Retrieved by Judy from a life of shame, her master had become a respectable character, and the year afterwards found work as a carpenter in an adjoining town, which compelled him to migrate from our village.
How to dispose of his dog was the question. His lodgings were situated in a crowded street,through which a continuous stream of the vehicles most dreaded by Judy, bicycles included, was passing literally by night and day. Garden he had none—only a small paved court-yard, tenanted in the main by children and cats, Judy’s natural enemies, while the nearest field was two miles off. It was clearly impossible to transfer her to such surroundings. Her future was settled thus. She was left in his old rooms under special charge of the landlady, and every evening when his day’s work was done, wet or fine, winter or summer, her master walked out to console her for the long hours of his absence.
Such affection might have satisfied a reasonable dog. But Judy was distinctly unreasonable. She remembered—none better—how in former times she was with him all the day, and sometimes, when she willed to have it so, all the night as well.Nowshe was left to her own devices, and only caught a hurried glimpse of him in the evening when she was too sleepy to enjoy it. Besides, when he left her at the garden gate, she was strictly enjoined not to follow him—a prohibition which, while it whetted her curiosity, was also regarded as a direct insult, viewed in thelight of former days, and the unrestricted licence that had been accorded to her then.
So Judy put on her considering cap. “He can’t go far,” she said, “else he could never leave me so late and get home in time for bed. And I’m sure he doesn’t drive or travel by train, else his boots would never be so muddy when he comes here at seven. So it’s clear that he walks. And, in that case, a dog of the feeblest intelligence can follow in his track.”
Accordingly, on a wet and windy evening, when bicyclists were not likely to be abroad, a little wistful-eyed face peered out into the road, growing bolder and bolder as her master receded from view, but ever and again hurriedly withdrawn whenever he turned upon her with a threatening hand. Then he vanished behind a hill, and Judy felt that her opportunity was come. But a mob of children ran by with sticks in their hands, and Judy slunk back in alarm. As soon as these had passed, she made another attempt. But horror of horrors! a bicyclist scorched by, and back she shrank again into the friendly shade. At last the road was empty and silent. The most careful inspection to theright hand and to the left could find no sign of life, and the keenest ears with which ever dog was gifted failed to detect a sound.
“Now or never,” said Judy, and with tail erect, and her tiny snub nose well to ground on the scent, she rushed out into the night.
* * * * *
An hour later a man was sitting down to his supper in the adjoining town, cursing the noise of the street in which he lived, with its wrangling women and screaming children, and cabs and drays coming home for the night, when a little dog whined and scraped at his door, and Judy rushed in, mud-stained and panting and panic-stricken with fear.
It was probably the fright that killed her; it may have been some injury. Her master never knew.
Only a brief friendship, measured by the standard of time. But perhaps what Southey says is true, and “love is indestructible”—even the love that bound these two.
No: he was no Professor in the recognised sense of the term; not a bit of it. Neither can I tell you how he acquired the title, unless it were in recognition of his original wit. He was simply my factotum or Man Friday, ready for shooting, fishing, game-keeping, or gardening, as the emergency of the moment required. He could neither read nor write. But what are trifling details like these in comparison with ’cuteness. Institute a Tripos for originality and native wit, and Matthew would even now, at the age of seventy, pass with high honours. But the examination must be strictlyviva voce, and not allowed to wander into the region of conventional knowledge.
“Matthew,” I said, “this isn’t work,” as I bestowed a kick upon an object that lay prone upon the lawn, when it ought to have been digging at our garden border.
“No, sir; but it’spreparin’ for it,” was the prompt reply. For myself, I was knockedout of time, though I felt I was clearly within my rights. Fancy a man, roused from a peaceful siesta, being ready with a retort of such preternatural smartness!
Unhappily Matthew had two failings, by which his career was handicapped. He was always lazy, and sometimes inebriate. Of the former he never repented so long as I knew him; the latter he was always repenting of and always repeating. And the stage of repentance was the more acute and the more grievous, at any rate to his neighbours. After a bout of drinking he would wander through the house with his hands on the pit of his stomach—as if the seat of his iniquity lay there—moaning in a dreary, exasperating way, “The Lord forgie I; I’ll never be drunk agin.” “How can youexpecthim to?” said his wife, in a tone of the bitterest sarcasm.
Every time he repented he took the pledge anew. The consequence was, his bosom was garnished with blue ribbons—his “decorations” he called them—for he never cast off one when he assumed another, but regarded them as an old soldier does his medals, traces of many a scar and many a conflict, in which, unhappily, he always fell.
“Decorations!” said his wife, “fine decorations! Call ’em rather sign-posts along the road to perdition. If you stick to ’em all when you’re buried, they’ll have no trouble in fixingyourwhereabouts.”
Sometimes, when he was particularly exasperating, she would take the law in her own hands. “My head’s swimmin’ like a tee-total,” Matthew would say pathetically. “The very last thing it ought to swim like,” retorted his wife, a woman with a ready wit, “but I’ll soon make it do so.” And with that she would take him in her strong arms and give him a twist, as boys do when they give its first impetus to a top, after which she would wait patiently for the result. The result was, of course, collapse as soon as the primary impulse had run down; whereupon she would catch him up when he was on the point of falling, and bear him off to repentance and bed.
Matthew’s dialect was unique. I question whether a specialist could have reproduced it in its integrity, if only because it never reached finality, but was always in process of development. For myself, I had studied it for years, and could never get any nearer towards the discovery of its principles. Every day he wasstartling you with some new combination, as a rule strictly ungrammatical, but often a reversion to some lost or more accurate phraseology. For example: “Let I go,” “Would you like I to do it”?—the latter a reproduction, as near as may be, of the Latin formulavisne ego faciam? A still more perplexing characteristic in his speech was that he used many of his words in a variety of senses.
“Cuss they nigglin’ weeds,” he’d say, and “Cuss my nigglin’ toothache”—phrases in which the adjective (or participle) carried an appreciable meaning, even when he didn’t add the word “darn’d” as an explanatory gloss. But when he transferred the phrase a minute afterwards to a splendid crop of potatoes, in which my inexperienced eye could detect no possible fault, I was all at sea again, and had to ask him to explain himself.
“I means they’m small,” he answered, with a contemptuous sniff at my ignorance.
“But, Matthew, you told me just now that ‘nigglin’’ meant ‘darn’d.’”
“And so it do—darn’d small;” looking at me as if he thought the epithet suited me as much as the potatoes.
When Matthew had pneumonia and layin extremis, his friends came round to console him with the assurance that he would die at the turn of the tide.
“What time, Matthew, do ’en begin to turn?” they said.
