A CLEAN PACK
Basil sat alone in the schoolroom, although it was past bedtime. Nurse, like everybody else, had apparently forgotten him, but Basil, absorbed in his own thoughts, sat on by the dying fire. There were always fires in his grandfather’s house whenever it was in the least cold, and that August it was very cold, so cold that grandfather, getting wet through out shooting, somehow got a chill, was ill only three days, and now was lying dead in the big bedroom over Basil’s head. So Basil had a good deal to think about. It was not that death was new to him—from his earliest infancy it had been impressed upon him that his father was dead—but that he could not by any stretch of fancy imagine what life would be without grandfather—grandfather who was lying with his beautiful hands crossed on his breast in that long, light-colored wooden box upstairs.
Basil resented the fact that grandfather’s coffin should be made of light wood. It seemed incongruous and impertinent, somehow, that anything used by grandfather should be otherwise than old—old and rich-colored and seemly; and the child found himself wondering whether grandfather was annoyed. There were many things in that bedroomcalculated to annoy him, Basil reflected. In the first place, when mother took him in that afternoon that he might lay the asters gathered in his own garden at his grandfather’s feet, he remarked that all the blinds were down, and grandfather would have hated that, and the windows were shut, and there was a heavy scent of hot-house flowers. “I fear he’s very uncomfortable,” whispered Basil to himself. “He’ll be glad to get to heaven out of that stuffy room.” For grandfather had loved air as much as he liked fires.
The horizon of Basil’s experience was somewhat limited. It consisted of mother and grandfather, and of “other grandfather,” who lived at Altringham in Cheshire, and was mother’s father.
Every year Basil and mother went to Altringham for six weeks, and life there was so utterly different from what it was with grandfather that Basil never ceased to puzzle over it and to wonder why mother always cried when she came away, and why “other grandfather” always said: “You moost bear with the old heathen, Sophia; he’s been generous enough as regards mooney, and, remember, you can beinthe world but not of it.”
There were aunts, too, at Altringham, who made a great fuss of Basil for about three days, and then seemed to find him greatly in the way; while “other grandfather” had a most embarrassing way of suddenly demanding: “Well, yoong mon, and how’s the ciphering?”
Basil loved his mother very dearly, but he could have wished that she took life a little less sadly. A gentle melancholy characterized her everythought, and the child felt rather than understood that her mental attitude toward her father-in-law was that of a deprecating disapproval. Grandfather felt it too, for only a week before Basil had heard him say to one of the gentlemen who were tramping the stubble with him: “We shall never understand each other, my poor little daughter and I, though we’ve lived together seven years. She’s as good as gold, and I don’t think I’m particularlydifficile, but there it is—we can never get the same focus for anything.” Basil was walking just behind with the keeper, who blushed up to the roots of his hair as he called out: “I’m here, you know, grandfather.”
Grandfather pulled up short and turned to look at Basil. Then he gave a queer little laugh. “There’s not much Manchester about the boy,” he said, and tramped on.
They all went to London from November till the end of March, and there grandfather generally dined at his club and played whist afterward, while Basil’s mother had supper with him or had friends of her own to dinner, just as she liked. Grandfather could not get on without his rubber. Even in the country, three times a week three broughams drove solemnly up the drive, and three old gentlemen descended therefrom to dine with grandfather and play whist afterwards.
In London on fine nights he walked to his club, and Basil used to watch him go from the nursery window just as he was going to bed; and at the lamp grandfather always stopped and looked up at the curly head pressed against the pane, thenhe would lift his hat with a grand sweep and walk on, while Basil hugged himself with the delighted conviction thathisgrandfather was the very handsomest old gentleman in the whole world. And sometimes grandfather would crush his hat over his eyes, while a spasm of pain crossed his clean-shaven, stately old face, and he’d whisper to himself: “My God! how like he is to my poor boy.”
Among the very first things that Basil ever learned were the different “suits” in cards. Grandfather taught him and gave him a shilling for every suit as he knew them and the values of the cards, as in whist. Then he taught Basil whist, playing double-dummy, and explaining as they went along: “I wish you, Basil, to play whist as a gentleman should, carefully and with due consideration, with the intelligence and respect that the game deserves, not like a counter jumper for penny points.”
It must be confessed that Basil took to this instruction much more kindly than to that included under the heading of “ciphering,” or even of reading and spelling. At six he could play a “fair hand,” at which he was somewhat puffed up, the only drawback being that mother did not seem to take any interest in his achievements. She never played herself, though grandfather impressed upon her that she was preparing for herself an unhappy old age; in fact, she did not seem to like cards at all.
