"Cripps charges a good deal more than twopence," said Mr. Oglander quietly; for his hopes and fears were once more postponed.
"He hath brought the worst load ever were brought!" cried the widow, growing eloquent. "Black death, and the plague, and the murrain of Egypt hath come in through Cripps the Carrier! How much will he charge Beckley, your Worship? How much shall Beckley pay him, when she mourneth for her children? when she spreadeth forth her hands and seeketh north and south, and cannot find them, because they are not?"
"What is it, good woman?" cried Smith, impatiently, "what is all this uproar? do tell us, and have done with it?"
"Good man," replied Widow Hookham tartly, "my words are addressed to your betters, sir. Your Worship knoweth well that Master Kale hath leave and license for his Sunday dinner; ever since his poor wife died, he sitteth with a knife and fork to the right side of our cook-maid. He were that genteel, I do assure you, although his appearance bespeaketh it not, and city gents may look down on him; he had such a sense of propriety, not a word did he say all the time of dinner to raise an objection to the weakest stomach. But as soon as he see that all were done, and the parlour dinner forward, he layeth his finger on his lips, and looketh to me as the prime authority; and when I ask him to speak out, no secrets being among good friends, what he said were a deal too much for me, or any other Christian person."
"Well, well, ma'am, if your own dinner was respected, you might have showed some respect for ours," Mr. Smith exclaimed very sadly, beholding the gravy in the channelled dish margined with grease, and the noble sirloin weeping with lost opportunity. But Mr. Oglander took no notice. To such things he was indifferent now.
"To keep the mind dwelling upon earthly victuals," the widow replied severely, "on the Lord's Day, and with the Day of the Lord a-hanging special over us—such things is beyond me to deal with, and calls for Mr. Warbelow. Carrier Cripps hath sent his sister over to nurse Squire Overshute!"
John Smith pretended to be busy with his beef, but Mary, who made a point of watching whatever he did (without well knowing why), startled as she was by her mother's words, this girl had her quick eyes upon his face, and was sure that it lost colour, as the carved sirloin of beef had done from the trickling of the gravy.
"Overshute! nurse Mr. Overshute?" cried the Squire with great astonishment. "Why, what ails Mr. Overshute? It is a long time since I have seen him, and I thought that he had perhaps forgotten me. He used to come very often, when—but who am I to tempt him? When my darling was here, in the time of my darling, everybody came to visit me; now nobody comes, and of course it is right. There is nobody for them to look at now, and no one to make them laugh a little. Ah, she used to make them laugh, till I was quite jealous, I do believe; not of myself, bless your heart! but of her, because I never liked her to have too much to say to anybody, unless it was one who could understand her. And nobody ever turned up that was able, in any way, to understand her, except her poor old father, sir."
The Squire, at the end of this long speech (which had been a great deal too much for him) stood up, and flourished his fork, which should have been better employed in feeding him, and looked from face to face, in fear that he had made himself ridiculous. Nobody laughed at him, or even smiled; and he was pleased with this, and resolved never to give such occasion again; because it would have shamed him so. And after all it was his own business. None of these people could have any idea, and he hoped they never might have. By this time his mind was dropping softly into some confusion, and feeling it so, he sat down again, and drank the glass of wine which Mary Hookham kindly held for him.
For a few minutes Mr. John Smith had his flourish (to let both the women be sure who he was) all about the Queen, and the law of the land, and the jurisdiction of the Bench, and he threatened the absent Cripps with three months' imprisonment, and perhaps the treadmill. He knew that he was talking unswept rubbish, but his audience was female. They listened to him without leaving off their work; and their courage increased as his did.
But presently Mr. Oglander, who had seemed to be taking a nap, arose, and said, as clearly as ever he had said anything in his clearest days—
"Mary, go and tell Charles to put the saddle on the mare at once."
"Oh Lor', sir! whatever are you thinking of? Lor' a massy, sir, I couldn't do it, I couldn't! You ain't abeen a-horseback for nigh four months, and your orders is to keep quiet in your chair, and not even look out o' winder, sir. Do 'ee plaize to go into your slippers, sir?"
"I will not go into my slippers, Mary. I will go into my boots. I hear that Mr. Overshute is ill, and I gather from what you have all been saying that his illness is of such a kind that nobody will go near him. I have wronged the young gentleman bitterly, and I will do my best to right myself. If I never do another thing, I will ride to Shotover this day. Order the mare, as I tell you, and the air will do me good, please God!"
Now was the happy time when Oxford, ever old, yet ever fresh with the gay triennial crown of youth, was preparing itself for that sweet leisure for which it is seldom ill prepared. Being the paramount castle and strongest feudal hold of stout "idlesse," this fair city has not much to do to get itself into prime condition for the noblest efforts and most arduous feats of invincible laziness. The first and most essential step is to summon all her students, and send them to chapel to pay their vows. After this there need be no misgiving or fear of industry. With one accord they issue forth, all pledged to do nothing for the day, week, or month; each intellectual brow is stamped with the strongest resolve not to open a book; and
"Games are the spur which the clear spirit doth raise,To scorn the Dons, and live luxurious days."
"Games are the spur which the clear spirit doth raise,To scorn the Dons, and live luxurious days."
"Games are the spur which the clear spirit doth raise,
To scorn the Dons, and live luxurious days."
This being so, whether winter shatters the Isid wave against Folly bridge, or spring's arrival rustles in the wavering leaves of Magdalen, or autumn strews the chastened fragrance of many brewers on ripe air—how much more when beauteous summer fosters the coy down on the lip of the junior sophist like thistle-seed, and casts the freshman's shadow hotly on the flags of High Street—now or never is the proper period not to overwork one's self, and the hour for taking it easy.
But against each sacred rite and hallowed custom of the place, against each good old-fashioned smoothness, and fine-fed sequacity, a rapid stir was now arising, and a strong desire to give a shove. There were some few people who really thought that the little world in which they lay was one they ought to move in; that perfect life was not to be had without some attempt at breathing; and that a fire (though beautifully laid) gives little warmth till kindled.
However, these were young fellows mostly, clever in their way, but not quite sound; and the heads of houses, generally speaking, abode on the house-top, and did not come down. Still they kept their sagacious eyes on the movement gathering down below, and made up their minds to crush it as soon as they could be quite certain of being too late. But these things ride not upon the cart of Cripps—though Cripps is a theologian, when you beat his charges down.
After the Easter vacation was over, with too few fattening festivals, the most popular tutor in Brasenose (being the only one who ever tried to teach) came back to his rooms and his college work with a very fine appetite for doing good;—according, at least, to his own ideas of good, and duty, and usefulness; all of which were fundamentally wrong in the opinion of the other tutors. But Hardenow, while he avoided carefully all disputes with his colleagues, strictly kept to his own course, and doing more work than the other five (all put together) attempted, was permitted to have his own way, because of the trouble there might be in stopping him.
The college met for the idle term, on Saturday morning, as usual. On Saturday afternoon Hardenow led off his old "squad" with two new recruits, for their fifteen miles of hard walking. Athletics and training were as yet unknown (except with the "eight" for Henley), and this Tractarian movement may have earned its name, ere the birth of No. 90, from the tract of road traversed, in a toe-and-heel track, by the fine young fellows who were up to it. At any rate that was what the country people said, and these are more often right than wrong, and the same opinion still abides with them.
