Rest Harrow: A Comedy of Resolution Part 18

Bazalguet interfered. "You mustn't talk like that, Glyde. We can't have it, you know." Colonel Vero added, "Certainly not," and stretched his long legs out.

Glyde recovered himself, and begged pardon. He was told that he might go on, in reason, but declined. "Thank you, sir. I think I'll leave it so. I own to what I did."

He was told that he could be dealt with summarily, or sent for trial.

"I'll take it from you, gentlemen," he said, and settled himself reposefully. The Bench drew together, with the Clerk intervening.

Mr. Bazalguet, double-chinned and comfortable squire, was disturbed by this case. What troubled him was that Ingram had not been straightforward.

What was this dismissal of a servant? He knew, and therefore he asked the question. Fortnaby knew also, but didn't intend to say. Everybody, indeed, knew. Romance appeals to us all in diverse ways; and it was actually romance which settled Clyde's romantic affair.

Fortnaby, Maximilian Fortnaby, had been a schoolmaster, had succeeded to an estate at forty, and retired. He, with his keen face and trim whiskers, leaning his head on his hand, thus spoke in undertones, and carried the day. "The case is clear. The young man's taught himself tongues, and has poetry. He's been taught other things, too, and has got some of them wrongly. One thing he ought to learn is that to relieve your feelings is not the way to help the oppressed. He's set himself up for a champion, and tongues have got to work. I should give him three months." Mr. Bazalguet looked at the Clerk, who said it was a bad case. Mr. Ingram was a magistrate and--the maximum was two years. The third magistrate saw his way to impressing himself,--"Make it six months," he said. The Chairman agreed with him, until Colonel Vero said, "I should give him a year." That shocked him. "It'll take a long time for it to blow over, you know," he whispered to Fortnaby, who smiled and shrugged. "I don't suppose six will hurt him. He'll be able to write after a bit." "Ingram will go abroad, you know," said Mr. Bazalguet. "Did you happen to know the--party?" Fortnaby looked up quickly. "I? Oh, dear no. But I gather that the less we say the better. It was not an ordinary servant." Mr. Weir, the third magistrate, said, "A lady, I hear;" but his colleagues ignored him. Then they all sat up, and the Clerk sank into the well.

"Clyde," said Mr. Bazalguet, "you will have to go to prison for three months, with hard labour. I hope this will be a warning to you. I do indeed."

The prisoner was removed amid murmurs. There was some cheering outside the court--at which Ingram grimly smiled. But he was very pale, and did not leave the Sessions house until late in the afternoon. Old Mr. Bazalguet was very cool with him after court. He grunted when they met in the hall.

"You go abroad?" he asked him. Ingram said, it was probable.

BOOK III

INTERLUDE OF THE RECLUSE PHILOSOPHER

I

A notable difference between the s.e.xes is this: that a man will thrive for years--that is, his better part--upon love denied, and woman upon love fulfilled. So Senhouse, in his hopeless plight, starved and did well; dreams nourished him in what pa.s.ses in England for solitude. From the grey of the mornings to the violet-lidded dusk his silence was rarely broken; and yet the music in his heart was continuous; his routine marched to a rhythm. The real presence of Sanchia was always with him, to intensify, accentuate, and make reasonable the perceptions of his quickened senses.

Sense blended with sense--as when the sharp fragrance of the thyme which his feet crushed gave him the vision of her immortal beauty, or when, in the rustle of the wind-swept gra.s.ses, he had a consciousness of her thrilled heart beating near by. All nature, in fact, was vocal of Sanchia by day; and at night, presently, she stole white-footed down the slant rays of the moon and fed his soul upon exhalations of her own. Idle as he might have appeared to one who did not know the man--for beyond the routine of his handiwork he did nothing visible--he was really intensely busy. Out of the stores reaped and garnered in those meditative years was to come the substance of his after-life.

But no man in England may live three years in a gra.s.s valley unreported; his fame will spread abroad, scattered as birds sow seeds. Discreetly as he lived and little as he fared, he was at first a thing of doubt and suspicion, and won respect by slow degrees. Was he a coiner, stirring alloys over his night fires? Was he Antichrist, blaspheming the Trinity at daybreak? He was talked of by gaitered farmers at sheep-fairs, by teamsters at cross-roads, by maidens and their sweethearts on Sundays. The shepherds, it was thought, might have told more than they did. It was understood that they had caught him at his secrets times and again. But the shepherds had little to say of him but that he was a mellow man, knowing sheep and weather, and not imparting all that he knew. Similarly the gypsies, who alone travel the Race-plain in these days, and mostly by night, were believed to know him well; but they, too, kept their lore within the limits of their own shifty realm.

