Thus Val dropped asleep on his last night at home; and he woke in the morning cured of his first trouble, with as light a heart as any schoolboy need have—the shock having gone off with all its consequences, and his mind being too full of his new start, of his new watch, of his long journey—the first he had ever taken—and of Eton at the end most wonderful of all,—far too full of these things to be sad. He gave his grandmother a hug when the moment came to go away. “I’ll be back at Christmas, grandma,” he said, between laughing and crying. The old lord was going with his heir, and this “broke the parting very much, so that he bore up like a man,” Lady Eskside said afterwards, wishing, I fear, that Val had been a little more “overcome.” She shed tears enough for both of them after the carriage had driven away, with a large box of game—to conciliate MrGrinder—fastened on behind. From the window of one of the turrets she could see it driving across the bridge at Lasswade; and there she went, though the stairs tired her, and waved her handkerchief out of the narrow window, and wept at thought of the dreariness he left behind him. It seemed to my lady that there was not one creature left in the great house, or on Eskside, up the water and down the water, save herself; and thus Val made his first start in life.
Theboy was very tired when he arrived in London, and not capable of the hot interest he expected to feel in the great muddy capital, which was one muddle of mean houses, noisy roads, carts and carriages, and crowding people, to his tired perceptions. The day after, he and his grandfather went to Windsor through the mild soft country, half veiled in the “mists and mellow fruitfulness” that distinguish autumn, and warm with the all-pervading and diffused sunshine of the season. How different was the calm slow river, lingering between its placid banks, seeking no coy concealment under cliff or tree, but facing the daylight with gentle indifference, from the wild shy Esk, which played at hide-and-seek with the sunshine, like a flying nymph among the woods! The old lord seemed half inspired by this return to scenes which he remembered so well, though he had not been himself brought up at Eton. “I brought your father here, as I’m bringing you,” he said, as they rolled along round the curves of the railway, looking out upon the distant castle and the river. “You will see plenty of boats on the river in another day, my boy; and if your grandma and I come here next summer, I daresay we shall see you strutting along in all your finery, with flowers in your hat, and a blue shirt.” Innocent old lord! he thought his little rustic, just out of the nest, might reach the celestial heights of Eton in a few months, and perhaps—for what limits are there to the presumption of ignorance?—find a place in the Eight in his first summer. But, indeed, I don’t really think Lord Eskside’s ignorance went so far as this. He said it, not knowing what else to say, to please the boy. They went down together to the great dame’s house, full already of small boys settling into their familiar quarters, upon whom Val looked with all the wondering envy and respect natural to a freshman. He had himself assumed the tall hat for the first time in his life, and the sight of so many tall hats moving about everywhere confused yet excited him. His tutor, who was not his “dame,” lived in a tiny house attached to a big pupil-room, and had no accommodation for boys or for much else, except the blue-and-white china in which his soul delighted. Mr Gerald Grinder, like his brother Mr Cyril Grinder, who had been Val’s tutor at Eskside, had one of the finest minds of his time; but the chief way in which this made itself evident to the outer world was in his furniture, and the fittings-up of his little house, every “detail” in which he flattered himself was a study. It was a very commonplace little house, but the thought that had been expended on its decoration might have built pyramids—if anything so rude and senseless as building pyramids could have occurred to the refined intelligence of a man of Mr Gerald Grinder’s day. Val gazed at all the velvet brackets, and all the antique cabinets (which had been “picked up” in holiday travels all over the world, and were each the subject of a tale), and all the china, with a sense of failing breath and space too small for him; while his grandfather engaged Mr Grinder in conversation, and pointed out the boy’s peculiarities, as if these characteristics could be of any particular interest to any one out of Val’s own family—and the young tutor listened with a smile. “I don’t doubt we shall soon know each other,” he said suavely, and shook hands with Val, and dismissed him: to receive just such a description of another boy next moment from another anxious parent. “Whether is it Ross or Smith now, that is the self-willed one, and which is the boy that catches cold?” the young tutor asked himself, when the audience was over. He concluded, finally, that the latter case must be Smith’s, since he was brought by his mother—a generalisation which perhaps was justifiable. Poor Mr Grinder! he knew all the marks of his china as well as these tiresome people knew, so to speak, the manufacturer’s marks on their boys; but how much more interesting was one than the other! He took a walk up to Windsor to an old furniture shop, where bargains of precious ware werenow and then to be had, with a delicious sense of relief when it was too late to expect more pupils—and fell upon a bit of real Nankin there which refreshed his very soul.
Meanwhile the old lord and his boy strayed about the narrow streets. They went to the bookseller’s and bought pictures for Val’s room—which, I need not say, were chiefly Landseers, though, granting the subject, Val was not particular as to the artist; and then they walked to the castle, the grandfather making a conscientious but painful attempt to remember who built the Round Tower, and who was responsible for St George’s Chapel. As to these points, however, Val was not at all exacting, and had no thirst for information. He liked to walk on the terrace better, where the great sunny misty plain before him made his young heart expand with a delightful sense of space and distance, but did not care for the splendid alleys of the Long Walk, which were too formal to please his ill-regulated fancy. And then they went to the river, along the green bank of the Brocas, which touched Lord Eskside’s heart with many recollections. “I have walked with your father here fifty times, I should think,” said the old lord. “He was not much of a boating man himself, but he was fond of the river. Your father had always what is called a fine mind, Val.”
“What is a fine mind?” said the boy, who did not know very much about his father, or care a great deal, if the truth must be told.
“It’s rather hard to define,” said the old lord, “when you don’t possess the article; and you must not learn to generalise too much, my boy; it’s a dangerous custom. It is, so far as I’ve been able to remark, an intellect which pays more attention to the small things than the great in this life; it cares for what it calls the details, and lets the bigger matters shift for themselves.”
“Was my father—very good at anything?” asked Val, whom this definition interested but moderately. He had some difficulty in shaping this question; for indeed, having just heard that his father was not a boating man, his curiosity was partially satisfied before expressed.
“Your father has very good abilities,” said Lord Eskside—“very good abilities. I wish he would put them to more use. I’ve been told he was an elegant scholar, Val.”
“What is an elegant scholar, grandpa?”
The old lord laughed. “Not me nor you,” he said; “and I doubt if either you or me are the stuff to make one of; but your father was. I’ll show you an old school-list at home with his name in it. I’ve heard his Latin verses were something very fine indeed; Val, Latin verses are grand things. Poetry in English is a thriftless sort of occupation; but a dead language makes all the difference. If you ever can make Latin verses like your father, you’ll be a great man, Val.”
Val never knew whether his grandfather was laughing at him when he adopted this tone. “Is my father a great man?” he asked, with a serious face. “I should like to know a little more about him. I have only seen him once. Once is not much for a fellow to have seen his father; and I was so small then, and never thought of anything.”
