So one wind braced him to titanic effort, and another confirmed him in patient toil, and another relaxed both mind and members in merited ease; so he came to know the birds about him, almost as a shepherd knows his sheep, and even to discover some individuality beneath the feathers. There was one huge sparrow, a perfect demon for the crumbs which Carlton strewed every morning near the scene of his day’s work, so that he might not be quite alone. The lowest human qualities came out in this small bird until finally, and with infinite ingenuity, it was trapped, rationed, and compelled to watch a feast of the smaller fry through the wires of a cage. Then there was a robin which in time came to perch upon the solitary’s hat while he worked; only in the beginning were there crumbs in the brim. And again there was a starling that entertained him by the hour together, and all for love, from an elder-bush close to the shed.
But each of these years brought riper knowledge, until God’s leafy acre, with its canopy of changing sky, both teeming with life to his quickened vision, became not only the outcast’s second Bible, but all the almanac he needed or possessed. With no newspaper to distract his mind, and perhaps not a letter or a human voice for months, it was on bird and leaf that he came to rely for the time of year; while the field of his research was greatly extended by nocturnal exercise upon the pine-serrated plateau beyond the church. Now the tips of the chestnut twigs might bulge and bud, but spring was not spring until the plover paraded his new black breast, or a peewit rose screaming at the midnight intruder. All summer the small bird was king; hedgerows twittered; crumbs were scorned; man was jilted for slug and worm. But the end came in sight with the homebred mallard, flying feebly in his summer feathers; and the flight of the wild duck was the end of all. The third year found Carlton watching for the mallard as his bird of ill-omen, and redoubling his efforts while his ear prepared for the shrill music of the full-grown quills in final flight. Harsh experience had taught him how little he could do, with any certainty or any continuity, in the season when the little birds and he were best friends.
It was late in May, and the church would soon be hidden for another summer; meanwhile Carlton was still at work upon his transept window, in a corner which a great stack of undressed sandstone made invisible from the lane, as it already was from the road. The folk from other villages were beginning to stop and watch him longer than he liked, and he did not care to be a cynosure at all. He only asked to build his church in peace, and with it an example which should do at least a little to counteract the one he had already set; and he meant both for his own people, not for the outlying world. He really feared a reaction in his favour on the part of the sentimental outsider. It would do him fresh injury in the eyes of many of whom he honestly longed to win back in the end. Moreover, his head was very level in these days. He saw nothing heroic in his own conduct. With all his wish to undo a little of the harm that he had done to others, there was a very human eagerness to redeem his own past, so far as that was possible upon earth. Carlton was never unaware of this incentive. He entertained no illusions about himself, nor did he wish to create any in others. For example, there was his work. It was never easy, sometimes hopeless, always fascinating. But the man himself desired no credit for devotion to labour which he loved for its own sake, and in which he was still capable (but no longer ashamed) of forgetting the past.
The transept window engrossed him to the last degree; mullion or no mullion, it involved the largest arch that Carlton had yet attempted; and already it alone had occupied many weeks. The patterns had been the easy recreation of his winter evenings, but it had taken him all the spring to reproduce a score of these in solid stone; for though the walls were coursed rubble, the windows must have ashlar facings, to be as they had been before; and ashlar is to coursed rubble what broadcloth is to Harris tweed. What with indefatigable labour, however, and the general proficiency which he had now attained in his self-taught craft, Carlton had his jambs up by the end of May, and his arched framework fixed between them, all ready to support the arch itself. He was now engaged upon the nine wedge-shaped stones to form the latter, working each to the fine ashlar finish, as also to the exact dimensions of its fellow in tin, wood, or cardboard, and laying them in couples on alternate sides of the wooden centre, so as to weight it evenly as the book ordained.
