by Ellen Wood
“Oh dear! What was the cause?”
“Papa did not tell me. He and Monsieur Petit talked about the heart: they said it was feeble. Oh, how we cried, papa and I! He cried for many days. I hope he will not bring home Thérèsine de Tocqueville!”
The dinner-bell rang out, and we went down. Dr. Frost was putting up the letter which old Fontaine had been translating to him. It was full of directions about Van Rheyn’s health. What he was to do, and what not to do. Monsieur Van Rheyn said his son was not strong: he was not to be allowed to do gymnastics or “boxing,” or to play at rough games, or take violent exercise of any kind; and a small glass of milk was to be given him at night when he went to bed. If the clothes sent over with him were not suitable to the school, or in accordance with the English mode, Dr. Frost was prayed to be at the trouble of procuring him new ones. He was to be brought well on in all the studies necessary to constitute the “gentilhomme,” and especially in the speaking and reading of English.
Dr. Frost directed his spectacles to Charles Van Rheyn, examining him from top to toe. The round, red face, and the strongly-built frame appeared to give nothing but indications of robust health. The doctor questioned him in what way he was not strong — whether he was subject to a cough, or to want of appetite, and other such items. But Van Rheyn seemed to know nothing about it, and said he had always been quite well.
“The father fears we should make him into a muscular Englishman, hence these restrictions,” thought Dr. Frost.
In the afternoon the fellows began to come in thick and threefold: Tod amongst them, who arrived about tea-time. To describe their amazement when they saw Van Rheyn is quite beyond me. It seemed that they never meant to leave off staring. Some of them gave him a little chaff, even that first night. Van Rheyn was very shy and silent. Entirely at his ease as he had been with me alone, the numbers seemed to daunt him; to strike him and his courage into himself.
On the whole, Van Rheyn was not liked. Once let a school set itself against a new fellow at first — and Van Rheyn’s queer appearance had done that much for him — it takes a long time to bring matters round — if they ever are brought round at all. When his hair began to sprout, it looked exactly like pig’s bristles. And that was the first nickname he got: Bristles. The doctor had soon changed his style of coat, and he wore jackets, as we did.
Charles Van Rheyn did not seem inclined to grow sociable. Shy and silent as he had shown himself to them that first evening, so he remained. True, he had no encouragement to be otherwise. The boys continually threw ridicule on him, making him into an almost perpetual butt. Any mistake in the pronunciation of an English word — Van Rheyn never made a mistake as to its meaning — they hissed and groaned at. I shall never forget one occasion. Being asked when that Indian lot intended to arrive (meaning the Scotts), and whether they would make the voyage in a palanquin (for the boys plied him with questions purposely) he answered, “Not in a palanquin, but in a sheep” — meaning ship. The uproar at that was so loud, that some of the masters looked in to know what was up.
Van Rheyn, too, was next door to helpless. He did not climb, or leap, or even run. Had not been used to it, he said. What had he been used to do, then, he was asked one day. Oh, he had sat out in the garden with his mother; and since her death, with Aunt Claribelle, and gone for an airing in the carriage three times a week. Was he a girl? roared the boys. Did he do patchwork? Not now; he had left off sewing when he was nine, answered Van Rheyn innocently, unconscious of the storm of mockery the avowal would invoke. “Pray, were you born a young lady? — or did they change you at nurse?” shouted Jessup, who would have kept the ball rolling till midnight. “I say, you fellows, he has come to the wrong school: we don’t take in girls, do we? Let me introduce this one to you, boys— ‘Miss Charlotte.’” And, so poor Charley Van Rheyn got that nickname as well as the other. Miss Charlotte!
Latin was a stumbling-block. Van Rheyn had learnt it according to French rules and French pronunciation, and he could not readily get into our English mode. “It was bad enough to have to teach a stupid boy Latin,” grumbled the under Latin master (under Dr. Frost), “but worse to have to un-teach him.” Van Rheyn was not stupid, however; if he seemed so, it was because his new life was so strange to him.
One day the boys dared him to a game at leap-frog. Some of them were at it in the yard, and Van Rheyn stood by, looking on.
“Why don’t you go in for it?” suddenly asked Parker, giving him a push. “There is to be a round or two at boxing this evening, why don’t you go in for that?”
“They never would let me do these rough things,” replied Van Rheyn, who invariably answered all the chaffing questions civilly and patiently.
“Who wouldn’t? Who’s ‘they’?”
“My mother and my Aunt Claribelle. Also, when I was starting to come here, my father said I was not to exert myself.”
“All right, Miss Charlotte; but why on earth didn’t the respectable old gentleman send you over in petticoats? Never was such a thing heard of, you know, as for a girl to wear a coat and pantaloons. It’s not decent, Miss Charlotte; it’s not modest.”
“Why do you say all this to me for ever? I am not a girl,” said poor Van Rheyn.
“No? Don’t tell fibs. If you were not a girl you’d go in for our games. Come! Try this. Leap-frog’s especially edifying, I assure you: expands the mind. Won’t you try it?”