“Most of us are just as well without thinking,” said Lord Eskside, with a suppressed sigh, “except about your work, my boy. You may be sure you will want all your thoughts for your work.”
“That is just how you always turn me off,” said Val. “I ask you about my father, grandpa, and you tell me about my work. I will do my work,” said the boy, with a dogged air, which he sometimes put on; “but why does my father never come home?—why doesn’t he care for me? All these fellows there are with their fathers. I like you a great deal better—butwhydoesn’t he come?”
“Because he likes his own way,” said the old lord, “better than he likes you or me—better than he likes his own country or our homely life. Observe, my boy, this is nothing for you to judge, or make your remarks upon,” he added, bending his brows at Val, who was not used to be looked on frowningly. “Your father is no boy like you, but a man, and able to judge for himself. His profession takes him abroad. He will be an ambassador one of these days, I suppose, and represent his sovereign—which is more honour than often falls to the lot of a poor Scots lord.”
Val did not make any reply, and the pair continued their walk along the river-side. His father a representative of his sovereign; his mother——. For the last time before he was engulfed by the practical schoolboy life which was more congenial to his years, Val felt the whirl of wonder, the strange chaos of his double life which was made up of such different elements, and lay as it were between twoworlds. His panic was gone, having worn itself out, and no real interest in his unknown mother kept her image before him; but he felt the jar in him of these two existences, so strangely, widely separated. His head felt giddy, as if the world were turning round with him. But every moment the river was becoming more gay and bright, and the moving panorama before him after a while overcame his individual reflections. The “fellows” newly arrived were already crowding down to the river—little new boys standing about with their hands in their pockets looking wistfully on; but the oldhabituésof the Thames asserted their superiority, and got afloat in swarms—some in the strange outriggers which Val had heard of, but had never seen before. Lord Eskside was as eager about the sight as if it had been he who was the new boy. “Look how light they are, Val!” he cried—“how cleverly they manage them! If those long oars get out of balance the thing upsets. Look at that small creature there no bigger than yourself——”
“Bigger! he’s not up to my elbow,” cried Val, indignant.
“Well, smaller than yourself: but you could not do that, you lout, to save your life.”
Val’s face grew crimson. “Come back next week, grandpa,” he said, “and see if I can’t; or come along, I’ll try now; it would only be a ducking—and what do I care for a ducking? I’ll try this very day.”
“Come back, come back, my boy; they won’t let you try to-day,” cried the old lord, laughing at the boy’s impetuosity. Val had turned back, and was rushing down to the “rafts” where boats were to be had; and it was all that his grandfather could do to restrain him. “You are not, Val Ross, your own master—not to speak of other people’s—here,” he said, holding the boy by the arm, “but a member of a corporation, and you must obey the laws of it. They’ll not give you a boat, or if they do, it will be because they think you don’t belong to Eton; and if you were to go out without fulfilling all the regulations, they’d punish you, Val.”
“Punish me!” cried Val, with nostrils dilating, and a wild fire in his eyes.
“Ay, punishyou, though you are such a great man. This will never do,” said Lord Eskside; “do you mean to struggle with me, sir, in the sight of all these lads? Master yourself! and that at once.”
The boy came to himself with a gasp, as if he had been drowning. I don’t think he had ever in his life been spoken to in so severe a voice. He ceased to resist, and the old lord gave up his hold on his arm, and continued in a lower tone—
“You must learn this lesson, my boy, at once. You are nobody here, and you must master yourself. Do it of your own will, and you show the makings of a man. Do it because you are compelled and what are you but a slave? The thing is in your own hands, Val,” said Lord Eskside, softened, and putting off his peremptory tone; “you have almost made an exhibition, before all these strange lads, of yourself—and me.”
Val did not say anything; his breast was swelling high, his heart throbbing with the effort he had made; and he was not pleased that he had been obliged to make the effort, nor did he feel that satisfaction in having done his duty which is said always to attend that somewhat difficult operation. He walked along the river-side panting and drawing his breath hard, as if he really had tried the experiment of a ducking. How he longed to do this thing which he had been assured he must not do! He would have liked to jump into the river and swim out to one of the long slim boats, poised like big dragon-flies on the water, and eject its rower, and take the vacant place; in which case, no doubt, Val would have come to signal grief, as he would have deserved—for he had never been in an outrigger in his life.
Then the pair went and dined at the hotel, where Val recovered his spirits; and then the old lord took the boy to his little room, where they found his things unpacked, and his pictures standing in a little heap against the wall, and his room almost filled up with the bed which had been folded up out of the way when they were there before. It was not like the luxurious large airy room which had been Val’s at home, any more than the house with its long passages, with regiments of doors on either side, was like the old-fashioned arrangements of Rosscraig. And here at last the parting so often rehearsed had to be done in earnest. “Master yourself,” said the old lord, with a voice which was neither so cheery nor so firm as he meant it to be; “and God bless you, Val!” And then he was gone, walking up the dark street with a heavy heart in his oldbosom, and his eyebrows working furiously. And Val sat down upon his bed and looked round him wonderingly, and for the first time realised that he was left alone.
However, it is needless to enter upon the details of so very common a scene. Perhaps the boy shed a few tears silently when the maid took away his candle, and he felt that no soft step, subdued lest he should be sleeping, no rustling silken garments, could come into his room that night. In the morning he faced his new existence vigorously, and hung his pictures, and began his work without any weakness of recollection. The old people felt it a great deal more, and a great deal longer; but Val could not have been known from the most accustomed and habitual schoolboy, and, stranger still, scarcely knew himself for anything else, after that night. At the end of the week he felt as if he had lived there all his life—as if he had been there before in some previous kind of existence. I suppose this readiness of a child to adapt itself to new habits, and make them its own, does but increase the strange unreality of life itself to the half-conscious mind—life which changes in a moment, so that one week seems like years, and years, being past, look as if they had never been.
At the end of the week Val wrote home; and in his first letter there was this paragraph, written in his clearest hand:—
“Tell grandpapa I rowed up to Surly Hall, a long way above where we walked, above locks,in an outrigger, this morning. I rowed another fellow and licked him. I passed swimming on Thursday, andoutriggers is veryeasy. You have nothing to do but keep steady, and it flies like a bird.”
“What is an outrigger?” said Lady Eskside, as she gave her husband the letter. The old lord gave an internal shiver, and thanked heaven that she did not remember; and Val did not think it necessary to inform his anxious grand-parents how often he had swamped his little craft on the Friday, before he succeeded in making that triumphal progress to Surly on Saturday morning. “He’s a determined rascal, that boy of yours, my lady,” was all the answer Lord Eskside made.
