“Yes, I have,” he admitted. “And why the devil — I beg your pardon! — I have done it I can’t imagine. England’s good enough for anybody. There’s too much gadding about everywhere nowadays. And the world seems to me to shrink in consequence. Shrink! — by Jove! — it’s no bigger than a billiard ball!”
Miss Letty smiled and said “sweet” to her bullfinch, who straightway warbled with delightful inaccuracy the quaint air of “The Whistling Coon.”
“Bravo! Bravo!” exclaimed Major Desmond, after listening attentively to the little bird’s performance. “Now, why the chap couldn’t do that for me I can’t understand. I have been chirruping to him till my tongue aches, and couldn’t get a note out of him. Only a wink. You just say ‘sweet,’ and off he starts. Well, and what have you been doing with yourself, Letty? You look very fit.”
“Oh, I’m always ‘fit,’ as you call it,” said Miss Leslie, placidly. “I live the same quiet life month after month, you know, and I suppose it’s scarcely possible for anything to go very wrong with me. I have passed through my storm and stress. The days go by now all in the same even monotonous way.”
Major Desmond took two or three turns up and down the room.
“Well, if you find it even and monotonous to be doing good all your time,” he observed, “I can only say I wish a few more people would indulge in monotony! But don’t you mean to have a change—”
“Oh, I have provided a little distraction for myself,” said Miss Letty, smiling demurely. “I have got a young man to stay with me for a few days.”
“Young man!” exclaimed the major. “Well, upon my word—” Here he stopped short, for at that moment Boy, attired in his best suit of white flannel, his face shining with recent ablutions, and his golden hair brushed into a shining aureola of curls round his brow, trotted into the room with a cheerful confidence and assertiveness quite wonderful to see.
“Ullo, major!” he exclaimed. “Zoo tum to see Boy?”
Major Desmond rose to the occasion at once.
“Of course,” he said; and lifting Boy in his arms he set him on his broad shoulder, “ of course I have come to see you. Impossible to keep away, knowing you to be here!”
Boy chuckled.
“Me turn to stay wiz Kiss-Letty,” he announced.
“So I perceive,” replied the major. And turning to Miss Leslie, he said, “This is the young man, eh? Letty! Well, however did you manage to get hold of him?”
“I will tell you all about it at dinner,” she answered, in a low tone. “You will stay and dine?”
“With pleasure. In fact, I hoped you would ask me,” responded the major frankly, “I’m sick of club food.”
Boy, from his lifted position on the major’s shoulder had been quietly surveying everything in the room. He now pointed to a copy of Burne-Jones’s “Golden Stair.”
“Pitty ladies,” he remarked.
“Yes,” agreed Major Desmond, “very pitty! All so good and sweet and lovely, aren’t they, Boy? Each one sweeter, gooder, lovelier as they come, and all so full of pleasant thoughts that they have almost grown alike. One ideal of goodness taking many forms.”
He spoke to himself now, and not to Boy, and his eyes rested musingly on Miss Letty. She was just setting a large vase of roses on the grand piano. She looked from his distance a very gentle, fragile lady, dainty and elegant too, almost young.
“Kiss-Letty wiz ze roses,” observed Boy.
“Just so,” agreed the Major. “And that is where she always is, Boy. Roses mean everything that is good and sweet and wholesome, and I should not wonder if Kiss-Letty was not something of a rose itself in her way.”
“Oh, Dick!” expostulated Miss Letty. “How can you talk such nonsense to the child! What flattery to an old woman like me!”
“Boy doesn’t know whether I’m talking nonsense or the utmost wisdom,” responded the major, undauntedly; “and as I have often told you, you will never be old to me, Letty. You are the best friend I ever had, and if friends are not the roses of life, I should like to know what flowers they do represent? And what I have said before, I say again, — that I’m ready to marry you tomorrow if you’ll have me.”
“Oh, dear me!” sighed Miss Leslie, with a little tremulous laugh. “Just think! Saying such a thing before Boy!”
“Boy! I guarantee he doesn’t understand a word I have been talking about. Eh, Boy? Do you know what I have been saying to Kiss-Letty?”
