The Tale of Lal Part 17

"You look jolly," announced Ridgwell, "only I can't make out who you are; but you know Father and Mother very well, don't you?"

"Rather," said the stranger, "great friends of mine."

"But we've never seen you, have we?" added Christine.

"No," replied the stranger, "but I thought it was quite time I made your acquaintance, so I thought I would call upon you. Sorry I haven't got a card, but you can supply something in its place which will be quite as good. Where does Father keep his books?" was the sudden and somewhat unexpected question.

"It just depends," debated Ridgwell, "what particular lot you want.

Biography, Philosophy, Romance or Poetry."

"I think the Romance and Poetry department," suggested the stranger.

"This way," said Ridgwell; "I will show you."

The stranger ran his finger over the well-stocked orderly shelves, then he paused at four volumes side by side about the middle of the second shelf.

"Of course you both read?" inquired the stranger.

"Not those sort of books," explained Ridgwell. "We haven't quite got up to those sort of books yet."

"Anyway you can read the author's name upon the back of each of them."

The children nodded.

"That's me," confessed the stranger. "I have the misfortune to write books that you don't read."

"Father does," Ridgwell hastened to explain; "I've often heard him talk about you. Why, you're quite famous, aren't you?"

"I hope not," said the Writer.

"Anyway," concluded Ridgwell, "Father said you wrote jolly good stuff, only it was over the heads of the people, but Father said one of these days when you woke up, you would knock 'em, and I've heard him say that anyway it was better than some of the drivel a lot of people wrote nowadays. He hoped you'd reform, though."

The Writer laughed. "A very candid opinion, Master Ridgwell, and I really must reform and mend my ways."

"Don't you write fairy tales as well?" inquired Christine upon the way back to the dining-room.

"Sometimes," agreed the Writer.

Without more ado, Christine drew three chairs invitingly round the fire, almost by way of an invitation to recount some upon the spot.

The fire was really very cheerful in spite of the fact that it was late spring. The daffodils nodded their yellow heads quite contentedly, and filled the bowls upon mantelshelf and table with colour, and the little room with fragrance, at one and the same time. The coloured crocuses peeped in from the window boxes outside, whilst the sparrows chirped and hopped about and hoped that the Writer had something pleasant to say about them. It was all very peaceful with the sunlight stealing into the room through the lattice panes, making little patterns upon the floor, the flickering red of the fire playing at hide and seek with the diamond patterns and never quite catching each other; the yellow flowers nodding drowsily over the two childish heads that were now regarding the Writer most earnestly. The clock upon the mantelpiece chimed its mellow notes. Three o'clock it said. The afternoon had seemed almost dull up to that time, but now it all appeared to have changed in some curious way, ever since the Writer had made his appearance.

"I wonder," commenced Ridgwell, "if by any chance you could have been sent to us; you know we were faithfully promised that a Writer should come and see us and write down for us something we particularly want to remember. I wonder if you are the man," ended Ridgwell, quizzically.

"Shouldn't wonder at all," murmured the Writer; "delighted if I have had the honour to be chosen for the mission, and it really sounds to me like one of Lal's very rash promises."

"What!!!" It was a shriek from two children at once. Two pairs of arms were suddenly flung around the Writer's neck, two pairs of arms that were almost hugging him to death.

The Writer endured this onslaught throughout in the most becoming manner.

"Lal _did_ send you then," shouted Ridgwell. "I knew it. How lovely!

Fancy your knowing him! Tell us all about it."

The Writer smiled. "I have known Lal almost as many years as I can remember; he is one of my oldest and very dearest friends."

"Ridgie," said Christine solemnly, at this point, "do you remember the motto of the cracker we pulled last night? It said--

"I'll whisper on this little page A secret unto you: The greatest wonder of the age Shall suddenly come true."

But Ridgwell was beyond crackers, and beyond poetry; he felt, not unreasonably, amidst the development of this new wonder, that he was in possession of the real thing.

"I think," said the Writer, "I had better tell you all about it from the very beginning, but you know really it is quite a long story."

Ridgwell and Christine arranged themselves comfortably to listen; sometimes they looked at the fire, but more often at the face of the Writer, but they never missed one word of his story.

"I expect," commenced the Writer, "my story is going to be very different from anything you children may have imagined; in fact, my life has turned out so utterly different from anything it promised to be in the early beginning, that at times upon looking back it seems to be like some wonderful fairy tale--utterly unlike the ordinary fairy tales, however, one reads in books.

"The only two good fairies in my case were first and foremost our good old friend Lal, and, secondly, a gentleman who in the early stages of my life was always called the Miser, but who since has become one of the wealthiest, most generous and notable personages in the City of London. As a rule, whenever I think of my early childhood it is with a shudder, for I was running about the streets of London minus any shoes or stockings, with hardly any food save of the smallest and coa.r.s.est description, selling newspapers in the streets until late at night, and invariably soundly beaten if I did not take back some miserable coppers at the end of the day.