I would not assert, however, that Val found all his difficulties at school to be surmounted so easily as the outrigger. He had to go through the average number of accidents, and perils, and overcome various wild stirrings of nature withinhim, before he learned, as a true Etonian does, to take pride in the penalties and hardships as well as the pleasures which distinguish his school. Val’s natural pride in his own person as Val Ross had to be met and routed by his artificial and conventional pride as a schoolboy, before, for instance, he could reconcile himself to be some one’s fag, a fate which overtook him instantly. Little Lord Hightowers, the Duke’s son, who was in the same house, took to it naturally, without any stirring of repugnance, and made his master’s toast with conscientious zest, and went his master’s errands, and accepted his share of the dainties he had fetched when that potentate was in a liberal mood, without any struggle whatever with himself. But Val had a struggle, the wild blood in his veins being unused to obedience and finding subjection hard. I am happy to say, however, that his powers were equal to the necessary sacrifice, and that he never made an exhibition of himself as he had been on the eve of doing on the day of his arrival. Time passed on, and Val grew and “mastered himself;” but sometimes did not master himself, and got into disgrace, and scrambled out again, and had no fair-weather voyage, but all a schoolboy’s troubles at their hardest. Hightowers had a very much easier time of it; he was neither proud nor ambitious, but was just as happy at the foot of his division as anywhere else, quite as happy looking on at a game as playing, and took the floggings which overtook him periodically with the most heavenly calm; whereas the mere threat of one wrought Val to the point of desperation. Hightowers was better off than Val by right of his temperament and calmer blood. He took everything much more lightly, and used to discourse to his companion on the vanity of “making a fuss” with ponderous and precocious wisdom. “Why don’t you take it easy, as I do?” said Hightowers; “what’s the good of verses, for instance? A fellow never does verses after he leaves school. If you get complained of, it don’t hurt you; and even a swishing, though it stings, it’s only for a minute—I don’t mind. There’s a house match on to-day between Guerre’s and Whiting’s. Put that rubbish away and come along.”
Val was on the point of going, when a recollection of what he had heard of his father’s eminence in the way of verse-making returned to his mind; whereupon he sat down again doggedly to grind the smooth English into rugged schoolboy Latin. He clenched his teeth at the thought of being inferiorto his father—not from love—for how should he love the man who had not spent a kind word on him, or seen him, but once in his life?—but from a violent instinct of opposition which had sprung up in his soul, he could not tell why. He would not be beaten by his father; and this visionary jealousy overcame all Hightowers’ philosophisings, and even the attractions of the match between Whiting’s and Guerre’s.
Thus the boy grew, not perhaps a very amiable boy, though with a side to his character which was as sweet and soft as the other was rugged; and with his grandfather’s lesson well learned and bearing fruit. People who do right by a struggle are not so pleasant as those who do right because it comes natural to them—or even sometimes as those who do wrong in an easy and natural way without any effort; and when Val went home he would carry occasional traces of the conflict, and sometimes showed a chaotic condition of mind which disturbed the peace of his elders almost as much as it disturbed his own; and his career at school was of a mixed character, sometimes almost brilliant, sometimes very doubtful. What wild impulses would rise in him, longings for he knew not what, desires almost uncontrollable to rush away out of the routine in which his life was spent. Sometimes a fierce inclination to go to sea seized upon him; sometimes he would be suddenly tempted by the sight of the soldiers, of whom he saw so many, and for the moment the fancy of enlisting and going off unknown to India, China, or the end of the world, in search of adventures—a veritable knight-errant—moved the boy. But only himself knew how sudden and fierce were these temptations. He did not confide them to any one. He could not tell where they came from, not being learned enough or clever enough to refer them to his mother’s vagrant blood, which stirred and rose in spring-tides and periodical overflowings with the rising of his youth. But his practical schoolboy life had this excellent effect, that it withdrew him from everything visionary, giving him only practical difficulties and temptations to struggle against. He forgot at Eton all about the other strange and jarring element in his existence which had perplexed him in his childhood. And, indeed, the boy had no leisure, even had he been disposed, to brood over his parentage, or ask himself why his father and mother were unlike thosepatersandmatersof whom his companions talked. It was so; and what more could be said? He accepted thefact without further questioning, and thought no more about it. He had enough to do with his schoolboy occupations, and with that high art in which he was being trained by all the influences round him—the art of mastering himself.
Valhad grown to be sixteen, tall and strong, towering far above the old lord, and even above his father, who had made another visit to Eskside, and had seen his son, and regarded him with more approval than he did when Val was seven years old. The older he grew, however, the less the boy resembled Richard, whose features, settling into middle age, no longer even resembled themselves—a thing which few people took into consideration. Many persons in the county expressed their surprise, indeed, on seeing them together, that they could ever have supposed Valentine to be like his father—without in the least perceiving that the Honourable Richard Ross, who was now Secretary of Legation in Florence, and had every chance of rising to the post of Ambassador the very next time that a wave of promotion came, was almost more unlike young Dick Ross, Lady Eskside’s fair-haired boy. But Richard himself was very civil to his son, and inquired after his studies, and recounted his own Eton experiences, and volunteered advice about Oxford in a way which gratified all the family. The intercourse between the father and son was perfectly polite and civil, though, on Val’s side at least, there was little warm feeling in it; but both took from this meeting a sentiment of satisfaction, not to say something like pride in each other. Valentine on his side perceived his father’s easy superiority in culture and knowledge of the world to the rural magnates who formed society at Eskside, with a sense of increased consequence which is always agreeable; while Richard looked upon the handsome bold boy, the soft oval of whose boyish face was yet unmarred by any manly growth on lip or cheek, with a curious mingled feeling of pride in this being who belonged to himself, and repugnance to the creature who recalled so stronglyanother image most unlike his own. Valentine possessed in a high degree that air of distinction which does not always accompany, as it ought, the highest birth. Beside him Lord Hightowers was as a ploughman, clumsy-footed, heavy-mannered, the very embodiment of the common in opposition to the refined. How did this come about? “Val is very like the picture of your grandfather—the Raeburn, as you call it; though it would be more respectful to say the tenth lord,” Lady Eskside said to her son, with a slight faltering. “To be a Raeburn is some distinction, but the tenth lord was nobody in particular,” said thedilettante, ignoring the subject of the likeness. For, indeed, as he developed, Valentine was the handsomest Ross that had been seen on Eskside for generations, though the dark curls pushed off his bold forehead, and his great liquid eyes full of light, and his form, which was all spring and grace and elasticity, represented another race altogether than the lords of Eskside.
