apparently reading to Keturah.The house was perfectly quiet, though there were movements in the back kitchen, showing the whereabouts of Mrs. Moulder. He stood at the foot of the little narrow staircase and listened, fully prepared to find some taint of ritualism in the curate's ministrations. He had come to make a convert of Keturah, of that he was sure; was there not an office—Matthew almost licked his lips over the word "office"—in the Book of Common Prayer especially adapted to the visiting of the sick? All the Protestant in him rose in rebellion. He would be calm, but he would convict this meddling priest out of his own mouth. Then with the dignified strength born of a just indignation bid him begone!The bedroom door stood open, and he heard Keturah's weak little voice saying, "Tell it again! I like it."Matthew braced himself to listen, and this was what he heard:—"We built a ship upon the stairs,All made of the back bedroom chairs,And filled it full of sofa pillows,To go a-sailing on the billows."We took a saw and several nails,And water in the nursery pails;And Tom said, 'Let us also takeAn apple and a slice of cake;'—Which was enough for Tom and meTo go a-sailing on, till tea."We sailed along for days and days,And had the very best of plays;But Tom fell out and hurt his knee,So there was no one left but me.""So there was no one left but me," repeated the weak child-voice. Matthew rose from the third stair from the bottom, where he had been sitting, and stumbled somewhat blindly into the parlour, where he sat down on the slippery horse-hair sofa. He cleared his throat and blew his nose, and there was an expression on his face which was seldom seen there."And ther' was no one left but me." The forlorn weak voice repeating that, moved him strangely. Keturah was the last of the children. There had been six babies before Keturah, and none had lived beyond babyhood. At that moment he forgot how naughty she was, how unregenerate! He only remembered that she used to lay her baby face against his, and that she said "dada" the very first word she spoke.A hundred pretty scenes of her first years flashed into his recollection. His suspicions of the curate were forgotten, and in their place came cold-handed fear to fill his heart with the dread that Keturah might not get well.
When he became gardener to friends of mine, he was old and they were young. His progress was slow and dignified, so were his manners. He could wither a budding enthusiasm with a slow smile charged full of scorn as effectually as a May frost withers the peach blossom. His own omniscience was emphasised in such fashion as to make his employers acutely conscious of their youth and ignorance. It is true that his master was not so excessively young, but then neither was he particularly well instructed in matters horticultural, and Williams had but a poor opinion of a man who, while he could tell you the long Latin name of every grass in the field and every weed in the hedgerow, had but small appreciation of carpet bedding, and had been heard to remark that a cabbage moth was really much prettier than a cabbage. Moreover, the said master extended his liking for moths and butterflies to other "hinsekses" of various and inferior sorts, and collected the same in small glass tubes, of which he carried numbers in his pockets. When a man is addicted to such "curus fads" as these, it is not to be expected that an elderly and experienced gardener should so much as consult him about things connected with his own craft.
Towards his mistress Williams showed an indulgent toleration; not that he ever did what she asked him—oh dear, no! But still he permitted her to "come anigh him," and shout her behests into his ear. He was decidedly deaf at the best of times, and when suggestions were made of which he disapproved his infirmity increased ten-fold.
Sometimes the "young missus"—she was really young, being still in her teens—attempted a little gardening on her own account, as when she planted crocus bulbs on a grassy bank facing the drawing-room windows. She had hoped that Williams would not notice them, as that bank was never mown till well on in the spring. But Williams not only noted but disapproved their very earliest appearance. "A grass bank be a grass bank," he asserted, "and bulbs a-growing be out of place," so he mowed the grass assiduously and the crocuses came to nought.
"He really is a most aggravating man," exclaimed the young missus; "he won't let one have a thing one wants."
However, the absolute monarchy of Williams was not destined to continue. Even as he had ruled his master and mistress there arose another who ruled not only them but Williams also. Where the young missus had meekly suggested that certain things might be done in such a way as they never were done, this personage had but to point a diminutive forefinger in the direction of anything he coveted when Williams would hasten to procure it for him with the greatest alacrity. He was not of imposing stature, this new autocrat. When he first began to tyrannise over Williams, he stood just about as high as that worthy's knee, and his walk, in its uncertainty, strongly resembled that of Williams himself on the night of the last election, when the Tory candidate was returned by a majority of two votes.
But to return to the autocrat. He certainly interfered with Williams's work, causing him to waste whole hours in hovering about near the drive gate that he might catch a glimpse of his equipage as he set out for an airing in a fine white coach propelled by a white-clad attendant. Williams would not have been averse from occasional parleyings with the attendant. She was young and pretty; but she had other and more lively fish to fry, and would have scorned to do more than exchange the most formal of passing courtesies with "that there deaf old gardener"—who, however, was never so deaf but that the clear little voice calling "Wee-ams" attracted immediate attention.
As time went on and the autocrat's steps grew steadier, the white coach was abandoned, and whenever he could the late occupant thereof escaped from the white-clad attendant and assisted Williams in his horticultural operations—a course which he found infinitely preferable to going walks with his nurse upon the high road. He upset all Williams's most cherished theories, and, not infrequently, his practice. He insisted upon helping to wheel manure from the stable-yard to the potato patch, and fell into the manure-heap. He hung on to a big water-can that Williams was carrying with such force that he spilled most of the contents over himself, and he persisted in digging in such close proximity to Williams that the senior gardener was fain to rest upon his spade and admire his assistant. He possessed a garden of his own, a chaotic piece of ground in which might be found specimens of everything growing in the larger garden all mixed up anyhow. That Williams, who but a few short years ago had objected to innocent crocuses upon a green bank, should, with his own hands, have planted a beetroot cheek by jowl with a Michaelmas daisy, and allowed a potato to flower in close proximity to a columbine, seems incredible. But so it was.