One very wet Sunday grandfather had arranged four “hands” on the library table, and was proceedingto play a game out of “Cavendish” for Basil’s instruction, when his mother suddenly came into the room. She gave one quick glance at the table with the cards, and came forward and stood beside it, saying very quietly: “I do not wish Basil to play cards on Sunday.”
Grandfather had risen to his feet as Basil’s mother entered the room. It would never have occurred to him to sit down while his daughter-in-law was standing; he swept the cards into a little heap with one swift movement of his beautiful white old hands, and said, with a grave little bow:
“I apologize, my dear. I had for the moment forgotten your—er—convictions on this question. Whatmaywe play at?—for I’ve made a bet with myself to keep Basil amused till teatime, and I don’t want to lose it.” Then, turning to Basil—who, conscious of the thunder in the air, felt very unhappy indeed: “It’s not your fault, my boy. You’ve not been naughty. It’s I who was forgetful.”
Basil’s mother looked from one to the other a little piteously. She had no weapons wherewith to meet her father-in-law’s smiling courtesy. She might have liked him better had he sometimes been rude. “Other grandfather” was not uniformly courteous.
On Sunday mornings they all three went to church together, and grandfather sat under the big carved tablet which set forth how Basil’s father had died at Ulundi, “aged twenty-nine.” Grandfather always carried his daughter-in-law’s prayer book for her up to the house, discussed thesermon with her, and was, as he himself would have put it, “vastly agreeable.”
A piece of coal fell out on the hearth and startled Basil out of his reverie. He had evidently come to some decision, for he nodded his head emphatically, muttering: “I’d better do it. I’m sure he’ll be bored if I don’t, and I mayn’t get another chance.”
The room was quite dark but for the flickering firelight, which had brightened since that big piece of coal fell apart. Basil went to his own special cupboard and took from it a pack of cards, which his grandfather had given him only last week. Grandfather never used the same pack on two consecutive evenings, and gave one to Basil nearly every week with the instruction: “Never use dirty cards, even to build castles with.” The child had never played with the ones he held in his hands, and his big grey eyes filled with tears as he wrapped them up in a leaf torn out of his copy-book. Then, laboriously, for Basil was no scribe, he wrote on the packet, a proceeding which took a considerable time. He gave a sob as he kissed his message, but there was no time to be lost. Slipping off his shoes, he opened the door very softly, raced across the hall and up the stairs. The staircase was quite dark, for Chapman had forgotten to light the lamps.
When he reached his grandfather’s bedroom door he paused with his hand on the handle. His heart was pounding in his ears, and for a full minute he could not hear whether all was quiet inthe room or not. Opening the door very softly, and as softly shutting it after him, he ran across the room and pulled up the blind of the big window that faced the bed. The moon came out from behind a bank of cloud, as if to aid him in his task, and shone full on that strange last couch at the foot of the bed in which grandfather lay so still under his coverlet of flowers. Basil pushed at the heavy window, but it was fastened far out of his reach, and he could not let in the fresh night air that grandfather loved. As his eyes grew accustomed to the lighter room, he came and stood by that light-colored box that he hated so, lifted the white cloth covering his grandfather’s face, and looked at him long and earnestly.
Basil had very vague notions as to what heaven was like; but, on reviewing all that he had heard of it, he came to the conclusion that if there was no whist there grandfather would be dull, and he had often heard him say: “There’s only one thing that I dread, and that’s boredom.” So Basil had decided that at all costs such a contingency must be avoided, and grandfather must teach the angels to play whist. “They can p’obably make more cards when they’ve seen them,” said Basil to himself, and pushed his little packet underneath the folded hands, kissed them, and turned to go as softly as he had come.
But the door opened at that moment, and his mother, candle in hand, stood on the threshold gazing at the little figure standing full in the strand of moonlight thrown across the carpet.
“What are you doing here, Basil?” she asked breathlessly.
“I came to give something to grandfather. Oh, don’t take it away from him!”
The passionate distress in the child’s voice moved her.
“I will take nothing away from him that you wish to give him. But what is it? Is it flowers?”
“No, mother, it is not flowers.”
She came into the room, closing the door after her.
“I must see what it is,” she said very gently.
Basil stood where he was as though turned to stone. Would she take it away—or would she put it back? He could not see her, for he stood with his back to her, and seemed incapable of turning round. His mother, noting the disarrangement of the flowers, drew out the little packet, and, holding her candle close, read the inscription in the large uncertain writing:
“Dear Grandfather,“I’m sory it’s not a cleane pak, but I don’t know where they are.“Your loving boy,“Basil.”
“Dear Grandfather,
“I’m sory it’s not a cleane pak, but I don’t know where they are.
“Your loving boy,“Basil.”