This was his age and this his appearance in the summer after his sixteenth birthday, when there happened to Val an encounter which affected all his future life, little as he thought of any such result. It was the middle of June, the height of the “summer half,” that period of perfect blessedness to young Eton, a delicious evening “after six,” when all the nine hundred boys that form the community were out and about in full enjoyment of their most perfect moment of leisure. The sun was setting up the river in purple and crimson, building a broad pathway as of molten gold, a celestial bridge up to the summer heavens, over the gleaming water; the banks were gorgeous with summer flowers, thickets of the gay willow-herb, and yellow toad-flax, and great plumy feathers of the meadow-queen glowing in the evening light—the soft green of scattered willow-trees drooping above—and long beds of the tenderest blue forget-me-not dipping in and out of the stream. As if these did not supply colour enough, the whole breadth of the river was aglow with reflected tints from the sky, soft yellow, crimson, orange—great rosy clouds deepening into purple, and a soft vague vault of blue above with specks of tinted cloud, like scattered roses. The river was alive with boats. A little farther up, at Athens, the bathing-place, it was alive with something else—with shoals of boys bathing, plunging in and out, and peopling the shining stream withbobbing heads and white shoulders, as plentiful as fishes and as much at their ease in the element, but using their human privilege of laughter to turn the spot into a Babel of noisy sweetness—noise which the charmed summer air took all roughness out of, and softened into gay music, tumultuous yet magical, in full accord with all the soft breathings of the waning day.
Val in his outrigger was lower down the stream, not much above the spot where the railway bridge does all that modern ugliness can to reduce nature to its own level. The boy was not thinking much about the beauty of the scene, yet he felt it, having a mind curiously open to all outdoor influences; and this it was which had arrested his course in mid stream, just where he could see the glorious mass of the castle rising from the green foliage of the slopes, and the clustered red roofs of the homely town at its feet. The sunset threw its fullest radiance upon this wonderful termination of the landscape, which seemed, from where Val contemplated it, to stand across the stream, the light whitening here and there a window, and a golden haze of warmth and mellow distance enveloping the grey walls, the pinnacles of St George’s, the picturesque broken outline of the Curfew tower. The animated foreground was full of boats—dragon-fly outriggers like his own, poising their long outstretched wings over the water—“tubs” full of laughing boys—and through the midst of all, the glorious vision of the Eight, with a well-known stalwart figure, as big as the boat in which he stood, steering the slim craft as it flew, and shouting stentorian correction and reproof to No. 4 and No. 7—for was not Henley in prospect, with all its chances of loss or triumph? Val withdrew towards the bank with a few strokes of his long oars, to get out of the way of that leviathan. As he stayed his boat again, with the sweetness of the evening, the light, the colour, the gay medley of sound floating in happy confusion into his mind—a gig, stumbling down stream in the hands of three or four laughing urchins, totally indifferent to the chances of a ducking, came suddenly foul of Val’s boat, tossing his oar out of his hand, and upsetting him from his precarious vessel in a moment. Let not the gentle reader be dismayed; there was neither fright nor rarity in the accident, nor the slightest occasion for the blue-coated waterman, with the Eton lilies on his silver buttons, who stood in apunt at some distance with uplifted pole, relieved against the sunset sky, to hasten to the rescue. “Awfully sorry!” said all the small boys, rather envying Val the delight of being swamped; they were fresh and wet themselves from bathing, and would have liked nothing better than to swamp too. As for Valentine, he swam to the bank, which was close by, pulling his slim bark after him. He had as little clothing upon his handsome person as decency permitted—a white jersey, thin as a spider’s web, and trousers turned up almost to the knee. So he was neither harmed nor alarmed, and might have walked back to the “rafts” and left his boat to be carried down by the stream without concerning himself about it, or seeking help to right it, had not his Fate commanded otherwise. But he had arrived at one of those moments in life, when Fate, potent and visible, except to the actors in the drama, does intervene.
It was, as I have said, the middle of June. Ascot races were lately over, and the roads, as careful housekeepers in lonely places knew but too well, were encumbered with “tramps,” making their way from that great central event of their year to the lesser incidents of country fairs and provincial races. Many of these wandering parties were about,—so many, that they had ceased to be much remarked by quiet wayfarers. And, indeed, the poor tramps were quiet enough;—weatherbeaten groups, women with children in their weary arms, men with fur caps and knotted handkerchiefs, and those specimens of the doggish race which have vagrant written in every hair of their shabby coats, as it is inscribed in the hard brown lines, drawn tight by exposure to the weather, of their masters’ faces. Two of these tramps were seated on a log of wood, resting, just opposite the spot where Valentine’s boat had swamped. These were a woman and a boy, more decent than the majority of their kind, though noway separated from it in appearance. The woman looked over forty, but was not so old. She was seated, with her hands crossed listlessly in her lap, holding a little bundle in a coloured handkerchief; her dress was a dark cotton gown and a shawl, with an old-fashioned bonnet which came quite round the face, enclosing it like a frame—a fashion which no longer finds favour among women. This dark circle round her face identified it, and called the passenger’s attention; and a more remarkable face has seldom caught and arrested the careless eye. I saw her aboutthis same time, seated on a bank in a leafy country road, with the light interlacing of shadow and sunshine over her; and as it was her aspect and looks which moved me to collect all these particulars, and trace out her history, and that of her children, I can speak still more distinctly of how she looked to me, than of her first appearance to Val. Complexion she had none. Her skin was burnt a kind of brick-dust colour, red-brown, and it was roughened by the exposure of years; her black hair was smoothed away on her forehead leaving only a little rim visible between the brow and the bonnet. Her features were beautiful, but only struck the spectator when he had looked at her more than once, the roughness of her aspect and colouring seeming to throw a veil upon their beauty of form. But it was her eyes and expression which were most remarkable, and fascinated the wondering glance. She looked like Silence personified—her lips shut close, as if they could not open, and an air of strange abstraction from the immediate scene enveloping and removing her from its common occurrences. The circles round her eyes were wide and large, and out of those worn sockets looked two great wistful eyes, always looking, never seeing anything—eyes unfathomable, which were full of solemn expression, yet told you nothing, except that there was much to tell. In her way the beauty of the night had entered into her inarticulate soul; but I do not think she was aware of any of the details that made it up—and she had not even noticed the incident of the swamping when Valentine’s light well-strung figure scrambled up the bank. “Here, you!” cried Val to the boy by her side, with the ready ease of one accustomed to command to one accustomed to obey—“lend us a hand, will you, to empty the boat?”
The boy, who had been seated by the woman’s side, rose at the call with ready reply to the demand upon him. He had the corresponding habit to Valentine’s—the habit of hearing when he was called to, of doing what he was told to do. He had done everything to which a vagrant lad is bred—held horses, ran errands, executed a hundred odd jobs; and it did not occur to him to withhold the help by which sixpences were earned and bread gained, from any one who demanded it. “Here you are, sir,” he answered, cheerily. He was about the same age as Valentine, but not so tall nor so finely made—a fair-haired, sunny-faced lad,looking clean and ruddy, despite of dust and weariness, and the rough tramp costume, blue-spotted handkerchief, and nondescript jacket which he wore. He and his mother had been seated there together for some time past, not speaking to each other—for vagrants generally are a silent race. She did not stir even now, when he rose from her side. To have him called casually by whomsoever wanted help, and to see him obey, was habitual to her also. Val and the young tramp worked together in silence at the righting of the boat: they pulled it up on the bank, and turned it over, and set it afloat again. Then, however, Val changed his first intention. “I say,” he began half meditatively, “have you time to take her down to Goodman’s? no, you mustn’t get in, you can tow her down; and if you’ll come to me to-morrow morning I’ll pay you. I’m Boss, at Grinder’s. Do you know Grinder’s? well, anybody will tell you. You can come after ten to-morrow; and tell old Goodman it’s Ross’s boat.”