“At seven o’clock, ezzactly,” whispered the inveterate old humorist. And it was not till the next morning they discovered that he had defrauded them of one whole hour of pleasant anticipation.
In his sober moments Matthew was a brilliant story-teller (in both senses, I fear); though his brilliancy now is limited to occasional flashes of wit. The following is one of his best reminiscences. I have selected it out of many because I have since discovered that it was founded on fact. Not only was it authenticated by a clergyman in whose neighbourhood it was enacted, but it was told and re-told by one of the actors in the tragedy, though he had passed to a land from which no testimony is available long before I heard the story at second-hand from Matthew.
“’Twas in December, 1824, that it happened. So Joseph told I.” (This, at any rate, was Matthew’s recognised formula.) “’Tis truehe were a great liar, and I didn’t take no count o’ the main o’ his tales; for he’d tell you most anything, he would; ’specially if he see’d the price of a glass of fourpenny for tellin’ it. But, in proof ’tis true, they’d tell it to the childer at night time, when they was obstrepulous and wouldn’t go to bed—just for a joke like, to fright ’em to sleep.
“’Twas in December, 1824; and not likely he were to forget it. For ’twas the year of the great gale (the ‘Outrage’ they calls it hereabouts), when the sea broke clean over Rudge and washed away th’ old church, all but the chancel. Joseph never took kindly-like to the new church they built for ’en higher up i’ the valley, out o’ reach o’ the sea. ’Twas too spick and span, he said, to suit he—all white and glitterin’ like chalk—though ’twere built of the best Portland stone, and a sight prettier to my thinkin’ than the tumble down old barn that’s all that’s left o’ th’ old un. But the visitors and gentry, they takes after Joseph, and for one what goes to see the new church there’s hundreds ’ll bring their vittles and sit and peant th’ old ’un—studyin’ all the tombstones, and what’s writ on ’em—mostly shipwrecks it be, for I doubt if there’s half-a-dozenstones in th’ old grave-yard but what tells of someone or t’other who was drownded at sea. In that one gale of ’24 ’twas thousands that perished, and all that was found on ’em Joseph buried there, when the sea gived back her dead, and he could get at his grave-yard. Though, to be sure, nought was left but the chancel, so you could scarce say as how, poor souls, they got a decent buryin’.
“Anyhow ’twas in that very month, just arter the ‘Outrage,’ that one Price—a farmer he called hisself—was livin’ high up yonder among they hills that you can see faint-like in the distance, nigh agin they ricks. A bleak and dreary place it were at the best o’ times, and a job to get at it at all when a strong so’wester were blowin’. And most every November itdoblow cruel strong along they high downs, wi’ no cover to speak on’t ’cept scraps of fuz and heather, and a small thorn tree, may be, now and agin, wi’ ’is branches all leanin’ to the nor’-east, as though ’twas an old man a holdin’ out his arms for shelter. And the road to Price’s farm were no better nor a sheep run. A godless man Price were, as you’d expect wi’ a man who lived so far from all we decent folks. And he never com’dnigh no church. Passon, he said, didn’t suit he, and he weren’t a goin’ to trapeze over hill and dale—not he—when chance ’twas he’d find no passon and no service at t’other end. And if passon went to he—as he did now and agin—he’d find the door shut in his face. And for vittles—not a bite nor a sup of anything did he offer ’en, though passon was a rare ’un at that kind of work. Sunday after Sunday he’d look in reg’lar nigh about dinner time, and savour by his nose, he would, where there was a chance for ’en of summat enticin’. Not but what ’twere bad for the childer where hedidsettle hisself, for ’twas little of the pudden was left for they when he’d a’ had his turn on’t.
“Howsomever, ’twas there Price lived, wi’ hisself for his company. So no wonder strange tales got abroad about ’m. ’Twas said, though Joseph never gived no heed to ’t, that three wives had entered his doors, and never one of ’em had come out agin—no, not for buryin’. And Joseph must have known on’t if so be they had, seein’ he were clerk and sexton and grave-digger, let alone the head o’ the choir. ’Twas thought that he’d buried ’em in another parish, more nigher to the househe lived in, and wi’ a better road ’long which to carry ’em. But, Lord save us! tweren’t nothin’ of the kind.
“One morning, early in December, ’twas nine o’ the clock, may be, or thereabouts—for Joseph had just been out to pen the sheep in the church-yard—a tall fine old genelman called at the door, and he knowed by his dress ’twere the Bishop. Not that he’d cast eyes on ’en before, for our youngsters are confirmed a way off; there baint enough of them to claim a Bishop for theirselves. But he knowed ’twere the Bishop, what wi’ his gaiters, fittin’ as though they’d grow’d to his legs, and his broad hat as shiny as if you’d smoothed it wi’ a flat iron.
“‘Good morning to you,’ says he, as pleasant as anyone could say it. ‘You be clerk of the parish, baint you?’ ‘True, your wusshup,’ he replied. ‘And sexton too’ says he. ‘Right you be; and grave-digger and choir leader as well,’ for he thought it no sin to make the most to ’m of his preferments. ‘Well,’ says he, ‘I want you for a buryin’—this night at eight o’clock.’ ‘A buryin’, your wusshup,’ says he, ‘and at night?’ ‘Yes, and three on ’em,’ says he, ‘all in one grave.’ ‘Well, itdosoundmortial strange, your wusshup, but ’tis you that says it, and not I.’ ‘You’d better go at once,’ he says, ‘and begin the grave, for you won’t have none too much time to spare on’t, ’specially as I want it done on the quiet, so to speak, and you mustn’t take no hand to help you, and meet me punctually as ever is at eight o’clock at Farmer Price’s, up along the hill, and bring a lantern and the parish hand-bier ’long wi’ ’e.’
“He hadn’t much time to ponder on it, as you may suppose, with that grave to dig, and no one to gi’ ’m a helpin’ hand. And mortial hard work he found it, too, for the frost set in early that year, and the ground that hard that, young and lusty as he were, he found it a job to get the pick-axe into ’en.
“Howsomever he did get ’en done, and at eight o’clock he was at Farmer Price’s door, and ’twas opened to ’en by the Bishop hisself. And so, hand in hand as you may say, he and the Bishop, they went into the kitchen. And there right facin’ ’em—packed up agin the wall like so many old grandfeyther clocks—stood three coffins, with a piece of glass let in ’em to show the face, and a dead woman in each!
“Close handy they were to ’m when he took his meals, or smoked his pipe; and when he felt a bit lonesome (so he told Joseph) he’d go up to ’em and ask ’em how they did, and if they felt comferable. And fresh as peant they were, too: only a bit shrivelled, like as ’twere an apple in April. Perhaps ’twas the heat of the kitchen, or may be some stuff he’d put in along wi’ ’em; anyhow you could see their faces right enough and tell they was women.
