We and the World Volume I Part 7

I never knew the ins and outs of the story very exactly. At the time that what did become generally known was fresh in people's minds Jem and I were not by way of being admitted to "grown-up" conversations; and though Mrs. Wood's husband and I became intimate friends, I neither wished nor dared to ask him more about his past than he chose to tell, for I knew enough to know that it must be a most intolerable pain to recall it.

What we had all heard of the story was this. Mr. Wood had been a head clerk in a house of business. A great forgery was committed against his employers, and he was accused. He was tried, condemned, and sentenced to fourteen years' penal servitude, which, in those days, meant transportation abroad. For some little time the jury had not been unanimous. One man doubted the prisoner's guilt--the man we afterwards knew as the old miser of Walnut-tree Farm. But he was over-persuaded at last, and Mr. Wood was convicted and sentenced. He had spent ten years of his penal servitude in Bermuda when a man lying in Maidstone Jail under sentence of death for murder, confessed (amongst other crimes of which he disburdened his conscience) that it was he, and not the man who had been condemned, who had committed the forgery. Investigation confirmed the truth of this statement, and Mr. Wood was "pardoned" and brought home.

He had just come. He was the tramp.

In this life the old miser never knew that his first judgment had been the just one, but the doubt which seems always to have haunted him--whether he had not helped to condemn the innocent--was the reason of his bequest to the convict's wife, and explained much of the mysterious wording of the will.

It was a tragic tale, and gave a terrible interest to the gaunt, white-haired, shattered-looking man who was the hero of it. It had one point of special awe for me, and I used to watch him in church and think of it, till I am ashamed to say that I forgot even when to stand up and sit down. He had served ten years of his sentence. Ten years! Ten times three hundred and sixty-five days! All the days of the years of my life.

The weight of that undeserved punishment had fallen on him the year that I was born, and all that long, long time of home with Mother and Father and Jem--all the haymaking summers and s...o...b..lling winters--whilst Jem and I had never been away from home, and had had so much fun, and nothing very horrid that I could call to mind except the mumps--he had been an exile working in chains. I remember rousing up with a start from the realization of this one Sunday to find myself still standing in the middle of the Litany. My mother was behaving too well herself to find me out, and though Jem was giggling he dared not move, because he was kneeling next my father, whose back was turned to me. I knelt down, and started to hear the parson say--"show Thy pity upon all prisoners and captives!" And then I knew what it is to wish when it is too late. For I did so wish I had really prayed for prisoners and captives every Sunday, because then I should have prayed for that poor man nearly all the long time he had been so miserable; for we began to go to church very early, and one learns to pray easier and sooner than one learns anything else.

All this had happened in the holidays, but when they were over school opened as before, and with additional scholars; for sympathy was wide and warm with the school-mistress. Strangely enough, both partners in the firm which had prosecuted Mr. Wood were dead. Their successors offered him employment, but he could not face the old a.s.sociations. I believe he found it so hard to face any one, that this was the reason of his staying at home for a time and helping in the school. I don't think we boys made him uncomfortable as grown-up strangers seemed to do, and he was particularly fond of Cripple Charlie.

This brought me into contact with him, for Charlie and I were great friends. He was as well pleased to be read to out of the Penny Numbers as the bee-master, and he was interested in things of which Isaac Irvine was completely ignorant.

Our school was a day-school, but Charlie had been received by Mrs. Wood as a boarder. His poor back could not have borne to be jolted to and from the moors every day. So he lived at Walnut-tree Farm, and now and then his father would come down in a light cart, lent by one of the parishioners, and take Charlie home from Sat.u.r.day to Monday, and then bring him back again.

The sisters came to see him too, by turns, sometimes walking and sometimes riding a rough-coated pony, who was well content to be tied to a gate, and eat some of the gra.s.s that overgrew the lane. And often Charlie came to _us_, especially in haytime, for hayc.o.c.ks seem very comfortable (for people whose backs hurt) to lean against; and we could cover his legs with hay too, as he liked them to be hidden. There is no need to say how tender my mother was to him, and my father used to look at him half puzzledly and half pitifully, and always spoke to him in quite a different tone of voice to the one he used with other boys.

Jem gave Charlie the best puppy out of the curly brown spaniel lot; but he didn't really like being with him, though he was sorry for him, and he could not bear seeing his poor legs.

"They make me feel horrid," Jem said. "And even when they're covered up, I know they're there."

"You're a chip of the old block, Jem," said my father, "I'd give a guinea to a hospital any day sooner than see a patient. I'm as sorry as can be for the poor lad, but he turns me queer, though I feel ashamed of it. I like things _sound_. Your mother's different; she likes 'em better for being sick and sorry, and I suppose Jack takes after her."

My father was wrong about me. Pity for Charlie was not half of the tie between us. When he was talking, or listening to the penny numbers, I never thought about his legs or his back, and I don't now understand how anybody could.