Boy looked down at him with a profound air of cherubic wisdom.
“Wants marry Kiss-Letty ‘morrow if ‘ave me,” he said, solemnly.
And then Major Desmond had one of his alarming laughs, a laugh which threatened to dislodge Boy altogether from his position and throw him headlong on the floor. Miss Letty laughed too, but more gently, and on her pale cheeks there was a rosy tinge suggestive of a blush.
“Well, well!” said the major, recovering from his hilarity at last. “Boy is not such a fool as he looks, evidently. There, Letty, I won’t tease you any more. But you are very obstinate, you know, — yes, you are. What does Longfellow say? —
‘Trust no future, howe’er pleasant,
Let the dead past bury its dead:
Act, act, in the living present,
Heart within and God o’erhead.’
That’s wholesome stuff, Letty. I like Longfellow because he is always straight. Some poets go giggetting about in all sorts of dark corners and pop out suddenly upon you with a fire-cracker of a verse which you can’t understand a bit because all the meaning fizzles out while you are looking at it, but Longfellow!—’ Let the dead past bury its dead.’ That’s sense, Letty. And ‘Act, act, in the living present.’ Why, that’s sense, too. And why don’t you do it?”
“I think I try to do it,” answered Miss Letty, quietly. “I like to be useful wherever I go. But for me there is no dead past, as you know: it lives always with me and makes the best and sweetest part of the present.”
“There, I suppose I’ve been putting my foot in it again,” muttered Major Desmond, somewhat disconsolately. “You know I never meant to suggest that you did not do all the good you could, and more than is necessary, in your life, but what I see in Longfellow’s line is that you should ‘Act, act, in the living present’ for yourself Letty. For yourself — make yourself happy, as well as others — make me happy! Now, wouldn’t that be a praiseworthy deed?”
“Not at all,” replied Miss Letty, smiling. “For you deserve to be much happier than I could ever make you. You know there are many charming young women you could marry.”
“No, I don’t know anything of the sort,” said the major, decisively. “The young women of the present day are all hussies, brazen-faced hussies, in my opinion. Girls don’t blush any more nowadays; men blush for them. No, you’re not going to get rid of me in that way, Letty. At my age I’m not going to be such a vain old ass as to go smirking after girls who would only laugh at me behind my back. I don’t believe in philandering, but I believe in love, — yes, love at all ages and in all seasons, — but it must be the real thing and no sham about it.” Here he stopped, for Boy was wriggling on his shoulder and showing unmistakable signs of wishing to go free, so he gently set him down. “There you are, little chap; and there you go, straight for the roses and Kiss-Letty. Lucky rascal!” This as Boy trotted up to Miss Leslie and stretched his short arms caressingly round her soft lace skirts.
“Where’s booful pick-shures?” he demanded. “Boy likes pick-shures.”
Miss Leslie then bethought herself that she had promised he should see some “booful pick-shures” when he came into the drawing-room; and turning towards a pile of editions de luxe in large quarto of famous works such as “Don Quixote,”
“Idylls of the King,” and Dante’s “Divina Commedia,” she hesitated.
“Which shall I give him, Dick?” she asked the major.
“Put ’em all on the floor and let him choose for himself,” was the reply. “I believe in treating childre
n like lambs and birds, — let them frisk and fly about in the fields of general information as they like; choose their own bits of grass, as it were. Now, here’s a quintessence of brain for you.” And he lifted four large volumes off the side-table where they generally stood and placed them on the floor. “Come here, Boy! Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Tennyson. Never heard of ’em, did you? No. But you will probably have the pleasure of making the acquaintance of all four of ’em in a few years. That’s where the wonderful immortality of genius comes in, — the dead author is able to spiritually shake hands with and talk to each and every generation which follows him. There is a wonderful secret in the power of expressed thought if we could only fathom it. Now, whom are you going for first?”