“Yes, sir, I’ll see to it,” said the boy blithely, touching his cap. He looked up with his fair frank face to Val’s and the two lads “took a liking” to each other on the spot. Val had made a step or two down the bank, then came back. “What are you?” he said; “do you live here? I never saw you on the river before.”
“Mother and I are going to stop the night,” said the lad; “we’re last from Ascot; I ain’t got a trade, but just does odd jobs. No, I never was on the river before.”
Upon which a sudden warmth of patronage and lordly benevolence came to Valentine’s bosom. “If you stay here I’ll give you what odd jobs I can. What’s your name? I like the looks of you,” said lordly Val.
“Dick Brown, sir; thank you, sir,” said the lad, with grateful kindliness. He had no pride to be wounded by this brusque address, but took it in perfectly good part, and was gratified by the good impression he had made. He had tied a piece of string, which he brought from his own pocket, to the sharp prow of the boat, and was preparing to tow it down stream. But he stopped as Val stopped, still dripping, his wet shirt fitting to his fine well-developed form like a glove. The other had none of Val’s physical advantages of education, any more than the mental. He was as ignorant of how to hold himself as how to make Latin verses; and had he got into the outrigger, as he at first proposed, wouldhave been by this time at the bottom of the river. He admired his handsome young patron with an innocent open-hearted pleasure in the sight of him, feeling him a hundred miles removed from and above himself.
“Very well,” said Val; “you come to me to-morrow at Grinder’s. If you stay we’ll find you plenty to do.”
Then he turned, bethinking himself of his wet clothes, which began to get chilly, and, with an amicable wave of his hand, stepped out along the road; but even then he paused again, and turned back to call out, “Remember Ross, at Grinder’s,” and with another nod disappeared. The woman behind had not been attending to the colloquy. She roused up suddenly at these last words, and looked after the boy, with her eyes lighting up strangely. “What did he say?” she asked, in a half whisper, rising quickly and coming to her son’s side; “what was that name he said?”
“His own name, mother,” said the smiling lad. “I am to go to him at ten to-morrow. He’s one of the college gentlemen. He says he likes the looks of me, and I shouldn’t wonder if he’d help me to a job.”
“What was his name?” repeated the woman, grasping her son’s arm impatiently. He took it with perfect calm, being accustomed to her moods.
“Come along, mother, I’ve to take the boat down to the raft; Ross, at Grinder’s. I wonder where’s Grinder’s? He’s Ross, I suppose?”
The woman stood with her hand on his arm, looking after the other figure which withdrew into the distance through the soft air, still tinted with all the rosy lights of sunset. The young athlete, all dripping in his scanty clothing, was joined by an admiring train as he went on; he was popular and well known, and his loyal followers worshipped him as much in this momentary eclipse as if he had done something famous. The tramp-woman was roused out of all the abstraction with which she had sat, oblivious of Valentine’s closer presence, gazing vaguely at the sky and the river. Her eyes followed him with a hungry eagerness, devouring the space between; a slight nervous trembling ran through her frame.
“I wish I had seen him nigh at hand,” she said, with a sigh; “it’s my luck, always my luck.”
“Come along and you’ll see him still if you want to,” said the lad, “I know what them swells do. They go downto the rafts and takes off their wet things, and puts on their coats and chimney-pots. He’s a good un to look at, I can tell you; but you never see nothing that’s under your nose, mother. You get curious-like when anything’s past.”
“Don’t stand talking,” said the woman with a tremulous impatience, “but come on.”
Dick obeyed promptly; but it is not so easy to walk quickly, towing a troublesome outrigger with its projecting rowlocks, when there is no one in it to guide its course along the inequalities of the bank. The woman bore this delay with nervous self-restraint as long as she could, then telling him she would wait for him, pursued her way rapidly alone to the rafts, which were crowded by boys arriving and departing in every possible stage of undress. She waited wistfully at the gate, not venturing to enter the railed-off enclosure, which was sacred to the boats and “the gentlemen;” and when Val issued forth in correct Eton dress, she did not recognise him. She stood there in tremulous and passionate agitation—suppressed, it is true, but intense—gazing wistfully at the crowds of moving figures, all bearing that resemblance to each other which boys undergoing the same training and wearing the same dress so often do. She could not identify any one, and she was growing sick and faint with weariness, and with the beating of her heart.
“Here I am, mother; did you see him?” said Dick, appearing at last, tired but pleased, with his awkward charge.
“How was I to know him?” she asked, sharply; “I did not see his face. As to who he is, Dick, it’s a name I once knew. I wish I had seen him; but it’s my luck, always my luck.”
“I’ll ask all about him, mother,” said the cheery boy; but while he was gone to deposit the boat, some other members of their wandering class joined the woman, and distracted, or did their best to distract, her attention. With them she made a long round by the bridge to the Windsor side—(there was a ferry, but pennies are pennies, and were not to be lightly spent on personal ease)—and then make her way to a lodging she knew in the vagrant quarter—the Rag Fair, of the little royal borough. Whatever might be the thoughts that were passing in her mind, or whatever the anxieties within her hidden heart, she had to give her attention to the practical side of her rough life, and stopped onher way to buy some scraps of meat and some bread for her own and her son’s meal. There was a common fire in the lower room of the lodging-house, at which the tramp-lodgers were allowed to cook their supper. This woman did so in her turn, like the rest; and to Dick the scraps which his mother had cooked, as well as she knew how, made a luxurious meal, taken on a corner of the rough table, with all the sounds and all the smells of Coffin Lane coming in at the open door. There was a Babel of sounds going on within in addition, each group talking according to its pleasure, and the outdoor shouting, jesting, quarrelling, coming in as chorus. Dick had not found out very much about his young patron. He told his mother that he had summut to do with a lord, but was not sure what. “But why can’t we stay here a bit?” said Dick. “There ain’t nothing going on in the country but poor things, where we don’t pick up enough to keep body and soul together; you’ll see I’ll make something handsome on the river, with all the odd jobs there is; and if this here young gentleman is as good as his word——”
“Did he look as if he would be as good as his word?”
“Lord bless us, how can I tell?” said Dick. “I don’t read faces, nor fortunes neither, like you. He said he liked the looks of me; and so did I,” the lad added, with a laugh. “I hope it’ll do him a deal of good. I like the looks of him too.”