"Bless 'is 'eart, 'e do like a bit of everythink," Williams would say, wagging his head and beaming at the autocrat, who chattered incessantly in the high, clear little voice that Williams found so easy to hear. The young missus profited by the subjugation of Williams to do sundry bits of gardening on her own account which he never discovered. As for the "professor gen'leman," as the cottage children called him, he bowed beneath the yoke of the autocrat with equal meekness. It is said that a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind, and it is certain that Williams and his master understood each other perfectly as regards this one subject.
In exchange for his instruction in gardening the autocrat occasionally essayed to teach Williams grammar.
"You mustn't say 'he were,' Williams; you must say 'he was.' It's 'he was; we were.' Do you understand?"
"Well, no, Mazter Billy, I can't say as I do; but I'll say 'we was' if it do please you."
"No, no, Williams. 'We were.'"
"What do us wear, Mazter Billy?" Williams would interpose, resting on his spade and smiling broadly at his own wit; while the autocrat broke into delighted laughter, and the grammar lesson came to an end for that day.
When the "professor gen'leman" engaged his gardener, that worthy explained that he "didn't want no reg'lar 'alf-'oliday," but that during the cricket season he would like an occasional afternoon off, as he was an enthusiastic admirer of the national game. On the autocrat's fourth birthday the old gardener presented him with a tiny cricket-bat, and during the summer months gardening was varied by batting practice. Williams was too old and too stiff to bat or run himself; but he bowled to the little boy with a tennis-ball, and gave him gentle catches, and these proceedings delighted Billy as much as they interfered with Williams's proper business.
When the Fifth of November came, he made what Billy called a "most 'normous Guy Fawkes"—a real Guy Fawkes, stuffed with straw, and clad in a cast-off coat and trousers of Williams's own, with a mask for a face, the whole crowned by a venerable top-hat. It says much for the depth and sincerity of Williams's affection for the autocrat that he should have thus sacrificed a hat still bearing the smallest outward semblance of such head-gear. For Williams himself never wore any other shape. Winter or summer, his large bald head was protected from rain or sun by a wide-brimmed and generally seedy tall felt hat. On Sundays it was a silk one, carefully brushed, but decidedly smudgy as regarded outline. All the children in the adjacent cottages were bidden to see the guy, as Williams proudly cast it upon a large bonfire that he had been saving for the occasion for many weeks. The professor gentleman let off rockets, and even Billy himself was permitted to fire off several squibs. It was altogether a great occasion, and was regarded in the autocrat's family as a sort of apotheosis of Williams, for shortly afterwards he fell ill, and grew worse so rapidly that he was removed to the cottage hospital in the town. His cottage was very small, and his wife very old, and the doctor is a man who has the very greatest objection to letting people die for lack of proper care and attention.
His gentle old wife crept down the hill every day to see him, but her accounts were far from cheering.
"'E be that deaf 'e can't yer what they do say, and 'e be that weak and low nothin' don't seem to rouse 'im."
So Billy's father went down to the hospital to see Williams, and found him lying, gaunt and ashen-coloured and still, in the straight white bed. The ward was clean and sunny and comfortable, but Williams did not seem to mend.
"He seems to have lost heart," said the cheery matron; "he's not so very old, or so very ill, but that he might get round, but his deafness is against him, and if he isn't roused he'll slip away simply because he doesn't care to stop."
Billy's father leant over the bed and laid his hand on the gnarled work-worn hand lying outside the white coverlet. Williams opened his eyes and stared languidly at his master. Presently there lighted in the tired old eyes a gleam of recognition.
"It be very quiet here," he muttered, "very lonesome and fur aff; them doctors and nusses they mumbles so, I can't yer 'em, and I'd like to yer summut.... I can allays yer Mazter Billy, 'e do talk so sensible——"
"He shall come and see you," said the visitor, loudly, right into the old man's ear; but Williams shook his head wearily, and closed his eyes again.
"What's the best time?" asked Billy's father of the matron. "I'll bring the little lad—it might rouse him; he has always been so fond of him."
"The morning's the best time," she answered. "He sleeps so much. We can but try it, sir."
Next day the autocrat—his rosy face very solemn, and his little soul oppressed by the solemnity of the occasion—pattered across the parqueted floor to the bedside of old Williams. The occupants of the three other beds in the men's ward—it is quite a little hospital—raised themselves and watched the pretty child with interest as he put out his little gloved hand timidly to touch this strange new Williams, lying so white and still in the clean, straight bed.
"Speak to him, sonnie!" said a voice at his ear.
"Williams!" whispered the child very low and timidly. Then, remembering that he never used to speak to Williams like that, he said loudly, "Williams, dear! the celery is very good."
Williams opened his eyes, and when he saw Billy a smile broke over his face like the November sunshine itself.
"Didn't I say as 'e talked sensible?" he asked of the world in general. Then, "So you be come at last, Mazter Billy!"
"Tell him you want him to 'get well!" whispered Billy's father.
"I wish you'd make haste and come home, Williams," Billy shouted; "I've got to go walks wiv Nanna nearly every day now, and it's so dull."
"Do ee miss Oi, Mazter Billy?"
"'Course I do. We all do. Please get well, Williams! Aren't you tired of stopping here?—though it's very pretty," he added hastily, fearing lest he had said something rude; "but Mrs. Williams is very lonely, and so am I."