Rarely, indeed, he was seen. Sunday lovers, strolling hand in hand up the valley, came to a point where they went tiptoe and peered about for him. He might be described motionless, folded in his white robe, midway between ridge and hollow; or a gleam of him flashed between the trees of the brake would perhaps be all that they would get for an hour of watching. The hill brows would, on such days, be lined with patient onlookers; all eyes would be up the narrow valley to its head under Hirlebury, where, below the little wood, his grey hut could be seen, deep-eaved, mysterious, blankly holding its secrets behind empty windows. None ever ventured to explore at close quarters; and if the tenant had appeared, a thousand to one they would all have looked the other way. The Wiltshire peasant is a gentleman from the heart outwards. So, too, carters, ploughmen, reapers in the vales would sometimes see his gaunt figure monstrous on the sky-line, cowled and with uplifted arms, adoring (it was supposed) the sun, or leaning on his staff, motionless and rapt, meditating death and mutability. He lost nothing by such change apparitions; on the contrary, he gained the name of a wise man who had powers of divination and healing. In the cottage whither he went once a week for bread, a child had been sick of a burning fever. His hands, averred the mother, had cured it. Groping and making pa.s.ses over its stomach, rubbing in oils, relief had come, then quiet sleep and a cool forehead. After this an old man, crippled with rheumatics, had hobbled up to the very edge of his dominion, and had waited shaking there upon his staff until he could get speech with the white stranger. He, too, had had the reward of his relief. If he was not made sound again, he was relieved and heartened. He had said that, if he was spared, he was hopeful to stretch to his height again, which had been six feet all but an inch. The stranger, said he, had put him in the way of new life, and whatever he might mean--whether that he were a Salvationist or a quack doctor--he would say no more. After that, a young woman went to him to get him to name the father of her child, and returned, and was modest for a month, and a good mother when the time came. And true it was that her chap came forward and saw the vicar about it, and that they were asked in church. Out of such things as these his fame grew.

The hunt struck upon him now and again, when the hounds in full cry streamed down his steep escarpments and threatened panic to his browsing goats. At such times he would rise up, white-robed and calm, as stay with a quiet gesture the scattering beasts. The whips would cap him, and the Master with his field find themselves in company of an equal. For his ease of manner never left him, nor that persuasive smile which made you think that the sun was come out. He had none of the airs of mystagogue, but talked to men, as he did to beasts, in the speech which was habitual to them. The lagging fox understood him when, grinning his fear and fatigue, he drew himself painfully through the furze. So did the hounds, athirst for his blood. Buck- skinned gentlemen, no less, found him affable and full of information--about anything and everything in the world except the line of the hunted fox. "Oh, come," he said once, "don't ask me to give him away. You're fifty to one, to start with; and the fact is I pa.s.sed him my word that I wouldn't. I'll tell you what though. You shall offer me a cigarette. I haven't smoked for six days." Which was done.

His powers with children, his charm for them, his influence and fascination, which in course of time made him famous beyond these sh.o.r.es, arose out of a chance encounter not far from his hut. Three boys, breaking school in the nesting season, came suddenly upon him, and paled, and stood rooted. "Come on," he said, "I'll show you a thing or two that you've never seen before." He led them to places of marvel, which his speech made to glimmer with the hues of romance: the fresh grubbed earth where a badger had been routing, the quiet glade where, that morning, a polecat had washed her face. He brought them up to a vixen and her cubs, and got them all playing together. He let them hold leverets in their arms, milk his goats, as the kids milk them for their need; and showed them so much of the ways of birds that they forgot, while they were under the spell of him, to take any of their eggs. Crowning wonder of all--when a peewit, waiting on the down, dipped and circled about his head for a while and finally perched on his shoulder while he stood looking down upon her eggs in the bents! Such deeds as these fly broadcast over the villages, and on Sat.u.r.days he would be attended by a score of urchins, boys and girls. To a gamekeeper who came out after his lad, sapling ash in hand, he had that to say which convinced the man of his authority.

"'A says to me, 'There's a covey of ten in thicky holler,' where you could see neither land nor bird. 'I allow 'tis ten,' he says, 'but we won't be particular to a chick.' There was nine, if you credit me, that rose out of a kind of a dimple in the down, that you couldn't see, and no man could see. 'Lord love you,' I said, 'Mr. John, how ever did you see 'em?' He looks at me, and he says, very quiet, 'I never saw the birds, nor knew they was there. I saw the air. There's waves in this air,' he says, 'wrinkled waves; and they birds stirred 'em, like stones flung into a pond. Tom,' he says, to my Tom, 'if you look as close as I do,' he says, 'you'll see what I see.' And young Tom looks up at him, as a dog might, kind of faithful, and he says, 'I 'low I will, sir, please, sir.' I says to him, 'Can a man be taught the like o' that?' 'No,' says he, 'but a boy can.' 'What more could thicky boy learn?' I says, and he says, 'To understand his betters, and get great words, and do without a sight of things--for the more you do without,' he says, 'the more you have to deal with.' 'Such things as what, now, would he do without?' I wants to know.

