Austin and His Friends Part 7

Hark! There they are again. I wish they would sound a little louder."

A distinct increase in the sound was noticeable. "Oh, isn't it perfectly wonderful? Now, what have you to say?"

Aunt Charlotte stood agape. It was no use pretending she didn't hear them. They were as unmistakable as knocks at a front door.

"What jugglery is this?" she demanded, in an angry tone.

"Really, dear auntie, I am not a conjurer," replied Austin, as he sank back upon his cushions. "That was what I heard last night. But of course _you_ don't believe in such absurdities. It's only your fancy after all, you know."

"'Tain't _my_ fancy, anyhow," put in old Martha, speaking for the first time. "I heard 'em plain enough. 'Tis the 'good people,' for sure."

"Hold your tongue, do!" cried Aunt Charlotte in sore perplexity. "Good people, indeed!--the devil himself, more likely. I tell you what it is, Austin----"

"Why, I thought you weren't superst.i.tious!" observed Austin, in a tone of most exasperating surprise. Three gentle knocks, running off into a ripple of pattering explosions, were then heard in a farther corner of the room. "There, don't you hear them laughing at you? Thank you, dear people, whoever you are, that was very kind. And it was awfully sweet of you to save me from those bricks last night. It _was_ good of them, wasn't it, auntie dear?"

"If all this devilry goes on I shall take serious measures to stop it," gasped Aunt Charlotte, who was almost frightened to death. "I cannot and will not live in a haunted house. It's you who are haunted, Austin, and I shall go and see the vicar about it this very day. It's an awful state of things, positively awful. To think that you are actually holding communication with familiar spirits! The vicar shall come here at once, and I'll get him to hold a service of exorcism. I believe there is such a service, and----"

"Oh, do, do, _do_!" screamed Austin, clapping his hands with delight.

"What fun it would be! Fancy dear Mr Sheepshanks, in all his tippets and toggery, ambling and capering round poor me, and trying to drive the devil out of me with a broomful of holy water! That's a lovely idea of yours, auntie. Lubin shall come and be an acolyte, and we'll get Mr Buskin to be stage-manager, and you shall be the pew-opener.

And then I'll empty the holy-water pot over dear Mr Sheepshanks' head when he's looking the other way. You _are_ a genius, auntie, though you're too modest to be conscious of it. But you're very ungrateful all the same, for if it hadn't been for----"

"There, stop your ribaldry, Austin, and get up," said Aunt Charlotte, impatiently. "The sooner we're all out of this dreadful room the better. And let me tell you that you'd be better employed in thanking G.o.d for your deliverance than in turning sacred subjects into ridicule."

"Thanking G.o.d? Why, not a moment ago you said it was the devil!"

exclaimed Austin. "How you do chop and change about, auntie. You can't possibly expect me to be orthodox when you go on contradicting yourself at such a rate. However, if you really must go, I think I _will_ get up. It must be long past eight, and I want my breakfast awfully."

The day so excitingly ushered in turned out a busy one. As soon as he had finished his meal, Austin pounded off to invoke the immediate presence of Mr Snewin the builder, and before long there was a mighty bustle in the house. The furniture had all to be removed from the scene of the disaster, the bed cleared of the _debris_, preparations made for the erection of light scaffolding for repairing the roof, and Austin himself installed, with all his books and treasures, in another bedroom overlooking a different part of the garden. It was all a most enjoyable adventure, and even Aunt Charlotte forgot her terrors in the more practical necessities of the occasion. Just before lunch Austin s.n.a.t.c.hed a few minutes to run out and gossip with Lubin on the lawn. Lubin listened with keen interest to the boy's picturesque account of his experiences, and then remarked, sagely nodding his head:

"I told you to be on the look-out, you know, Master Austin. Magpies don't perch on folks' window-sills for nothing. You'll believe me a little quicker next time, maybe."

For once in his life Austin could think of nothing to say in reply. To ask Lubin to explain the connection between magpies and misadventures would have been useless; it evidently sufficed for him that such was the order of Nature, and only a magpie would have been able to clear up the mystery. Besides, there are many such mysteries in the world.

Why do cats occasionally wash their heads behind the ear? Clearly, to tell us that we may expect bad weather; for the bad weather invariably follows. These are all providential arrangements intended for our personal convenience, and are not to be accounted for on any cut-and-dried scientific theory. Lubin's erudition was certainly very great, but there was something exasperating about it too.