He read and remembered far more than I did, and he was even wilder about strange countries. He had as adventurous a spirit as any lad in the school, cramped up as it was in that misshapen body. I knew he'd have liked to go round the world as well as I, and he often laughed and said--"What's more, Jack, if I'd the money I would. People are very kind to poor wretches like me all over the world. I should never want a helping hand, and the only difference between us would be, that I should be carried on board ship by some kind-hearted blue-jacket, and you'd have to scramble for yourself."

He was very anxious to know Isaac Irvine, and when I brought the bee-master to see him, they seemed to hold friendly converse with their looks even before either of them spoke. It was a bad day with Charlie, but he set his lips against the pain, and raised himself on one arm to stare out of his big brown eyes at the old man, who met them with as steady a gaze out of his. Then Charlie lowered himself again, and said in a tone of voice by which I knew he was pleased, "I'm so glad you've come to see me, old Isaac. It's very kind of you. Jack says you know a lot about live things, and that you like the numbers we like in the _Penny Cyclopaedia_. I wanted to see you, for I think you and I are much in the same boat; you're old, and I'm crippled, and we're both too poor to travel. But Jack's to go, and when he's gone, you and I'll follow him on the map."

"G.o.d willing, sir," said the bee-master; and when he said that, I knew how sorry he felt for poor Charlie, for when he was moved he always said very short things, and generally something religious.

And for all Charlie's whims and fancies, and in all his pain and fretfulness, and through fits of silence and sensitiveness, he had never a better friend than Isaac Irvine. Indeed the bee-master was one of those men (to be found in all ranks) whose delicate tenderness might not be guessed from the size and roughness of the outer man.

Our neighbours were all very kind to Mr. Wood, in their own way, but they were a little impatient of his slowness to be sociable, and had, I think, a sort of feeling that the ex-convict ought not only to enjoy evening parties more than other people, but to be just a little more grateful for being invited.

However, one must have a strong and sensitive imagination to cultivate wide sympathies when one lives a quiet, methodical life in the place where one's father and grandfather lived out quiet methodical lives before one; and I do not think we were an imaginative race.

The school-master (as we used to call him) had seen and suffered so much more of life than we, that I do not think he resented the clumsiness of our sympathy; but now I look back I fancy that he must have felt as if he wanted years of peace and quiet in which to try and forget the years of suffering. Old Isaac said one day, "I reckon the master feels as if he wanted to sit down and say to hisself over and over again, 'I'm a free man, I'm a free man, I'm a free man,' till he can fair trust himself to believe it."

Isaac was probably right, and perhaps evening parties, though they are meant for treats, are not the best places to sit down and feel free in, particularly when there are a lot of strange people who have heard a dreadful story about you, and want to see what you look like after it.

During the summer holidays Jem and I were out the whole day long. When we came in I was ready for the Penny Numbers, but Jem always fell asleep, even if he did not go to bed at once. My father did just the same. I think their feeling about houses was of a perfectly primitive kind. They looked upon them as comfortable shelter for sleeping and eating, but not at all as places in which to pursue any occupation.

Life, for them, was lived out-of-doors.

I know now how dull this must have made the evenings for my mother, and that it was very selfish of me to wait till my father was asleep (for fear he should say "no"), and then to ask her leave to take the Penny Numbers down to the farm and sit with Cripple Charlie.

Now and then she would go too, and chat with Mrs. Wood, whilst the school-master and I were turning the terrestrial globe by Charlie's sofa; but as a rule Charlie and I were alone, and the Woods went round the homestead together, and came home hand in hand, through the garden, and we laughed to think how we had taken him for a tramp.

And sometimes on a summer's evening, when we talked and read aloud to each other across a quaint oak table that had been the miser's, of far-away lands and strange birds of gorgeous plumage, the school-master sat silent in the arm-chair by the open lattice, resting his white head against the mullion that the ivy was creeping up, and listened to the blackbirds and thrushes as their songs dropped by odd notes into silence, and gazed at the near fields and trees, and the little homestead with its hayricks on the hill, when the gra.s.s was apple-green in the gold mist of sunset: and went on gazing when that had faded into fog, and the hedgerow elms were black against the sky, as if the eye could not be filled with seeing, nor the ear with hearing!

CHAPTER VI.

"Who, doomed to go in company with Pain, Turns his necessity to glorious gain."

WORDSWORTH.

"Jack," said Charlie, "listen!"