He looks at me. 'Food,' he says, kind of sharp; 'food when he's hungry, and clothing, and a bed; and money, and the respect of them that don't know anything, and other men's learning, and things he don't make for himself.' Heard any man ever the like o' that? But just you bide till I've done. 'Can a boy learn to do without drink?' I wants to know--for beer's been my downfall. 'He can,' says thicky man. 'And love?' I says; and 'No,'

says he straight, 'he cannot. But he can learn the way of it; and that 'ull teach him to do wi'out l.u.s.t.' 'Tis a wise thought, the like of that, I allow."

The gamekeeper paused for the murmurs of his auditory to circle about the tap-room, swell and subside, and then brought out his conclusion. There was book-learning to be faced. "How about scholarship? 'I'd give him none,' says the man. 'Swallerin' comes by nature, and through more than the mouth. I'd open him his eyes and ears, his fingers and toes, and the very hairs on the backs of his hands; and they'll all swaller in time, like the parts of the beastes do.' Now, that's a learned man, I allow. My boy must go to the Council School it does appear; but thicky man will give him more teaching in a week than school-master in a year--and there he goes o' Sat.u.r.days--and wants no driving, moreover." He returned to his beer, thoughtful-eyed.

The gamekeeper's son was twelve years old, and was the nucleus round which grew the Senhusian school of a later day, where neither reading nor writing could be had until the pupil was fifteen years old. But this is antic.i.p.atory, for the school was a matter of long gestation and tentative birth.

II

One September midnight, as he stirred a late supper over a small wood- fire, he was hailed by a cry from above. "Ho, you! I ask shelter," he was adjured. The quarter moon showed him a slim figure dark against the sky.

"Come down, and you shall have it," he answered, and continued to skim his broth.

The descent was painfully made, and it was long before the traveller stood blinking by his fire--a gaunt and hollow-eyed lad. Senhouse took him in at a glance, stained, out-at-elbows with the world, nursing a grudge, footsore and heartsore. He had a gypsy look, and yet had not a gypsy serenity. That is a race that is never angry at random; and never bitter at large. A gypsy will want a man's life; but if the man is not before him, will be content to wait until he is. But this wanderer seemed to have a quarrel with time and place, that they held not his enemy by the gullet.

"You travel late, my friend," said Senhouse briskly.

"I travel by night," said the stranger, "lest I should be seen by men or the sun."

Senhouse laughed. "_In girum imus noctu, non ut consumimur igni_.' They used to say that of the devils once upon a time. Devilish bad Latin; but it reads backwards as well as forwards, like the devil himself."

"My devil rides on my back," said the stranger, "and carries with him the fire that roasts me."

He was at once bitter and sententious. Senhouse put down his hurts to bruises of the self-esteem.

"I hope that you dropped him up above," he said cheerfully, "or that you will let me exorcise him. I've tried my hand with most kinds of devil. Are you a Roman?"

"Half," he was told, and, guessing which half, asked no more questions.

"You are pretty well done, I can see," he said. "You want more food. You want warm water, and a bed, and a dressing for your feet. You've been on the road too long."

The stranger was huddled by the fire, probing his wounded feet. "I'm cut to pieces," he said. "I've been over stubbles and flint. This is a cruel country."

"It's the sweetest in the world," Senhouse told him, "when you know your way about it. When you have the hang of it you need not touch the roads.

You smell out the hedgerows, and every borstal leads you out on to the gra.s.s. But I'll own that there are thistles. I wear sandals myself. Now,"

he continued, ladling out of his pot with a wooden spoon, "here's your porridge, and there are bread and salt; and here water, and here goat's milk. Afterwards you shall have a pipe of tobacco, and some tea. Best begin while all's hot--and while you eat I'll look to your wounds.

Finally, you shall be washed and clothed."

He went away, returning presently with water and a napkin. Kneeling, he bathed his guest's feet, wiped them, anointed, then wrapped them up in the napkin. The disconsolate one, mean-time, was supping like a wolf. He gulped at his porridge with quick snaps, tore his bread with his teeth.

Senhouse gave him time, quietly eating his own supper, watching the red gleam die down in the poor wretch's eyes. Being himself a spare feeder, he was soon done, and at further business of hospitality. He set a great pipkin of water to heat, brought out a clean robe of white wool, a jelab like his own, and made some tea.

The stranger, then, being filled, cleansed and in warm raiment, stretched himself before the fire, and broke silence. He was still surly, but the grudge was not audible in his voice. "I took your fire for a gypsy camp, and was glad enough of it. I've come by the hills from Winterslow since dusk. You were right, though: I was done. I couldn't have dragged another furlong."

Senhouse nodded. "I thought not. Been long on the road?"

"Two months."

"From the North, I think? From Yorkshire?"

The stranger grunted his replies. His host judged that he had reasons for his reticence. There was a pause.

"You sup late," was then observed.

Senhouse replied, "I generally do. I take two meals a day--the first at noon, the second at midnight; but I believe that I could do without one of them. I never was much of an eater--and I need very little sleep. Somehow, although I am out at sunrise most mornings, I rarely sleep till two or thereabouts. Four hours are enough for me--and in the summer much less.