So Austin went in to lunch thoughtful and dispirited, wondering why there were so many absurdities in life that he could neither elucidate nor controvert. He decided not to say anything to Aunt Charlotte about Lubin's magpie sciolisms, lest he should provoke a further outburst of the discussion they had held in the morning; he had had the best of that, anyhow, and did not care to compromise his victory by dragging in extraneous considerations in which he did not feel sure of his ground. Aunt Charlotte, on her side, was inclined to be talkative, taking refuge in the excitement of having work-men in the house from the uneasy feelings which still oppressed her in consequence of those frightening raps. But now that the haunted room was to be invaded by friendly, commonplace artisans from the village, and turned inside out, and almost pulled to pieces, there was a chance that the ghosts would be got rid of without invoking the aid of Mr Sheepshanks; a reflection that inspired her with hope, and comforted her greatly.

"You know you're a great anxiety to me, Austin," she said, as, refreshed by food and wine, she took up her knitting after lunch. "I wish you were more like other boys, indeed I do. I never could understand you, and I suppose I never shall."

"But what does that matter, auntie?" asked Austin. "I don't understand _you_ sometimes, but that doesn't make me anxious in the very least.

Why you should worry yourself about me I can't conceive. What do I do to make you anxious? I don't get tipsy, I don't gamble away vast fortunes at a sitting, and although I'm getting on for eighteen I haven't had a single action for breach of promise brought against me by anybody. Now _I_ think that's rather a creditable record. It isn't everybody who can say as much."

"I want you to be more _serious_, Austin," replied his aunt, "and not to talk such nonsense as you're talking now. I want you to be sensible, practical, and alive to the sober facts of life. You're too dreamy a great deal. Soon you won't know the difference between dreams and realities----"

"I don't even now. No more do you. No more does anybody," interrupted Austin, lighting a cigarette.

"There you are again!" exclaimed Aunt Charlotte, clicking her needles energetically. "Did one ever hear such rubbish? It all comes from those outlandish books you're always poring over. If you'd only take _my_ advice, you'd read something solid, and sensible, and improving, like 'Self Help,' by Dr Smiles. That would be of some use to you, but these others----"

"I read a whole chapter of it once," said Austin. "I can scarcely believe it myself, but I did. It's the most immoral, sordid, selfish book that was ever printed. It deifies Success--success in money-making--success of the coa.r.s.est and most materialistic kind. It is absolutely unspiritual and degrading. It nearly made me sick."

"Be silent!" cried Aunt Charlotte, horrified. "How dare you talk like that? I will not sit still and hear you say such things. Few books have had a greater influence upon the age. Degrading? Why, it's been the making of thousands!"

"Thousands of soulless money-grubbers," retorted Austin. "That's what it has made. Men without an idea or an aspiration above their horrible spinning-jennies and account-books. I hate your successful stockbrokers and shipowners and manufacturers. They are an odious race. Wasn't it a stockjobber who thought Botticelli was a cheese?

Everyone knows the story, and I believe the hero of it was either a stockjobber or a man who made screws in Birmingham."

Aunt Charlotte let her knitting fall on her lap in despair. "Austin,"

she said, in her most solemn tones, "I never regretted your poor mother's death as I regret it at this moment."

"Why, auntie?" he asked, surprised.

"Perhaps she would have understood you better; perhaps she might even have been able to manage you," replied the poor lady. "I confess that you're beyond me altogether. Do you know what it was she said to me upon her death-bed? 'Charlotte,' she said, 'my only sorrow in dying is that I shall never be able to bring up my boy. Who will ever take such care of him as I should?' You were then two days old, and the very next day she died. I've never forgotten it. She pa.s.sed away with that sorrow, that terrible anxiety, tearing at her heart. I took her place, as you know, but of course I was only a makeshift. I often wonder whether she is still as anxious about you as she was then."

"My dearest auntie, you've been an angel in a lace cap to me all my life, and I'm sure my mother isn't worrying herself about me one bit.

Why should she?" argued Austin. "I'm leading a lovely life, I'm as happy as the days are long, and if my tastes don't run in the direction of selling screws or posting ledgers, nothing that anybody can say will change them. And I tell you candidly that if they were so changed they would certainly be changed for the worse. I hate ugly things as intensely as I love beautiful ones, and I'm very thankful that I'm not ugly myself. Now don't look at me like that; it's so conventional! Of course I know I'm not ugly, but rather the reverse (that's a modest way of putting it), and I pray to beloved Pan that he will give me beauty in the inward soul so that the inward and the outward man may be at one. That's out of the 'Phaedrus,' you know--a very much superior composition to 'Self Help.' So cheer up, auntie, and don't look on me as a doomed soul because we're not both turned out of the same melting-pot. Now I'm just going upstairs to see to the arrangement of my new room, and then I shall go and help Lubin in the garden."

