Corporal Sam and Other Stories Part 21

Charis clapped her hands, with a triumphant little laugh.

'But I knew him first!' she exclaimed, 'Yes, Aunt Netta, it's him!-- it's him, _him_, HIM! And isn't it just perfectly glorious?'

'You must excuse my niece, sir--that is to say, if you are really Colonel--'

'Baigent, ma'am. I think you know my name; though how or why that should be, pa.s.ses my comprehension.'

She bowed to him, timidly, a trifle stiffly. 'It is an honour to have met you, sir. I have an aunt at home, an invalid, who will be very proud when she hears of this. She has followed your career with great interest--I believe I may say, ever since you were a boy at the college. She has talked about you so often, you must forgive the child for being excited. Come, Charis! Thank Colonel Baigent, and say good-night.'

'But isn't he coming with us?' The child's face fell, and her voice was full of dismay. 'Oh! but you must! Aunt Louisa will cry her eyes out if you don't. And on Christmas Eve, too!'

Colonel Baigent looked at Miss Netta.

'I couldn't ask it--I really couldn't,' she murmured.

He smiled. 'The hour is unconventional, to be sure. But if your aunt will forgive a very brief call there is nothing would give me greater pleasure.'

He meant it, too!

He fetched his hat, and the three pa.s.sed out together--down the High Street, through the pa.s.sage by the b.u.t.ter Cross, and along the railed pavement by the Minster Close. On the colonel's ear their three footfalls sounded as though a dream. The vast bulk of the minster, glimmering above the leafless elms, the solid Norman tower with its edges bathed in starlight, were transient things, born of faery, unsubstantial as the small figure that tripped ahead of him clutching a pair of dancing-shoes.

They came to a little low house, hooded with dark tiles and deeply set in a narrow garden. A dwarf wall and paling divided it from the Close, and from the gate, where a bra.s.s plate twinkled, a flagged, uneven pathway led up to the front door. So remote it lay from all traffic, so well screened by the shadow of the minster, that the inmates had not troubled to draw blind or curtain. Miss Netta, pausing while she fumbled for the latchkey, explained that her aunt had a fancy to keep the blinds up, so that when the minster was lit for evensong she might watch the warm, painted windows without moving from her couch.

Colonel Baigent, glancing at the pane towards which she waved a hand, caught one glimpse of the room within, and stood still, with a catch of his breath. On the wall facing him hung an Oxford frame, and in the frame was a cheap woodcut, clipped from an old ill.u.s.trated paper of the Mutiny date, and fastened in that place of honour--his own portrait!

After that, for a few minutes, his head swam. He was dimly aware of what followed: of an open door; of the child running past him and into the room with cries of joy and explanation, a few only articulate; of the little old figure that half rose from the couch and sank back trembling; the flush on the waxen face, the violet ribbons in the cap, the hand that trembled as it reached out, incredulous in its humility, to his own. He took it, and her other hand rested a moment on the back of his, as though it fluttered a blessing.

Yes; and her hands, when he released them--and it seemed that he had been holding an imprisoned bird--yet trembled on the coverlet after her voice had found steadiness.

'An honour--a great honour!' it was saying. 'You will forgive the liberty?' She nodded towards the portrait. 'We are not quite strangers, you see. I have always followed your career, sir. I knew you would grow into a great and worthy man, ever since the day when I dropped a bandbox in the street--a muddy day it was!--and the box burst open just as you were pa.s.sing with half a dozen young gentlemen from the college. The rest laughed; and when I began to cry--for the ribbons were muddied--they laughed still more. Do you remember?'

Colonel Baigent had not the faintest recollection of it.

'Ah! but it all happened. And you--you were the only one that did not laugh. You picked up the box and wiped it with your handkerchief. You tried to wipe the ribbons, too; but that only made matters worse. And then, when the others made fun of you, you put the box under your arm, and said you were going to carry it home for me. And so you did, though it made you late for your books; and besides, our house was out of bounds, and you risked a thrashing for it.'

'I wonder if I got it?' murmured Colonel Baigent.

'I knew nothing about the school bounds at the time, or I should never have allowed you! And on the way you asked me if I had hurt myself in falling. I told you "No"; but that was a fib, for my hip was growing weak even then. It's by reason of my hip that I have to lie here. But in those days there was no one else to take the dancing cla.s.ses, and it would never have done to confess. And--and that was all. I only met you once after that--it was in the post office at St Swithun's, and you ran in to get a stamp. I was standing by the counter, weighing a letter; and you, being in a hurry, did not recognise me. But I asked the old postmistress your name. Do you remember her?'

'She knew everybody's name,' said the colonel. 'And so that was all?'

'That was all, except that my blessing has gone with you, sir, from that day. Man and boy it has gone with you.'

'Ma'am, if I had guessed it, some weary days in India might have been less weary.'

So they sat talking for a while; but, by degrees, the invalid's eyes had grown pre-occupied.

'Netta, dear,' she asked at length, 'do you think we might ask the colonel to honour us by sharing our Christmas dinner to-morrow?'