Hardenow only took this long tramp for the sake of collecting his forces. Saturday was not their proper day for this very admirable coat-tail chase. Neither did they swallow hill and plain in this manner on a Sunday. Lectures were needful to fetch them up to the proper pitch for striding so. Wherefore on the morrow Mr. Hardenow was free for a cruise on his own account, after morning sermon at St. Mary's; and not having heard of his old friend Russel for several weeks, he resolved to go and hunt him up in his own home.
It was not a possible thing for this very active and spare-bodied man to lounge upon his road. Whatever it was that he undertook, he carried on the action with such a swing and emphasis, that he seemed to be doing nothing else. He wore a short spencer, and a long-tailed coat, "typical"—to use the pet word of that age—both of his curt brevity and his ankle-reaching gravity. His jacket stuck into him, and his coat struck away with the power of an adverse wind, while the boys turned back and stared at him; but he was so accustomed to that sort of thing that he never thought of looking round. He might have been tail-piped for seven leagues without troubling his head about it.
This was a man of great power of mind, and led up to a lofty standard; pure, unselfish, good, and grand (so far as any grandeur can be in the human compound), watchful over himself at almost every corner of his ways, kind of heart, and fond of children; loving all simplicity, quick to catch and glance the meaning of minds very different from his own; subtle also, and deep to reason, but never much inclined to argue. He had a shy and very peculiar manner of turning his eyes away from even an undergraduate, when his words did not command assent; as sometimes happened with freshmen full of conceit from some great public school.
The manner of his mind was never to assert itself, or enter into controversy. He felt that no arguments would stir himself when he had solidly cast his thoughts; and he had of all courtesies the rarest (at any rate with Englishmen), the courtesy of hoping that another could reason as well as himself.
In this honest and strenuous nature there was one deficiency. The Rev. Thomas Hardenow, copious of mind and active, clear of memory, and keen at every knot of scholarship, patient and candid too, and not at all intolerant, yet never could reach the highest rank, through want of native humour. His view of things was nearly always anxious and earnest. His standing-point was so fixed and stable, that every subject might be said to revolve on its own axis during its revolution round him; and the side that never presented itself was the ludicrous or lightsome one.
As he strode up the hill, with the back of his leg-line concave at the calf, instead of convex (whenever his fluttering skirt allowed a glimpse of what he never thought about), it was brought home suddenly to his ranging mind that he might be within view of Beckley. At a bend of the rising road he turned, and endwise down a plait of hills, and between soft pillowy folds of trees, the simple old church of Beckley stood, for his thoughts to make the most of it. And, to guide them, the chime of the gentle bells, foretelling of the service at three o'clock, came on the tremulous conveyance of the wind, murmuring the burden he knew so well—"old men and ancient dames, married folk and children, bachelors and maidens, all come to church!"
Hardenow thought of the months he had spent, some few years back, in that quiet place; of the long, laborious, lonesome days, the solid hours divided well, the space allotted for each hard drill; then (when the pages grew dim and dark, and the bat flitted over the lattice, or the white owl sailed to the rickyard), the glory of sallying into the air, inhaling grander volumes than ever from mortal breath proceeded, and plunging into leaves that speak of one great Author only. And well he remembered in all that toil the pure delight of the Sunday; the precious balm of kicking out both legs, and turning on the pillow until eight o'clock; the leisurely breakfast with the Saturday papers, instead of Aristotle; the instructive and amusing walk to church, where everybody admired him, and he set the fashion for at least ten years; the dread of the parson that a man who was known as the best of his year at Oxford should pick out the fallacies of his old logic; and then the culminating triumph of Sabbatic jubilee—the dinner, the dinner, wherewith the whole week had been privily gestating; up to that crowning moment when Cripps, in a coat of no mean broadcloth, entered with a dish of Crippsic size, with the "trimmings" coming after him in a tray, and lifting the cover with a pant and flourish, said, "Well, sir, now, what do 'ee plaize to think of that?"
Nor in this pleasant retrospect of kindness and simplicity was the element of rustic grace and beauty wholly absent—the slight young figure that flitted in and out, with quick desire to please him; the soft pretty smile with which his improvements of Beckley dialect were received; and the sweet gray eyes that filled with tears so, the day before his college met. Hardenow had feared, humble-minded as he was, that the young girl might be falling into liking him too well; and he knew that there might be on his own part too much reciprocity. Therefore (much as he loved Cripps, and fully as he allowed for all that was to be said upon every side), he had felt himself bound to take no more than a distant view of Beckley.
Even now, after three years and a half, there was some resolve in him to that effect, or the residue of a resolution. He turned from the gentle invitation of the distant bells, and went on with his face set towards the house of his old friend, Overshute. When he came to the lodge (which was like a great beehive stuck at the end of a row of trees), it caused him a little surprise to find the gate wide open, and nobody there. But he thought that, as it was Sunday, perhaps the lodge-people were gone for a holiday; and so he trudged onward, and met no one to throw any light upon anything.
In this way he came to the door at last, with the fine old porch of Purbeck stone heavily overhanging it, and the long wings of the house stretched out, with empty windows either way. Hardenow rang and knocked, and then set to and knocked and rang again; and then sat down on a stone balustrade; and then jumped up with just vigour renewed, and pushed and pulled, and in every way worked to the utmost degree of capacity everything that had ever been gifted with any power of conducting sound.
Nobody answered. The sound of his energy went into places far away, and echoed there, and then from stony corners came back to him. He traced the whole range of the windows and caught no sign of any life inside them. At last, he pushed the great door, and lo! there was nothing to resist his thrust, except its sullen weight.
When Hardenow stood in the old-fashioned hall, which was not at all "baronial," he found himself getting into such a fright that he had a great mind to go away again. If there had only been anybody with him—however inferior in "mental power"—he might have been able to refresh himself by demonstrating something, and then have marched on to the practical proof. But now he was all by himself, in strange and unaccountable loneliness. The sense of his condition perhaps induced him to set to and shout. The silence was so oppressive, that the sound of his own voice almost alarmed him by its audacity. So, after shouting "Russel!" thrice, he stopped, and listened, and heard nothing except that cold and shuddering ring, as of hardware in frosty weather, which stone and plaster and timber give when deserted by their lords—mankind.
Knowing pretty well all the chief rooms of the house, Hardenow resolved to go and see if they were locked; and grasping his black holly-stick for self-defence, he made for the dining-room. The door was wide open; the cloth on the table, with knives and forks and glasses placed, as if for a small dinner-party; but the only guest visible was a long-legged spider, with a sound and healthy appetite, who had come down to dine from the oak beams overhead, and was sitting in his web between a claret bottle and a cruet-stand, ready to receive with a cordial clasp any eligible visitor.
Hardenow tasted the water in a jug, and found it quite stale and nasty; then he opened a napkin, and the bread inside it was dry and hard as biscuit. Then he saw with still further surprise that the windows were open to their utmost extent, and the basket of plate was on the sideboard.
"My old friend Russel, my dear old fellow!" he cried with his hand on his heart where lurked disease as yet unsuspected, "what strange misfortune has befallen you? No wonder my letter was left unanswered. Perhaps the dear fellow is now being buried, and every one gone to his funeral. But no; if it were so, these things would not be thus. The funeral feast is a grand institution. Everything would be fresh and lively, and five leaves put into the dinner-table." With this true reflection, he left the room to seek the solution elsewhere.
He failed, however, to find it in any of the downstair sitting-rooms. Then he went even into the kitchen, thinking the liberty allowable under such conditions. The grate was cold and the table bare; on the one lay a drift of soot, on the other a level deposit of dust, with a few grimy implements to distribute it.