Well, the upshot was, that they dared him to try it. A dozen, or so, set on at him like so many wolves. What with that, and what with their stinging ridicule, poor Van Rheyn was goaded out of his obedience to home orders, and did try it. After a few tumbles, he went over very tolerably, and did not dislike it at all.
“If I can only learn to do as the rest of you do, perhaps they will let me alone,” he said to me that same night, a sort of eagerness in his bright grey eyes.
And gradually he did learn to go in for most of the games: running, leaping, and climbing. One thing he absolutely refused — wrestling.
“Why should gentlemen, who were to be gentlemen all their lives, fight each other?” he asked. “They would not have to fight as men; it was not kind; it was not pleasant; it was hard.”
The boys were hard on him for saying it, mocking him fearfully; but they could not shake him there. He was of right blue blood; never caving-in before them, as Bill Whitney expressed it one day; he was only quiet and endured.
Whether the native Rouen air is favourable to freckles, I don’t know; but those on Van Rheyn’s face gradually disappeared over here. His complexion lost its redness also, becoming fresh and fair, with a brightish colour on the cheeks. The hair, growing longer, turned out to be of a smooth brown: altogether he was good-looking.
“I say, Johnny, do you know that Van Rheyn’s ill?”
The words came from William Whitney. He whispered them in my ear as we stood up for prayers before breakfast. The school had opened about a month then.
“What’s the matter with him?”
“Don’t know,” answered Bill. “He is staying in bed.”
Cribbing some minutes from breakfast, I went up to his room. Van Rheyn looked pale as he lay, and said he had been sick. Hall declared it was nothing but a bilious attack, and Van Rheyn thought she might be right.
“Meaning that you have a sick headache, I suppose?” I said to him.
“Yes, the migraine. I have had it before.”
“Well, look here, Charley,” I went on, after thinking a minute; “if I were you, I wouldn’t say as much to any of them. Let them suppose you are regularly ill. You’ll never hear the last of it if they know you lie in bed for only a headache.”
“But I cannot get up,” he answered; “my head is in much pain. And I have fever. Feel my hand.”
The hand he put out was burning hot. But that went with sick headaches sometimes.
It turned out to be nothing worse, for he was well on the morrow; and I need not have mentioned it at all, but for a little matter that arose out o
f the day’s illness. Going up again to see him after school in the afternoon, I found Hall standing over the bed with a cup of tea, and a most severe, not to say horror-struck expression of countenance, as she gazed down on him, staring at something with all her eyes. Van Rheyn was asleep, and looked better; his face flushed and moist, his brown hair, still uncommonly short compared with ours, pushed back. He lay with his hands outside the bed, as if the clothes were heavy — the weather was fiery hot. One of the hands was clasping something that hung round his neck by a narrow blue ribbon; it seemed to have been pulled by him out of the opening in his night-shirt. Hall’s quick eyes had detected what it was — a very small flat cross (hardly two inches long), on which was carved a figure of the Saviour, all in gold.
Now Hall had doubtless many virtues. One of them was docking us boys of our due allowance of sugar. But she had also many prejudices. And, of all her prejudices, none was stronger than her abhorrence of idols, as exemplified in carved images and Chinese gods.
“Do you see that, Master Ludlow?” she whispered to me, pointing her finger straight at the little cross of gold. “It’s no better than a relict of paganism.”
Stooping down, she gently drew the cross out of Van Rheyn’s hot clasped hand, and let it lie on the sheet. A beautiful little cross; the face of our Saviour — an exquisite face in its expression of suffering and patient humility — one that you might have gazed upon and been the better for. How they could have so perfectly carved a thing so small I knew not.
“He must be one of them worshipping Romanics,” said Hall, with horror, snatching her fingers from the cross as if she thought it would give her the ague. “Or else a pagan.”
And the two were no doubt alike in Hall’s mind.
“And he goes every week and says his commandments in class here, standing up before all the school! I wonder what the doctor — —”
Hall cut short her complaints. Van Rheyn had suddenly opened his eyes, and was looking up at us.
“I find myself better,” he said, with a smile. “The pain has nearly departed.”
“We wasn’t thinking of pains and headaches, Master Van Rheyn, but of this,” said Hall, resentfully, taking the spoon out of the saucer, and holding it within an inch of the gold cross. Van Rheyn raised his head from the pillow to look.
“Oh, it is my little cross!” he said, holding it out to our view as far as the ribbon allowed, and speaking with perfect ease and unconcern. “Is it not beautiful?”
“Very,” I said, stooping over it.
“Be you of the Romanic sex?” demanded Hall of Van Rheyn.
“Am I —— What is it Mrs. Hall would ask?” he broke off to question me, in the midst of my burst of laughter.
“She asks if you are a Roman Catholic, Van Rheyn.”
“But no. Why you think that?” he added to her. “My father is a Roman Catholic: I am a Protestant, like my mother.”
“Then why on earth, sir, do you wear such a idol as that?” returned Hall.
“This? Oh, it is nothing! it is not an idol. It does me good.”
“Good!” fiercely repeated Hall. “Does you good to wear a brazen image next the skin! — right under the flannel waistcoat. I wonder what the school will come to next?”