And Dick went to bed in the room which he shared (under Government regulation and with great regard to the cubic feet of air—such air as is to be had in Coffin Lane) with two other rough fellows not so guiltless in their vagrancy as himself—with a cheery heart, thinking that here, perhaps, he had found foundation enough to build a life upon—a beginning to his career, if he had known such an imposing word. He was a good boy, though his previous existence had been spent among the roughest elements of society. He knelt down boldly at his bedside, and said the short half-childish prayer which he had been taught as a child, without caring in the least for his companions’ jeers. Perhaps even it was more a charm against evil than a prayer; but, such as it was, the boy held by it bravely. He was exhilarated somehow, and full of hope, he could not have told why. Something good seemed about to happen to him. I do not know what he expected Valentine to do for him, or if he expectedanything definite; but he was somehow inspired and elated, he could not tell why.
His mother, for her part, sat down upon her bed and pondered, her abstract eyes fixing upon the bare whitewashed walls as solemn a gaze as that which she had fixed on the distant glow of the sunset across the river. They were not eyes which could see anything near at hand, but were always far off, watching something visionary, more true than the reality before her. She, too, had companions in her room, where there was nothing beyond the supply of bare necessities—a bed to sleep on, nothing more. She had not Dick’s happy temperament, though she was as indifferent as he was to the base surroundings of that poor and low level of life to which they were accustomed; but somehow, in her mind too, various new thoughts, or rather old thoughts, which were new by reason of long disuse, were surging up whether she would or not. Perhaps it was the sound of the name which she had not heard for years. Ross. It was not a very uncommon name; but yet, when this poor creature began to think who the boy whom she had seen might be—and to wonder with quick-beating pulses whether it was so—these thoughts were enough to fill her heart with such wild throbs and bursts of feeling as had not stirred it for many years.
Dick Browngot up very early next morning, with the same sense of exhilaration and light-heartedness which had moved him on the previous night. To be sure he had no particular reason for it, but what of that? People are seldom so truly happy as when they are happy without any cause. He was early in his habits, and his heart was too gay to be anything but restless. He got up though it was not much past five o’clock, and took his turn at the pump in the yard, which formed the entire toilet arrangements of the tramps’ lodging-house, and then strolled down with his hands in his pockets and his ruddy countenance shining fresh from these ablutions to where the river shone blue in the morning sunshine at thefoot of Coffin Lane. Dick had passed through Windsor more than once in the course of his checkered existence. He had been here with his tribe—those curious unenjoying slaves of pleasure who are to be found wherever there is merrymaking, little as their share may be in the mirth—on the 4th of June, the greatfêteday of Eton, and on the occasion of reviews in the great Park, and royal visits; so the place was moderately familiar to him, as so many places were all over the country. He strolled along the raised path by the water-side, with a friendly feeling for the still river, sparkling in the still sunshine, without boat or voice to break its quiet, which he thought to himself had “brought him luck,” a new friend, and perhaps a long succession of odd jobs. Dick and his mother did very fairly on the whole in their wandering life. The shillings and sixpences which they picked up in one way or another kept them going, and it was very rare when they felt want. But the boy’s mind was different from his fate; he was no adventurer—and though habit had made the road and his nomadic outdoor life familiar to him, yet he had never taken to them quite kindly. The thing of all others that filled him with envy was one of those little tidy houses or pretty cottages which abound in every English village, or even on the skirts of a small town, with a little flower-garden full of flowers, and pictures on the walls inside. The lad had said to himself times without number, that there indeed was something to make life sweet—a settled home, a certain place where he should rest every night and wake every morning. There was no way in his power by which he could attain to such a glorious conclusion; but he thus secured what is the next best thing to success in this world, a distinct conception of what he wanted, an ideal which was possible and might be carried out.
Dick sat down upon the bank, swinging his feet over the mass of gravel which the workmen, beginning their morning work, were fishing up out of the river, and contemplated the scene before him, which, but for them, would have been noiseless as midnight. The irregular wooden buildings which flanked the rafts opposite looked picturesque in the morning light, and the soft water rippled up to the edge of the planks, reflecting everything,—pointed roof and lattice window, and the wonderful assembly of boats. It was not hot so early in the morning; and even had it been hot, thevery sight of that placid river, sweeping in subdued silvery tints, cooled down from all the pictorial warmth and purple glory of the evening, must have cooled and refreshed the landscape. The clump of elm-trees on the Brocas extended all their twinkling leaflets to the light; lower down, a line of white houses, with knots of shrubs and stunted trees before each attracted Dick’s attention. Already lines of white clothes put up to dry betrayed at once the occupation and the industry of the inhabitants. If only his mother was of that profession, or could adopt it, Dick thought to himself,—how sweet it would be to live there, with the river at hand and the green meadow-grass between—to live there for ever and ever, instead of wandering and tramping about the dusty roads!
There was no dust anywhere on that clear fresh morning. The boy made no comment to himself upon the still beauty of the scene. He knew nothing of the charm of reflection and shadow, the soft tones of the morning brightness, the cool green of the grass; he could not have told why they were beautiful, but he felt it somehow, and all the sweetness of the early calm. The great cart-horse standing meditative on the water’s edge, with its head and limbs relieved against the light sky; the rustling of the gravel as it was shovelled up, all wet and shining upon the bank; the sound of the workmen’s operations in the heavy boat from which they were working,—gave a welcome sense of “company” and fellowship to the friendly boy; and for the rest, his soul was bathed in the sweetness of the morning. After a while he went higher up the stream and bathed more than his soul—his body too, which was much the better for the bath; and then came back again along the Brocas, having crossed in the punt by which some early workmen went to their occupation, pondering many things in his mind. If a fellow could get settled work now here—a fellow who was not so fortunate as to have a mother who could take in washing! Dick extended his arms as he walked, and stretched himself, and felt able for a man’s work, though he was only sixteen—hard work, not light—a good long day, from six in the morning till six at night; what did he care how hard the work was, so long as he was off the road, and had some little nook or corner of his own—he did not even mind how tiny—to creep into, and identify as his, absolutely his, and not another’s? The cottages facing to the Brocas were too fine and too grand for his aspirations. Short of the ambitious way of taking inwashing, he saw no royal road to such comfort and splendour; but homelier places no doubt might be had. What schemes were buzzing in his young head as he walked back towards Coffin Lane! He had brought out a hunch of bread with him, which his mother had put aside last night, and which served for breakfast, and satisfied him fully. He wanted no delicacies of a spread table, and dreams of hot coffee did not enter his mind. On winter mornings, doubtless, it was tempting when it was to be had in the street, and pennies were forthcoming; but it would have been sheer extravagance on such a day. The bread was quite enough for all Dick’s need; but his mind was busy with projects ambitious and fanciful. He went back to the lodging-house to find his mother taking the cup of weak tea without milk which was her breakfast; and, as it was still too early to go to his appointment with Val, begged her to come out with him that he might talk to her; there was no accommodation for private talk in the tramps’ lodging-house, although most of the inmates by this time were gone upon their vagrant course. Dick took his mother out by the river-side again, and led her to a grassy bank above the gravel-heap and the workmen, where the white houses on the Brocas, and the waving lines of clean linen put out to dry, were full in sight. He began the conversation cunningly with this practical illustration of his discourse before his eyes.
