A THROW BACK
Nana had at last gone out and left the coast clear. Kit seized her little brother’s hand, and they sped down the long passage to the red baize door which swung heavily but did not latch, shutting off the nursery quarters from the house.
Kit was a person of dramatic instincts, and as they ran down the passage she quoted in a deep and awful voice, “The tiger is a fearful beast, He comes when you expect him least.” Addison gazed fearfully over his shoulder, and ran at the top of his speed.
At last by a mighty effort they pushed open the heavy red door, and the staircase and the house lay before them for exploration. It was a very wide staircase, black and shiny and slippery, and as they went down their little feet made a pattering noise which seemed to echo and multiply in the silent house. Kit turned and said, “Hush!” in a reproving voice to Addison, who was, like Agag, walking delicately, on the banister side. “I can’t hush any more than I’m doing!” he replied in an injured tone. “I must put my feet down firm or I’d skate!”
“Come on!” said Kit. “Let’s go and see ifJakes is in the dining-room, and he’ll tell us what’s for lunch.”
They crossed the stone-flagged hall, and Kit opened the dining-room door and marched boldly in. There was no one there; the big room was wrapped in silence, and Addison felt very small and timid as he stood on the threshold. Not so Kit; she walked boldly up to the table, which was laid. There was a great deal of old silver on the table, and many flowers; but its appearance was evidently most displeasing to Kit, for she exclaimed angrily:
“Look here, Addison, just look here! Jakes has only laid lunch forone!”
Even the mild and gentle Addison was roused to something like indignation at this tremendous intelligence. To have breakfast and tea in the nursery is an understood thing; but lunch—whoever heard of a well-conducted child having lunch anywhere but in the dining-room, once he or she could hold a spoon and fork? It was abominable; it had to be seen into at once.
Kit gave an indignant sniff, saying: “I know it isn’t Jakes; it’s Nana. She’d go and say we could have lunch with her till Miss Mercer came; but I’ll go and speak to grandpapa at once; it’s a shame; I won’t stand it. Come on!”
The obedient Addison trotted after Kit across the hall with some alacrity. He hadn’t seen much of grandpapa; but what he had seen he liked. How still the old house was, no sound to be heard but the drip, drip of the rain on the ivy outside thewindows and the sizzle and fiz of the big logs in the great stone fireplace.
The children looked upon “Nanas” and their like as necessary evils. They divided mankind into two classes, which they called respectively “the dears” and “the deafs.” To the “dears” belonged father and mother, all father’s friends and most of mother’s; Gaffer and all Gaffer’s servants; orderlies—particularly orderlies—and grooms. To the “deafs” belonged nurses, governesses, cross gardeners, and a great many young ladies who wore smart frocks and were affectionate in public. These latter were called “deafs” not because of any defect in their aural arrangements, but simply because the children considered them incapable of discussing anything interesting. “Stupid people!” Kit was wont to observe, “who ask you how old you are, and who fetch stale cake out of tin boxes, and one’s got to eat it for politeness’ sake. Oh, I hate deafs!”
When Kit reached the study door she knocked, but there was no answer. “Mother says he never hears if he’s writing,” she whispered. “Let’s go in—come on!” So she turned the handle of the door and went in. Grandfather was writing. His great knee-hole table was piled with open books, and he had on his gold-rimmed spectacles. He never looked up as Kit shut the door softly behind her. For one thing, doors never creaked in grandfather’s house.
The children stood inside the door and waited, but he never looked up. “Come on,” said Kit, as, holding Addison by the hand, they walked leisurelyacross the room, till she stood close by their grandfather; then she said in a loud and cheerful voice:
“Good-morning, Gaffer; we’ve come to see you!”
“We’ve come to see you!” echoed the ever-obedient Addison. Grandfather was fond of old-fashioned things, and the name “Gaffer” was so delightfully inappropriate that he encouraged the children to use it when they spoke to him.
