The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales Part 7

"But how did you come?" asked Miss Bracy. "We sent a cart to meet you-- I heard no sound of wheels."

"Yes, I saw it outside the station; but the man didn't recognise me-- quite a small crowd came by the train--and of course I didn't recognise him. So I bribed a porter to put my luggage on a barrow and come along with me. Half-way up the hill the cart overtook us--the driver full of apologies. While they transhipped my things I walked on ahead--yes, listen, there it comes; and--Oh, I say, what a lovely spot!"

Miss Bracy was listening--not for the wheels and not to the story, but critically to every word as it came from his lips. "The woman has certainly done wonders," was her unspoken comment. At Victor's frank outburst, however, she flushed with something like real pleasure. She was proud of her cottage and garden, and had even a sort of proprietary feeling about the view.

They sat down around the little tea-table; the boy first apologising for his travel-stains (he was, in fact, as neat as a pin) and afterwards chatting gaily about his journey--not talking too much, but appealing from one to another with a quick deferent grace, and allowing them always the lead. "This is better and better," thought Miss Bracy as she poured tea; and, after a while, "But this is amazing!" He was a thorough child, too, with all his unconscious tact. The scent of a lemon-verbena plant fetched him suddenly to his feet with his eyes bright. "Please let me--" he thrust his face into the bush; "I have never seen it growing like this."

Miss Bracy looked at Mr. Frank. How utterly different it was from their old-maidish expectations! They had pictured the scene a hundred times, and always it included some awkwardly decorous reference to the dead woman. _This_ had been their terror--to do justice to the occasion without hurting the poor boy's feelings--to meet his sullen shyness, perhaps antipathy, with a welcome which somehow excused the past.

Yes, the past (they had felt) required excuse to _him_. And he had made no allusion to his mother, and obviously wished for none. Miss Bracy could not help smiling at the picture of their fears.

The boy turned, caught her smiling, and broke into a jolly laugh at his own absurdity. It echoed in the garden, where no one had laughed aloud for years.

And with that laugh Ba.s.sett's revenge began.

IV.

For with that laugh they began to love him. They did not--or at any rate Miss Bracy 'did not--know it at the time. For some days they watched him; and he, the unsuspicious one, administered a score of shocks as again and again he took them neatly and decisively at unawares. He had accepted them at once and in entire good faith.

They were (with just the right recognition of their seniority) good comrades in this jolliest of worlds. They were his holiday hosts, and it was not for the guest to hint (just yet) at the end of the holiday.

He surprised them at every turn. His father's canvases filled him with admiring awe. "Oh, but I say--however is it done?" As he stood before them with legs a trifle wide, he smoothed the top of his head with a gesture of perplexity. And Mr. Frank, standing at his shoulder with legs similarly spread, used the same gesture--as Miss Bracy had seen him use it a thousand times. Yet the boy had no artistic talent--not so much as a germ. For beauty of line and beauty of colour he inherited an impeccable eye; indeed his young senses were alive to seize all innocent delight,--his quickness in scenting the lemon-verbena bush proved but the first of many instances. But he began and ended with enjoyment; of the artist's impulse to reproduce and imitate beauty he felt nothing.

Mr. Frank recognised with a pang that he had failed not only in keeping his torch bright but in pa.s.sing it on; that the true self which he had missed expressing must die with him barren and untransmitted.

The closer he drew in affection, the farther this son of his receded,-- receded in the very act of acknowledging his sonship--with a gesture, smilingly imprehensible; with eyes which allured the yearning he baffled, and tied it to the hopeless chase.

Mr. Frank, who worshipped flowers, was perhaps the most ineffective gardener in England. With a trowel and the best intentions he would do more damage in twenty minutes than Miss Bracy could repair in a week.

She had made a paradise in spite of him, and he contented himself with a.s.suring her that the next tenant would dig it up and find it paved with good intentions. The seeds he sowed--and he must have sown many pounds'

worth before she stopped the wild expense--never sprouted by any chance.

