Ronald and I (continued 2)

Having abused her sufficiently for her personal appearance, let me add that she had the sweetest and most winning of faces—chiefly composed of eyes, which were so large in comparison with the rest of her features that they seemed to swallow them up, giving to the face, as a whole, the thin, troubled look of premature age, which is so pathetic in any sick animal. But Judy was far from being delicate, and enjoyed to the full the zest and sparkle of life. With her head on one side, and her ears pricked up, and attention bestowed on the curl of her tail, a matter in which she was often negligent, she would have matched the best of them as a study of arrested life.

The two—the dog and the young reprobate she was expected to reform—took to each other with all their hearts, and soon became inseparable. But at first Ronald’s pessimistic prophecy seemed likely to be realised. True to his natural instinct, her master took Judy at once to the nearest public-house, and, as the biscuits due to an intelligent dog were always forthcoming, Judy fell in entirely with her master’s view as to the direction their daily walk should take. Ronald triumphed maliciously but prematurely. For Judy was to be recalled to her duty by a stern dispensation.

It happened one day, that, as she and her master were starting, a troop of bicyclists came scorching down the hill, and Judy, caught off her guard and losing her head, was run over, and taken up for dead. After long days of anxious nursing she was called slowly back to life, at least to a measure of life. But the little dog’s nerve was gone. From that day forward no persuasion could tempt her to follow her master along the public road. Warned by experience, she dreaded bicyclists at every turning. Just so far as the garden gate, and no further, she would follow him, and, with a thin little feeble whine, plead almost in words for a change of route. But the master’s heart was steeled. It was to be a conflict of will between them. And which was to conquer? the dog or the man? For days and weeks the result trembled in the scale. But the walk grew dreary apart from his companion, and, going and returning, he was haunted by the piteous whine. Then at last he succumbed. The day’s walk along the high road was exchanged for a run in the nearest field or common, and Judy’s heart rejoiced, and her spirit came again to her, and she became—almost, but never quite—her natural self again.

Thenceforth the sympathy between these two was complete. When Judy was ill again, almost to death, she was restful nowhere but in her master’s presence. When he left the room, her eyes would languidly follow him; when he came back, they kindled to life again, breathed into by a new spirit; and when he took her in his arms, all pain and disquiet ceased, and she lay neither shivering nor moaning—lost to all feeling but the satisfied assurance of his love.

“Well, Ronald, and how about my experiment?”

“You’ve beaten me,” was the reply. “What a wonderful woman you are!”

II

“In quo tam similem videbis Issam Ut sit tam similis sibi nec ipsa.”

Martial.

She was a very little dog with a very large soul, and all her soul looked out of her eyes. No one whom she loved could doubt her love, when once her eyes had assumed their final expression. “I am your friend for life,” they said, “and for death—and perhaps beyond it.”

In the frivolous days of her youth she had snapped at the knickerbockers of a chubby errand boy, and been promptly handed over for punishment. But she broke from the executioner under the indignity of the first stroke, and fled for refuge to her master’s bedroom, from which no efforts could dislodge her. So, making the best of a bad business, he took to his bed too for company’s sake. Judy was deeply touched by this practical sympathy, and it formed, I believe, the historic ground-work of their life-long friendship.

Her pedigree was mixed. Her father was a white English terrier of unimpeachable breed, who lived a sober, self-contained existence, with no friend but the postman, whom he followed conscientiously on all his rounds of delivery. Her mother was the daughter of a “King Charles,” who had been woo’d and won by a fox. Fair and frail, she was careless of the duties of life, and passed her time in eating and sleeping, sleeping and eating—she is sleeping and eating still, the latter with an ever increasing appetite as the time at her disposal grows less.

Judy repudiated in toto her maternal parentage, and reproduced all the best characteristics of her father, combined with a brilliant intelligence, and a far wider appreciation of the sympathies of life. Her minor peculiarities were borrowed from those of a cat. She sat like a cat, pounced like a cat, and washed her face like a cat, using either or both of her paws with a truly feline indifference. She could climb bushes, too, hanging on by her teeth, to the detriment of any unwary fledgling who presumed over confidently upon the limitation of natural gifts.

Judy often came on a visit to Thorpe Hill, where she regularly spent an hour after dinner in digging at the root of a favourite beech tree, with the energy of a dog that is close on a prize. From which I inferred that she was a truffle-terrier in disguise, who would make all our fortunes, and set Matthew to dig in her place till he blasphemed against Judy and the truffles and me. But Matthew didn’t put his heart into his work, or realise the fact that Judy’s credit was at stake. And I always believed in her more than I did in him. Later on she justified my confidence—not, I admit, by a discovery of truffles, but (better still) of a full-grown Roman or Anglo-Saxon, crouching among his household divinities. Judy was complacently proud of him as a very superior find, in spite of Matthew’s sneer, “Tweren’t triffles, I knowed,” and forthwith transferred her attentions to a neighbouring tree, under which, for all I know, others of his family may still be reposing.