So saying, he strolled out. But poor Aunt Charlotte only shook her head. She could not forget how Austin's mother had grieved at not living to bring up her boy, and wished more earnestly than ever that the responsibility had fallen into other hands than hers. There was something so dreadfully uncanny about Austin. His ignorance about the common facts of life was as extraordinary as his perfect familiarity with matters known only to great scholars. His views and tastes were strange to her, so strange as to be beyond her comprehension altogether. She found herself unable to argue with him because their minds were set on different planes, and her representations did not seem to touch him in the very least. And yet, after all, he was a very good boy, full of pure thoughts and kindly impulses and spiritual intuitions and intellectual proclivities which certainly no moralist would condemn. If only he were more practical, even more commonplace, and wouldn't talk such nonsense! Then there would not be such a gulf between them as there was at present; then she might have some influence over him for good, at any rate. Her thoughts recurred, uneasily, to the strange experiences of that morning. The mystery of the raps distracted her, puzzled her, frightened her; whereas Austin was not frightened at all--on the contrary, he accepted the whole thing with the serenest cheerfulness and _sang-froid_, finding it apparently quite natural that these unseen agencies, coming from n.o.body knew where, should take him under their protection and make friends with him. What could it all portend?

Of course it was very foolish of the good lady to fret like this because Austin was so different from what she thought he should be.

She did not see that his nature was infinitely finer and subtler than her own, and that it was no use in the world attempting to stifle his intellectual growth and drag him down to her own level. A burly, muscular boy, who played football and read 'Tom Brown,' would have been far more to her taste, for such a one she would at least have understood. But Austin, with his queer notions and audacious paradoxes, was utterly beyond her. Unluckily, too, she had no sense of humour, and instead of laughing at his occasionally preposterous sallies, she allowed them to irritate and worry her. A person with no sense of humour is handicapped from start to finish, and is as much to be pitied as one born blind or deaf.

But Austin had his limitations too, and among them was a most deplorable want of tact. Otherwise he would never have said, as he was going to bed that night:

"By the way, auntie, what day have you arranged for the vicar to come and cast all those devils out of me?"

He might as well have let sleeping dogs lie. Aunt Charlotte turned round upon him in almost a rage, and solemnly forbade him, in any circ.u.mstances and under whatsoever provocation, ever to mention the subject in her presence again.

Chapter the Seventh

But by one of those curious coincidences that occur every now and then, who should happen to drop in the very next afternoon but the vicar himself, just as Austin and his aunt were having tea upon the lawn. Now Aunt Charlotte and the vicar were great friends. They had many interests in common--the same theological opinions, for example; and then Aunt Charlotte was indefatigable in all sorts of parish work, such as district-visiting, and the organisation of school teas, village clubs, and those rather formidable entertainments known as "treats"; so that the two had always something to talk about, and were very fond of meeting. Besides all this, there was another bond of union between them which scarcely anybody would have guessed. Mr Sheepshanks, though as unworldly a man as any in the county, considered himself unusually shrewd in business matters; and Aunt Charlotte, like many middle-aged ladies in her position, found it a great comfort to have a gentleman at her beck and call with whom she could talk confidentially about her investments, and who could be relied upon to give her much disinterested advice that he often acted on himself. On this particular afternoon the vicar hinted that he had something of special importance to communicate, and Aunt Charlotte was unusually gracious. He was a short gentleman, with a sloping forehead, a prominent nose, a clean-shaven, High-Church face, narrow, dogmatic views, and small, twinkling eyes; not the sort of person whom one would naturally a.s.sociate with financial ac.u.men, but endowed with an air of self-confidence, and a pretension to private information, which would have done credit to any stockbroker on 'Change.

"I've been thinking over that little matter of yours that you mentioned to me the other day," he began, when he had finished his third cup, and Austin had strolled away. "You say your mortgage at Southport has just been paid off, and you want a new investment for your money. Well, I think I know the very thing to suit you."

"Do you really? How kind of you!" exclaimed Aunt Charlotte. "What is it--shares or bonds?"

"Shares," replied Mr Sheepshanks; "shares. Of course I know that very prudent people will tell you that bonds are safer. And no doubt, as a rule they are. If a concern fails, the bond-holder is a creditor, while the shareholder is a debtor--besides having lost his capital.

But in this case there is no fear of failure."

"Dear me," said Aunt Charlotte, beginning to feel impressed. "Is it an industrial undertaking?"

"I suppose it might be so described," answered her adviser, cautiously. "But it is mainly scientific. It is the outcome of a great chemical a.n.a.lysis."

"Oh, pray tell me all about it; I am so interested!" urged Aunt Charlotte, eagerly. "You know what confidence I have in your judgment.

Has it anything to do with raw material? It isn't a plantation anywhere, is it?"

"It's gold!" said Mr Sheepshanks.

"Gold?" repeated Aunt Charlotte, rather taken aback. "A gold mine, I suppose you mean?"