“Oh, you’ve come, have you?” he said, taking off his spectacles and turning himself in his heavy revolving chair toward the children. “And how are you, my dears? Did you sleep well after your long journey?”
It did not take long to install a child on each knee. Addison gazed at him in adoring silence, but Kit hastened to unbosom herself of her wrongs. “I’ve come to complain!” she began with dignity. “They’ve only laid lunch for you in the dining-room. Now I know you’d like our company. Mother said we were to keep you company—will you give orders about it?”
Gaffer seemed duly impressed, as he said: “I will give orders at once. Of course you are to have lunch with me while you are here. It’s a pity it’s so wet for your first day, but it’s nice to think that those dear people are going further and further away from the fogs and damp. It will do mother so much good to be in a warm climate, and you must try not to feel dull without them.”
“I wish they’d taken me!” said Kit. “I love hotels!” Gaffer looked at her and laughed:“What a traveled little person you are! I never slept in a hotel till I was seventeen.”
“Ah, but that’s long ago. People go about more now, and, you see, we have to go with the regiment.”
“To go with the regiment,” echoed Addison.
Kit conversed affably with her grandfather for some time; she told him who were her favorite officers, and which her favorite puddings. She carefully explained that, as she was four years older than Addison, she went to bed an hour later, and that she intended to spend that hour in her grandfather’s society. She expressed her approval of the study as a room, but thought it was a pity that, owing to the large number of books, there was no space for any pictures on the walls. Addison stared about him in solemn silence, till at last Gaffer suggested that, as he had got to write to mother, they had better go back to the nursery till lunchtime. Then they trotted across the room together, but when they reached the door and Kit had gone out, Addison raced back and stood by his grandfather’s chair, whispering breathlessly: “Will you let me see some of the books some day—wivout Kit?” There was a passionate eagerness in the question which startled Gaffer. He looked down at the imploring, upturned face.
And then “a strange thing happened.” It was no longer Addison, his namesake, that he saw; it was himself. Himself of sixty years ago. There he stood, the quaint, serious-eyed boy, whose portrait hung in his dead wife’s dressing-room. Theboy who longed for books, and who had asked the same question of a scholar in an Oxford library, on a long-forgotten morning all those years ago. With a sudden rush of gratitude he remembered how the question had been answered, and though his smile was very pleasant, his voice was a trifle husky as he said:
“Assuredly!”
“Wivout Kit?” persistently questioned the little boy.
“Without Kit, I promise,” repeated Gaffer. Then he and Addison shook hands, and Addison followed Kit.
She was waiting in the hall. “What did you say to Gaffer?” she asked inquisitively, but Addison shook his head. He could keep his own counsel even when coerced by pinches.
At lunch Gaffer inquired: “Addison, can you read?”
“Not well!” answered Kit. “He can’t read well; he’s only doing ‘sequel,’ and he’s six. He’s very backward!”
“I asked Addison, my dear,” said Gaffer, in gently reproving tones.
Addison blushed and held down his head; then he said: “I don’t like what I read; it’s so uninteresting. They ask such silly questions, over and over again.”
“He knows heaps of poetry!” said Kit magnanimously. “He can learn anything when he’s heard it once, and he knows pages of verses, and psalms, and that, but he’s no good on horseback. He’s got no nerve. Dad says he’ll never be anygood across country! And he’s afraid of the dark!”
“Are you not nervous?” asked Gaffer.
“Me nervous!” said Kit with great scorn. “I can ride dad’s chargers!”
“Ah, you’re like your mother,” said Gaffer, smiling at her. “Now I, I was never any good across country; but yet I haven’t found that it has alienated my friends, or done me any great damage in life. Has Addison begun Latin?”
“Oh, no; Miss Mercer doesn’t teach Latin, and he’s far too backward in other things to begin.”
“I began Greek when I was his age,” said Gaffer dreamily; “but there’s no reason why Addison should not begin Latin. He shall begin it with me.”