"I may say that these pence I had procured with so much toil were always expended in the public-house by both the man and his wife who were supposed at that time to provide me with the weird accommodation they were pleased to call home. My particular portion of this edifice was a dirty mat by way of a bed, which I shared with a rough-haired terrier dog called Sam. We two, Sam and I, were roofed in with many panes of broken gla.s.s in a species of outhouse which may at one time have formed a small conservatory. It must have been a hopeless failure, I am sure, as a conservatory, for I cannot imagine anything growing in it at all.

"One thing I am very certain of, I should never have grown either, but should most likely have withered and died in it had I remained, like my possible predecessors the plants, a few blackened and withered sticks of which could still be seen in some broken red flower-pots upon a shelf out of my reach. How these people came to have charge of me I shall never know, but I have sometimes believed, from odds and ends of conversation they let drop when they were quarrelling, which they were always doing, that my real father and mother had died when I was a tiny mite.

"The woman, who seemed at one time to have been better off, was left a sum of money to bring me up, as no relations appeared to claim me. At this time the woman was single, and had not met the man she afterwards married, the man who used to beat me so cruelly. Whether she spent all the money left for me, or whether they both spent it, appears to be of little consequence; anyway, once it was gone I was regarded with black looks as an enc.u.mbrance, and turned out into the streets to make some money, or do something for my board and lodging, as they expressed it.

I have already told you what the lodging was like. Well, the board part of it corresponded to the rest of the picture in every way.

Crusts of old dry bread, which they couldn't eat themselves, did for me and the dog, sometimes a little milk, varied by an occasional awful form of hard cake which the woman cooked, and which was impossible to eat unless first soaked in something. In the long hours of waiting between selling the newspapers I learned to spell, and then to read, very slowly at first, but still I learned. Then one of the men employed at the newspaper office I collected papers from, although I should imagine a very poor man himself, found a few pence every week to have me taught to write and spell, together with arithmetic, grammar, history and other things. This rather uncertain method of education went on for about two years. I was getting on fine, and absorbing everything I was taught with great rapidity, when my one friend, who had provided the night school education, departed to another world where I always hope he found the conditions easier than the one he had left. I might have been at my miserable home in the slums with the man and woman for years after this, only a curious form of providence was working upon my behalf.

"It had been a bad night for selling papers, I had a few coppers only, and my heart sank down when I approached the hovel where we all lived.

The man and woman were quarrelling violently. As I slunk in white of face and with a terrible quaking feeling inside me, I saw at once the man was worse than he had ever been, and as I entered the door of the squalid room he struck the woman an awful blow, then he saw me. He grabbed me, and I think might have killed me that night, but I wrenched myself away after he had given me the first blows; he pursued me, catching at my coat, which at the best of times was only rags; he tore part of the coat away, which was left in his hand, and I ran for dear life. The man was mad and didn't know what he was doing, maybe, but the only thing he could lay his hands upon was a broken brandy bottle; he hurled this at my head. It struck me as I reached the street and cut the back of my head open. Although I was hurt I staggered on. I was dizzy and sick and the blood was dripping all over my shirt, but though I swayed about I never stopped, I would go anywhere away from the horror of that place. I never meant to go back there again.

"The next thing I remember was some sort of Square, which I had never seen until then, for I had never gone so far West in London before.

There was n.o.body about, and I sank down beside a sort of stone thing and held my head, which hurt me horribly, and began to cry, I think.

"I was only about ten or eleven years old at that time, if as much, for no record of my age had ever been kept. Whether it was the pain, or simply fright because the few clothes I had were covered in blood from the wound in my head where the bottle had cut me, I don't know, but there is no doubt that I lost consciousness, probably for some considerable time. When I came to myself and woke up, it must have been very late at night. It was a fairly cold night, but the moon was shining, and the Square where I was sitting all looked like polished silver, and the clock of a big church at the side of the Square boomed out one.

"I looked about me, and raised myself up painfully upon one elbow and tried to think.

"Here I was outside everything--no shelter, no home, alone in London with a vengeance. True the other place had been a hateful home, yet at the very worst it had been a shelter, and, moreover, the rough-haired dog Sam and I had somehow squeezed together to keep ourselves warm, and Sam was the only thing that was in any way fond of me, and Sam was really good company.

"As the thought of him came across my mind, and how I had lost him for good now, I think I was about to start crying again, when a rather gruff but quite kindly voice just over my head called out--

"'Now then, stop that.'

"Of course I was only a very common c.o.c.kney little street boy at that time, and I couldn't either speak the Queen's English properly or spell it correctly, so when the voice said 'Stop that,' I said 'Wot?' 'Going to cry,' said the voice."

Here Ridgwell was so overcome with excitement by reason of a strange coincidence that he interrupted. "Why, that is exactly what Lal first said to me, and I can guess what the next thing was that he said to you--wasn't it 'Here, jump up'?"

The Writer smiled. "Yes," he said, "it is really very wonderful how history repeats itself. That is exactly what he said, but what I said is perhaps even more singular.