He was reading bits out of the numbers to me, whilst I was rigging a miniature yacht to sail on the dam; and Mrs. Wood's husband was making a plan of something at another table, and occasionally giving me advice about my masts and sails. "It's about the South American forests," said Charlie. "'There every tree has a character of its own; each has its peculiar foliage, and probably also a tint unlike that of the trees which surround it. Gigantic vegetables of the most different families intermix their branches; five-leaved bignonias grow by the side of bonduc-trees; ca.s.sias shed their yellow blossoms upon the rich fronds of arborescent ferns; myrtles and eugenias, with their thousand arms, contrast with the elegant simplicity of palms; and among the airy foliage of the mimosa the ceropia elevates its giant leaves and heavy candelabra-shaped branches. Of some trees the trunk is perfectly smooth, of others it is defended by enormous spines, and the whole are often apparently sustained by the slanting stems of a huge wild fig-tree. With us, the oak, the chestnut, and the beech seem as if they bore no flowers, so small are they and so little distinguishable except by naturalists; but in the forests of South America it is often the most gigantic trees that produce the most brilliant flowers; ca.s.sias hang down their pendants of golden blossoms, vochisias unfold their singular bunches; corollas, longer than those of our foxglove, sometimes yellow or sometimes purple, load the arborescent bignonias; while the chorisias are covered, as it were, with lilies, only their colours are richer and more varied; gra.s.ses also appear in form of bamboos, as the most graceful of trees; bauhinias, bignonias, and aroideous plants cling round the trees like enormous cables; orchideous plants and bromelias overrun their limbs, or fasten themselves to them when prostrated by the storm, and make even their dead remains become verdant with leaves and flowers not their own.'"

Though he could read very well, Charlie had, so far, rather stumbled through the long names in this description, but he finished off with fluency, not to say enthusiasm. "'Such are the ancient forests, flourishing in a damp and fertile soil, and clothed with perpetual green.'"

I was half-way through a profound sigh when I caught the school-master's eye, who had paused in his plan-making and was listening with his head upon his hand.

"What a groan!" he exclaimed. "What's the matter?"

"It sounds so splendid!" I answered, "and I'm so afraid I shall never see it. I told Father last night I should like to be a sailor, but he only said 'Stuff and nonsense,' and that there was a better berth waiting for me in Uncle Henry's office than any of the Queen's ships would provide for me; and Mother begged me never to talk of it any more, if I didn't want to break her heart"--and I sighed again.

The school-master had a long smooth face, which looked longer from melancholy, and he turned it and his arms over the back of the chair, and looked at me with the watchful listening look his eyes always had; but I am not sure if he was really paying much attention to me, for he talked (as he often did) as if he were talking to himself.

"I wanted to be a soldier," he said, "and my father wouldn't let me. I often used to wish I had run away and enlisted, when I was with Quarter-master McCulloch, of the Engineers (he'd risen from the ranks and was younger than me), in Bermuda."

"Bermuda! That's not very far from South America, is it?" said I, looking across to the big map of the world. "Is it very beautiful, too?"

The school-master's eyes contracted as if he were short-sighted, or looking at something inside his own head. But he smiled as he answered--

"The poet says,

'A pleasing land of drowsy-head it is, Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye; And of gay castles in the clouds that pa.s.s, For ever flushing round a summer sky.'"

"But are there any curious beasts and plants and that sort of thing?" I asked.

"I believe there were no native animals originally," said the school-master. "I mean inland ones. But the fowls of the air and the fishes of the sea are of all lovely forms and colours. And such corals and sponges, and sea-anemones, blooming like flowers in the transparent pools of the warm blue water that washes the coral reefs and fills the little creeks and bays!"

I gasped--and he went on. "The commonest trees, I think, are palms and cedars. Lots of the old houses were built of cedar, and I've heard of old cedar furniture to be picked up here and there, as some people buy old oak out of English farm-houses. It is very durable and deliriously scented. People used to make cedar bonfires when the small-pox was about, to keep away infection. The gardens will grow anything, and plots of land are divided by oleander hedges of many colours."

"Oh--h!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed I, in long-drawn notes of admiration. The school-master's eyes twinkled.

"Not only," continued he, "do very gaudy lobsters and quaint cray-fish and crabs with lanky legs dispute your attention on the sh.o.r.e with the sh.e.l.l-fish of the loveliest hues; there is no lack of remarkable creatures indoors. Monstrous spiders, whose bite is very unpleasant, drop from the roof; tarantulas and scorpions get into your boots, and c.o.c.kroaches, hideous to behold and disgusting to smell, invade every place from your bed to your store-cupboard. If you possess anything, from food and clothing to books and boxes, the ants will find it and devour it, and if you possess a garden the mosquitoes will find you and devour you."

"Oh--h!" I exclaimed once more, but this time in a different tone.

Mr. Wood laughed heartily. "Tropical loveliness has its drawbacks, Jack.

Perhaps some day when your clothes are moulded, and your brain feels mouldy too with damp heat, and you can neither work in the sun nor be at peace in the shade, you may wish you were sitting on a stool in your uncle's office, undisturbed by venomous insects, and cool in a November fog."