It is humbling to admit that she was wholly devoid of tricks, properly so called: partly because no one had troubled to teach her any, and partly, I think, because she accounted it a waste of time to try and acquire them. No one who studied her thoughtful little face could doubt that she held higher and more recondite theories of the responsibilities of life.

It was probably the same reason that led her to pass her days in silence. Few objects she thought were worth the trouble involved of setting in motion the harsh and cumbrous method by which alone a dog converses—certainly not meat and drink, and therefore she declined to ask for them. The prospect of a walk, or the sight of a blackbird deriding her from a twig, formed the only exceptions and proved the rule. Otherwise Judy would have been a canine Trappist. And her reticence was the more remarkable, seeing that her mother passed her time in futile and vociferous talking. Probable Judy regarded her as an object lesson and a warning. She was certainly disdainful of her noise.

But she had two natural gifts: you may call them tricks if you will. She took her meals like a Christian, seated, or rather kneeling, at table beside her master, with her paws doubled under her knees. From this post of vantage she would watch the whole proceedings of dinner with the curiosity of an epicure. But dining on her own account offered little attraction. The position of her paws, it is true, suggested an attitude of devotion and gained for her the reputation of saying grace before meat. But her own diet was strictly limited to morsels of bread and biscuit, which she received with indifference, and apparently without gratitude. It may be that she dined in the night-time, as Amina did with the ghoul. If so, I hope she selected more desirable company.

She had one other peculiarity. I cannot call it an accomplishment, though it found her a number of admirers. After studying you intently with eyes that looked you through and through, as though she were appraising carefully your capacity for friendship, she would raise a delicate fur-capped paw, and lay it gently upon your nose—never anywhere else. It was a favour accorded to no stranger, never indeed till she had known you for months. For it was an oath of allegiance, emblematic as the solemn transfusion of blood, and renewable on occasion, if you cared to elicit it by staring her well out of countenance. Yet it was trying to be reminded of the fact when you were kneeling at prayers in full view of the servants, simply because Judy regarded your attitude and surroundings as a ceremonial specially designed for the re-enactment of her vow.

Being a good friend, Judy was, by consequence, an equally good nurse. The attributes of the two are indeed strangely akin, if the latter be not a natural development of the former. For in sickness, as in sorrow, there are times when a sympathetic silence is a better restorative than more obtrusive remedies. Her master found it so when Judy nursed him for four months at a stretch, sacrificing without a whine the most brilliant summer on record. Cleverer than many a nurse or doctor, she inferred his condition from certain changes of face and expression, unappreciable by their less intuitive faculties. Satisfied by a careful inspection that he was for the moment improving, she would fall back on the pillow with a sigh of satisfaction, till he was restless again, or till the time came—she knew it as well as did the nurse—when he had to be roused for his medicine.

Judy was sorry, I fancy, on her own account when the days of her nursing were ended by her master’s recovery. For she never disguised her real sentiments, whether creditable or the reverse, differing therein from the race of men, at whose feelings and motives one can only hazard a bewildered guess.

Judy taught her master many things: among them how to win the love of her community. Jealousy, it seems, is the family failing. It is idle, she told him, to imagine that a few scraps of half-hearted affection can claim the devotion of a life. Careless, casual attentions may gratify an unexacting dog; they can never win his heart’s love. It is not for pity’s sake, as some will tell you, that the mongrel of the streets is attracted by preference to the vagabond and outcast, who is as lonely as himself; rather, because he feels that here at any rate is a field unoccupied, a mine of sympathy that will royally repay for working.

But let the master of his affection form other and more engrossing ties, and the love that he has given he will infallibly withdraw—not hastily, capriciously, or for the moment, but slowly, deliberately, and for ever—at what cost to himself is happily not ours to fathom.

III

“They sin who tell as love can die.”

Southey.

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. Now she 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 the light 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 the right 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.

Our Professor

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 strictly viva 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’s preparin’ for it,” was the prompt reply. For myself, I was knocked out 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 you expect him 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 fixing your whereabouts.”

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 was startling 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 formula visne 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 lay in 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 true he 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-dozen stones 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 it do blow 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’d nigh 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 he did settle 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 house he 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, it do sound mortial 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 they did get decent burial—the three 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 the story 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, Master Fred (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.

The Cruel Crawling Foam

It was 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 her devoted 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 his strength? 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 on either 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 so at 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.”

Our Queen

“And the stars—they shall fall, and the Angels go weeping, Ere I cease to love her, my Queen, my Queen.”

I

“Our Queen” 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 interest and 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 the tone 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, can there 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—in black, 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 it does look 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 spoil the 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 “Our Queen” 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.

II

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—no longer 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 to whom 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 no promises,” 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.”