"I be main tired, Mazter Billy. I don't seem to 'ave no sart o' stren'th in me, I be a hold man——"
"There's such a lot of chrysanthemums in the drive, Williams, and in your garden too," Billy continued, remembering his instructions to "interest" the sick man, "and Trimmie has scratched up such a lot of bulbs in the bed in the middle of the front lawn, and thrown the earth all over the place."
Trimmie was the autocrat's fox-terrier, and his misdeeds were the only subject upon which Williams ventured to disagree with that gentleman—on occasion expressing a strong desire to thrash "that there varmint of a dog" for sundry scratchings which his master only regarded with admiring amusement.
For the first time for a whole long week Williams raised his head quite two inches from the pillow, exclaiming:
"That there dog'll 'ave to be beat, scrattin' and scramblin' and spilin' my garden——" and Williams dropped his head on the pillow again with an emphatic bump.
Here the nurse interfered, and the autocrat, having succeeded in rousing the patient rather more effectually than the authorities either anticipated or desired, was led away.
Half an hour later the nurse approached his bedside.
"Here's your beef-tea, Mr. Williams!" she almost shouted; "you must try and take it."
"Who be you a-hollerin' at?" growled the patient. "I'll take the messy stuff without so much noise about it."
"I don't believe the old image is half so deaf as he makes out," whispered the nurse to the matron, feeling rather nettled at this unexpected retort.
The old image kept muttering to himself all that day, and those who listened heard remarks to the effect that there was no rest to be expected this side of the grave, that he simply couldn't lie there and think of his garden going to "wrack and rewing, all along of a slippety varmint of a tarrier. Just let me catch him a-scrattin' in my borders, and I'll give 'im what for."
The ultimate result of these mutterings being that, in another week, Williams was discharged as convalescent, and by Christmas was well enough to dictate to his mistress as to what greenery she might cut for the decoration of the house.
"Ladies, they did cum," said he to his wife, "and did read in that there 'orspital, but they did spake so secret-like and quiet, I couldn't never yer what it were all about; and the doctor 'e cum, and passun 'e cum, but I didn't seem to take no sort of delight in none of 'em. Then Mazter Billy 'e cum, and did talk the most sensiblest of the lot.... And, in spite of that there influinzy, yer Oi be!"
III
"ESPECIALLY THOSE"
They did not know that Billy had so many friends until he lay a-dying. Then they knew.
It takes some of us more than four years to make one friend. Billy had only lived four years altogether, but every one he knew was his friend, and he knew every one in his little world.
"I want some ice for Master Billy's head!" said the parlour-maid. "He's that feverish, doctor says it's to be kept on all the time."
Mr. Stallon, the fishmonger, looked grave.
"I haven't a bit of ice on the premises. It's ordered, but it won't be here till to-morrow. Dear! dear! and to think as the little gentleman's so bad!"
Mr. Stallon was a stout, seafaring-looking man, with a short brown beard. He shook his head, and looked really sorry.
"Whatever shall we do?" cried the parlour-maid. "Whatever shall we do?"
"Do!" echoed Mr. Stallon. "Do! why, get some, to be sure. I'll go to Farenam for it myself. Tell your lady she shall have it in a' hour or so."
Mr. Stallon owned an inn as well as a fish-shop. He crossed the road to his inn yard; there he harnessed his horse to his spring cart, and he drove to Fareham for the ice. Billy's town is a very little one, but Fareham, six miles off, is big, and Mr. Stallon got the ice. I'm afraid that he drove furiously, and beat his horse. But he quite forgot to charge for the ice, and no one ever thanked him for getting it. He didn't mind, he was one of Billy's friends.
The Earl was another. The Earl is young, fresh-coloured, and chubby, and somewhat lacking in dignity. He is an M.F.H. for all that, and Billy was wont to go with him to the kennels, and knew all the old hounds by name.
The Earl and Billy held long conversations on the subject of poachers. Billy's sympathies were apt to go with the poachers; but that was the fault of the Radical curate.
As for the curate, he and Billy were dear friends. He would spend long sunny afternoons bowling slows, and twisters, and overhands to Billy, and he could sing such charming songs.
One of Billy's peculiarities was that he exacted songs from all his friends. Then he learnt them himself, and sang them in his turn. The curate's favourite song was "For it's My Delight, On a Shiny Night." It was this song that caused Billy's predilection for poachers.
The Earl could sing too. Of his répertoire the favourite was—
"She went and got married, that 'ard-'earted girl,And it was not to a Wicount, and it was not to a Hearl."
"She went and got married, that 'ard-'earted girl,And it was not to a Wicount, and it was not to a Hearl."
"She went and got married, that 'ard-'earted girl,
And it was not to a Wicount, and it was not to a Hearl."
Here Billy always interrupted, exclaiming delightedly, "That'syou, you know!" and demanded the verse again.
There was one friend from whom Billy exacted no songs. This was old Williams, the gardener. He was a very good gardener, but deaf. Billy was the only person whom he could hear well. He really had no notion of singing, that gardener. So he told Billy tales in broad Gloucestershire instead, and Billy trotted after him, assisting in all his horticultural operations, and they loved each other.
But the fever had got a hold upon Billy, it was such a hot July.
At last a Sunday came, when those who loved him best feared that he could not last through the day. At morning service the curate gave it out that "the prayers of the congregation, are desired for William Wargrave Ainger"; then he paused, and with a ring of supplication in his voice, which startled the listening people, said, "little Billy Ainger, whom we love—who lies grievously sick."
"William Wargrave Ainger" had fallen on inattentive ears, but the familiar name struck home, and the congregation prayed.
In the pause which followed the words "especially those for whom our prayers are desired," the deaf gardener's voice was heard to say "Amen"; but no one smiled at him that Sunday.