“Why should I not wear it?” said Van Rheyn. “What harm does it do me, this? It was my poor Aunt Annette’s. The last time we went to the Aunt Claribelle’s to see her, when the hope of her was gone, she put the cross into my hand, and bade me keep it for her sake.”
“I tell you, Master Van Rheyn, it’s just a brazen image,” persisted Hall.
“It is a keepsake,” dissented Van Rheyn. “I showed it to Monsieur Mons one day when he was calling on mamma, and told him it was a gift to me of the poor Tante Annette. Monsieur Mons thought it very pretty, and said it would remind me of the great Sacrifice.”
“But to wear it next your skin,” went on Hall, not giving in. Giving in on the matter of graven images was not in her nature. Or on any matter as far as that went, that concerned us boys. “I’ve heard of poor misdeluded people putting horse-hair next ‘em. And fine torment it must be!”
“I have worn it since mamma died,” quietly answered Van Rheyn, who did not seem to understand Hall’s zeal. “She kept it for me always in her little shell-box that had the silver crest on it; but when she died, I said I would put the cross round my neck, for fear of losing it: and Aunt Claribelle, who took the shell-box then, bought me the blue ribbon.”
“That blue ribbon’s new — or almost new — if ever I saw new ribbon,” cried Hall, who was in a mood to dispute every word.
“Oh yes. It was new when I left Rouen. I have another piece in my trunk to put on when this shall wear out.”
“Well, it’s a horrid heathenish thing to do, Master Van Rheyn; and, though it may be gold, I don’t believe Miss Emma Aberleigh would ever have gave countenance to it. Leastways before she lived among them foreign French folks,” added Hall, virtually dropping the contest, as Van Rheyn slipped the cross out of view within his night-shirt. “What she might have come to, after she went off there, Heaven alone knows. Be you going to drink this tea, sir, or be you not?”
Van Rheyn drank the tea and thanked her for bringing it, his gratitude shining also out of his nice grey eyes. Hall took back the cup and tucked him up again, telling him to get a bit more sleep and he would be all right in the morning. With all her prejudices and sourness, she was as good as gold when any of us were ill.
“Not bathe! Not bathe! I say, you fellows, here’s a lark. Bristles thinks he’d better not try the water.”
It was a terribly hot evening, close upon sunset. Finding ourselves, some half-dozen of us, near the river, Van Rheyn being one, the water looked too pleasant not to be plunged into. The rule at Dr. Frost’s was, that no boy should be compelled to bathe against his inclination: Van Rheyn was the only one who had availed himself of it. It was Parker who spoke: we were all undressing quickly.
“What’s your objection, Miss Charlotte? Girls bathe.”
“They would never let me go into cold water at home,” was the patient answer. “We take warm baths there.”
“Afraid of cold water? well I never! What an everlasting pussy-cat you are, Miss Charlotte! We’ve heard that pussies don’t like to wet their feet.”
“Our doctor at Rouen used to say I must not plunge into cold water,” said poor Van Rheyn, speaking patiently as usual, though he must have been nearly driven wild. “The shock would not be good for me.”
“I say, who’ll write off to Evesham for a pair of waterproofs to put over his shoes? Just give us the measure of your foot, Miss Charlotte?”
“Let’s shut him up in a feather-bed!”
“Why, the water’s not cold, you donkey!” cried Bill Whitney, who had just leaped in. “It’s as warm as new milk. What on earth will you be fit for, Bristles? You’ll never make a man.”
“Make a man! What are you thinking of, Whitney? Miss Charlotte has no ambition that way. Girls prefer to grow up into young ladies, not into men.”
“Is it truly warm?” asked Van Rheyn, gazing at the river irresolutely, and thinking that if he went in the mockery might cease.
I looked up at him from the water. “It is indeed, Van Rheyn. Quite warm.”
He knew he might trust me, and began slowly to undress. We had continued to be the best of comrades, and I never went in for teasing him as the rest did; rather shielded him when I could, and took his part.
By the time he was ready to go in — for he did nothing nimbly, and undressing made no exception — some of us were ready to come out. One of Dr. Frost’s rules in regard to bathing was stringent — that no boy should remain in the water more than three minutes at the very extent. He held that a great deal of harm was done by prolonged bathing. Van Rheyn plunged in — and liked it.
“It is warm and pleasant,” he exclaimed. “This cannot hurt me.”
“Hurt you, you great baby!” shouted Parker.
Van
Rheyn had put his clothes in the tidiest manner upon the grass; not like ours, which were flung down any way. His things were laid smoothly one upon another, in the order he took them off, though I dare say I should not have noticed this but for a shout from Jessup.
“Halloa! What’s that?”
Those of us who were out, and in the several stages of drying or dressing, turned round at the words. Jessup, buttoning his braces, was standing by Van Rheyn’s heap, looking down at it. On the top of the flannel vest, exposed to full view, lay the gold cross with the blue ribbon.
“What on earth is it?” cried Jessup, picking it up; and at the moment Van Rheyn, finding all the rest out of the water, came out himself. “Is it a charm?”