It was the middle of the afternoon, and the quiet corner was already in shadow; beyond, the wet grass glistened, for the day was a duel between sun and rain. Carlton was taking the busier advantage of a brilliant interval, and roughing out a new voussoir with the bold precision of the expert mason. Ting, ting, ting, fell the hammer on the cold-chisel; the soft, wet sandstone peeled off in curling flakes; the quick strokes rang like a bell through the cool and cleanly air. It had been honest rain, and it was honest sunshine. The green world broke freshly upon all the senses. Every colour was more vivid than its wont, from the reddish yellow of the rain-soaked stone to lilac and laburnum in the rectory garden; from the creamy castles of the full-blown chestnuts to the emerald sprays which were all that the slower elms had as yet to show against an uncertain sky. Every inch of earth, every blade and petal, was contributing its quota to the sweet summer smell. The birds sang; the bees hummed; the hammer rang. And Carlton was so intent upon his task, so bent upon making up for time lost that day, that it might have been mid-winter for the little he looked and listened; yet he heard and saw none the less; and his face was filled with quiet peace.
In appearance he was many years older; at a distance he might have passed for the father of the man who had drawn a larger congregation than the old church would hold. His hair was grey; his beard was grizzled. Incessant manual toil had aged him even more by giving his body a constant stoop. And the hands were the hands of a labouring man. But the brown eye, once inflammable, was now all gentleness and humility; the whole face was sweetened and exalted by solitude and suffering; in expression more patient, less austere; though the untrained beard and moustache, hiding mouth and jaw, had something to do with this.
To his gentleness, however, there was striking testimony even now, as his hammer rained ringing blows upon the cold-chisel; for within easy reach of it perched the tame robin on another stone, quizzically watching the performance. Then, in the same moment, three things happened. The robin flew away, Carlton turned his head, and the ringing blows broke off.
XXI
AT THE FLINT HOUSE
“The child must have a name, Jasper.”
“All right, you give it one. That’s nothun to me.”
“But he must be christened properly.”
“Why must he?”
“Oh, Jasper, if you don’t fare to believe, his mother did, poor thing!”
“And a lot of good that did her . . . but do you have your way. Make a canting little Christian of him if you like. Do you think I care what you do with the brat? I know what I’d do with it, if that wasn’t for the law!”
So, in the early days, while Robert Carlton was still learning to live alone, his son was trundled across the heath to Linkworth, and there christened George after no one in particular. Followed the remaining period of extreme infancy, during which Jasper Musk seldom set eyes upon the child, and was more or less oblivious to its concrete existence. Then one afternoon, the second summer, as Jasper sat smoking at a back window, in the big chair to which his sciatica would bind him from morning till night, there was a shuffling and a grunting in the passage, and in came the child on all fours, with the lamp of adventure alight and shining in grimy cheeks and great grey eyes.
Musk took the pipe from his mouth, and met the small intruder with an expressionless stare. Had his wife been by, no doubt he would have bidden her take the little devil out of his sight; he had done so before, using a harsher and more literal epithet for choice. But this afternoon he was alone, and very weary of his solitary confinement. So for the moment Musk sat stolidly intent; and the child, after a halt induced by the creaking of the open door and the austere apparition within, advanced once more, wit
h the infantile equivalent for a cheer.
“Well, you’ve got a cheek!” said Jasper, grimly.
The boy had reached his legs, and was pulling himself up by the particularly lame one, chattering the while in the foreign tongue of one year old. Musk winced and muttered, then suddenly encircled the small body with his mighty hands, and set the child high and dry upon his knee.
“And now what?” said he. “And now what?”
For answer a chubby hand flew straight at his whiskers, grabbed them unerringly, and pulled without mercy, but with yells of delight that brought Musk’s wife in hot haste from a far corner of the rambling house. In the doorway she threw up her arms.
“Oh, Georgie!” she cried aghast. “You naughty boy — you naughty boy!”
Jasper had already created a diversion in favour of his whiskers, and was in the act of blowing open an enormous watch when his wife appeared.
“Now you take and mind your own business,” snapped he, “and we’ll mind ours . . . Blow — can’t you blow? Like this, then — p-f-f-f — and there you are! Now you try; blow, and that’ll open again.”
