A Dozen Ways Of Love Part 22

It was summer time then; the sky relented somewhat; there was sunshine between the showers, and sometimes a long fair week of silvery weather, when a white haze of lifting moisture rose ever, like incense, from the hills, and the light shone white upon the yellow bloom of the furze.

Betty Lamb found the ambry niche in the wall of the ruin at the side of the place where the altar had been. She laid her baby there. That was his cradle, and by sunlight and moonlight she was heard singing loud songs to him. The people were afraid of going too near her at that time.

'It is dangerous,' said they, 'to touch an animal when she has her young with her.'

As years went on Betty Lamb and her little boy spent summer after summer upon the moor. The child was not christened, unless, indeed, the dew falling from the sacred stones and the pity of G.o.d for fatherless innocents had christened him. In this world, at least, his name was written in no book of life, for he had no name.

He grew to be a little lithe lad. Then it was that in every pickle of mischief where a little lad could be this elf-child, with his black eyes and curly auburn hair, was to be found. So maddening indeed were his naughty tricks that the townspeople spoke not so often of beating him, as they would have beaten a human child, but of wringing his neck like a young thing that had no right to live. Yet it was more often in word than in deed that punishment of any sort was inflicted, for the preliminary stage was perforce, 'first catch your boy,' and that was far from easy.

Even when the catching was accomplished the beating did not always come.

One day the minister of the Kirk looked out upon his glebe. His favourite cow, with a bridle in her mouth, was being galloped at greatest speed around the field, Betty's lad standing tip-toe upon her back. The minister, with the agility which unbounded wrath gave him, caught the boy' and swung his cane.

'I am going to thrash you,' said he.

'Ay, ye maun do that.' The small face was drawn to the aspect of a grave judge--'ye maun do that; it's yer juty.'

The minister, who had looked upon his intention rather in the light of natural impulse, felt the less inclination for the task. 'Are you not afraid of being beaten?' he asked.

'Aweel'--an air of profound reflection--'I'm thinking I can even it ony day wi' ridin' on a coo's back when she'll rin like yon.'

The sunlight of habitual benevolence began to break through the cloud of wrath upon the good minister's face. 'If I let you off, laddie, what will you do for me in return?'

An answering gleam of generosity broke upon the sage face of the child.

'I'll fair teach ye how to dae't ye'sel'.'

The lad grew apace. The neighbours said that he showed 'a caring' for his mother, but no one held toward him a helping hand. They were so sure that no good could come of him or of her. The mother had taken to drink, and one day it was found that the lad was gone. Just as he had often slipped from the grasp of one or other of the angry townsmen, dodged, darted, and disappeared for the moment, so now it seemed that he had slipped from the grasp of the town, run quickly and disappeared. No one knew why he had gone, or whither, or to what end.

Betty Lamb remained in the town, a fine figure of a woman, but bowed in the shoulders, dirty, and clad in rags. At last, when her strong defiance of poverty and need would no longer serve her, she was seen to go about from door to door in the early dawn, raking among the ashes for such articles as she chose to put in an old sack and carry upon her back. The townsfolk honestly thought that all had been done that could be done to make a decent woman of her, and now in her old age she must needs go down to the gutter.

One day a man came to the town with circus pictures and a bucket of paste. He pasted his pictures upon all the blank s.p.a.ces of walls which he could find. Great was the joy of the children who stood and stared, their little hearts made glad by novelty and colour. Great was the surprise of the older folk, who said, 'It is a new thing in the world when so great a show as this comes out of the accustomed track of shows to erect its tent in our small town!' Yet so it was; from some whim of the manager, or of some one who had the ear of the manager, the thing was decreed.

Upon these circus pictures there figured, in a series of many wonderful harlequin att.i.tudes, a certain Signor Lambetti. Very foreign was the curl of his hair and the waxen ends of his moustache; very magnificent was his physique; he wore the finest of silken tights and crimson small clothes, and medals were depicted hanging upon his breast.