Boy sat down on the floor and considered. One or two of the big books he opened cautiously and looked in, as though expecting to see some strange living object inside; then he shut them quickly, smiling mysteriously to himself the while. Then in the same doubtful way he peeped into the second volume of Dante entitled “Paradiso,” and lo! a picture of angels ascending and descending, one of Doré’s most wonderful conceptions of forms of light portrayed in a dazzling atmosphere, and his blue eyes sparkled; he opened the book wider and wider, till the whole page burst upon his view, whereupon he curled down closer still and stared silently. Miss Letty seated herself in a low chair, and took out some dainty embroidery, and while her swift needle went in and out with a bright-coloured silk behind it, which wove a flower as it moved, she watched the little fellow, and Major Desmond, sitting opposite to her, did the same. The bull-finch began a scrap of his “aria,” but broke off to preen his wing, and there was a silence in the pretty room, while Boy’s innocent little face drooped in a rapture over the pictured scene of heavenly glory. Not a word did he utter, but merely drew a long breath like a sigh, and his eyes darkened with an expression of wistful gravity. Then he turned over a few more pages and came upon that most exquisite “Cross” of Doré’s imagination, where the dying Saviour of the world hangs crucified, but is surrounded at every point by angels. This seemed to fascinate him more than the other, and he remained absorbed for many minutes enrapt and speechless. Some unaccountable influence held Miss Leslie and her old friend, Dick Desmond, silent too. The thoughts of both were very busy. The major had a secret in his soul which, had he declared it, would have well-nigh killed Letitia Leslie. He knew that the man she had loved, and whose memory she honoured with such faithful devotion, had been nothing but a heartless scamp, who in an unguarded moment had avowed to him, Major Desmond, that he was “going to throw over Letty when he got back from India, as he was ‘on’ with a much prettier and wealthier woman.” But he had never “got back from India,” to carry out his intention; death had seized him in the heyday of his career, and Letty believed he had died loving her, and her only. Who would have undeceived her? Who would have poisoned the faith of that simple, trusting heart? Not Dick Desmond, certainly; though he had himself loved her for fully twenty years, and, being of a steadfast nature, had found it impossible to love anyone else. And he was more content to have her as a friend than to have the most charming “other woman” as a wife. And he had jogged on quietly till now — well, now — he was fifty and Letty was forty-five.
“We’re getting on, — by Jove, yes! — we’re getting on,” mused Dick. “And just think what that dead rascal out in India has cost us! Our very lives! All sacrificed! Well, never mind! I would not spoil Letty’s belief in her sweetheart for the world.”
And yet he could not help feeling it to be a trifle “hard,” as he felt the charm of Letty’s quiet presence, and saw Boy bending over Doré’s picture of the Cross.
“If — if she would have had me, we might have had a child of our own like that,” he mused, dolefully, “and as it is, the poor little chap has got a drunken beast for a father and a slovenly fool for a mother. Well, well, God arranges things in a queer way, and I must say without irreverence, it doesn’t seem at all a clear or a just way to me. Why the innocent should suffer for the guilty (and they always do) is a mystery.”
Letty, meanwhile, was thinking too. Such sweet and holy thoughts! — thoughts of her dead lover, her “brave, true Harry,” as she was wont to call him in her own mind, a mind which was as white and pure as the “Taj-Mahal,” and which enshrined this same “Harry” in its midst as an heroic figure of stately splendour and godlike honour. No man was ever endowed by woman with more virtues than Letty gave to her dead betrothed, and her faith in him was so perfect that she had become content with her loneliness because she felt that it was only for a little while, — that soon she and her beloved would meet again never to part. Is it impossible to believe that the steadfast faith and love of a good woman may uplift the departed spirit of an unworthy man out of an uttermost hell by its force and purity? Surely in these days, when we are discovering what marvellous properties there are in simple light, and the passing of sound through space, it would be foolish to deny the probability of noble thought radiating to unmeasured distances, and affecting for good those who are gone from us, whom we loved on earth, and whose present state and form of life we are not as yet permitted to behold. Anyway, whatever wonders lie hidden in waiting for us behind Death’s dark curtain, it may be conceded that the unfaithful soul of the man she loved was in no wise injured by Miss Letty’s remembering tenderness and prayers, but rather strengthened and sustained. She was touched just now by Boy’s admiration of the pictured angels, and to her always thoughtful mind there was something quaint in the spectacle of the little wondering fellow bending over the abstruse great poem of Italy, which arose to life and being through the poet’s own great wrong. Little did the enemies of Dante dream that their names would be committed to lasting execration in a hell so immortal as the “Inferno,” though it is to be deplored that so supreme a writer should have thought it worth his while to honour, by handing down to posterity, the names of those who were as nobodies compared with himself. However, he, like other Old-World poets, was not permitted to see his fate beyond his own lifetime. We are wiser in our generation. We know that the more an author’s work is publicly praised, the more likely it is to die quickly and immediately, and those who desire their thoughts to last, and to carry weight with future generations should pray for the condemnation of their present compeers in order to be in tune with the slow but steady pulsebeat of Fame. One has only to look back through a few centuries to see the list of the despised who are now become the glorious, and a study of contemporary critics on the works of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens is a very wholesome lesson to the untried writer of books who is afraid of the little acrimonies of Fleet Street. To lead the world one must first be crucified. This is the chief lesson of practical Christianity.