“‘Take ’em down,’ says the Bishop; ‘Farmer Price’ll lend ’e a helpin’ hand: and we’ve none too much time to get ’em back to the churchyard and bury ’em.’ Joseph hisself could scarce do nought but stare at ’em. To think that that godless man had kep’ ’em there—one on ’em for nigh on ten years—never thinkin’, not he, that he was keepin’ ’em tied hand and foot to this world, with never no chance of a resurrection till he took it into his wicked head to let ’em go. And there they’d a’ been for ten years longer—for just so long he lived—if Bishop hisself hadn’t got wind on’t and come down right away to bury ’em.
“Anyhow theydidget decent burial—thethree on ’em—at last. For they had Bishop, and Joseph and Farmer Price; though I don’t take no count o’ he, ’cept that he helped to lower ’em and fill in the grave.
“But Joseph were right glad, he were—and so he told I—to see the rare tug he had in draggin’ they three dead women up hill and down hill ’cross to the church-yard. For Joseph never gived ’en no helpin’ hand—you may take your oath on’t—though he did make a show of pushin’ at the bier whensomever the Bishop looked his way.
“Didn’t no one never hear on’t? Yes, they did. But they didn’t take no count on’t. Our people baint over wise about religion, and things were done in those days that’d make a rare potheration now. Besides, you see, Bishop were there, and he made a sight o’ difference. ’Twas a rare fine buryin’, people thought, wi’ a Bishop to put you unnerground; though ’tis true he hadn’t his fine gran’ toggery on, and his girt white sleeves.”
The actors in our humble drama are dead and gone. The Bishop and Price and Joseph have, each in his turn, been followed to the grave, only with less eccentric rites. But thestory of the farmer’s “Happy Family” still lingers in the village, and is told and re-told round many a cottage hearth under the quaint but significant title of “Price’s Menagerie.”
P.S. The “Professor” himself came round to-day—“for a pipe of baccy, Sir, if you have such a thing about you”—so I have utilised him to correct his own proof sheets. “There baint nothin’ wrong in ’em,MasterFred (this to a man of sixty!), so fur as I sees. Only you says ‘gived’ where I says ‘gi’ed.’ But taint no odds. Like enough they’ll guess what you means whatsomever you writes down.” Thanks, Matthew, for your tribute to my clearness of expression.
Itwas a touch of the old wilfulness in Ronald, which cost him dear, and saddened all his future life.
A windy storm-swept sky, though the wind was only playing with the sea as yet. Still, it met us, as we went down to the shore, with a drift of sand that stung the face like pin-pricks—trying, one might easily fancy, to warn us back from our foolhardy enterprise.
A painter would have needed only his blends of grey to paint the scene, till we came upon it, and added, I suppose, a patch of colour. Wiser people than ourselves kept quietly indoors; and the sand, the sea, the gulls, and the hurrying scud could all have been rendered in varying shades of grey. It is, to me, the most fascinating hue that the changeful sea can wear. One great artist, whose sketches are the glory of Girton College, knew it well.With an unerring eye for this sad unity of tone, she admits no faintest touch of colour into her cold grey wastes of sea and sky.
It was a risky and foolhardy attempt on the part of Ronald, and one that he has bitterly repented of, to launch a boat that afternoon. I can never quite forgive him for the sorrow it was to bring on us. But his wife would have it so. It was her greatest enjoyment to put out to sea on such a day. A calm aimless drift, in life or on the sea, was out of harmony with her bright and nerve-wrought soul.
Where Ronald was still more at fault was in the choice of our third hand. True, we had a fair amount of experience between us. But, with a strong south-wester to fight against, weight and strength are the two things needed, and will often win through a gale when experience is powerless. Ronald, however, was in one of his obstinate moods. He would take Oswald or no one, and his wife said ditto. Now Oswald was a lad of eighteen: a good seaman, I grant, but quite unequal to the work we had in view. However, he was the son of Ronald’s favourite gardener, and had been his wife’s pet scholar at her Sunday school, since which time he had been herdevoted slave, making himself useful about the house, and looking after her specialities in the garden and conservatory.
“Isn’t that boat too big for us, Oswald? Remember, there are only two of us to handle it, for Ronald’s ill, and can’t be reckoned on for much. Unless I’m mistaken, it intends to blow harder than this before it’s done.”
“Yes, sir. You’re right in a way. But we’ve got the winch to lower and haul her up with. And once at sea she’ll be a deal safer and stauncher than that one,” pointing to a lean, wall-sided thing that was our only alternative. “Besides, we’ll set very little canvas; indeed, to all appearance we shan’t want much.”
What a sail we had that afternoon! I think that I, who had countenanced it least, enjoyed it most. For Ronald was only just recovering from influenza, and certainly not up to a rough and tumble experience of this sort. And Oswald, too, for a lad of his spirits, was strangely depressed. “Never felt like it before,” he said, “and I shall be thankful when we’re safe on shore again. Our old people at home would say that I was walking over my grave, or some folly of the kind.But that can’t be out here,” he added, with a poor attempt to laugh it off.
First of all we took her along under the lee of the shore, where we were able to carry a fair amount of sail, and when we had worked her well round the bay we put her head straight for the south-east, and, with the wind on our beam, raced out into the open sea.
It was a longer and heavier business to work her back again, with the wind right in our teeth, and freshening steadily as the evening wore on. Fortunately for us it had only blown fitfully, and without much weight in it till now. It was still “making up its mind,” as sailors say, whether it would blow or not. But as we were beaching her in a deep sandy cove it had finished apparently with indecision, and began to blow in earnest.
Just as we had landed, and Oswald was preparing to follow us, a terrific squall burst full upon the boat, which lay beam on to it. Relieved of her last weight, as Oswald stepped on shore, she yielded to the pressure, and, heeling over on her side, pinned him to the ground. In a moment the horror of it broke upon us. What could we do, the two of us, even if Ronald hadn’t been shorn of half hisstrength? It would have taken ten men to pull her over in the face of the gale that was blowing. And the tide was rising rapidly. It was idle to look for help. We had beached her in a quiet sequestered cove, used only by ourselves. But it was closer to Thorpe Hill than the regular landing stage, and, after a hard day’s work, saved us a tedious beat along the coast when the wind was blowing from its present quarter. The high land above us was private property, with no right of way, and on a day like this, for it was beginning to rain, would be lonely as a desert.