The Earl had no surplice to take off, so he reached Billy's house first; but the curate caught him at the drive gate, for the curate ran.
There was no sound in the house but the voice of Billy's mother, singing to him, over and over again, the same old nursery rhyme. It ran:
"O do not come, but go away—Away with your eyes that peep;O do not come to Billy's house,For Billy is going to sleep."
"O do not come, but go away—Away with your eyes that peep;O do not come to Billy's house,For Billy is going to sleep."
"O do not come, but go away—
Away with your eyes that peep;
Away with your eyes that peep;
O do not come to Billy's house,
For Billy is going to sleep."
For Billy is going to sleep."
It has a quaint lilting tune, and Billy loved it, but he could not sleep.
His father came down to the Earl and the curate, and silently they followed him up into the darkened nursery. Billy smiled when he saw them. He could not speak, he was so tired.
His mother knelt at the head of his bed, singing tirelessly. His father knelt down at the other side, devouring the thin, flushed, little face with loving, sorrowful eyes. The curate knelt down at the foot of the bed, and the Earl, who made no attempt to wipe the tears from off his ruddy cheeks, knelt by a chair. By the darkened window sat the pretty hospital nurse, in her white cap and apron.
"O do not come to Billy's house," the mother's voice went on. Then she sang more softly, and suddenly there was silence:
Billy had gone to sleep.
The drive gate clicked, a quick step sounded on the gravel outside. It was the doctor. He came hastily into the room, and, stepping softly over to Billy's mother, lifted her up, and set her in a chair.
He took her place, laying his hand on the child's pulse, and on his forehead. Then he said in a whisper, "He'll do, he's gone to sleep."
The three men rose from their knees, as Billy's mother fell on hers, with the first tears she had shed, in all that weary week.
They followed the doctor out of the room, and crept downstairs into the hall. The doctor pushed Billy's father into the dining-room, saying, "You must give me some lunch. I want to see the little chap again, in twenty minutes or so—what the deuce was the matter with you all? Did you think he was dead?"
"Idid," said the Earl, in an awestruck whisper.
"Go away!" said the doctor testily; "go away, you long-faced lunatics, and leave us in peace!"
The two young men turned and went into the drive, where they found Williams, waiting for news. The Earl went up to the old man, and put his mouth to his ear, saying loudly, and with pauses between each word—"He—is better—he's asleep—the doctor—says—he'll do."
Williams blew his nose noisily, in a large red handkerchief; then said huskily, "The Lard be praised! your lardship, the Lardbepraised!"
Then the Earl and Williams shook hands; and the curate and Williams shook hands. The two young men shut the gate softly, and went down the road.
The curate went to lunch with the Earl. They had champagne, and the Earl grew frivolous, as his manner is; he has not much dignity, and he and the curate are old friends, for they were at Eton and "the House" together.
"I say, old chap!" said the Earl confidentially, "you were jolly careful that the Almighty should make no mistake, this morning."
The curate leaned back in his chair, and with more than a reminiscence of their college tutor in his manner, remarked, "In matters of importance, it is well to be strictly accurate."
IV
AT BLUE HOUSE LOCK
The life of Dorcas Heaven, who keeps the Blue House Lock, is somewhat lonely and monotonous. Her post is more or less of a sinecure, for but few barges pass along that bit of the canal. Indeed, the canal itself, though winding through the prettiest bit of country in the neighbourhood, is only navigable during a wet season. After a drought it grows so shallow that cows are wont to stand derisively in the very middle of it, cooling their legs.
Elijah, husband of Dorcas, is a labourer on a farm some two miles off.
As the path alongside the canal leads to nowhere in particular, there is not much traffic; but when a barge does come, Dorcas "bustles her about sharpish," and there is a great to-do. She looks upon herself as more or less the hostess of the occupants of the barge. "They change the weather and pass the time of day," their destination and their business are exhaustively discussed, and when at length stillness settles down over the Blue House, when there is no sound but the cry of a peewit or the rustle of a water-rat in the rushes, Dorcas fetches a chair into the doorway and sinks upon it, exclaiming, "'Law! what a paladum it have been, to be sure!"
On Sunday mornings Dorcas does not go to church, for "Elijah do like a bit o' meat of a Sunday," and Dorcas is a good wife first and a good churchwoman second. She therefore defers her attendance until evening, when Elijah accompanies her. While the bit o' meat is in course of preparation he strolls round for "a bit of a talk" with one "Ethni Harman, licensed to sell beer and tobacco," whose house of cheer lies on the outskirts of the town, and where the very latest electioneering news is to be had. Elijah has been heard to express an opinion to the effect that "there ain't no 'arm in going to church twice, for them as it suits, but once, along of my missus, be enough for I."
Had it been in Elijah's nature to be astonished at anything, he would have felt some surprise at the amiability with which Dorcas had lately speeded him on his way to "The Cat and Compasses" on Sunday mornings. She had at one time been rather given to inconvenient suggestions as that "them peas want sticking, and the salery be ready for banking," when Elijah would fain have been sunning himself upon the bench outside Ethni Harman's hospitable door, a mug of cider and like-minded friend beside him. He usually fell in with his wife's suggestions, for he was a man who loved a quiet life, and Dorcas—when annoyed on Sunday—was apt to carry on her domestic duties with unnecessary vigour far into the night on Monday.