When at length the circus came for that one night's entertainment and the huge tent was set up upon the common not far from the old red ruin, all the town flocked to see the brilliant spectacle. The minister was there, and what was more, his wife and daughters too; they were far grander than he was, and wore silken furbelows and fringed shawls. The minister paid for the best seats for them to sit in. All the shopkeepers were there; every man, woman and child in all the town who could find as much as sixpence to pay for standing room was there. But the strangest circ.u.mstance was that before the show began a man went out from the brightly-lit doorway and called in a loud voice to the beggars and little ragged boys and girls who had come to survey the tent on the outside, and he brought them all in and gave them a good part of the tent to sit in, although they had not sixpence to pay, nor even a penny.

Ah! in those days it was a very grand sight. There were elephants who performed tricks, and camels who walked about with men and bundles on their backs just as they do in eastern deserts, and there were wonderful ladies who dressed and behaved like fairies, and who rode standing tip-toe on the backs of horses and jumped through swinging rings. But the crowd had not read the circus bills and the newspapers from all the neighbouring cities for nothing. They were a canny Scotch crowd; they were not to be taken in by mere glitter, no, not the smallest barefoot boy nor the most wretched beggar, for they knew very well that the real crisis of the evening was to be the appearance of Signor Lambetti, and the word 'wonderful' was not to be spoken until his feats began to be performed.

At length he came outside the curtain upon which all eyes had long been fixed. The curl of his hair and the waxed ends of his moustache proved him to be beyond doubt from foreign parts. He was indeed a most grand and handsome gentleman. His dress was, if anything, more superb than it had been in the pictures; all his well-formed muscles showed through the silken gauze that he wore. His velvet trappings were trimmed with gold lace and his medals shone like gold.

He walked upon a tight rope away up in the peaked roof of the tent; he held a wand in his hand by which to balance himself and in the other hand a cup of tea which he drank in the very middle of his walk; tossing it off, bowing to the crowd below, and bringing the cup and saucer to the other end in safety.

The crowd gave deep sighs, partly of satisfaction for being permitted to see so wonderful a sight, partly out of relief for the safety of the performer. 'Ay me,' they said to one another, 'did ye ever see the licht o' that?' It meant more from them than the loudest clamour of applause, yet they applauded also.

Then Signor Lambetti, looking quite as fresh and jaunty as at first, ascended a small platform, standing out upon it in the full light of all the lamps. He made a little speech to the effect that he was now going to perform a feat which was so difficult and dangerous that hitherto he had kept it solely for the benefit of crowned heads, before whom on many occasions he had had the privilege of appearing. He said, in an airy way, that the reason he did the town the honour of beholding this most wonderful of all his feats was merely that he had taken a liking to the place.

'Ay, but he's grond,' said the little barefoot boys to one another as they huddled against the front of the stand allotted to them. 'Ay me, but he's grond'; and all the rest of the townsfolk said the same to themselves or each other, but they expressed it in all the different ways of that dignified caution common to the Scotch.

There was a series of swings, one trapeze fixed higher than another, like a line of gigantic steps, to the very pinnacle of the tent. 'The Signor' announced that he was going to swing himself up upon these hanging bars until he reached the topmost, and from that he would leap through the air down, down into the lighted abyss below, and catch a rope that was stretched at the foot of the Grand Stand.

Merely to hear him tell what he was going to do made the crowd draw breath with thrills of joyful horror.

Up and up he went, swinging himself with lissome grace, raising each trapeze with the force of his swing until he could reach the one above it.

He looked smaller as he travelled higher in his wonderful flying progress. The little boys had not breath left now even to say, 'Ay me, but he's grond.' There was silence among all the crowd.

To every one in all that crowd--to all except one--the spectacle was that of a strange man performing a strange feat; one poor woman present saw a different sight, one alone in all that crowd knew that the acrobat was not a stranger.

In a corner of the beggars' gallery sat Betty Lamb. Dirty and clothed in rags as she was, she held up her head at this hour with the old queenly defiance of her youthful days. Her eyes, bleared and sunken, had descried her son; her mother's heart, mad though all p.r.o.nounced her to be, had vibrated to the first sound of her son's voice. She knew him as certainly as if she had seen him standing before her again, the little lad of past years, or the infant cradled in the ambry of the ruined chancel.