Hardenow made up his mind for the worst. He was not addicted to fiction (as haply was indicated by his good degree), but he could not help recalling certain eastern and even classic tales; and if he had come upon all the household sitting in native marble, or from the waistband downward turned into fish, or logs, or dragons, he might have been partly surprised, but must have been wholly thankful for the explanation. Failing however to discover this, and being resolved to go through with the matter, the tutor of Brasenose mounted the black oak staircase of this enchanted house. At the head of the stairs was a wide, low passage, leading right and left from a balustraded gallery. The young man chose first the passage to the right, and tightening his grip of the stick, strode on.
The doors of the rooms on either side were not only open but fastened back; the sashes of the windows were all thrown up; and the rain, which had followed when the east wind fell, had entered and made puddles on the sills inside. Such a draught of air rushed down the passage that Hardenow's lengthy skirts flickered out, in the orthodox fashion, behind him.
At the end of this passage he came to a small alcove, fenced off with a loose white curtain, shaking and jerking itself in the wind. He put this aside with his stick; and two doorways, leading into separate rooms, but with no doors in them, faced him. Something told him that both these rooms held human life, or human death.
First he looked in at the one on the left. He expected to see lonely death; perhaps corruption; or he knew not what. His nerves were strung or unstrung (whichever is the medical way of putting it) to such a degree that he wholly forgot, or entirely put by, everything, except his own absorbing sense of his duty, as a man in holy orders. This duty had never been practised yet in any serious way, because he had never been able to afford it. It costs so much more money than it brings in. However, in the midst of more lucrative work, he had felt that he was sacred to it—rich or poor—and he often had a special hankering after it. This leaning towards the cure of souls had a good chance now of being gratified.
In the room on the left hand he saw a little bed, laid at the foot of a fat four-poster, which with carved mouths grinned at it; and on this little bed of white (without curtain, or trimming, or tester), lay a lady, or a lady's body, cast down recklessly, in sleep or death, with the face entirely covered by a silvery cloud of hair. From the manner in which one arm was bent, Hardenow thought that the lady lived. There was nothing else to show it. Being a young man, a gentleman also, he hung back and trembled back from entering that room.
Without any power to "revolve things well," as he always directed his pupils to do, Hardenow stepped to the other doorway, and silently settled his gaze inside. His eyes were so worried that he could not trust them, until he had time to consider what they told.
They told him a tale even stranger than that which had grown upon him for an hour now, and passed from a void alarm into a terror; they showed him the loveliest girl—according to their rendering—that ever they had rested on till now; a maiden sitting in a low chair reading, silently sometimes, and sometimes in a whisper, according to some signal, perhaps, of which he saw no sign. There was no other person in the room, so far as he could see; and he strained his eyes with extreme anxiety to make out that.
The Rev. Thomas Hardenow knew (as clearly as his keen perception ever had brought any knowledge home) that he was not discharging the functions now—unless they were too catholic—of the sacerdotal office, in watching a young woman through a doorway, without either leave or notice. But though he must have been aware of this, it scarcely seemed now to occur to him; or whether it did, or did not, he went on in the same manner gazing.
The girl could not see him; it was not fair play. The width of great windows, for instance, kept up such a rattling of blinds, and such flapping of cords, and even the floor was so strewn with herbs (for the sake of their aroma), that anybody might quite come close to anybody who had cast away fear (in the vast despair of prostration), without any sense of approach until perhaps hand was laid upon shoulder. Hardenow took no more advantage of these things than about half a minute. In that half-minute, however, his outward faculties (being all alive with fear) rendered to his inward and endiathetic organs a picture, a schema, or a plasm—the proper word may be left to him—such as would remain inside, at least while the mind abode there.
The sound of low, laborious breath pervaded the sick room now and then, between the creaking noises and the sighing of the wind. In spite of all draughts, the air was heavy with the scent of herbs strewn broadcast, to prevent infection—tansy, wormwood, rue, and sage, burnt lavender and rosemary. The use of acids in malignant fevers was at that time much in vogue, and saucers of vinegar and verjuice, steeped lemon-peel, and such like, as well as dozens of medicine bottles, stood upon little tables. Still Hardenow could not see the patient; only by following the glance of the reader could he discover the direction. It was the girl herself, however, on whom his wondering eyes were bent. At first he seemed to know her face, and then he was sure that he must have been wrong. The sense of doing good, and the wonderful influence of pity, had changed the face of a pretty girl into that of a beautiful woman. Hardenow banished his first idea, and wondered what strange young lady this could be.
Although she was reading aloud, and doing it not so very badly, it was plain enough that she expected no one to listen to her. The sound of her voice, perhaps, was soothing to some one who understood no words; as people (in some of the many unknown conditions of brain) have been soothed and recovered by a thread of waterfall broken with a walking-stick. At any rate, she read on, and her reading fell like decent poetry.
Hardenow scarcely knew what he ought to do. He did not like to go forward; and it was a mean thing to go backward, rendering no help, when help seemed wanted so extremely. He peeped back into the other room; and there was the lady with the fine white hair, sleeping as soundly as a weary top driven into dreaming by extreme activity of blows.
Nothing less than a fine idea could have delivered Hardenow from this bad situation. It was suddenly borne in upon his mind that the house had a rare old fire-bell, a relic of nobler ages, hanging from a bar in a little open cot, scarcely big enough for a hen-roost; and Russel had shown him one day, with a laugh, the corner in which the rope hung. There certainly could be but very little chance of doing harm by ringing it; what could be worse than the present state of things? Some good Samaritan might come. No Levite was left to be driven away.
For Hardenow understood the situation now. The meaning of a very short paragraph in the Oxford paper of Saturday, which he had glanced at and cast by, came distinctly home to him. The careful editor had omitted name of person and of place, but had made his report quite clear to those who held a key to the reference. "How very dull-witted now I must be!" cried the poor young fellow in his lonely trouble. "I ought to have known it. But we never know the clearest things until too late." It was not only for the sake of acquitting himself of an awkward matter, but also in the hope of doing good to the few left desolate, that Hardenow moved forth his legs, from the windy white curtain away again.
He went down the passage at a very great pace, as nearly akin to a run as the practice of long steady walks permitted; and then at the head of the staircase he turned, and remembered a quiet little corner. Here, in an out-of-the-way recess, the rope of the alarm-bell hung; and he saw it, even in that niche, moving to and fro with the universal draught. Hardenow seized it, and rang such a peal as the old bell had never given tongue to before. The bell was a large one, sound and clear; and the call must have startled the neighbourhood for a mile, if it could be startled.
"Really, I do believe I have roused somebody at last!" exclaimed the ringer, as he looked through a window commanding the road to the house, and saw a man on horse-back coming. "But, surely, unless he sprang out of the ground, he must have been coming before I began."
In this strange loneliness, almost any visitor would be welcome; and Hardenow ran towards the top of the stairs to see who it was, and to meet him. But here, as he turned the corner of the balustraded gallery, a scared and hurrying young woman, almost ran into his arms.
"Oh, what is it?" she cried, drawing back, and blushing to a deeper colour than well-extracted blood can show; "there is no funeral yet! He is not dead! Who is ringing the bell so? It has startled even him, and will either kill or save him! Kill him, it will kill him, I am almost sure!"
"Esther—Miss Cripps—what a fool I am! I never thought of that—I did not know—how could I tell? I am all in the dark! Is it Russel Overshute?"