The fact was that, of late, Sunday mornings had become for Dorcas the corner-stone of her week, and in this wise: it did not as a rule take long to get Elijah's dinner under way; this done, Dorcas would take her chair into the doorway, and read her Bible. She generally chose the Book of Revelation, carefully forming the words with her lips and following each with gnarled and work-worn forefinger. With Dorcas, as with many people whose lives are somewhat hard and monotonous, the prospect of a suite of rooms in one of the many mansions was extremely pleasant. Moreover, the Cotswold peasant dearly loves any form of spectacle, and although Dorcas could not pronounce, far less understand, many of the words she met with, there was a sense of pageant all around her as she read; while her appreciation of the city which has "no need of the sun, neither of the moon to shine in it," was as purely sensuous as that of any disciple of Wagner himself.
"And now, a little wind and shy" scattered the apple-blossoms over the path, and the Sunday silence was broken by a clear child-voice. To Dorcas such sound was as the skirl of the pipes to a Highlander in a far country; her heart beat quick and her cheeks grew redder, and she rushed out to see who "was a-comin'"; for Dorcas had "put away four" in the "cemetrary" on the Fletborough road, and one had lived to be four years old. Besides, to let any one pass the Blue House without "givin' of 'em good-day!" was a thing she had never done—"not once in twenty year." So she laid her Bible on the chair, covering it with a clean white handkerchief, and crossed the few feet of garden which lay between her cottage and the towing-path.
A sturdy little boy, in reefer coat and muffin cap, with round, fresh little face, and cheeks pink as the petals of the apple-blossom nearest the calyx, danced with excitement on the bank as he watched his father gathering some yellow "flags" which grew at the water's edge. The attendant father—parents and such were always a secondary consideration with Dorcas—was not very successful, as the ground was soft and slippery.
"Is it wet down there, dad? Can I come? Oh, get that big one just over there! Won't muth be pleased? What dirty boots you'll have! Shall I hold your stick for you to cling on to?"
Then he noticed Dorcas. "Good-morning!" said he with gay courtesy. "Isn't it a fine May morning?"
"It be that surely, little master!" answered Dorcas in high delight. Then "the little gentleman's dada"—he never achieved a separate identity in the mind of Dorcas—scrambled up from the swamp in which he had been standing. He, too, proved most approachable, and she learned that the youthful potentate in the reefer jacket had never walked so far before, that the "scroped out old quarry" just beyond the Blue House was his destination, and that he would probably come again next Sunday.
He came every Sunday morning all through that summer, and always with his dad. Sometimes they went tapping for fossils in the disused quarry, sometimes they came with butterfly-nets and caught "Tortoiseshells" and "Wall-Browns," and upon one great occasion a "Fritillary." But whatever they sought or whatever they caught, Dorcas was always, as who should say, "in at the death," and shared the excitement and the triumph with them.
The little gentleman was very friendly—a child is quick to recognise an admirer as any pretty woman—and it is possible that the attendant father understood and indulged the childless woman's craving for a child's affection. Sometimes Dorcas felt a qualm of conscience, and wondered whether her adored young gentleman ought not rather to be in church these sunny Sunday mornings; though had he been in church he certainly could have been nowhere in the neighbourhood of the Blue House. But she was comforted when she heard that he went with his mother to a children's service in the afternoon. Henceforth she gave herself up to the study of natural history and the worship of her dear "little gentleman" with a light heart.
Even in winter he sometimes came "of a fine Sunday," and Dorcas would spend many hours of the following week vainly trying to determine whether she admired him most in a sailor suit, or in the breeches and gaiters of which he was so proud. One never-to-be-forgotten day the rain came down in torrents just as her sultan and his grand vizier reached the Blue House. They took shelter with Dorcas, and the sultan was graciously pleased to be lifted up that he might reach a certain mug from the top shelf of the dresser—a mug which had belonged to "'im as wer gone." Dorcas made gingerbread cats and ducks, and her artistic efforts went so far as to attempt a king "with a crown upon 'is 'ead." After regaling himself with these delicacies her sultan would hold up a rosy face, ornamented by sundry sticky streaks, to be kissed in farewell; and when she had watched him round the bend of the canal her eyes would grow dim, and she would go back to the Book of Revelation, murmuring another favourite quotation to herself, "The Lard gave and the Lard 'ave took away. Blessed be the name of the Lard."
Of course the many charms of the "little gentleman" were duly reported to Elijah, and the residence of Ethni Harman took on a reflected glory from the fact that it was but a stone's throw from that of her sultan.
It was a wet summer, and there came four wet Sundays one after the other. Vainly did Dorcas try to fix her mind on the streets of jasper, while all the time she was straining her ears for the sound of the little voice that never chimed into the stillness. She grew to hate the patter of the rain, on the path outside; even the fact that the canal, for once, was full, and three barges passed in one week, did not console her. The gingerbread animals grew stale and crumbly between two plates, and the gorgeous mug, "A Present from Fairford," was put back on the top shelf of the dresser again.
The weather changed, and there came a lovely Sunday. Elijah set off to the "Cat and Compasses" as usual; Dorcas bustled about with a pleasant sense of expectation and went and stood on the towing-path, her eyes fixed on the distant bridge. Some boys went by to bathe beyond the second bend, with laughter and shouting. Then the only sound was the hum of bees settled on the purple scabious growing a-top the crumbling Cotswold wall.
On Monday Dorcas could bear it no longer. "I be that tewey and narvous, I don't know what I be about," she remarked, as she locked the door of the Blue House and hid the key under the mat. Should a barge come—well, it must manage somehow! Barges were never in a hurry. She had come to a momentous decision. She was going to inquire after her "little gentleman." Whether he was ill or gone for a holiday, or was merely forgetful, she would find out and end this dreadful suspense. She was a very simple-minded woman, but in her heart of hearts she felt a little sore with the grand vizier, for she had a notion that he was by no means ignorant of what these Sunday visits meant to her.