Our first thought was of the winch. We had had one fitted up under the cliff in order to save labour in launching and beaching the boat. But, even if it were possible, we had no time nor knowledge how to alter the gear so as to utilise the leverage for righting her. No doubt the incoming tide would help us later on, but its help, when it did come, would come too late. Yet to do anything was better than to do nothing. So we took the balers out of the boat, and, kneeling down beside Oswald, attempted the hopeless task of freeing him by scooping out the sand oneither side, till he begged us to desist, as the boat only fell over more heavily, and imprisoned him still deeper in the yielding sand.
And all the time that we were working, Kingsley’s “cruel, crawling foam” beat persistently upon my brain, maddening me with its ghastly congruity. And yet “cruel and crawling” it was not. Quicker it could scarcely have been, and its quickest was (I saw) its kindliest. Already it was playing with the lad’s hair, though his mistress, careless of the risk she ran, knelt down beside him and supported his head in her arms.
“Pray for me,” he said.
She whispered the words in his ear, though if she had shouted them with all her strength they would not have reached us on the other side of the boat, where, with a hope that was hopeless now, we were straining ourselves to no purpose in the attempt to right her.
But Oswald was satisfied. A look of repose and even comfort settled upon his face before the last words came.
“Thank you,” he said, “you have made death easy for me. And you have done soat the risk of your own life. Tell them at home I was not afraid.”
She bent down and kissed his forehead.
“And now—cover my face.”
“And the stars—they shall fall, and the Angels go weeping,Ere I cease to love her, my Queen, my Queen.”
“And the stars—they shall fall, and the Angels go weeping,Ere I cease to love her, my Queen, my Queen.”
“OurQueen” she was to me and Ronald, ever since we first met her at Broadwater, and Ronald had dared to love her. And now that she is gone from us there is little fear that her title will ever be questioned. Neither he nor I need any coarser picture of her than that engraved by memory. But for others—for those who knew her little, or less well—let me try to call her back in clearer and less shadowy outline.
A woman this, to whom you gave your confidence with your first greeting, and never afterwards withdrew it.
Not the face to tempt an artist by its regularity of feature or beauty of colouring. Madonna-like some would call it, and so it was in sweet and loving trustfulness, but far too mobile and human, too full of interestand human sympathy to suggest the reposeful placidity of conventional art. Instinct, rather, with the life and animation that inspires the best work of Gainsborough and Reynolds, and frank with a simplicity that is careless of its surroundings, and therefore conquers them. The centre of her interest was home; thence it radiated outwards. From her family to her friends, from friends to neighbours, her influence passed in ever widening circles like a ripple that, stirred in the centre of some pool, travels to the extremest edge.
Nature creates not many such. Happy the man who has known and honoured one.
Over and over again I have tried to unravel the secret of her inexplicable charm. Seating myself in some sequestered nook, where Ronald himself would find it hard to discover me, it has been my pleasure, through a long evening’s entertainment, to watch her in every graceful word and greeting that she exchanged with her friends. It was a satisfaction even to see her walk across the room—a lost art (they tell us) in these hurried and inartistic days. I tried to learn the mystery from her conversation. The words told nothing, but the tone was less secretive; and, after all, how much more thetone always does tell of the spirit of the speaker than the conventional coinage we have devised in words.
“And how’s that sweet little bairn of yours, Mrs. Macpherson?” (She was half Scotch by birth, and now and again her descent betrayed itself in a pretty mannerism of word and accent.) “I lost my heart to her, I did, when I met her yesterday on the Parade with her nurse.” A greeting old as time can make it, but new, entirely new, in the sympathy she threw into it right from the depths of her heart. No one could hear her and not believe; and Mrs. Macpherson was won. Sometimes, almost awestruck, I asked myself, Is there,canthere be a human nature so nearly approximating to the divine as to possess the verity of universal sympathy? And, knowing this woman so nearly and so closely as I knew her, it was impossible, I found, to answer the question with a negative.
“If you are in doubt, play trumps” used to be the rule in whist, and “If you are in doubt, wear black” would be my advice to a lady in difficulty about her dress. And Ronald’s wife suggested it.
To-night she was looking her best—inblack, and silver and diamonds. She and Ronald were giving their largest ball of the season, due regularly at this period of the year, and every family of standing for miles round had sent its representative. For a wonder I hadn’t been watching her that evening, and was surprised to feel her gentle touch on my arm.
“Come with me, Fred,” she said, “I want you for a few minutes upstairs. Poor old nurse is dying. We’ve been expecting it, you know, at any moment for some weeks past. But I wish it hadn’t come to-night. It looks so heartless to have all these people about us; and yet I know she wouldn’t have had the ball put off. She was the last person ever to think of self. Still itdoeslook unfeeling to go to her straight from all this light and merriment. Yet I feel it less than most would. Life and death seem to me so closely mixed, that wherever one is there you may expect the other.”
“Of course I’ll come. But oughtn’t Ronald to be there too?”
“Yes; but, you see, we cannot both be spared. He must be here to make excuses for me if I am missed. I don’t want to spoilthe pleasure of all these young things during their one great evening of the year.”
“But you’ll change your dress?” I said aghast.
“No, I think not. If death is always so very near to us, it hardly seems worth while to change one’s dress to meet him. Besides, I have a special reason in this case. All her life long dear old nurse has liked to see me in my ball-room dress, and I’m sure she will to-night. She said it gave her an idea of what the angels were like better than did her Bible. And if it could give her one comforting thought to help her, I’d have dressed on purpose as I am.”
There was little need for Ronald to make excuses for our absence. The old woman was dying when they called us. But her eyes opened and brightened as she saw her mistress.
“What! an angel?” she cried. “No, but my own dear mistress, the best angel of them all, and dressed as I would have her—not yet in her robe of white—not yet.” And, with her mistress’ face pressed close to hers, and the diamonds and silver rippling and shimmering about her pillow, our old nurse died as she would have chosen. Half-an-hour later “OurQueen” was back in the ball-room: bright, and, to all appearance, cheerful as the rest. None that saw her would have guessed the scene from which she had come back to them. “Heartless” they would have said, and will say so still. But Ronald and I knew better. Her heart was in the nursery up stairs.
She wears her white robe now. But, in reverence be it written, I would fain see her come to welcome me, clothed, as she was clothed that night, in black and silver and diamonds.
When her own time came, as it did soon after, she met death with the same fearless, friendly courage. Her thoughts were wholly for those who were to stay, and she was even playful in urging upon me never to leave Ronald and the children, but learn to “take her place.” I own I was troubled at times by what seemed almost levity in the face of death, till I began by degrees to realise her point of view.
“I think it will be a very short distance,” she said, “perhaps into another room, perhaps not even so far as that; and the time (to me, at any rate) will certainly seem short—nolonger than the night of sleep which separates us from our loved ones till the morning.” And of the future she had no fear. “Nothing,” she said, “could persuade me that the light which has been fanned and quickened here will be extinguished for ever by the incident we call death. The jest would be too horribly, inconceivably malicious. Yet our choice lies between this and the crowning impossibility of a self-created world.”