“Mother,” said Dick, “did you never think as you’d like to try staying still in one place and getting a little bit of a home?”
“No, Dick,” said the woman, hastily; “don’t ask me—I couldn’t do it. It would kill me if I were made to try.”
“No one ain’t agoing to make you,” said Dick, soothingly; “but look here, mother—now tell me, didn’t you ever try?”
“Oh yes, I’ve tried—tried hard enough—till I was nigh dead of it——”
“I can’t remember, mother.”
“It was before your time,” she said, with a sigh and uneasy movement—“before you were born.”
Dick did not put any further questions. He had never asked anything about his father. A tramp’s life has its lessons as well as a lord’s, and Dick was aware that it was not always expedient to inquire into the life, either public or private, of your predecessors. He had not the leastnotion that there had been anything particular about his father, but took it for granted that he must have been such a one as Joe or Jack, in rough coat and knotted handkerchief, a wanderer like the rest. He accepted the facts of existence as they stood without making any difficulties, and therefore he did not attempt to “worrit” his mother by further reference to the past, which evidently did “worrit” her. “Well, never mind that,” he said; “you shan’t never be forced to anything if I can help it. But if so be as I got work, and it was for my good to stay in a place—supposing it might be here?”
“Here’s different,” said his mother, dreamily.
“That’s just what I think,” cried Dick, too wise to ask why; “it’s a kind of a place where a body feels free like, where you can be gone to-morrow if you please—the forest handy and Ascot handy, and barges as will give you a lift the moment as you feel it the right thing to go. That’s just what I wanted to ask you, mother. If I got a spell of work along of that young swell as I’m going to see, or anything steady, mightn’t we try? If you felt on the go any day, you might just take the road again and no harm done; or if you felt as you could sit still and make yourself comfortable in the house——”
“I could never sit still and make myself comfortable,” she said; “I can’t be happy out of the air, Dick—I can’t breathe; and sitting still was never my way—nor you couldn’t do it neither,” she added, looking in his face.
“Oh, couldn’t I though?” said Dick, with a laugh. “Mother, you don’t know much about me. I am not one to grumble, I hope—but if you’ll believe me, the thing I’d be proudest of would be to be bound ’prentis and learn a trade.”
“Dick!”
“I thought you’d be surprised. I know I’m too old now, and I know it’s no good wishing,” said the boy. “Many and many’s the time I’ve lain awake of nights thinking of it; but I saw as it wasn’t to be done nohow, and never spoke. I’ve give up that free and full, mother, and never bothered you about what couldn’t be; so you won’t mind if I bother a bit now. If I could get a long spell of work, mother dear! There’s them men at the gravel, and there’s a deal of lads like me employed about the rafts; and down at Eton they’re wanted in every corner, for the fives-courts and the rackets,and all them things. Now supposing as this young swell has took a fancy to me, like I have to him—and supposing as I get work—let’s say supposing, for it may never come to nothing,—wouldn’t you stay with me a bit, mother, and try and make a home?”
“I’d like to see the gentleman, Dick,” said his mother, ignoring his appeal.
“The gentleman!” said the boy, a little disappointed. And then he added, cheerily—“Well, mother dear, you shall see the gentleman, partickler if you’ll stay here a bit, and I have regular work, and we get a bit of an ’ome.”
“He would never come to your home, lad—not the likes of him.”
“You think a deal of him, mother. He mightn’t come to Coffin Lane; I daresay as the gentlemen in college don’t let young swells go a-visiting there. But you take my word, you’ll see him; for he’s taken a fancy to me, I tell you. There’s the quarter afore ten chiming. I must be off now, mother; and if anything comes in the way you’ll not go against me? not when I’ve set my heart on it, like this?”
“I’ll stay—a bit—to please you, Dick,” said the woman. And the lad sprang up and hastened away with a light heart. This was so much gained. He went quickly down, walking on through the narrow High Street of Eton to the great red house in which his new friend was. Grinder’s was an institution in the place, the most important of all the Eton boarding-houses, though only a dame’s, not a master’s house. The elegant young Grinder, who was Val’s tutor, was but a younger branch of this exalted family, and had no immediate share in the grandeurs of the establishment, which was managed by a dominie or dame, a lay member of the Eton community, who taught nothing, but only superintended the meals and morals of his great houseful of boys. Such personages have no place in Eton proper—the Eton of the Reformation period, so to speak—but they were very important in Val’s time. Young Brown went to a side door, and asked for Mr Ross with a little timidity. He was deeply conscious of the fact that he was nothing but “a cad”—not a kind of visitor whom either dame or tutor would permit “one of the gentlemen” to receive; and, indeed, I think Dick would have been sent ignominiously away but for his frank and open countenance,and the careful washing, both in the river and out of it, which he had that morning given himself. He was told to wait; and he waited, noting, with curious eyes, the work of the great house which went on under his eyes, and asking himself how he would like to be in the place of the young curly-headed footman who was flying about through the passages, up-stairs and down, on a hundred errands; or the other aproned functionary who was visible in a dark closet at a distance, cleaning knives with serious persistence, as if life depended on it. Dick decided that he would not like this mode of making his livelihood. He shrank even from the thought—I cannot tell why, for he had no sense of pride, and knew no reason why he should not have taken service in Grinder’s, where the servants, as well as the other inmates, lived on the fat of the land, and wanted for nothing; but somehow his fancy was not attracted by such a prospect. He watched the cleaner of knives, and the curly-headed footman in his livery, with interest; but not as he watched the lads on the river, whose life was spent in launching boats and withdrawing them from the water in continual succession. He had no pride; and the livery and the living were infinitely more comfortable than anything he had ever known. “His mind did not go with it,” he said to himself; and that was all it was necessary to say.