Georgie walked before the summer was over; and this was the year in which Jasper scarcely set foot to the ground, so he made use of the child from the first. Now it was his pipe, now his spectacles, now the newspaper; these were the first familiar objects which the child came to know by name before he could speak; and he never saw any one of the three without taking it as straight as he could toddle to the great grey man in the chair.
Mrs. Musk suddenly found half her work with Georgie taken entirely off her hands. She was even quicker over another discovery. Jasper would not own that he had taken to the child; in her presence, on the contrary, he ignored its very existence as utterly as heretofore. Yet now every day she could have found them together at most hours; only she knew better.
Cheerless environment for this new life — a gloomy old house — a grim old couple. Nevertheless, and in very spite of all the circumstances of his birth, Georgie from the first evinced that temperament which is a sun unto itself. An expansive gaiety was his normal mood, and for years the only variant was a terrible and overwhelming indignation with all his world. He was, in fact, an entirely healthy little savage, with all the wild spirits and facile affections of his age, and no exemption from its traditional ills. Once he had croup so severely that two doctors came in the middle of the night, and Georgie never forgot their grave faces and his grandfather’s grim one at the foot of the bed. Indeed, the scene formed his first permanent impression, though the sequel was more memorable in itself. Georgie seemed to go to sleep for days and days, and to awake in another world, though the bed was the same, and the medicine-bottles, and the singing kettle; for it was day-time, and the room full of sun, and the doctors gone; but in the sunlight there stood instead the loveliest lady whom Georgie had beheld in his three or four years of earthly experience. Thereupon he lay with his firm little mouth pursed up, his grey eyes greater than even their wont, and his mind at work upon some surreptitious teaching of his grandmother. It was a very simple question that he asked in the end, but it made the lady kiss him and cry over him in a way he never could understand.
“Are you a angel?” Georgie had said.
Gwynneth happened to be somewhat morbidly aware of her own poverty in angelic qualities, though it was not this that made her cry. She was alone at the hall for the winter, which Sir Wilton and Lady Gleed were spending upon a well-beaten track abroad, while Sidney was still at Cambridge. Gwynneth also might have drifted from Cannes to Nice, and from Nice to Mentone, for she had been taken from school on Lydia’s marriage, and assigned a permanent position at the side of Lady Gleed. In this capacity the girl had not shone, though her peculiar character had lost nothing by the duty and faithful practice of consistent self-suppression. On the other hand, there was the demoralising sense of personal superiority, which was thrust upon Gwynneth at every turn of this companionship, causing her to take an unhealthy interest in her own faults, in order to preserve any humility at all; for she was full of mental and of bodily vigour, and her aunt was signally devoid of both. Consequently when Lydia petitioned to go instead (having become a mother to her great disgust, and demanding an immediate separation from her infant), the proposal was adopted to the equal satisfaction of all concerned. Gwynneth, for her part, was very sorry not to travel and see the world; but she knew, from a tantalising experience, that hotel life was all that one could count upon seeing with Lady Gleed; and from every other point of view it was infinite relief to be alone. Literally alone she was not, since the little German housekeeper never left the hall. But Fraulein Hentig was a self-contained and entirely tactful companion, with whom it was possible to enjoy the delights of solitude while escaping the disadvantages. The two were very good friends.
Gwynneth was now in her twentieth year, a tall and graceful girl, albeit with the slight stoop of the natural student that she was. At her school she had won all available honours, but it was not a modern school, and in those days such as Gwynneth had no definite knowledge of any wider arena. So she left her school without great regret. She had learnt all that they could teach her there. And she taught herself twice as much in stolen hours spent in the hall library, which had been bought with the place, and hitherto only used by Sidney on wet days. But now there was no need to steal an hour; the girl’s time was all her own, and she held high revel among the books. Moreover, it was the dawn of the University Extension system, and Gwynneth heard of a course of lectures upon English literature, only eight miles from Long Stow, just in time to attend. To do so she had to fight a weekly battle with the coachman, but Fraulein Hentig took her side, and the opposition did not endure. Gwynneth took voluminous notes and wrote elaborate essays, bringing to the whole interest that energy, thoroughness and enthusiasm, to which, though each was an essential characteristic, she was only now enabled to give free play. Yet the young girl was no mere bookworm, though at this stage of her career she seemed little else. It was a phase of intellectual absorption, but all the while it needed but a touch of human interest in her life to awake the deeper nature of the eternal woman. Such awakening had come with the most alarming period of Georgie’s illness. Gwynneth was starting for her lecture, primed with sharp pencils and her new essay, when she heard in the village that two doctors had been at the Flint House in the night. She did not go to that lecture at all, but for two days and nights was scarcely an hour absent from the bedside of a little boy whom she had barely known by sight before. And his first comprehensible words formed the question which Gwynneth, worn out by watching, had answered in the fashion he could never understand.