"Yes, Mr. Hardenow. Everybody knows it. Every one has taken good care to run away. Even the doctors will come no more! They say it is hopeless; and they might only infect their other patients. I fear that his mother must die too! She has taken the fever in a milder form; but walk she will, while walk she can. And at her time of life it is such a chance. But I cannot stop one moment!"
"And at your time of life is it nothing, Esther? You seem to think of everybody but yourself. Is this fair to your own hearth and home?"
While he was speaking he looked at her eyes; and her eyes were filling with deep tears—a dangerous process to contemplate.
"Oh, no, there is no fear of that," she answered misunderstanding him; "I shall take good care not to go home until I am quite sure that there is no risk."
"That is not what I mean. I mean supposing you yourself should catch it."
"If I do, they will let me stay here, I am sure. But I have no fear of it. The hand that led me here will lead me back again. But you ought not to be here. I am quite forgetting you."
Hardenow looked at her with admiration warmer than he could put into words. She had been thinking of him throughout. She thought of every one except herself. Even in the moment of first surprise she had drawn away so that she stood to leeward; and while they were speaking she took good care that the current of wind passed from him to her. Also in one hand she carried a little chafing-dish producing lively fumigation.
"Now, if you please, I must go back to him. Nothing would move him; he lay for hours, as a log lies on a stone. I could not have knowledge whether he was living, only for his breathing sometimes like a moan. The sound of the bell seemed to call him to life, for he thought it was his own funeral. His mother is with him; worn out as she is, the lady awoke at his rambling. She sent me to find out the meaning. Now, sir, please to go back round the corner; the shivering wind comes down the passage."
Hardenow was not such a coward as to obey her orders. He even wanted to shake hands with her, as in her girlhood he used to do, when he had frightened this little pupil with too much emendation. But Esther curtsied at a distance, and started away—until her retreat was cut off very suddenly.
"Why, ho girl! Ho girl; and young man in the corner! What is the meaning of all this? I have come to see things righted; my name is Worth Oglander. I find this here old house silent as a grave, and you two looking like a brace of robbers! Young woman!—young woman!—why, bless me now, if it isn't our own Etty Cripps! I did believe, and I would believe, but for knowing of your family, Etty, and your brother Cripps the Carrier, that here you are for the purpose of setting this old mansion afire!"
Esther, having been hard set to sustain what had happened already (as well as unblest with a wink of sleep since Friday night), was now unable to assert her dignity. She simply leaned against the wall, and gently blew into the embers of her disinfecting stuff. She knew that the Squire might kill himself, after all his weeks of confinement, by coming over here, in this rash manner, and working himself up so. But it was not her place to say a word; even if she could say it.
"Mr. Oglander," said Hardenow, coming forward and offering his hand, while Esther looked at them from beneath a cloud of smoke, "I know your name better than you know mine. You happened to be on the continent when I was staying in your village. My name is Thomas Hardenow. I am a priest of the Anglican Church, and have no intention of setting anything on fire."
"Lor' bless me! Lord bless me! Are you the young fellow that turned half the heads of Beckley, and made the Oxford examiners all tumble back, like dead herrings with their jaws down? Cripps was in the schools, and he told me all about it. And you were a friend of poor Overshute. I am proud to make your acquaintance, sir."
"Master Cripps has inverted the story, I fear," Hardenow answered, with a glance at Esther; while he could not, without rudeness, get his hand out of the ancient Squire's (which clung to another, in this weak time, as heartily as it used to do); "the examiners made a dry herring of me. But I am very glad to see you, sir; I have heard of—at least, I mean, I feared—that you were in weak health almost."
"Not a bit of it! I was fool enough—or rather I should say, my sister—to have a lot of doctors down; fellows worth their weight in gold, or at any rate in brass, every day of their own blessed lives; and yet with that temptation even, they cannot lengthen their own days. Of that I will tell you some other time. They kept me indoors, and they drenched me with physic—this, that, and the other. God bless you, sir, this hour of the air, with my own old good mare under me, has done me more good—but my head goes round; just a little; not anything to notice. Etty, my dear, don't you be afraid."
With these words the Squire sank down on the floor, not through any kind of fit, or even loss of consciousness; but merely because his fine old legs (being quite out of practice for so many weeks) had found it a little more than they could do to keep themselves firm in the stirrups, and then carry their master up slippery stairs, and after that have to support a good deal of excitement among the trunk parts.
"In all my life I never knew such a very extraordinary thing," said Squire Oglander on the following Tuesday, to his old friend Dr. Splinters. "Why, look you here, he was wholly given up by the very first man in London—that the poor young fellow was—can you deny that, Splinters?"
"Well, between you and me and the door-post, Squire," answered his learned visitor, "I am not quite so sure that Sir Anthony is quite the rose and crown of the profession. He may be a great Court card and all that, and the rage with all the nobility; but for all that, Squire, there are good men in comparatively obscure positions; men who have devoted their lives to science from the purest motives; modest men, sir, who are thankful to pocket their poor guinea; men who would scorn any handle to their name or any shabby interloping; sir, I say there are d——d good men——"
"But even you, Splinters, come now—even you gave him up—unless we are wholly misinformed."
"Not at all. That was quite a mistake. The fact was simply this. When Sir Anthony pronounced his opinion at our last consultation, it was not my place to contradict him—we never do that with a London man—but I ventured in my own mind to differ even from our brilliant light, sir. For I said to myself, 'first see the effect of the remedial agent which I myself, in the absence of this Londoner, have exhibited.' I was suddenly called away to retrieve a case of shocking blundering by a quack at Iffley. That was why you did not see me, Squire."
"Oh, yes, to be sure! I quite see now," answered Mr. Oglander, with a quiet internal wink. "And when you came you found the most wonderful effect from your remedial agent."
"That I did. Something I could scarcely have believed. Soft sweet sleep, a genial perspiration, an equable pulse, nice gentle breathing—the very conditions of hygiene which Sir Anthony's efforts could never produce. Why, my good sir, in all the records of the therapeutic art, there is no example of such rapid efficacy. I think it will henceforth be acknowledged that Dr. Splinters knows what he is about. My dear friend, you know that there is nothing I dislike so much as the appearance of vaunting. If I had only condescended to that, nobody could have stopped me, sir. But no, Squire, no; I have always been the same; and I have not an enemy, except myself."
"You may say more than that, sir—a great deal more than that. You may say that you have many friends, doctor, who admire your great abilities. But as to Russel Overshute, if the poor fellow does come round the general belief will be that he must thank the fire-bell."
"The fire-bell! My dear sir, in this age of advanced therapeutics—Oglander, you must know better than to listen to that low story!"
"Splinters, I know that foolish tales are told about almost everything. But being there myself, I thought there might be something in it."
"Nothing whatever! I never heard such nonsense! I was quite angry with Esther Cripps. What can chits of girls know? They must have their chatter."
"I suppose they must," said the Squire sadly, thinking of his own dear Grace; "still they may be right sometimes. At any rate, doctor, the fire-bell did as much good as your medicine did. Take another glass of wine. I would not hurt your feelings for the world, my dear old friend."
"Oglander," answered Dr. Splinters, putting up his great gold spectacles, so that beneath them he might see—for he never could see through them—how to pour out his fine glass of port, "Oglander, you have something or other that you are keeping in the background. Squire, whatever it is, out with it. Between you and me, sir, there should be nothing but downright yes or no, Mr. Oglander. Downright yes or no, sir."