“Rather curious,” said Major Desmond, at last, nodding towards Boy, and speaking softly, as if he were in church, “how he seems to like those fanciful things!”
Miss Letty smiled.
“Boy!”
Boy looked up with a start.
“Do you like the picture-book?”
Boy gave no answer in words. He merely nodded and placed one dumpy hand on the “Cross of Angels,” to keep the place. Suddenly, however, he found voice. He had turned over a few more pages, though still careful not to lose the picture he had selected as his favourite, when he stopped and exclaimed, breathlessly, —
“Boy been there!”
The major, with remarkable alertness, went down on the floor beside him and looked over his golden head.
“Boy been there! Nonsense! What! In that wonderful garden with all those flowers and trees and lovely angels flying about! Boy couldn’t get there if he tried!”
Boy looked at him with solemnly reproachful eyes.
“Tell ‘oo Boy bin there,” he repeated. “Boy seen f’owers and booful people! Boy knows vezy well about it!”
The major became interested.
“Oh, all right! I don’t wish to contradict you, little chappie,” he said, with a
cheery and confidential air. “But when were you there last, eh?”
Boy considered. His rosy lips tightened and his fair brows puckered in a frown of mental puzzlement.
“Me dunno,” he replied at last, “long, long time ‘go, awfoo long!” And he gave a deep sigh. “Dunno ‘ow long,” — here he studied the picture again with an approving air of familiarity, “ but Boy ‘members it: pitty p’ace, pitty f’owers, all bwight, awfoo bwight!— ‘ess! me ‘members it!”
The major got up from his knees, dusted his trousers, and looked quizzically at Miss Letty.
“Odd little rascal,” he observed, sotto voce. “Doesn’t know a bit what he is jabbering about.”
Miss Letty’s soft blue eyes rested on the child thoughtfully.
“I am not sure about that, Dick,” she said. “We are rather arrogant, we old worldly-wise people, in our estimate of children. Boy may remember where he came from, and the imagination of a great artist may have recalled to him a true reality.”
Her voice was very sweet, her face expressed a faith and hope which made it beautiful; and Dick Desmond, in his quick impulsive fashion, caught one of her little white hands and raised it to his lips with all the gallant grace of a soldier and a gentleman.
“God bless you, Letty!” he said, heartily. “I know very well where you came from, and I don’t want any picture but yourself to remind me of the fact.”
CHAPTER IV.
THAT evening, after Boy had gone to bed, Miss Leslie and the major discussed the possibilities of his future with great and affectionate interest.
“Of course,” said Desmond, “it is a splendid chance for the boy, — but Letty, that is just the very reason that I am afraid he will not be allowed to have it. The affairs of humanity are arranged in a very curiously jumbled-up fashion, and I have always found that when some specially good luck appears about to favour a deserving person, something unfavourable comes in the way and prevents him getting it. And Fortune frequently showers her choicest gifts on the most unworthy scoundrels, male and female, that burden this earth’s surface. It’s odd — it’s unfair — but it’s true.”
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 22) Page 433