"Dormant, my dear Laura--dormant!" he would exclaim in springtime, rubbing his head perplexedly as he studied the empty borders.

"When I die, and am buried here, they will all sprout together, and you will have to take a hook and cut your way daily through the vegetation which hides my grave." But Victor, who approached them in the frankest ignorance, seemed to divine the ways of flowers at once. In the autumn he struck cuttings of Miss Bracy's rarest roses; he removed a sickly pa.s.sion-flower from one corner of the cottage to another and restored it to health within a fortnight. Within a week after his coming he and Miss Bracy were deep in cross-fertilizing a borderful of carnations she had raised from seed. He carried the same natural deftness into a score of small household repairs. He devised new cradles for Miss Bracy's cats, and those conservative animals at once accepted the improvement; he invented a cupboard for his father's canvases; he laid an electric bell from the kitchen beneath the floor of the dining-room, so that Miss Bracy could ring for Deborah by a mere pressure of the foot; and the well-rope which Deborah had been used to wind up painfully was soon fitted with a wheel and balance-weight which saved four-fifths of the labour.

"It beats me where you learned how to do these things," his father protested.

"But it doesn't want learning; it's all so simple--not like painting, you know."

Mr. Frank had been corresponding with the boy's headmaster. "Yes, he is a good fellow," said one of the letters; "just a gentle clear-minded boy, with courage at call when he wants it, and one really remarkable talent. You may not have discovered it, but he is a mathematician; and as different from the ordinary book-made mathematician--from the dozens of boys I send up regularly to Cambridge--as cheese is from chalk.

He has a sort of pa.s.sion for pure reasoning--for its processes.

Of course he does not know it; but from the first it has been a pleasure to me (an old pupil of Routh's) to watch his work. 'Style' is not a word one a.s.sociates as a rule with mathematics, but I can use no other to express the quality which your boy brings to that study. . . ."

"Good Lord!" groaned Mr. Frank, who had never been able to add up his washing bills.

He read the letter to Miss Bracy, and the pair began to watch Victor with a new wonder. They were confident that no Bracy had ever been a mathematician; for an uncle of theirs, now a rector in Shropshire and once of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where for reasons best known to himself he had sought honours in the Mathematical Tripos and narrowly missed the Wooden Spoon, had clearly no claim to the t.i.tle. Whence in the world did the boy derive this gift? "His mother--" Miss Bracy began, and broke off as a puff of smoke shot out from the fireplace.

It was late September; Deborah had lit the fire that morning for the first time since May, and the chimney never drew well at starting.

Miss Bracy took the tongs in hand, but she was not thinking of the smoke; neither was Mr. Frank, while he watched her. They were both thinking of the dead woman. The thought of her--the ghost of her--was always rising now between them and her boy; _she_ was the impalpable screen they tried daily and in vain to pierce; to _her_ they had come to refer unconsciously all that was inexplicable in him. And so much was inexplicable! They loved him now; they stretched out their hands to him: behind _her_ he smiled at them, but through or across _her_ their hands could never reach.

As at first they had avoided all allusion to her, and been thankful that the boy's reticence made it easy, so now they grew almost feverishly anxious to discover how he felt towards his mother's memory.

They detected each other laying small traps for him, and were ashamed.

They held their breath as with an air of cheerful unconsciousness he walked past the traps, escaping them one and all. At first in her irritation Miss Bracy accused him of what she (of all women!) called false pride. "He is ashamed of her. He wishes to forget, and is only too glad that we began by encouraging him." On second thoughts she knew the charge to be undeserved and odious. His obvious simplicity gave it the lie. Moreover she knew that a small water-colour sketch of her in her youth--a drawing of Mr. Frank's--stood on the table in the boy's bedroom. Miss Bracy often dusted that room with her own hands.

"And, Frank," she confessed one day, "he kisses it! I know by the dullness on the gla.s.s when I rub it." She did not add that she rubbed it viciously. "I tell you," she insisted, almost with a groan, "he lives with her. She is with him in this house in spite of us; she talks with him; his real existence is with her. He comes out of it to make himself pleasant to us, but he goes back and tells her his secrets."