"Of course, of course," said the Squire, relapsing into some quiet mood again; "that was how I always liked it. Splinters, you must know I did. And I never meant anything against it, by bringing this here little bottle back. It may have saved the poor boy's life; and of course it did, if you say so. But the seal is still on the cork, and the stuff all there; so it may do good again. I dare say the good came through the glass; you doctors have such devices!" Mr. Oglander took a small square bottle from his inner peculiar pocket, and gave it to the doctor, so as not to disturb his wine-glass.
"How the deuce did you get hold of this?" cried Splinters, being an angry man when taken without notice; "this is some of that girl's insolent tricks!—I call her an insolent and wicked girl!"
"I call her a good and a brave girl!—the very best girl in Beckley, since—but, my dear Splinters, you must not be vexed. She told me that you had the greatest faith in this last idea of yours; and it struck me at once that you might wish to try it in some other case; and so I brought it. You see it has not been opened."
"It doesn't matter whether it was used or not," cried Dr. Splinters vehemently; "there is the stuff, sir; and here is the result! Am I to understand, sir, that you deny the existence of Providence?"
"Far be such a thing from me!" the Squire replied, with a little indignation at such an idea; and then, remembering that Splinters was his guest, he changed the subject. "How could I help having faith in the Lord, when I see His care made manifest? Why, look at me, Splinters; I am twice the man I was last Sunday morning! Why is it so? Why, because it pleased a gracious Providence to make it my duty, as a man, to ride!—to ride, sir, a very considerable distance, on a mare who had been eating her head off. Every one vowed that I never could do it; and my good housekeeper locked me in; and when I unscrewed the lock, she sent two men after me, to pick me up. Very good, sir; here I am, enjoying my glass of port, with the full intention of having another. Yesterday I sent to our road-contractor for a three-headed and double-handed hammer; and Kale smashed up, in about two minutes, three hundred and twenty medicine bottles! They will come in for the top of the orchard wall."
"Squire," answered Splinters, with a twinkling eye, "it is not at all improbable that you may be right. There are some constitutions so perverse that to exhibit the best remedial agent is just the same thing as to reason with a pig. But it is high time for me to be jogging on my road. If Beckley and Shotover discard my extremely humble services, there are other places in the world, sir, besides Beckley and Shotover."
"There is no other place in the world for you, except Beckley, for some hours, my friend. We have known one another long enough, to allow for one another now. I would have arranged a rubber for you—but, but—well, you know what I mean—sadly selfish; but I cannot help it."
The doctor, though vain and irritable, was easily touched with softness. He thought of all his many children, and of the long pain he had felt at losing one out of a dozen; then without process of thought he felt for the loss of one; where one was all.
"Oglander, you need not say another word," he answered, putting forth his hand, to squeeze any trifle away between them. "A rubber in winter is all very well; and so it is in summer, at the proper time, but on a magnificent spring evening, to watch the sunset between one's cards is not—I mean that it is very nice indeed, but still it ought scarcely to be done, when you can help it. Now, I will just take the leastest little drop of your grand Curaçoa before I smoke; and then if you have one of those old Manillas, I am your man for a stroll in the garden."
To go into a garden in good weather soothes the temper. The freedom of getting out of doors is a gracious joy to begin with; and when the first blush of that is past, without any trouble there come forward so many things to be looked at. Even since yesterday—if we had the good hap to see them yesterday—many thousand of little things have spent the time in changing. Even with the weather scarcely different from yesterday's—though differ it must in some small points, when in its most consistent mood—even with no man to come and dig, and fork, and roll, and by all human devices harass; and even without any children dancing, plucking, pulling, trampling, and enjoying their blessed little hearts, as freely as any flower does; yet in the absence of all those local contributions towards variety, variety there will be for all who have the time to look for it.
The most observant and delightful poets of the present age, instead of being masters of nature, prefer to be nature's masters. Having obtained this power they use it with such diligence and spirit, that they make the peach and the apple bloom together, and the plum keep the kalendar of the lilac. Once in a way, such a thing does almost happen (without the poet's aid)—that is to say, when a long cold winter is broken by a genial outburst waking every dormant life; and after that, a repressive chill returns, and lasts to the May month. At such a time, when hope deferred springs anew as hope assured, and fear breaks into fluttering joy, and faith moves steadily into growth, then a truly poetic confusion arises in the works of earth.
In such a state of things the squire and the doctor walked to and fro in the garden; the Squire still looking very pale and feeble, but with the help of his favourite spud, managing to get along, and to enjoy the evening. The blush of the peach wall was not over, and yet the trellised apple-tree was softly unsheathing puckered buds, all in little clusters pointed like rosettes of coral. The petals of the plum-bloom still were hovering with their edges brown, although in a corner near a chimney, positively a lilac-bush was thrusting forth those livid jags which lift and curve themselves so swiftly into plumes of beauty. The two good gentlemen were surprised; each wanted particularly to hear what the other thought of it; but neither would deign to ask; and either feared to speak his thoughts, for fear of giving the other an advantage. Because they were rival gardeners; and so they avoided the subject.
"This is the very first cigar," said the Squire, as they turned at the end of the peach wall, over against a young Grosse Mignonne, beautifully trained on the Seymour system, and bright with the central glow of pistil, although the petals were dropping—"my very first cigar, since that—you know what I mean, of course—since I have cared whether I were in my garden, or in my grave. But the Lord supports me. Providence is good; or how could I be smoking this cigar?"
"You must not learn to look at things in that way," Dr. Splinters answered; "Oglander, you must learn to know better. You are in an uncomfortable frame of mind, or you would not have flouted me with that bottle, after all our friendship. Why, bless me! Only look around you. Badly pruned as your trees are, what a picture there is of largeness!"
"Yes, Splinters, more than you could find in yours; which you amputate into a doctor's bamboo. But now, perhaps, you may doubt it, Splinters, because your trees are so very poor—but I have not felt any pride at all, any pride at all, in one of them. What is the good of lovely trees, with only one's self to enjoy them?"
"Now, Oglander, there you are again! How often must I tell you? Your poor little Gracie is gone, of course; and a nice little thing she was, to be sure. But here you are again as well as ever, or at any rate as positive. I judge a man's state of health very much by his powers of contradiction. And yours are first-rate. Go to, go to! You are equal to another wife. Take a young one, and have more Gracies."
"Splinters, do you know what I should do," Mr. Oglander answered, with his spud uplifted, "if my powers were such as you suppose—because I smashed your bottles?"
"Yes, I dare say you would knock me down, and never beg my pardon till the wedding breakfast."
"You are right in the first part; but wrong in the second. Oh, doctor, is there no one able to share the simplest thoughts we have?"
"To minister to a mind diseased? First, he must have his own mind diseased; as all the blessed poets have. But look! The green fly—who would ever believe it, after our Siberian winter? The aphis is hatched in your young peach-shoots before they have made even half a joint. That comes of your Seymour system."
"Ridiculous!" answered the Squire; "but never mind! What matter now? Then you really do think, Splinters—now, as an old friend, try to tell me—in pure sincerity, do you think that I have altogether lost my Gracie?"
"Oglander, no! I can truly say no. We are all good Christians, I should hope. She is not lost, but gone before."