"I believe 'e'd 'ave come afore this if 'e'd been let. 'A be that meek-'earted 'a wouldn't 'urt a vloi, let alone a 'oman," she said to herself with a half sob. She was convinced that her sultan could not forget so utterly the humblest of his slaves. So she put on her best clothes and tight elastic-sided boots, with lots of little white buttons adorning the fronts.
At the Blue House, Dorcas was never either self-conscious or shy; but when she reached her sultan's palace, having timidly pushed open the drive gate, she became aware that the new boots creaked horribly, and that perspiration was dropping from her eyebrows into her eyes. Having mopped her face, and generally pulled herself together, she managed to reach the front door, though her knees trembled, and her heart fluttered like a caged bird.
Never was such a noisy bell! It clanged and echoed in most alarming fashion; she wished that the stone steps would open and swallow her up. What would they think of her for daring to make such a clatter? Besides—and at the dreadful thought she nearly cried out—of course she ought to have gone to the back door.
For full five minutes she stood on the steps, listening for any sound inside the house, but all was perfectly quiet. She turned and went into the drive, meaning to go round to the back door, when it occurred to her to look back at the house; she had been far too nervous to do so as she came in. The lower windows were shuttered, and all the blinds were down.
They had gone then! and it was empty. "And they never didn't bring 'im for to say good-bye to me."
Life's little tragedies generally happen to the lonely. What in a full and happy life ranks but as an episode, becomes an epoch in the sad-coloured days of lean monotony. Dorcas wiped her eyes more than once, on her way home, and went heavily for many days. Elijah saw that she was fretting, and tried to distract her by news from the town, and occasional suggestions that she should go over "and see sister-law" in an adjacent village; but beyond her necessary journeys to the town to buy such stores as she could afford, Dorcas never left home. She scrubbed the kitchen table till she grudged to sully its whiteness by so much as a yellow bowl, and she made herself a warm new winter dress, but, for all her industry, the time hung heavy on her hands, and she never forgot her "little gentleman." The wet season was followed by an Indian summer of exceptional beauty. "The spirit of October, mild and boon," was in the air; the tottering Cotswold wall, which laid its wayward length on the far side of the footway, was covered by sprays of crimson blackberry, mingled with the fluffy greyness of "old man's beard." Dorcas no longer stared hungrily down the towing-path on Sunday morning, but she did not forget; and, in token of her remembrance, the twenty-first chapter of the Book of Revelation was marked in her Bible by a little woollen glove with a large hole in the thumb. Her sultan had dropped it during his last visit.
The birds sang as though it were spring, and Dorcas began to read aloud to herself to keep her thoughts from wandering. "And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes," whispered the kind Gloucestershire voice, when suddenly, above the triumphant voices of the birds, above the soft wash of the water among the yellowing reeds, rang that clear sound for which the soul of Dorcas had hungered so cruelly.
"I wonder if the lady at the Blue House will know me again, Dad!"
* * * * *
It seemed as though the grand vizier had not been so greatly to blame after all. He had been suddenly called away to the north of Scotland; and although he had left directions that before the sultan and the household followed him that potentate was to be taken to say good-bye "to the lady at the Blue House," although the sultan himself had repeatedly suggested the propriety of such a pilgrimage, his nurse had always considered the road too muddy.
"I thought, sir, as you was all gone fur good and all," said Dorcas, with a catch in her voice; "and I were that taken to I never made no inquiries."
On his way home the grand vizier was rather silent. Once or twice he made a queer little face, and seemed to swallow something in his throat. At last he quoted, but not to the sultan, "By heavens, it is pitiful, the bootless love of women for children in Vanity Fair." The rosy-faced child, who had been wondering why the usual Sunday service of gingerbread had been omitted, was rather surprised, but nevertheless asked curiously, "Are you thinking of the Blue House lady, Dad?"
His father stooped down hastily and kissed him.
V
KETURAH
On Mondays the doctor stayed at the surgery to see patients from two till seven. He did not live at the surgery, oh, dear no! but had a fine house, with a carriage drive and a conservatory, right at the other end of the town. The waiting-room was very full on Mondays, people came from all parts to see the doctor; moreover, it was market-day, and the pursuit of health could be combined with that of business.
It was getting late, and only two people were left in the waiting-room—a shabby, nervous-looking woman and a handsome lad of sixteen, who had come to consult the doctor about a sprained thumb. "One of the gentry," thought the woman to herself, as she noted the trim riding-breeches and the leather on his shoulders.
From time to time she looked anxiously at the clock, clasping and unclasping her thin, work-worn hands.
A door banged outside, the consulting-room bell pealed, signifying that an interview was over. It was the lad's turn next. He stretched his long legs preparatory to obeying the expected summons, when the woman rose hastily and came and stood in front of him, saying eagerly, "Sir, will you let me go in out of my turn? I won't keep the doctor a minute; it's to ask him to come to my child who is very ill. I've been away far too long as it is, but I'd no one as I could send."
"Of course, of course!" exclaimed the lad, who had risen to his feet when she first spoke, looking very shy and embarrassed, "and I am awfully sorry, you know, but the doctor will be sure to do it good. He's 'A one,' you know——"
At this moment the door opened and a voice cried, "Next, please!" and the little woman, casting a grateful look behind her, hurried into the presence of the doctor. He looked up surprised as she entered—poor people generally came on Thursdays.
"Well?" he demanded. With rich and poor alike the doctor's manners were always somewhat abrupt. He was saving of speech, though it is true that he expanded under the smiles of youth and beauty.