"Nonsense, Laura," Mr. Frank interrupted testily. "For some reason or other the boy is getting on your nerves. It is natural, after all."

"Natural? Yes, I see: you mean that I'm an old maid, and it's a case of crabbed age and youth."

"My dear Laura, I mean nothing so rude. But, after all, we have been living here a great many years and it _is_ a change."

"Frank, you can be singularly dense at times. Must I tell you in so many words that I am fond of the boy, and if he'd be only as fond of me he might racket the house down and I'd only like him the better for it?"

Mr. Frank rubbed his head, and then with sudden resolution marched out of the house in search of Victor. He found the boy on the roof removing a patent cowl which the local mason had set up a week before to cure the smoky chimney.

"My dear fellow," the father cried up, "you'll break your neck!

Come down at once--I have something particular to say to you."

Victor descended with the cowl under his arm. "Do be careful. . . .

Doesn't it make you giddy, clambering about in places like that?"

Mr. Frank had no head at all for a height.

"Not a bit. . . . Just look at this silly contrivance--choked with soot in three days! The fellow who invented it ought to have his head examined."

"It has made you in a horrible mess," said his father, who took no interest in cowls, but lost his temper in a smoky house.

"I'll run in and have a change and wash."

"No; put the nasty thing down and come into the garden." He opened the gate, and Victor followed, after dipping his hands in the waterfall.

"The fact is, my boy, I've come to a decision. This has been a pleasant time--a very pleasant time--for all of us. We have put off speaking to you about this, but I hope you understand that this is to be your home henceforward; that we wish it and shall be the happier for having you . . ."

Victor had been gazing out over the cove, but now turned and met his father's eyes frankly. "I have a little money," he said.

"Mother managed to put by a small sum from time to time, enough to start me in life. She did not tell me until a few days before she died: she knew I wanted to be an engineer."

He said this quite simply. It was the first time he had mentioned his mother. Mr. Frank felt his face flushing.

"But your headmaster tells me it will be a thousand pities if you don't go to Cambridge. I am proposing that you should go there--should matriculate this term. My dear boy"--he laid a hand on Victor's arm--"

don't refuse me this. I have no right--perhaps--to insist; but I daresay you can guess what your acceptance would mean to me. You can choose your own career when the time comes. For your sake your mother would have liked this: ask yourself if she would not."

Mr. Frank had not looked forward to pleading like this; yet when it came to the point this seemed his only possible att.i.tude. Victor had removed his gaze, and his eyes were resting now on the green sunny waves rolling in at the harbour's mouth. For almost a minute he kept silence; then--

"Yes, she would advise it," he said. It was as though he had laid the case before an unseen counsellor and waited submissively for the answer.

Mr. Frank had gained his end and without trouble: yet he felt a disappointment he could not at once explain. He was the last man in the world to expect a grat.i.tude which he did not deserve; but in the satisfaction of carrying his point he missed something, and surmised what he missed. The boy had not turned to _him_ for the answer, but had turned away and brought it to him. Father and son would never have the deeper joy of taking counsel together heart to heart.

V.

So Victor went up to Trinity, and returned for the Christmas vacation on the heels of an announcement that he had won a scholarship. He had grown more manly and serious, and he smoked a tobacco which sorely tried Miss Bracy's distinguished nose; but he kept the boyish laugh--the laugh which always seemed to them to call invitingly from the door of his soul, "Why don't you enter and read me? The house is clean and full of goodwill--Come!" But though they never ceased trying, they could never penetrate to those inner chambers. Sometimes--though they might be talking of most trivial matters--the appeal would suddenly grow pathetic, almost plangent, "What is this that shuts me off from you?

We sit together and love one another: why am I set apart?" Time was when he had seemed to them consciously reticent, almost of set purpose; but now it was they who, looking within the doorway, saw the dead woman standing there with finger on lip.