"But, my dear fellow, will you never understand that she ought to have gone, long after? It is all very well for you, who have got some baker's dozen of little ones, and lost only one in the measles—forgive me, I know it was hard upon you—I say things that I should not say—but if you could only bring your mind—however, I daresay you have tried to do it; and what right have I to ask you? Splinters, I know I am puzzle-headed; and many people think me worse than that. But you have the sense to understand me, because for many years you have been acquainted with my constitution. Now, Splinters, tell me, in three words—shall I live to see my Gracie?"
"That you will, Squire; and to see her married; and to dance on your lap her children!" So said Dr. Splinters, fearing what might happen, if he did not say it.
"Only to see her. That is all I want. And to have her in my arms once more. And to hear her tell me, with her own true tongue, that she never ran away from me. After that I shall be ready for my coffin, and know that the Lord has ordered it. Here comes more of your dust into my eyes! Splinters, will you never learn how to knock your ash off?"
Whatever might or may be said by any number of most able and homicidal physicians, Russel Overshute will believe, as long as he draws breath of life, that by the grace of the Lord he owes that privilege to the fire-bell. In this belief he has always been most strongly supported by Esther Cripps, who perhaps was the first to suggest the idea; for he at that time must have failed to know a fire-bell from a water-bucket. The doctors had left him, through no fear for their own lives, but in despair of his. There was far less risk of infection now than in the earlier stages. No sooner, however, did the household find out that the medical men had abandoned the case, than panic seized their gallant hearts, and with one accord they ran away. From Saturday morning till Saturday night, when Esther came from Beckley, there was nobody left to watch and soothe the poor despairing misery, except the helpless and worn-out mother.
One thing is certain (and even the doctors, with their usual sharpness, found it wise to acknowledge this)—both Mr. Overshute and his mother must have been dead bodies with little hope of Christian burial, if that brave girl had not set forth (without any one even asking her) on the Saturday night to help them. Mrs. Overshute had quite thrown up all hope of everything—save the mercy of God in a better world, and His justice upon her enemies—when quite in the dark this young girl came, while she was lying down on her back, and curtsied, and asked her pleasure.
If Esther had not curtsied, perhaps Mrs. Overshute in that state of mind would have taken her for an angel; though Etty's bonnet, made by herself, was not at all angelical. But she knew her for one of the lower orders (who bend knee instead of neck), and belonging herself to a fine old race, she rallied her last energies with a power of condescension.
However, these are medical, physical, social, economical, and perhaps even psychological questions—wherein what remains except perpetual inquiry? Enough is to say that Russell Overshute, having long had a ringing in his ears, was rung out of that, and rung back to life, by the lively peal of the fire-bell. And ever since that, whenever he is ill—though it be only a little touch of gout—he immediately sends a good corpulent man to lay hold of the rope and swing to it. These things are of later date. For the present, this young man (although he certainly had turned the corner) lay still in a very precarious state, with a feeble mother to pray for him. Mrs. Overshute held that same vile fever, but in a very different form, as at her time of life was natural. With her it was intermittent, low, stealthy, and undermining. It never affected her brain, or drove her into furious calenture, but rooted slowly inward, preying on her life quite leisurely. Their cases differed, as a knock-down blow differs from a quiet grasp.
But though the house lay still in sadness, loneliness, and dull suspense, and though the doctors, having abandoned the case, had the manners not to come again, still from day to day there was some little growth of liveliness. Hardenow came almost daily, having put his class of striders under a deputy six-leaguer; the Squire also might be expected, whenever Mother Hookham let him out; and even Zacchary Cripps renewed an old washing in that direction. He came, with the hoops of his cart taken out, because of the beautiful weather, and four good baskets of clothes for to wash (whose wearers were happy enough to have no idea where their "things" were), and quite at the centre of his gravity—as felt by himself, and endorsed by Dobbin—anybody getting up with a curious eye might well have beheld a phenomenon. For here stood a very large pickling tub, with the cover taken off for the sake of air; around the sides was salted pork—hands and springs, and belly pieces—and in the middle was a good-sized barrel of the then existent native.
"Veed 'un," cried Cripps, with his coat-tails up, while tugging at his heavy tub; "veed 'un, Etty, whatsomever 'ee do. Salt is the main thing for 'un now. I have heerd tell that they burns away every bit of the salt inside 'em, in these here bouts of fever. If 'ee can replace 'un, laife comes round; or else they goes off, like the snuff of a candle. Bless me, I must be getting fevery myzell, or never should have a job to lift this here. Now the quality of this pickle you know well, for the most part fell on your shoulders. Home-bred, home-born, home-fed, home-slaughtered, and home-salted—that's what I calls pork!"
"Yes, to be sure, Zak," Etty answered, laying her hand to the tub upon the shaft-stock, while Dobbin wagged his tail at her; "but what have you got in this very small cask, sitting in the middle of all the brine?"
"Why, you know, Etty, you must have seed me bring 'em for all the great folk about Christmas-tide. Oysters, as lives in the sea, and must be salt inside of their barryels. So I clapped them in here for a fresh smack of it, and uncommonly strengthening things they be if you take them with enow of treble X. Likely his worship will be too weak to keep them down with the covers on yet, as is the proper way, they tell me; so you best way take out the hearts and give him."
"Oh, brother," cried Esther, remembering suddenly, "I ought not to be talking to you like this. Whatever could I be thinking of? What would the people at Beckley say? They would fear to come nigh you for a month, Zak, and your business would be ruined. Now, do jog on, you and dear old Dobbin. How well I knew the sound of his old feet. I can't give you the fever, Dobbin, can I?"
With this perhaps incorrect or, at any rate, unestablished hypothesis, she gave the old horse a lingering kiss just below his blinkers, in return for which he jerked off some froth on the sleeve of her dress, and shook himself; while the Carrier, having discharged his cargo, smote himself with both arms, from habit rather than necessity, and approached his young sister for his usual hearty smack.
"No, Zak, no," she cried, running up the steps, "I have no fear of taking it myself whatever; but if I should happen to give it to you, I never should get over it."
"Well, well, little un, the Lord knows best," Master Cripps answered, without repining too bitterly at this arrangement; "but ating of my victuals lonesome is worse than having no salt to them; you better come home pretty soon, my dear, or somehow or other there might happen to be some one over in the corner, 'longside of our best frying-pan."
Etty had heard this threat so often, that now she only laughed at it. But instead of laughing, she blushed most sadly at her brother's parting words:
"God bless you, Etty, for a brave good girl; and speed you home to Beckley. You want more sleep of nights, my dear; your cheeks are getting like a pillow-case. But excoose my mentioning of one thing, Etty; I be like a father to 'ee; don't 'ee have more than you can help to say to the great scholard, Master Hardenow."
Cripps was a gentleman, in an inner kind of way, and he took good care to be getting up his shaft (with his stiff knee stiffer than ever, from the long frost of last winter) while he discharged his duty, as he thought it, at, as well as to, his sister. Then he deposited the polished part of his breeches on the driving-board, and brought his "game-leg" into the right stick-out, and with his usual deliberation started—nay, that is too strong a word—persuaded into progress his congenial and deliberate horse. Neither of them hurried on a washing-day, any more than they hurried upon any other day.
Zacchary knew that his sister was—as Master Phil Hiss had said of her—"a most terrible hand at blushing;" and she could not bear to be looked at in this electric aurora of maidenhood; and therefore he managed to be a long way off, ere even he turned both head and hand, to deliver last issue of "God bless you!"