In that luckless moment Colonel Baigent glanced up, caught sight of Miss Netta's face, and saw that in it which made his own colour to the roots of his hair. Then he gave a gulp, and faced the situation like the brave man he was.

'Ma'am,' he said gently, 'you have taken me for a friend, and G.o.d knows, my friends are few enough. I am going to treat you as a very old friend, and to dismiss all tact. You will eat your Christmas dinner with me to-morrow, here, in this house.'

On his way back to the hotel Colonel Baigent halted to stare up at the minster tower. So much of his life had been spent under the shadow of it!--and yet, of all his sowing, one small act alone, long forgotten, had taken root here and survived.

In his dreams next morning he heard the minster bell ringing for early service. In his dreams, for a stroke or two, the remembered note of it carried him back to boyhood. Then he awoke with a start, and jumped out of bed.

Far up the hill the bugles from the barracks challenged the note of the bell. Over the muslin blind drawn half-way across his window the sun shone on a clear, frosty morning; and in the haze of it, as he dressed, his eyes rested, across the cl.u.s.tered roofs, on an angle of the minster tower, and beyond it on the hill with the quarry hewn in its side, and the clump of trees remembered of all who in boyhood have been sons of the city's famous school.

He dressed rapidly. The street below had not yet awakened to Christmas Day, and the colonel, with Christmas in his heart, felt eager as a messenger of good news.

An hour later, as he returned, all refreshed in soul, from the minster, he ran against the second waiter, blinking in the sunlight on the door-step of the hotel, and looking as though he had slept in his evening suit.

'I want breakfast at once,' said the colonel; 'and for luncheon you may put me up a basket.'

'There was to have been a cold turkey,' said the waiter, 'it being Christmas Day.'

'Put in the turkey, then--the whole turkey, please--and two bottles of champagne. I'll take my luncheon out.'

'Two bottles, sir, did I understand you to say?'

'Certainly. Two bottles.'

'Which the amount for corkage is cruel,' said the waiter as he delivered his order at the office. 'My word, and what an appet.i.te!

But I done him an injustice in one respec'. He do seem to be every inch a gentleman.'

So the waiter's verdict, after all, sounded much the same as Miss Lapenotiere's. And the conclusion seems to be that you can not only say the same thing in different ways, but quite different things in identical words.

DOCTOR UNONIUS.

CHAPTER I.

'In all his life he never engaged in a law suit. Reader, try if you can go so far and be so good a man.'

Thus concludes the epitaph of Doctor Unonius, upon a modest stone in the churchyard of Polpeor, in Cornwall, of which parish he was, during his life, the general friend, as his scientific reputation now abides its boast.

To those who knew him in life there is a gentle irony in the thought that while, during life, his scientific attainments earned him nothing but neglect, their recognition grows now proportionately as the man himself, his face and habit, the spruce black suit he wore, and the thousand small acts of kindness he did, fade out of memory.

'Your late eminent fellow-parishioner, now these forty years with G.o.d,'--so the Bishop of the Diocese spoke the other day before unveiling a stained-gla.s.s window to that memory in Polpeor Church.

The Bishop, you see, spoke of eternal life in terms of time--a habit with us all. If anything could be more certain than that, in whatever bliss Doctor Unonius now inherits, forty years--or a thousand for that matter--count as one day, it is that throughout his life he detested stained-gla.s.s. Through this very window, indeed, now obscured _ad majorem gloriam Dei et in memoriam Johannis Unonii medicinae doctoris_, he loved--for it faced his pew--to watch during sermon-time the blue sky, the clouds, the rooks at their business in the churchyard elms. He has even recorded (in an essay on 'Visions'

read before the Tregantick Literary and Scientific Society in the winter session of 1856) that once, awaking with a start in the middle of Parson Grylls's sermon, he distinctly saw suspended in these same elm-tops the image of an abnormally long pilot-fish (_naucretes ductor_) he had received from a fishing-boat overnight and left at home in his surgery mounted upon an apparatus of his own invention, ready to be sketched before dissection. _Piscium et summa genus haesit ulmo_ . . . for twenty seconds, rubbing his eyes, he stared at the apparition as it very slowly faded.

It is on his researches in ichthyology, his list (no short one) of discoveries, his patient cla.s.sification of British Fishes, that his fame rests. 'Why "British"?' the reader may ask. 'Have fishes, then, our nationalities?' The doctor liked to think so. He was a lover of his country, and for three years, while Napoleon threatened us with invasion, he had served as a second-lieutenant in that famous company, the East and West Looe Volunteer Artillery, better known as the Looe Die-hards. Now, in times of peace, with Britain supreme upon the seas, he boldly claimed for her every fish found off these sh.o.r.es. A sturgeon, even, might not visit our coastal waters, however casual the occasion, without receiving the compliment of citizenship for himself and his tribe. Yet Doctor Unonius patiently tracked these creatures in their most distant migrations--'_motus et migrationes diligentissime indagavit_,' says the mural tablet beneath the window. The three lights of the window represent (1) Jonah vomited by the Whale, (2) the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, and (3) St Peter, John Dory and the stater.