"Please, sir, could you come and see my little girl? She's bin ill now these three weeks; she don't get no better, and she does nothing but cough, and seems that hot and restless, and is that weak——"
"What have you done?" interrupted the doctor.
"I've kep' 'er in bed and giv' 'er 'Dinver's Lung Tonic.' My 'usband, 'e don't 'old with doctors—'e's a Plymouth Brother, and don't seek advice——"
The doctor growled out something about "nonsense," prefaced by a somewhat forcible adjective, then "All right! I'll come. Where do you live?"
After giving her address, the woman held out to him a little screw of paper. He waved it aside impatiently, saying, "Haven't seen her yet," held the door open, and the woman hurried out.
"I'll come directly," he shouted after her. His heart was much softer than his manners.
"These Plimmy brothers are the biggest lunatics going," he said to himself, "with their faith-healing and their providence-mongering. I'd like to dose the lot of them."
The doctor was not accurate in his diagnosis of the sect in question, but in his own mind lumped together every sort of religious enthusiasm.
* * * * *
Matthew Moulder, baker, was an upright, God-fearing man, foreman to the baker—our little town boasts but one. He turned out excellent bread; moreover, he was a good husband, a conscientious if not affectionate father, and a diligent worshipper in that upper room, wherein assembled a handful of people of similar religious views. He indulged himself in few pleasures, and rather wondered at the frivolity of his neighbours, who took life with that cheerful philosophy still to be found in portions of England which yet remain to justify the description "merrie."
His wife was meek-hearted, and easily ruled; she never questioned his authority, but having early laid to heart the maxim that "what a man doesn't know can't vex him," she was careful to vex Matthew as seldom as possible.
How, then, did these two sedate and respectable persons come by such a child as their daughter Keturah?
Keturah of the elf-locks and great wine-coloured eyes. Keturah, who danced and sang and giggled the live-long day; who yawned in sermons and played "handy-pandy" with herself, while her father uplifted his voice in prayer. Who turned up in the hunting-field when she ought to have been safe in school, ever ready to open gates for the "gentry," with dazzling smiles, showing the whitest of white teeth, and with curtsies that suggested drawing-rooms rather than the village lane.
At the little school, which she attended with a fitfulness perplexing in the extreme to the worthy mistress, she did her lessons far better and more quickly than anybody else. There was no doubt about it, Keturah was a "character."
While there were but few people outside the row of cottages where they lived who even knew Matthew and his wife by sight, everybody knew Keturah. Always in mischief, alwaysen évidence, always doing the unexpected, undaunted by misfortunes and punishments which would have struck terror into the heart of any well-regulated little girl; she had, during her six months' residence in our midst, attained to a notoriety which was apparently as much a matter of indifference to her as it was painful to her parents. Her father looked upon her as a cross to be borne with Christian fortitude. He wrestled in prayer on her behalf, and on occasion with Keturah herself, accentuating his remarks by means of a stick. But, as Thomas Beames, her slave and shadow, remarked on one occasion, when they played truant to attend a meet some seven miles off, "They'll beat we when us do get 'ome; but us'll 'ave our fun fust."
Thomas was a round-faced, in no way extraordinarily small boy, who was dominated by Keturah's stronger character; he loved her, why, he himself could not have told. Perhaps because he admired the way she always made sure of her "fun" regardless of consequences—a disregard the stranger in Keturah's case, for Nemesis was by no means leaden-footed. As a rule, the punishment was in very truth the other half of the crime.
She loved her mother, and regarded her father much in the same light that he regarded her, with this difference that she looked for no change in him, but with a philosophy as pagan as the rest of her conduct accepted his existence as a necessary evil. Indeed, had Matthew but known it, she extracted considerable "fun" out of circumventing him.
But Keturah had fallen on evil days. A fishing expedition, during which she tumbled into the canal, and after which she walked about till she was, as she put it, "moderate dry"—"at least not to notice"—had ended in the mysterious illness to which the doctor had just been called.
Matthew Moulder had gone that evening to a prayer-meeting in a neighbouring village, where he would stay the night with a hospitable brother; this fact, taken together with the fact that Keturah seemed most alarmingly ill, had given her mother the courage to call in the doctor.
He had seen Keturah, had expressed himself with his customary vigour as to the imbecility of people who could treat a case of acute pneumonia with "Dinver's Lung Tonic" for sole remedy, and now he had returned to the little bedroom to have a final look at the child.
She was too weak to raise herself on her elbow, but she turned her head on the doctor's entrance. "Shall I go to hell?" she asked, devouring his face with her great fever-bright eyes.
The doctor started. She had not volunteered any remark before.
"God bless my soul, no!" he exclaimed. "You'll go to Weston-super-Mare when you're well enough."
Keturah shook her head. "But if I don't get well? Shall I go to hell?"
Theology is not one of the doctor's strong points. Being as a rule much concerned with the treatment of the body, he expresses himself with diffidence regarding the ultimate fate of the soul. But on this occasion he shook his head vigorously, holding the hot thin little hand in a firm comforting clasp. "You must ask a parson about these things, my dear, but I am quite sure that no little girls go——but you are going to get well—cheer up! Eh?"
"Could I ast the young gentleman parson wot plays cricket?" Keturah's voice was hoarse and eager.
"The very man—couldn't do better. I'll send him round as I go home," and the doctor turned to go. He hurried down the narrow stairs, but stopped at the front door to call back into the house, "She's to live in poultices, mind!Livein 'em."
He stopped at the curate's lodgings as he drove home, and went right in, to find the cleric in question resting his slippered feet upon the chimney-piece, while he smoked and read the evening paper.