Not thoughtlessly, but in the hope of finding a standing ground for myself, I would ask her sometimes if she had no misgivings regarding the re-existence of the body, and mutual recognition, and the endless difficulties that centre round the subject.
“None,” she answered, “none. Why should I? Look at the natural world. I know that space must be either limited or limitless; but can I form a conception of either alternative? Yet the problem may be simplicity itself to some larger mind than ours. So why trouble myself about difficulties which may be easier of solution still to those who hold the key? And you think it hard, I know—you have often said so—that many should die, as we know they must, without a friend on earth towhom they can look forward for a welcome when they reach the further shore. To me, I confess, it seems quite the contrary. Surely the burst of welcome will be greater in their ears than in ours, who have lived surrounded by friends, and never known the dearth of sympathy.”
And every difficulty, as I raised it, she met with the same calm, unquestioning certainty.
She died, as she had lived, in ministering to others. Oswald’s death was the first blow. From the exposure and the physical effects she soon recovered—sooner than we expected, considering her frail and uncertain hold on life. But the horror of it was always with her, especially the feeling that it was she who had suggested the fatal experiment. Ever and again, as the subject was referred to, I could see her shuddering at the reminiscence, blaming herself with what was surely the only reproach that can have harassed her bright and blameless conscience. And the remembrance was still upon her when her two children sickened with the scarlet fever. Considering her weak state, and consequent liability to infection, the doctor had strictly forbidden her to enter their room. “I can make nopromises,” she said; “if they want me I must go. Till then I will obey your orders. We are told to give up father and mother, and perhaps oneself for one’s husband, but our children, I think, have a prior claim to all.” And so she watched and waited at their door, stealing along the corridor in her robe of white at all hours of the night, listening and listening to hear if a summons came.
One night, unhappily, it came—a summons she was powerless to resist. The elder child was delirious, and she heard it moaning piteously, “Mother, mother, why don’t you come to me?” Without a moment’s hesitation she had entered the room, signing her own death-warrant in the act.
She did not linger long in dying; lingering was little in her way. On a grey morning in October, just ten days after she was taken ill, the gun which welcomes sunrise from the signal-station on the pier echoed like a call. She opened her eyes to greet us, and with the diamonds flickering again about her head—only they were sunbeams now—she passed to that “larger life” of which she, if anyone, held the key.
“Lest we forget.”
Thelast notes of “Jerusalem, Jerusalem!”—sung as no other boy on earth could sing it—had just died away in a storm of applause. Now and again the surge of voices reached the green-room in a muffled roar, where Eric was protesting to the Manager that nothing would induce him to sing another note that night. “They’ve had four songs,” he said, “what on earth do they want more? As it is, I shall break my voice some day in that confounded hall. It was never meant for a boy to sing in—all wood and iron and glass—with nothing to help you or carry the voice. No! Iwon’tsing, that’s flat; tell them I’m ill, or my mother’s come for me, or anything you like. Sing again, Iwon’t.” “Yes, I’ll tell them your mother’s come for you,” said the Manager with a laugh, “but, remember, they’ll be clamouring for ‘A boy’s best friend is his mother’ if I do.”
As if to confirm Eric in his determination there came a knock at the door, and a boyish face peepedin. “Sorry, Hudson, if I’ve interrupted business, but they told me the show was over, and I want Eric for supper. By the way, you can come too, if you like. Andrews and Thorne are there already, and have finished supper by this time, I expect. But there’ll be some champagne and lobster-salad left for us.”
“Thanks, Lord Eastonville, I’ll come with pleasure, but I must first go and quiet these lunatics. They’re roaring for Eric like a lioness robbed of her cub.”
Ten minutes later the three were entering a room in Hope Square, so rich in its decorations of china, tapestries, and antique bronzes that it might have been transported by a slave of the lamp direct from Aladdin’s palace, or have done duty for a catalogue of Roman luxury: “The merchandise of gold and silver and precious stones and of pearls and fine linen and silk and scarlet and all manner of vessels of most precious wood and of brass and iron and marble and frankincense, and souls of men.”
By the fire (for it was early in May) stood an oval table, covered with old glass and silverin pleasant confusion. The fruit—a distinctive feature—piled artistically in a ribbed basket of the Queen Anne period, not disposed at the rate of four apples here, flanked by four oranges there, after the fashion dear to the soul of the British householder when he calls his neighbours to a feast.
The three new comers were greeted with a round of applause as hearty in spirit as the cheer which had followed them from the hall.
“Why, Bindo, you’ve the very boy we’ve been longing for. We’ve finished supper and used up our talk, and it’s too late for a theatre and too early for bed. Singing will just fill the interval before cards.”
“Not a note from me, Thorne, till I’ve had some supper. I must clear my throat from the dust of the hall with champagne first. Why you’re as bad as the audience, who think that songs can be pumped out of one as easily as you can get squeaks out of a gutta-percha doll.”
While Eric is better employed we can introduce the party.
Lord Eastonville, who owns the rooms, is a thorough gentleman of the well-bred Englishtype, with brains enough to carry him safely through life—good-looking, generous, easy-going to a fault, and twenty-five. Too fond, it may be, of taking his ease, as all well-to-do Englishmen are now-a-days, but a man who could fight for his country, as in the old Crimean times, when war galvanised our lethargy into life. War is no unmixed evil; it carries with it a blessing in disguise. It is the scare and shadow of war that is the curse without the blessing.
Thorne, as a minute in his company would prove to you, is a hard-headed journalist; witty, and an excellent talker; facile, of course, with his pen, and ready to turn out a new theology as easily as he could write an article on the last discovered butterfly or grub.
Andrews is a graduate of London University, spending with Eastonville the remnant of a holiday. Fairly humorous and incorrigibly deaf—never more so (his friends say) than when a subject bores him—he is himself a trifle of a bore to-night. In his latest translation of Vergil “ploughed with a team” has become in the hands of the printers “ploughed with steam,” an anachronism that pleases him mightily.
He is also sorely exercised over the term “Prolegomena,” used in connexion with our classical editions. “Either the word’s bad Greek,” he says, “or else it’s rank nonsense. ‘Things that are being said before’ means just nothing at all. What they want is a Perfect, ‘things that have been said beforehand,’ which is not only more grammatical, but also (he adds with a chuckle) much more descriptive of prefaces in general.”
“Well, I don’t understand Greek and Latin,” said Thorne, “so suppose we talk English. I have been studying you carefully, Bindo, and have come to the conclusion that you look highly picturesque among all that fruit and flowers. I wonder what made you so good looking; was your father particularly lovely?”