Full of confusion about herself, and clearness of duty for other people, Esther Cripps ran in, to see to the many things now depending upon her. There were now three servants in the house, gathered from good stuff around, but wholly void of any wit, to make up for want of experience. Esther had no experience either, but she possessed good store of sense, and quickness, and kind energy. Whatever she thought of her brother's warning, she would think of afterwards. For the present she must do her best concerning other people; and Mrs. Overshute needed now more nursing than her son did.
Zacchary Cripps, at the very first distance at which he was sure of not being seen, began to shake his head, and shook it, in a resolutely reflective way, for nearly three quarters of a mile. The trees above him were alive with beauty, alike of sight, and sound, and scent; and the Carrier made up his mind for a pipe, to enable him to consider things. His custom was not to smoke, except when good occasion offered; and he tried to have no contempt for carriers (of inferior family) who could not deliver a side of bacon without smoking it over again almost. Zacchary Cripps, like all good men, stood up for the dignity of his work. Strictly meditating thus, he saw a slight figure approaching with a rapid swing, and presently met Mr. Hardenow.
The fellow and tutor of Brazenose, at the sight of Cripps and the well-known cart, stopped short to ask how things were going on at the house on the hill above them. The Carrier answered that it would be many a long day, he was afraid, ere his worship could get about again, and that he ought to be kept very quiet, and those would be his best friends now who had the least to say to him. Also he was told that the poor old lady would find it as much as her life was worth, if she was interrupted or terrified now.
"But, my good Cripps," answered Hardenow, "I am not going either to interrupt or terrify them. All I desire is to have a little talk with your good and intelligent sister."
Poor Zacchary felt that his own tactics thus were turned against him; and, after a little stammering and heightened glow of countenance, he betook himself to his more usual course—that of plain out-speaking. But first he got down from his driving-board that he might not fail in due respect to a gentleman and clergyman. Master Cripps had no liking at all for the duty which he felt bound to take in hand. He would rather have a row with three turnpike-men than presume to speak to a gentleman; therefore his bow-leg seemed to twitch him at the knee, as he led Hardenow aside into a quiet gateway; but his eyes were firm and his manner grave and steadfast as he began to speak.
"Mr. Hardenow, now I must ask your pardon, for a few words as I want to say. You are a gentleman, of course, and a very learned scholar; and I be nothing but a common carrier—a 'carrier for hire,' they calls me in the law, when they comes upon me for damages. Howsoever, I has to do my part off the road as well as on it, sir; and my dooty to them of my own household comes next to my dooty to God and myzell. You are a good man, I know, and a kind one, and would not, beknown to yourself, harm any one. It would go to your heart, I believe, Mr. Hardenow, from what I seed of you, when you was quite a lad, if anyhow you was to be art or part in bringing unhappiness of mind to any that had trusted you."
"I should hope so, Cripps. I have some idea of what you mean, but can hardly think—at any rate, speak more plainly."
"Well then, sir, I means all about your goings on with our little Etty, or, at any rate, her goings on with you, which cometh to the same thing in the end, so far as I be acquaint of it. You might think, if you was not told distinkly to the contrairy, that having no business to lift up her eyes, she never would do so according. But I do assure you, sir, when it cometh to such like manner of taking on, the last thing as ever gets called into the account is sensible reason. They feels this, and they feels that; and then they falls to a-dreaming; and the world goes into their tub, same as butter, and they scoops it out, and pats, and stamps it to their own size and liking, and then the whole melteth, and a sour fool is left."
"Master Cripps, what you say is wise; and the like has often happened. But your sister is a most noble girl. You do her gross injustice by talking as if she were nothing but a common village maid. She is brave, she is pure, she is grandly unselfish. Her mind is well above feminine average; anything more so goes always amiss. You should not have such a low opinion as you seem to have of your sister, Cripps."
"Sir, my opinion is high enough. Now, to bring your own fine words to the test, would you ever dream of marrying the maid, if I and she both was agreeable?"
"It would be an honour to me to do so. For the prejudices of the world I care not one fig. But surely you know that we contend for the celibacy of the clergy."
"Maning as a parson maun't marry a wife?" asked Cripps, by the light of nature.
"Yes, my friend, that is what we now maintain in the Anglican communion, as the tradition of the Church."
"Well, may I be danged!" cried Cripps, who was an ardent theologian. "Then, if I may make so bold to ask, sir, how could there a' been a tribe of Levi? They must all a' died out in the first generation; if 'em ever come to any generation at all."
"Your objection is ingenious, Cripps; but the analogy fails entirely. We are guided in such matters by unbroken and unquestionable tradition of the early Church."
"Then, sir, if you goes outside of the Bible, you stand on your own legs, and leave us no kind of leg to stand upon. However, I believe that you mean well, sir, and I am sure that you never do no great harm. And, as to our Etty, if you feel like that in an honest, helpless sort of way, I beg the honour of shaking hands, sir, for the spirit that is inside of you."
"Certainly, certainly, Cripps, with great pleasure!"
"And then of asking you to tramp another road, for your own sake, as well as hers, sir. And may the Lord teach you to know your own mind."
"Cripps, I will follow your advice for the present; though you have said some things that you scarcely ought to say."
"Then I humbly beg your pardon, sir. Every one of us doeth that same sometimes. The bridle of the tongue falleth into the teeth, when the lash is laid on us."
"Your metaphors are quite classical. However, I respect you greatly, Cripps, for your straightforward conduct. I am not a weak man, any more than you are; although you seem to think me one. I like and admire your sister Esther, for courage combined with gentleness. I always liked her, when she was a child; and I understood her nature. But as to her—liking me more than she ought; Cripps, you are imaginative."
"Never heerd before," cried Cripps, "any accoosation of that there kind."
"My friend, it is the rarest compliment. However, your horse is quite ready to walk off; and so am I, towards Cowley. I will not go to Shotover Grange to-day; and I will avoid your sister; though I rarely do like talking to her."
"You are a man sir," cried Zacchary Cripps, as Hardenow set off across the fields. "God bless your reverence, though you never get a waife! A true man he is, and a maight a' been a faine one, if he hadn't taken to them stiff coat tails."
In the meanwhile, Mrs. Luke Sharp was growing very anxious about her son, and only child and idol, Christopher. Not that there was anything at all amiss with his bodily health, so far at least as she could see; but that he seemed so unsettled in his mind, so absent and preoccupied, and careless even of his out-door sports, which at one time were his only care. Of course, at this time of year, there was very little employment for the gun, but there was plenty of fishing to be got, such as it was, round Oxford, and it must be a very bad time of year when there are no rats for little terriers, and badgers for the larger tribe. Yet none of these things now possessed the proper charm for Christopher. Wherever he was, he always seemed to be wanting to be somewhere else; and, like a hydrophobic dog, he hated to be looked at; while (after the manner of a cat assisted lately by Lucina) he ran up into his own loft, when he thought there was nobody watching.
Well arranged as all this might be, and keen, and self-satisfactory, there was something keener, and not very easy to satisfy, looking after it. The love of a mother may fairly be trusted to outwit any such calf-love as was making a fool of this unfledged fellow, fresh from the feather-bed of a private school.