"There's a kid down with pneumonia in the Waterlow Cottages, and she fancies she's going to hell. She'd like to see you, so I said I'd send you. Her people are Plymouth Rocks, or some such thing. She's a queer little soul—dying, I fear."
"It can't be Keturah?" exclaimed the curate, swinging his feet off the mantelpiece and standing up on his long legs.
"I believe that is the creature's name."
"Oh, you mustn't let Keturah die! She's a genius!"
"She may be a genius," said the doctor grimly, "but her people are the balliest lunatics in creation, and I rather fancy that geniuses are just as likely to die of neglect as other folk——" But the curate had not waited for the rest of the sentence. He seized his hat and ran into the street, his slippers (down at the heel) going flip, flop, on the wet pavement as he ran.
"He's a good chap," murmured the doctor as he climbed into his dog-cart. "He's a devilish good chap."
He went to see Keturah again that night, and found that his instructions had been carried out to the letter. He also found the curate there, in his shirt-sleeves, assisting Mrs. Moulder to make poultices. He often does such things. His people look upon it as an amiable eccentricity. "'E's a curus gent," they say. "'E'll turn 'is 'and to hany think."
He turned his hand to the nursing of Keturah with such success that two days later the doctor said, "She is better, but weak as a kitten. She must have brandy. You must watch for the grey look and give it her then."
"Oh, sir!" exclaimed poor Mrs. Moulder, who, since the invasion of the curate, could not call her soul her own, "Oh, sir, I daren't. My 'usband wouldn't 'ave it in the 'ouse. 'E's tee-total, 'e is——"
"Tell him it is medicine," said the doctor shortly. "She must have it, and here it is. Give it her in milk like this!" and suiting the action to the word, he measured out something into a tea-cup. Something that had a most unmistakable smell.
Keturah drank it, and her ashy cheeks grew a shade less grey. Then she turned to the doctor, with one of her dazzling smiles. "I don't think much on the taste of it, but"—with immense conviction—"it do make you feel so cheerful-like, about the knees."
Her mother wrung her hands, but the doctor chuckled, and, placing on the table the innocent-looking medicine bottle he had produced from his pocket, nodded at it, remarking, "Every time she looks so grey, mind!"
Mrs. Moulder burnt brown paper in the bedroom, for Matthew came home at five. She dared not pour the accursed stuff away, for the doctor and the curate between them had frightened her out of her wits, by threatening legal proceedings if Keturah were in any way neglected. She had been obliged to confess to the visits of the doctor, who might fly in at any moment when Matthew was at home. But she had not felt in any way called upon to tell her husband that the curate had sat up with Keturah the whole night that he was away, helping her poultice, and allaying the child's fears as to eternal punishment so successfully that she fell asleep. It was therefore a shock to Matthew, on his return to tea that afternoon, to hear an undoubtedly clerical voice, apparently reading to Keturah.
The house was perfectly quiet, though there were movements in the back kitchen, showing the whereabouts of Mrs. Moulder. He stood at the foot of the little narrow staircase and listened, fully prepared to find some taint of ritualism in the curate's ministrations. He had come to make a convert of Keturah, of that he was sure; was there not an office—Matthew almost licked his lips over the word "office"—in the Book of Common Prayer especially adapted to the visiting of the sick? All the Protestant in him rose in rebellion. He would be calm, but he would convict this meddling priest out of his own mouth. Then with the dignified strength born of a just indignation bid him begone!
The bedroom door stood open, and he heard Keturah's weak little voice saying, "Tell it again! I like it."
Matthew braced himself to listen, and this was what he heard:—
"We built a ship upon the stairs,All made of the back bedroom chairs,And filled it full of sofa pillows,To go a-sailing on the billows."We took a saw and several nails,And water in the nursery pails;And Tom said, 'Let us also takeAn apple and a slice of cake;'—Which was enough for Tom and meTo go a-sailing on, till tea."We sailed along for days and days,And had the very best of plays;But Tom fell out and hurt his knee,So there was no one left but me."
"We built a ship upon the stairs,All made of the back bedroom chairs,And filled it full of sofa pillows,To go a-sailing on the billows.
"We built a ship upon the stairs,
All made of the back bedroom chairs,
And filled it full of sofa pillows,
To go a-sailing on the billows.
"We took a saw and several nails,And water in the nursery pails;And Tom said, 'Let us also takeAn apple and a slice of cake;'—Which was enough for Tom and meTo go a-sailing on, till tea.
"We took a saw and several nails,
And water in the nursery pails;
And Tom said, 'Let us also take
An apple and a slice of cake;'—
Which was enough for Tom and me
To go a-sailing on, till tea.
"We sailed along for days and days,And had the very best of plays;But Tom fell out and hurt his knee,So there was no one left but me."
"We sailed along for days and days,
And had the very best of plays;
But Tom fell out and hurt his knee,
So there was no one left but me."
"So there was no one left but me," repeated the weak child-voice. Matthew rose from the third stair from the bottom, where he had been sitting, and stumbled somewhat blindly into the parlour, where he sat down on the slippery horse-hair sofa. He cleared his throat and blew his nose, and there was an expression on his face which was seldom seen there.
"And ther' was no one left but me." The forlorn weak voice repeating that, moved him strangely. Keturah was the last of the children. There had been six babies before Keturah, and none had lived beyond babyhood. At that moment he forgot how naughty she was, how unregenerate! He only remembered that she used to lay her baby face against his, and that she said "dada" the very first word she spoke.
A hundred pretty scenes of her first years flashed into his recollection. His suspicions of the curate were forgotten, and in their place came cold-handed fear to fill his heart with the dread that Keturah might not get well.