“Neither my father nor my mother, Thorne, though shehascontrived to marry again; and the consequence is I’m not so well looked after as I ought to have been, else I shouldn’t be here to-night. Fate, I think, must have made a judicious blend of the best points in his face with the best features of hers. And the result is me.”
“First class grammar, Bindo. She musthave sent you to a good school at any rate.”
“Anything else to ask, old man? You seem to be in an inquisitive mood to-night.”
“Yes; who taught you to sing?”
“Le bon Dieu, I suppose, as Patti said. I had only the training of a country choir boy. By the by, my master’s name was Thorne, a matter full of interest to you. I believe I sang by intuition.”
“A Hamiltonian philosopher,” muttered Andrews, “only he has developed theory into practice.”
“Anyhow, when your voice goes I shall put on mourning,” said Eastonville, “not black, for I don’t believe in it. Purple’s the farthest I can go.”
“You may put on white or canary yellow, like a heathen Chinee, for all I care.”
“Don’t lose your temper, Bindo.”
And Eric,aliasBindo, how shall I describe him? A fair boy, delicate looking, but with lungs that can fill the biggest concert room in London, with wavy golden hair flung back on his forehead, and the long dreamy eyes so dear to the soul of Raphael. In fact, it was Raphael’s picture of Bindo Altoviti (longsupposed to be a portrait of the painter) that had won him his name. Framed in the cabin window of a Bournemouth steamer (excursion boats in these days do not condescend to port holes), his arms resting on the sill, the resemblance had struck me irresistibly. From that day he became “Bindo” to all of us, and would scarcely have recognised an appeal to him as “Eric,” if we had lighted on the name by accident. His hair perhaps was one of his most telling points. It reflected under strong lights brilliant flakes of gold, isolated like the motes that are suspended in certain liqueurs.
But after all it was his manner that took so much with all his friends. He had the timid deprecating caress of a half-tamed animal, like Hawthorne’s Donatello before he had won himself a soul. Alas! poor Bindo was hardly allowed time to win it.
“And what was the show like to-night, Bindo?” asked Eastonville.
“Oh, the same old game. Nothing would suit them out of sixty songs but ‘Jerusalem,’ ‘Rags and Tatters,’ and ‘Home, sweet Home.’ They don’t mind ‘A boy’s best friend’ for an encore when they are in a strictly domesticmood. But anything really worth singing they won’t look at.”
“Well, we’ll follow their better mood and have ‘Jerusalem.’ You’ve got back your voice by now, old chap, and we’ve been waiting for you patiently this last half-hour or more.”
Once again that night the glorious voice rang out into the thin air, startling the silent square. Windows were hastily flung up, and the word “Bindo” was passed from sill to sill. Even a drowsy canary was stimulated to try a note or two in emulation of a method more attractive than its own. And through the open window came, for an accompaniment, the voice of London, soft as the murmur of a far-off sea.
With the end of the song a sharp rattle of applause ran round the square, marked by distinctive intervals, like the volley at a soldier’s funeral.
“Bravo, Bindo,” said Eastonville, “it would pay you to send the hat round to-night. Here’s a fiver, young ’un, to open the bank with, though why I should give it you passes my comprehension. A boy who can earn ten pounds a night at sixteen is a sight better offthan I am. If you lose it, you’ll have to try the others. I’m pretty well cleared out. After all you’re detestable, Bindo. Just when we want you most, your voice will be gone, and you’ll have spoiled us for all other singing, precisely as the great Sarah has spoiled us for any acting but her own. If we could only forget and start fresh with each week, how nice and pleasant everything would be. I believe Nelly is right in ‘Cometh up,’ when she says that memory is often a cruel gift. No one would choose to remember a feeble show, or to spoil his enjoyment of average singing by a recollection of the best. Why are ‘Jack Sheppard’ and ‘Geneviève de Brabant’ practically withdrawn from the London stage? Because elderly playgoers cannot forget the days when Mrs. Keeley played ‘Jack,’ or when Emily Soldene and the Dolaro drew all Mayfair to Islington by the witchery of a serenade. But now for ‘A boy’s best friend’—we’re all in a domestic mood to-night—and then cards.”
Bindo was very docile as a rule, especially in the hands of those who loved and cared for him. But on some points he was obdurate assteel. For instance, I could never persuade him, try what I would, to invest his salary, nor could anything induce him to learn a profession against the day when his voice should fail him. Singing, he said, had come naturally to him; a good voice, a good ear, and a little training had done the trick; and he thought, or pretended to think, that the evil day, when it did come, would bring with it its own resource. “Sufficient unto the day is thegoodthereof” was Bindo’s motto throughout.
And it was impossible to teach him the value of money. He spent it royally on others, lavishly on himself. “Where have you been, Bindo?” I said to him one Monday, when he hadn’t turned up as usual on the previous afternoon. “Oh, I took Harry out of town. He’s been seedy, you know, and wanted change. So we went to Brighton.” “And you travelled first-class, and put up at the Bedford, and lost money to him at cards in the evening?” “You have hit itexactly, old man,” was the reply.
I believe that most of his money went on Quixotic kindnesses of this sort. One night when I was with him at the Queen’s Hall (heliked to run round to me between his “turns” and criticise the show from the front) his salary for two nights went before it was earned to the first violin, a blind little snuff-powdered man, but Bindo’s very particular friend, because he had stumbled in getting down from the stage and damaged his instrument.
When the end did come, it came suddenly. His voice cracked on an upper G—sudden and short like the string of a violin—in the very hall he had so emphatically abused for its acoustic deficiencies. Of course he came to me, if it can be said that he came to me, when he had always been with me for most of his time. But the life bored him. I had my own work to do in the evenings, and couldn’t go with him to restaurants, theatres, and concerts, the excitement of which had become a second nature to Bindo. And so we drifted, little by little, but still very surely, farther and farther apart.
It was about this time that his friend Harry, the same whom he had entertained so royally at Brighton, fell ill. Bindo had been anxious about him for a long while, and never passed a day without seeing him. But it was only quite lately that the doctors had begun tosuspect a rapid form of consumption. Bindo was full of trouble. I think he liked Harry best of all his friends, perhaps excepting me.