Addison flushed up to the roots of his hair; then he scrambled off his seat—a most unheard-of proceeding in the middle of lunch—and ran round to his grandfather. He threw himself upon him, exclaiming: “I love you; oh, how I love you!”
Kit regarded him with astonished eyes. That Addison, who never kissed anybody but mother, who was so undemonstrative, so slow to show feeling, should behave in this extraordinary manner, because he was told he might have Latin lessons, was to her incomprehensible; and Gaffer seemed to approve, for he lifted Addison on to his knee, and said in such a queer voice: “I think we’re rather of a kidney, you and I; we’re going to understand each other uncommonly well,” and Addison sat enthroned on Gaffer’s knee all the restof lunch, and shared his cheese. Kit felt injured.
When Gaffer went back to his study he sat down before the fire, and he pondered for a long time over his queer little grandson. Then he gave his shoulders a shake and sighed: “I was a disappointment to my father, and he’ll be a disappointment—he is a disappointment—poor little chap, to his. He is unaccountably like me.”
A lonely child was Addison. The fact that he was always called Addison from the time he ceased to be baby was proof enough. A child who is understood gets a nickname. Kit had fifty. Addison was always called by his baptismal name. It was Gaffer’s name, and Gaffer’s grandfather had been called after a gentleman who wrote poetry and things. Little Addison knew that much, and he wondered if the writings of that far-away Mr. Addison were more interesting than “Step by Step.” Addison was called an “old-fashioned child”; he was not very sure precisely what that was, but that it was something a child ought not to be, he was convinced. Kit was pretty, very pretty; so the officers said, not infrequently to Kit herself. Kit was never afraid of anything by day or by night. Kit always spoke the truth; Addison had been known to prevaricate when he was frightened, and he was often frightened—at nothing at all, Kit said.
But the worst and most unforgivable thing about Addison was this: he had no wish to be a soldier—and said so. The sound of a pop-gun caused his heart to thump against his breast in anunpleasantly violent manner, and a review was to him a prolonged agony that made him ill for days.
His mother—whom he worshipped—and who loved him tenderly, was quite unconscious of his many sufferings. She was absolutely devoid of nerves herself, and thought that Addison would grow out of his “delicacy,” as she called it. She was proud of his remarkable resemblance to her father, whom she admired above all mortal men—but she was disappointed; and poor Addison, with the quick intuition of childhood, was perfectly aware of it—at his being what her husband called “such a Molly.”
So it came about that Kit was always brought forward, and Addison kept in the background—to his own satisfaction certainly, but very much to the detriment of Kit.
Edinburgh, where the regiment was stationed, was too cold for mother, and dad obtained leave to take her to the Riviera for the worst months; so Kit and Addison were sent to Gaffer, and for Addison it was the turning-point of his life.
To most people, their initiation into the accidence of the Latin language is not a very happy recollection. To Addison it is a recollection little short of rapturous.
To him the first pages of a Latin grammar call up the picture of a large, old-fashioned room, flooded with a mellow light like that of the sun through a veil of yellowing beeches. There is a goodly smell in the room, the smell of dressed and well-kept leather. The walls are lined with books, books bound in calf and russet-colored Russia, andin the middle of the room stands a knee-hole table both deep and wide. It, too, is covered with books; but here they lie open, one upon the other, a crowd of witnesses to the tastes of the owner of the room. That gracious owner! Addison’s eyes grow dim as he thinks of the spare upright figure seated in the revolving chair; the keen scholarly face and noble white head. He hears again the kind, cultivated voice ever ready to answer questions, to answer them so fully and so beautifully, with such a tender sympathy for the eager childish questioner. And then Addison goes down on his mental knees and thanks his God that as yet he had brought no look of sorrow into those kind eyes, but many a look of pride and joy.
Is there not one shelf in that library devoted to Addison’s prizes? And the row is lengthening by leaps and bounds. Yet they wonder at Winchester why he should be so fond of classics.