While he was thus meditating, Valentine Boss, in correct Eton costume—black coat, high hat, and white necktie—fresh from his tutor, with books under his arm, came in, and spied him where he stood waiting. Val’s face lightened up into pleased recognition,—more readily than Dick’s did, who was slow to recognise in this solemn garb the figure which he had seen in undress dripping from the water. “Hollo, Brown!” said Val; “I am glad you have kept your time. Come up-stairs and I’ll give you what I promised you.” Dick followed his patron up-stairs, and through a long passage to Val’s room. “Come in,” said Val, rummaging in a drawer of his bureau for the half-crown with which he meant to present his assistant of last night. Dick entered timidly, withdrawing his cap from his head. The room was quite small, the bed folded up, as is usual at Eton. The bureau, or writing-desk with drawers adorned by a red-velvet shelf on the top, stood in one corner, and a set of book-shelves similarly decorated in another; a heterogeneous collection of pictures, hung as closely as possible, theaccumulation of two years, covered the wall; some little carved brackets of stained wood held little plaster figures, not badly modelled, in which an Italian image-seller drove a brisk trade among the boys. A blue-and-black coat, in bright stripes (need I add that Val—august distinction—was in the Twenty-Two), topped by a cap of utterly different but equally bright hues—the colours of the house—hung on the door; a fine piece of colour, if perhaps somewhat violent in contrast. The window was full of bright geraniums, which grew in a box outside, and garlanded with the yellow canariensis and wreaths of sweet-peas. Dick looked round upon all these treasures, his heart throbbing with admiration, and something that would have been envy had it been possible to hope or wish for anything so beautiful and delightful for himself; but as this was not possible, the boy’s heart swelled with pleasure that his young patron should possess it, which was next best.
“Wait a moment,” cried Val, finding, as he pursued his search, a note laid upon his bureau, which had been brought in in his absence; and Dick stood breathless, gazing round him, glad of the delay, which gave him time to take in every detail of this schoolboy palace into his mind. The note was about some momentous piece of business,—the domestic economy of that one of “the boats” in which Val rowed number seven, with hopes of being stroke when Jones left next Election. He bent his brows over it, and seizing paper and pen, wrote a hasty answer, for such important business cannot wait. Dick, watching his movements, felt with genuine gratification that here was another commission for him. But his patron’s next step made his countenance fall, and filled his soul with wonder. Val opened his door, and with stentorian voice shouted “Lower boy!” into the long passage. There was a momentary pause, and then steps were heard in all directions up and down, rattling over the bare boards, and about half-a-dozen young gentlemen in a lump came tumbling into the room. Val inspected them with lofty calm, and held out his note to the last comer, over the heads of the others. “Take this to Benton at Guerre’s,” he said, with admirable brevity; and immediately the messenger departed, the little crowd melted away, and the two boys were again alone.
“I say, I mustn’t keep you here,” said Val; “my dame mightn’t like it. Here’s your half-crown. Have you gotanything to do yet? I think you’re a handy fellow, and I shouldn’t mind saying a word for you if I had the chance. What kind of place do you want?”
“I don’t mind what it is,” said Dick. “I’d like a place at the rafts awful, if I was good enough; or anything, sir. I don’t mind, as long as I can make enough to keep me—and mother; that’s all I care.”
“Was that your mother?” said Val. “Do you work for her too?”
“Well, sir, you see she can make a deal in our old way. She is a great one with the cards when she likes, but she won’t never do it except when we’re hard up and she’s forced; for she says she has to tell the things she sees, and they always comes true: but what I want is to stay in one place, and get a bit of an ’ome together—and she ain’t good for gentlemen’s washing or that sort, worse luck,” said Dick, regretfully. “So you see, sir, if she stays still to please me, I’ll have to work for her, and good reason. She’s been a good mother to me, never going on the loose, nor that, like other women do. I don’t grudge my work.”
Val did not understand the curious tingling that ran through his veins. He was not consciously thinking of his own mother, but yet it was something like sympathy that penetrated his sensitive mind. “I wish I could help you,” he said, doubtfully. “I’d speak to the people at the rafts, but I don’t know if they’d mind me. I’ll tell you what, though,” he added, with sudden excitement. “I can do better than that—I’ll get Lichen to speak to them! They might not care for me—but they’ll mind what Lichen says.”
Dick received reverentially and gratefully, but without understanding the full grandeur of the idea, this splendid promise—for how should the young tramp have known, what I am sure the reader must divine, that Lichen was that Olympian demigod and king among men, the Captain of the Boats? If Lichen had asked the Queen for anything, I wonder if her Majesty would have had the courage to refuse him? but at all events nobody about the river dared to say him nay. To be spoken to by Lichen was, to an ordinary mortal, distinction enough to last him half his (Eton) days. Dick did not see the magnificence of the prospect thus opened to him, but Val knew all that was implied in it, and his countenance brightened all over. “I don’t think they can refuse Lichen anything,” he said. “Look here, Brown;meet us at the rafts after six, and I’ll tell you what is done. I wish your mother would tell me my fortune. Lots of fellows would go to her if they knew; but then the masters wouldn’t like it, and there might be a row.”
“Bless you, sir, mother wouldn’t—not for the Bank of England,” cried Dick. “She might tellyouyours, if I was to ask her. Thank you kindly, sir; I’ll be there as sure as life. It’s what I should like most.”
“If Lichen speaks for you, you’ll get it,” said Val; “and I know Harry wants boys. You’re a good boy, ain’t you?” he added, looking at him closely—“you look it. And mind, if we recommend you, and you’re found out to be rowdy or bad after, and disgrace us, Lichen will give you such a licking! Or for that matter, I’ll do it myself.”
“I’m not afraid,” said Dick. “I ain’t rowdy; and if I get a fixed place and a chance of making a home, you just try me, and see if I’ll lose my work for the sake of pleasure. I ain’t that sort.”
“I don’t believe you are,” said Val; “only it’s right I should warn you; for Lichen ain’t a fellow to stand any nonsense, and no more am I. Do you think that’s pretty? I’m doing it, but I haven’t the time.”
This was said in respect to a piece of wood-carving, which Valentine had begun in the beginning of the year, and which lay there, like many another enterprise commenced, gathering dust, but approaching no nearer to completion. Dick surveyed it with glowing eyes.
“I saw some like it in a shop as I came down. Oh, how I should like to try! I’ve cut things myself out of a bit of wood with an old knife, and sold them at the fair.”
“And you think you could do this without any lessons?” said Val, laughing; “just take and try it. I wonder what old Fullady would say? there are the saws and things. But look here, you’ll have to go, for it’s time for eleven o’clock school. Take the whole concern with you, quick, and I’ll give you five bob if you can finish it. Remember after six, at the rafts to-night.”
Thus saying, the young patron pushed hisprotégébefore him out of the room, laden with the wood-carving, and rushed off himself with a pile of books under his arm. All the boys in the house seemed flooding out, and all the boys in Eton to be pouring in different directions, one stream intersecting another, as Dick issued forth filled with delightand hope. He had not a corner to which he could take the precious bit of work he had been intrusted with—nothing but the common room of the tramps’ lodging-house. Oh for a “home,” not so grand as Val’s little palace, but anything that would afford protection and quiet—a place to decorate and pet like a child! This feeling grew tenfold stronger in Dick’s heart as he sat wistfully on the river’s bank, and looked across at the rafts, in which were sublime possibilities of work and wages. How he longed for the evening! How he counted the moments as the day glowed through its mid hours, and the sun descended the western sky, and the hour known in these regions as “after six” began to come down softly on Eton and the world!