One day he burst into my room, with something more akin to tears in his eyes than I had ever seen in them before. “Whatisto be done, Charlie? They’ve given Harry the sack at his office because he’s too ill to do his work properly. They won’t even keep it open for him for a week or two on the chance. What brutes they are! And, poor old chap, he’s got nothing. If it were only this time last year, and I had my voice again, we could do famously. I wish I’d taken your advice, old man, and saved my pile while I had the chance. By the way: happy thought! I have a heap of rings and pins and watches at home that the swells gave me last year for singing at their matinees and concerts—enough of them to stock a pawnshop. By Jove! theyshallhelp to stock Attenborough’s; and we’ll live on the proceeds, at any rate till things look more rosy.” He was off then and there, and for the next six months, till Harry died, I scarcely saw him. One excitement in his case had cast out the others, and while Harry lived he hardly cared to be outside his room.Brother and nurse in one he was to him—with him night and day—and, whatever money or love could do, Bindo did for him.
Afterwards he came back to me, looking a trifle older, a trifle more depressed; but improved, or so it seemed to me, by the experience he had undergone. I forgot that there are natures receptive of vigorous and even intense impressions, but absolutely incapable of retaining them. So soon as one predominant idea has passed from the brain, its place must be occupied by another, for good or else for evil. Which of the two it may be, seems almost a matter of indifference; it is the law, so to speak, of their being that itshouldbe indifferent.
I almost wished in those days that I could fall ill myself. Five or six months of nursing under Bindo’s hand would have been a lazy delight to me, and (selfish as it may seem) better far for him than the life he was leading. Unhappily I never felt fitter, much too fit and too self-occupied to be interesting to Bindo, and so he left me for others, more at liberty and likely to be more amusing.
All this time he was (to quote his own words) “looking about for something”—theMicawber-like expression that does duty for an idle life. Whatever Bindo’s interpretation may have been, I know it made him very late in coming home of an evening. Yet he never asked me for money. His resources seemed boundless, and the stock of rings and watches inexhaustible. But, portable and useful property as they are, you must have a good supply of them in hand to live upon it for a year in the style Bindo was doing. Besides, it occurred to me as strange that I had never had a sight of them; in old days I had always had the first view of any present that was made him. On another point, too, he was inflexible as ever. Advice and help towards securing permanent employment he absolutely and positively refused. “Better that, old boy,” he said, “than do what most people do—bother their friends all round for an opinion when they’ve decided all along to follow their own.”
Your practical and steady-going individual—the one, for example, who can “see nothing” inAlice in Wonderland—never admits into his reckoning the influence of excitement. It disturbs and disarranges his equilibrium of life. Yet, disparage it as you may, it is oneof the most important factors in shaping life and character, and perhaps the very strongest lever that operates for the development of vice. Fortunately, a fair number of mankind can do with a small and weak modicum of this dangerous stimulant. Individuals like Bindo, who ask for more, are classed among the eccentricities of nature, for whom it is impossible to prescribe. Yet, think what it means for a boy of sixteen, without discipline or experience to steady him, to drop, literally in a moment, from notoriety to neglect, activity to stagnation; almost from life to death.
No wonder Bindo pined and drooped. I knew the alternative that lay before him: life and death—not in metaphor this time, but in sober earnest. Yet I let him go, for he had taught me himself, if I had wanted the knowledge, that no man can cage a human will. So from the very moment I had become more hopeful about him, the gulf widened between us. But only in companionship; never in spirit—
“For, till the thunder in the trumpet be,Soul may divide from body, but not we,One from the other.”
“For, till the thunder in the trumpet be,Soul may divide from body, but not we,One from the other.”
Meanwhile he had retained all his old friends—no one who had known Bindo wasin a hurry to part company with him—but he had made other and less reputable ones. The strange and (to me) disquieting element in the situation was that he never, even now, seemed to be in want of money. Yet Harry’s illness alone must have cost him a fortune. All his old luxuries were resumed. Dinners to his friends, at which Bindo was always paymaster, with periodical trips to Brighton and Bournemouth for change, succeeded one another with the same regularity as when the boy was earning £10 a night. “Wheredoesthe money come from?” I asked myself again and again. Alas! the knowledge was to come soon.
Late one evening, as I was finishing an article for the editor who employed me, Thorne and Eastonville called at my rooms. That they had come on no pleasant errand was written on their faces. “Charlie,” said Thorne, “we are here on a disagreeable business. I hope it may prove less disagreeable than it looks. The fact is we’ve been losing a lot of things for some time past; at least we’ve tried our level best tothinkwe’ve lost them. But it won’t do. The thing is far too systematic to be accidental. Sometimes it hasbeen money—a sovereign or two at a time; then it was a diamond ring of Eastonville’s that went, and then some valuable scarf-pins of mine. So the thing must be stopped. But who has done it? I may as well out with it at once, though it burns my throat to tell it. We can’t help fancying it’s Bindo. No one but he has had access to our rooms at all hours, and you know how suspicious he has made us all by the pile of money he’s been spending.”
“Yes: itisBindo, Thorne.”
What was the good of attempting to deny it, when it flashed across me in a moment where all his jewellery had come from? No, not all perhaps. Probably—for I never asked him—he had started with articles that were legitimately his own, and then, when these had failed him, had been tempted to supplement them less creditably in the time of Harry’s need.
Of course we found the things, as I anticipated, at Attenborough’s; all of them, that is, but one. Bindo was not the boy to try and hide his work, as an expert would have done, by distributing the articles at different shops, or even by signing under an assumedname. On the contrary, there was a contemptuous candour in his method of dealing that actually surprised and puzzled us for a moment at starting.
I would allow no one but myself to liquidate on behalf of Bindo. But I as steadily refused to be the bearer to him of the discovery we had made. None of the others volunteered for the office, or showed the faintest ambition to be the one selected for the murder of a friendship. So we cast lots for the office, whose it should be, in true melodramatic style, and the lot fell upon me.
“Cheer up, old fellow,” said Eastonville. “Bindo’s a deal fonder of you than he is of the rest of us, and won’t take it so hardly if it comes through you. The fact is we’ve spoiled him; all of us, that is, but you. And he knew it too, and I believe he liked the preaching you gave him better than all my five-pound notes; not that he showed any objection to the notes, I’m bound to say. Now, don’t look so savage, old man. I’m bound to try and laugh over it, because, if I didn’t, I feel sure I should do the other thing. And after all this business may be the making of Bindo.”
But he didn’t know Bindo as I did. The boy came to me with outstretched hand, and with the old frank look in his eyes. But I could not trust myself to return it. What I did, must, I felt, be done quickly. If I waited for words in which to break the news to him; above all, if I gave him the chance of speaking first, I knew it was all up with me. So I just put the things on the table in front of him—how I hated the sight of them!—and said, “These things have come into my hands, no matter by what means.” He looked at them, and the faintest flush imaginable crept over his face. “Before you leave me to-night we will do them up for the post, and you will address them to the respective owners and leave them in my hands.” I did not dare to look at him, but turned away to another table, making up the parcels one by one and handing them to him where he stood behind my back. He addressed each parcel as he received it, never betraying by a word or sign what I knew the effort must have cost him.