The monarchs of whom Lambetti had been glibly speaking were not more n.o.ble in rank or more surrounded with glory in the thought of Betty Lamb than was this hero of the circus, and he her son! What const.i.tutes glory? Is it not made up of the glare of lamps and the wearing of shining clothes, the shout of a thousand voices in applause, the glance of a thousand eyes in admiration, and the renown that spreads into the newspapers? In the mind of Betty Lamb there was no room for gradations; she knew glory, she knew shame; she herself had sunk to shame; but now that was past, her son had attained to glory, and her soul went out, as it were, from the circ.u.mstances of her own degradation and accepted his glory as her own.

They said (the townsfolk said) that Betty Lamb had not lacked opportunity. Ah well, G.o.d knows better than we what to each soul may be its opportunity.

Betty Lamb watched her son in his perilous upward flight, and, for the first time in her life, prayed that Heaven would forgive her misdeeds.

By some inborn instinct she a.s.sumed that it was this prayer she must pray in order to obtain that desire of her eyes, his safety. When he reached the highest swing, when he made his leap from that awful height and caught the lower rope, there had come a change in Betty Lamb's soul.

It had seemed hours, nay, years to her, the s.p.a.ce of time in which he was swinging himself up and leaping down. Perhaps, half-witted as she had been, this was in reality her life, not the other that for sixty years she had been visibly living. She saw that his eye was fixed upon her; she knew that the kisses were thrown to her. She rose and walked erect, in her heart a new sense of responsibility and of the value of life.

Next day in Betty Lamb's cellar-room a shadow darkened the doorway, and her son stood before her. He did not kiss her--that had not been their way, even when he was an infant and she had sung her songs to him in the lonely ruin--but he bowed to her with all the foreign graces that he had learned, just as if she were one of the queens before whom he had performed. She feasted her eyes upon him.

He looked round upon the cellar. 'You must not live here any longer,'

said he.

For the first time in her life humility reigned in her heart and she resigned her gypsy freedom. 'I'm thinking,' she replied modestly, 'that it's nae fit for the mither of sich as ye are noo.'

With the minister Lambetti left money that would defray the expenses of a decent habitation for his mother, and, to the wonder of all, from that day forth the mother lived in it decently. She was even charitable with her little store; she was even known to raise the fallen.

When she was dead Lambetti was dead too. He had lived his life fast, and, if gold be of worth, it seemed as if he had lived it to some purpose. Lambetti left money to the town, money for two purposes which in due time the long-headed townsmen carried into effect. An asylum was built upon the moor; it is called 'Betty Lamb's Home for the Young and the Aged.' The old Abbey also was walled in; lawns and flower beds were spread about the broken stones, and where the walls might totter they were supported. The honour of this change too is ascribed to the famous son of Betty Lamb, who had no name but his mother's.

XI

THE SOUL OF A MAN

CHAPTER I

A man was standing on one of the highroads in the south of Gloucestershire. He was a man of science; his tools and specimens were in his hand, and he was leaning against the wayside paling, enjoying a well-earned rest. A long flock of birds fluttered over the autumn fields; beneath them a slow ploughman trudged with his horses, breaking the yellow stubble. The sky hung low, full of sunshine yet full of haze--an atmosphere of blue flame, and the earth was bright with the warm autumn colours of woods and hedgerow.

Just as the birds were flying past, a young woman came by upon the road, treading with quick powerful step upon the fallen leaves. She was a poor woman; her beauty, which would have been almost perfect in a simpler gown, was marred by garments cut in cheap conformity to fashionable dress. It could not be hidden, however, and her large symmetrical figure, swinging as she walked, attracted the attention of the man; as he stood there, leaning against the paling, he felt by no means disinclined to while away his hour of rest by a few soft words with the comely stranger. If he had put his thoughts into words, he would have held it as good luck that she had come to amuse his leisure, thinking very little about luck as it concerned her. His dog lying at his feet stirred to look at the woman, and the man, following the same instinct of nature, accosted her.

'Can you tell me, my girl, what time it is?'

She stopped short and looked at him. 'That I can't, sir,' she said in clear hearty tones, and turned to continue her walk.

'But tell me what time you think it is, my good girl; I am not good at reading the sun.'

She turned again, and looked at him with a longer pause, but, if there was suspicion or disapproval in her thoughts, she expressed nothing in her face.