Considering whence he came, and how he had been brought up and pampered, Kit Sharp was a very fine young fellow, and—thanks to his liking for gun and rod—he could scarcely be called a milksop. Still he was only a boy in mind, and in manner quite unformed and shy; his father (for reasons of his own) having always refused to enter him at any of the colleges. He might perhaps have shaped his raw material by the noblest models, if he had been admitted into the society of undergraduates. But the members of the University entertained in those days, and probably still entertain, a just and inevitable contempt for all the non-togati. Kit Sharp had made some fluttering overtures of the flag of friendship towards one or two random undergraduates who had a nice taste for ratting; he had even dined and wined, once or twice, in a not ignoble college; and had been acknowledged to know a meerschaum as well as if he owned a statute-book. But the boy always fancied, perhaps through foolish and shy pride on his part, that these most hospitable and kind young men had their jokes to themselves about him. Perhaps it was so; but in pure goodwill. Take him for all in all, and allow for the needs of his situation—which towards the third year grow imperative—and the Oxford undergraduate is as good as any other young gentleman.
But Kit Sharp being exceedingly proud, and most secretive of his pride, would not long receive, without return, good hospitality. And this alone, without other suspicions, would have set bounds to his dealing with a race profusely hospitable. His dear and good mother would gladly have invited a Cross Duck Houseful of undergraduates, and left them to get on as they might, if only thereby her pet son might have sense of salt for salt with them; but Mr. Luke Sharp took a different view. To his mind, the junior members of the glorious University were a most disagreeable and unprofitable lot to deal with. He never, of course, condescended to the Vice-Chancellor's court, and he despised all little actions, in that large word's legal sense. He liked a fine old Don, or Head of a House, who had saved a sack of money, or well earned it by vitality. But for any such young fellows, with no expectations, or paulo-post-futura such, Mr. Sharp was now too long established to put a leaf into his dinner-table. This being so, and Christopher also of restricted pocket-money (so that no dinners at the Star or Mitre could be contemplated), Master Kit Sharp, in a "town and gown row," must have lent the weight of his quiet, but very considerable, fist to the oppidan faction.
"Kit, now, my darling Kit, do tell me," said Mrs. Sharp for about the fiftieth time, as she sat with her son in the sweet spring twilight, at the large western window of Cross Duck House; "what is it that makes you sigh so? You almost break your poor mother's heart. I never did know you sigh, my own one. Now, is it for want of a rat, my darling? If rats are a sovereign apiece, you shall have one."
"Rats, mother! Why, I can catch my own, without any appeal to 'the Filthy!' Rats are never far away from legal premises, like these."
"You should not speak so of your father's house, Kit. And I am sure that no rats ever come upstairs, or out of the window I must jump. But now you are only avoiding the subject. What is it that disturbs your mind, Kit?"
"Once more, mother, I have the greatest objection to being called 'Kit.' It sounds so small, and—and so horribly prosaic. All the dictionaries say that it means, either the outfit of a common soldier, or else a diminutive kind of fiddle."
"Christopher, I really beg your pardon. I know how much loftier you are, of course; but I cannot get over the habit, Kit. Well, well, then—My darling, I hope you are not at all above being 'my darling,' Kit."
"Mother, you may call me what you like. It can make no difference in my destinies."
"Christopher, you make my blood run cold. My darling, I implore you not to sigh so. Your dear father pays my allowance on Monday. I know what has long been the aspiration of your heart. Kit, you shall have a live badger of your own."
"I hate the very name of rats and badgers. Everything is so low and nasty. How can you look at that noble sunset, and be full of badgers? Mother, it grieves me to leave you alone; but how can I help it, when you go on so? I shall go for a walk on the Botley Road."
"Take your pipe, Kit, take your pipe; whatever you do, Kit, take your pipe," screamed poor Mrs. Sharp, as he stuck his hat on, as if it were never to come off again. "Oh, Kit, there are such deep black holes; I will fill your pipe for you, if you will only smoke."
"Mother, you never know how to do it. And once more, my name is 'Christopher.'"
The young man threw a light cloak on his shoulder, and set his eyebrows sternly; and his countenance looked very picturesque in the glow of his death's-head meerschaum. It occurred to his mother that she had never seen anything more noble. As soon as she had heard him bang the door, Mrs. Sharp ran back to the window, whence she could watch all Cross Duck Lane, and she saw him striding along towards the quickest outlet to the country.
"How wonderful it is!" she said to herself, with tears all ready; "only the other day he was quite a little boy, and whipped a top, and cried if a pin ran into him. And now he is, far beyond all dispute, the finest young man in Oxford; he has the highest contempt for all vulgar sports, and he bolts the door of his bedroom. His father calls him thick and soft! Ah, he cannot understand his qualities! There is the deepest and purest well-spring of unintelligible poetry in Kit. His great mind is perturbed, and has hurried him into commune with the evening star. Thank goodness that he has got his pipe!"
Before Mrs. Sharp had turned one page of her truly voluminous thoughts about her son, a sharp click awoke the front-door lock, and a steady and well-jointed step made creaks on the old oak staircase. Mrs. Sharp drew back from her meditative vigil, and trimmed her little curls aright.
"Miranda, I have some work to do to-night," said Mr. Sharp, in his quiet even voice; "and I thought it better to come up and tell you, so that you need not expect me again. Just have the fire in the office lighted. I can work better there than I can upstairs; and I find the evenings damp, although the long cold winter is gone at last. If I should ring about ten o'clock it will be for a cup of coffee. If I do not ring then, send everybody to bed. And do not expect me until you see me."
"Certainly, Luke, I quite understand," answered Mrs. Sharp, having been for years accustomed to such arrangements; "but, my dear, before you begin, can you spare me five minutes, for a little conversation?"
"Of course I can, Miranda! I am always at your service."
Mrs. Sharp thought to herself that this was a slight exaggeration. Still on the whole she had little to complain of. Mr. Sharp always remembered the time when he cast sad distant eyes at her, Miranda Piper,—more enchanting than a will-case, more highly cherished than the deed-box of an Earl. Nothing but impudence had enabled him to marry her; thereby his impudence was exhausted in that one direction, and he ever remained polite to her.
"Then, Luke, will you just take your favourite chair, and answer me only one question?" As she said these words, Mrs. Sharp took care to set the chair so that she could get the last gleam of sunset on her dear lord's face. Her husband thoroughly understood all this, and accepted the situation.
"Now, do tell me, Luke—you notice everything, though you do not always speak of it—have you observed how very strangely Kit has been going on for some time now? And have you any idea of the reason? And do you think that we ought to allow it, my dear?"
"Yes, Mrs. Sharp, I have observed it. You need not be at all uneasy about it. I am observing him very closely. When I disapprove, I shall stop it at once."
"But surely, my dear, surely I, his mother, am not to be kept in the dark about it? I know that you always take your own course, and your course is quite sure to be the right one; but surely, my dear, when something important is evidently going on about my own child, you would never have the heart to keep it from me. I could not endure it; indeed, I could not. I should fret myself away to skin and bone."
"It would take a long time to do that, my dear," replied Mr. Sharp, as he looked with satisfaction at her fine plump figure. It pleased him to hear, as he often did, that there was not in Oxford a finer couple of middle-aged people than Mr. and Mrs. Sharp. "However, I should be exceedingly grieved ever to initiate such a process. But first, before I tell you anything at all, I will ask you to promise two things most clearly."
"My dear, I would promise fifty things rather than put up with this cruel anxiety."
"Yes, I dare say. But I do not want rash promises, Miranda. You must pledge yourself to two things, and keep your pledges."
"I will do so in a moment, with the greatest pleasure. You would never ask anything wrong, I am sure. Only do not keep me waiting so."
"In the first place, then, you must promise me, whether my plan turns out well or ill, on no account to blame me for it, but to give me the credit of having acted for the best throughout."