“And now, Eric, you and I part company.” I saw him wince at the name; almost as if he had received a blow. No doubt it implied to him, far more plainly than I had intended,that the Bindo of the past was lost beyond recall. It was not said in heedlessness, still less in heartlessness; it was simply loss of self-control. The old familiar namecouldnot be forced past my lips. In a moment I saw what I had done, and would have given worlds to repair it. “Bindo,” I cried impulsively, “come back.” But it was too late; the mischief was done. I had lost my last chance by that one word.
“Good-bye,” he answered, and was gone.
The characters we meet with in this world are composite, all of them—not saint or sinner; not this or else that, but something betwixt and between; the good in them not permanent, the bad in them not hopeless; and Bindo’s short life had exemplified the fact with startling clearness.
From that day forward my influence over him was gone. He must have kept studiously out of my path—an easy thing for him to do, as he knew all my habits and places of resort. I used to try and persuade myself that I was guiltless of the result, whatever it might be;that “unstable as water” his character was past all guidance, and would in any case have drifted to the end that seemed to be in view. Yet it was hard to feel all the while that a strong, kind word from me that night might have nerved him to fresh energy.
“And what about Bindo?” I asked of Eastonville one day.
“Going to the dogs, and pretty rapidly, too, I’m afraid. The last time I saw him, he was with Hutchinson and all that crew. You know what comes of mixing with loafers like that. He wouldn’t look at me, though I tried hard to get a talk with him. He’d had more to drink, too, than a boy of seventeen can carry. The pity of it all. What a voice he had, and what a good fellow, too, at heart! How he nursed poor Harry! Few Samaritans of the present day would have given up six months of their time to spend them in a sick room. But I’m afraid it’s all up with him.”
“Can’t Thorne do anything?”
“No; Bindo fights shy of us all, and no wonder either. I am sure I should do the same in his place. Ifyoucould only have got hold of him, and made him feel that we were rather glad than otherwise that our uselessbelongings had gone towards nursing Harry, he’d have got back his self-respect and been less shy of us. But our last hope went whenyoufailed. What the plague made you call him Eric instead of Bindo?”
“Heaven only knows,” I answered, “or its Antipodes.”
I told Thorne one day of Eastonville’s report, and asked him what he thought of it.
“Just nothing at all,” he said. “He knows no more of what Bindo’s doing than all the rest of us. For myself, I believe he’s got work of some kind. I grant he’s seen sometimes at shady music halls with shady companions; and that’s what Eastonville means. But, after all, a fellow must have some one to speak to in the evening, especially if he’s at work all day; and if he’s lost his old friends he must fill up their places with the best he can. Besides, it’s quite possible that Bindo has grown wise enough by this time to make sure they do him no harm.”
A few months later Thorne dropped in again. “Now you’ll be happy, I suppose; at least I am. Bindo starts to-morrow for Brazil in theMagdalena. We came across him to-day. He’s had work on hand all the year,though he kept it quietly to himself; and now he’ll be quit of all his old associations and be able to make another, and, I hope, a better start.”
I made up my mind, of course, that I must see him before he sailed. But how to do it? Fortunately I knew the name of the boat he was to travel by, unless he had wilfully put Thorne off the scent. But it was too late to get a train that night, and, as the boat I knew sailed at two o’clock, it gave me none too much time to hunt him up at Southampton.
When a letter came to me next morning by the early post, requiring an article at once for the afternoon papers, it was only what I expected. Fate had come between me and Bindo every time I had wished to help him, and she was at her old games again. So I sat down and wrote off my article—doggedly rather than savagely—in the spirit of one who gives up the game against chance, yet knowing, all the time I was writing, that I was losing my train, and that it was doubtful whether the next one would catch theMagdalenaat all. The official at the Dock entrance told me that she was already throwing off from the quay wall, and it would be quiteimpossible to get on board. “Far and away your best chance,” he added, “is to run round this way to the Dock gates. You’ll be there before she is, for it takes a lot of time to back and turn her. Then if you want to say good-bye to anyoneveryparticularly (and he smiled), you’ll get a word with her perhaps. For the vessel’s loaded deep, and her portholes won’t stand very high above the quay wall. Besides, she’ll only creep through the gates, but you’ve no time to lose.”
I hardly stopped to thank himthen. On my way back he got, not only thanks, but, to his great astonishment, a five-shilling piece. “Well; he must have wanted to see her badly,” I heard him whisper to his mate.
The preliminaries of throwing off, backing, warping, were all over by the time I reached the gates, and the big vessel was beginning to make a move under her own steam. I looked eagerly for Bindo among the passengers. Fate had been kind to me, and given me yet another chance. What if I missed it like the last? But she favoured me this time. He was leaning over the deck-rail, watching the leave-takings as the great vessel swept slowly past the wall. His cap was thrown back andhis hair blown off his forehead. What a boy he looked to be starting a new life in a new world, without a friend and with worse than failure for the past!
Just then he caught sight of me. For a moment he hesitated—I couldseehim hesitate; then he left the deck and re-appeared at a port-hole in the aft part of the ship, framed once more (and it was my last picture of him) as the very Bindo of old. “Good-bye,” he said, “old man; it was good of you to come, after the way I’ve treated you. Thanks again, most faithful of friends, and good-bye. Forgive and forget. This time, believe me, I’ll go straight. By the way,” he added, “just give this parcel for me to Fred—naming one of his chums—I had intended it for the pilot, but it will be safer in your hands.”
A wave of the hand, as the ship headed for the open water, was the last I saw of Bindo. But a load was off my mind as I walked back to the station. I could look forward hopefully now and patiently to our next meeting.
Glancing at the parcel he had given me, I found it was addressed to myself. It contained a small diamond ring without word orcomment. At the time when we found the jewellery at Attenborough’s, this ring had been missing, and, as it belonged to me, I had said nothing to the others about it. I might easily have lost it, and at any rate I gladly gave Bindo the benefit of the doubt. He had pledged it apparently at a different shop; perhaps because it was mine, and he did not wish it to be discovered with the rest; perhaps to remind him more vividly of the task he had set himself during the year to come. Till this ring could be redeemed, he must wait and work in London, and though all his hopes were centred in life abroad, it must not be thought of till this one act of reparation had been done. I never saw or heard from him directly again.
Two years later he died of yellow fever in hospital at Rio; and his last act, while he still had strength to hold a pen, was to write me a loving letter of farewell, enclosing a cheque that covered the sums I had expended on his account. The letter was forwarded to me by the nurse who attended him.
“Is it well with the lad?It is well.”