Well, she was destined to be the boy’s good angel, though he never mistook her for one again; and sometimes she looked the part. The dark eyes, so ardent in the pursuit of knowledge, or of any other of her heart’s desires, could yet sparkle with childish glee, or soften with the tenderness of the ideal Madonna. The self-willed mouth and nose were only sweet as Georgie saw them; and none but he knew the warmth of the pale brown cheek or the crisp electric touch of the dark brown hair. Little knowing it before, and never dreaming of it now, Gwynneth had long been hankering for all that the little child gave her out of the fulness and purity of his tiny heart. She supposed that she was happy because at last she was being of some trifling use to somebody; it made her think more of herself. Looking deeper (as she thought), through the deceptive lenses of her inner consciousness, Gwynneth took a still less favourable view of her latest interest in life. It was that and not much more to the imperfect introspection of her morbid mood.
Nevertheless, this was the happiest time that she had ever known. Georgie and she became inseparable, even when the boy was well again; and on him Gwynneth was really lavishing all the love and tenderness which had been gathering in her heart since the hour when she had kissed a dead forehead for the last time. The fact was that the girl had an inborn capacity for passionate devotion, and was now once more enabled to indu
lge this sweet instinct to the full. She still went to her weekly lecture, read every book in the syllabus, and wrote her essay with as much care for detail as her innate energy would permit. Nor was her work the worse for the counter-attraction which now filled her young life to the brim. Georgie spoke of Gwynneth as his “lady,” with a sufficient emphasis upon the possessive pronoun, and to her by a succession of pet names of their joint invention.
Croup is an enemy that lives to fight another day, as Dr. Marigold said when he paid his last visit; and that word was sufficient for the Musks. Thenceforward Georgie had only to sneeze to be put to bed, where he wasted many days before the winter was over. But Georgie was not to be depressed, and as Gwynneth would come and play with him for hours it was perhaps no wonder. They both had some imagination; one showed it by extemporary flights of downright romance, and the other by following these with immense eyes and not a syllable of his own from beginning to end. Then and there they would dramatise the story, for it was usually one of adventure, and Georgie had a clockwork paddle-steamer called the Dover, which sailed the bed manned by cardboard sailors of Gwynneth’s making. In these seas the roughest weather was experienced in crossing Georgie’s legs, but the best fun was in the polar regions, where the vessel lay wedged for months between two pillows, while the crew hunted bear and walrus over Georgie’s person, and dug winter quarters under the clothes.
One day, when he really had a cold, and had fallen asleep upon the icebergs, Gwynneth took upon herself to search the cupboard for some picture-book which he might not have seen before; and in so doing she came across the photograph of a comely young woman, not much older than herself, which compelled her attention rather than her curiosity, for she guessed at once who it was. Moreover, the face was striking and interesting in itself. The eyes had a strange look, half reckless, half defiant, but, even in a faded and inartistic photograph, of a subtle fascination. There was some slight coarseness of eyelid and nostril; but for all that it was a fine expression, full of courage and full of will. The will was obvious in the mouth. It had the strength of Musk himself. Yet there was something about the mouth — so firm — so full — that Gwynneth did not like. She could not have said what it was, but she preferred looking into the eyes. They fascinated her, and she did not lift her own eyes from them till Mrs. Musk entered and caught her thus engaged.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 199
