Читать книгу Collected Short Stories, Vol. 18 - Fred M. White - Страница 4

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WHEN I am tired and weary of the world, there is one spot where I can find balm for the vexed spirit and rest for an overburdened mind. You would pass it day by day and year by year, never dreaming of the paradise that lies within the city walls. All the passer-by sees is a long blank wall facing the hot dusty street, and nothing to break its dreary monotony save an iron-studded door, like the entrance to a jail. How should you know that beyond it lies all that remains of an erstwhile flourishing monastery of the Dominicans, and that the half-effaced inscription over the grim door points to the fact that, at the suppression of the religious houses, 'the site was granted to John Le Marchant and Raphael Hutchinson, Esquires?' Also, that early in Elizabeth's reign, it belonged to the Fotheryngsbys of Fotheryngsby Court; and further, as every student of Welsh Border history can tell, it is known as the Fotheryngsby Hospital to this day; for in the year of grace 1614 one Sir Thomas Fotheryngsby erected within the walls a quadrangular building to contain 'ten servitors, a Corporal to be over them, and also for a chaplain for their souls' good; five of them to be such as have borne arms, and five such as have served their masters well and faithfully.' And furthermore, 'that each Hospitaller at his first admittance should have a fustian suit of ginger colour of a soldier-like fashion, seemly laced; a hat with a band of white, and red slippers; a soldier-like jerkin with half-sleeves, and a square shirt down half the thigh, with a moncado or Spanish cap; a soldier-like sword with a belt to wear as he goeth abroad; a cloak of red cloth lined with a baise of red, and reaching to the knee; and a seemly gown to be worn of red cloth reaching down to the ankle, lined likewise with red baise, to be worn in walks and journeys.' All of which, with the exception of the sword, has been studiously observed to this very day in the year of our Lord 1888.

Here is such a change from the dusty Widemarsh Street as will startle and delight you. Close the door behind and shut out the workaday world, for, in the historic words of the Quaker, it hath no business here. There is a dim passage opening out suddenly into a quadrangle, formed of twelve houses, four a side; and on the other the ancient chapel, where the chaplain, who is no longer an inmate, officiates; a wonderfully quaint building, containing on the reading-desk a veritable chain-Bible. The houses are small, but neat and clean; and round each doorway, far into the flagged court, are a profusion of flowering plants in pots, making the quiet spot a veritable garden. We have stepped back into the past. There are clean old men and women clad in the 'cloak of red cloth lined with a baise of red;' and for the latter pensioners, the 'seemly gown,' also of ruddy hue. Beyond, there is another passage leading to the gardens, filled with peas and beans, and such produce as the owners care to cultivate; and then, when you have noted and admired the Arcadian neatness, you will have another surprise; for exactly opposite you there stands the ivy-mantled ruin of the old monastery, its roofless walls showing the bright blue sky beyond, with a peep of the same boundless heaven through an open chimney, where now the swallows and sparrows build. Where once the rushes were strewn underfoot, lies a carpet of emerald turf; great heads of foxglove rear themselves on the open hearthstone; the very preaching-cross where vast multitudes were wont to assemble to hear exhortations in time of war, or prayer in the hour of disaster, still remains in the midst of this silent silvan beauty, presided over by the invisible spirit of Peace.

Every inch of this ground is teeming with historic interest. For a small honorarium the Corporal will shake his white head, and pour out his store of antiquarian lore for the stranger's behoof, embellishing his history with certain scraps of information, easy to one long versed in the art of concocting historical fiction, yet at the same time believing every word that falls so solemnly from his own lips.

One bright August morning, some two years since, or it may be more, for time stands still in Fotheryngsby Hospital, two of its inmates sat under the shady side of the refectory wall, facing the gardens. One was an old man, so old that his clean shaven face was one mass of wrinkles; the other, somewhat more robust and hearty, who listened politely to his senior's amiable chatter with some show of interest, for the discussion was warlike, not to say bloodthirsty, to the last degree. Their gray heads were close together, contrasting not inharmoniously with the scarlet coats; on the breasts of each gleamed more than one silver medal with its parti-coloured clasp.

'It's in the blood, Jacob,' said the younger man, reflectively sucking his pipe. 'There was that lad of mine just the same. He might have been the old Squire's body-servant, and a good place too; but nothing would do but soldiering. He fell at Balaklava, in the charge. He was a good lad, was Jim.'

'They was like we, Ben. There's a mort of trouble in bein' a father, not as I ever had time to think much of that sort of thing. When I was a boy, it was a sore time for wives and sweethearts. I'm ninety-five, Mr Choppin—ninety-five next Sunday, and I fought under the Duke at Waterloo——'

'It was in Balaklava harbour,' returned Mr Choppin, not to be outdone, 'as I see my most active service—A.B. on the old Ajax. It was there as Master Frank got killed——'

'And he never smiled again,' interrupted Mr Jacob Dawson, in the tone of one who repeats a well-learnt lesson or an oft-repeated story. 'I've heerd the tale afore, Benjamin, though as sad a one as I ever heerd tell.'

Ben Choppin looked into space meditatively, perfectly unconscious, as was the last speaker, of the irony underlying his words. It was a hot still morning, with the gentlest of breezes ruffling the ivy mantle of the ruin—a time for rest and retrospection.

'He never smiled again, Jacob,' Choppin resumed approvingly; 'leastwise, not till Miss Sylvia was born, and that was twelve years afterwards. There was three besides her and Master Frank, all of 'em dyin' of infantcy'—as if childhood was some fell disease—'the rest was Turkish Bonds, I'm told.'

Mr Dawson nodded his head approvingly, somewhat hazy in his mind, as well he might be, as to whether the bonds in question represented another and more virulent complaint peculiar to children of tender years.

'There was a lad for you,' continued the narrator, with rising enthusiasm—'a gentleman and a Goldsworthy every inch of him. And, mind you, though he was a midshipman aboard his father's own ship, there was no favour for him.—Well, we was just laughing together—for he always had a pleasant word for everybody—when plump comes a ball and cuts him right down.'

'And then he said, faintlike: "Ben, old fellow, never mind me, but fetch the dear old gov'nor,"' Jacob Dawson exclaimed parenthetically. 'Then you lifts him—all, all white from the pain as he pretends he can't feel. That's what I calls being something like an Englishman.'

'Jacob,' asked Choppin suspiciously, 'where did you get that last bit from?'

'That bit,' Dawson returned, with some show of pride, 'is my own. Still, I won't make a pint on it, Ben, if you do object.'

But Ben was so overcome that he could find no words to reprimand the Corporal for his unparalleled audacity in spoiling the symmetry of his best story.

Interruptions, so far as they were quotations from the original text, were permitted, and indeed accepted as a compliment; but never before, in the course of fourteen years' friendship, had Mr Dawson ventured to interpolate ideas of his own into the story-teller's polished narrative.

It was, after all, a commonplace tale enough. Captain Goldsworthy, the last of a good old Downshire family, had commanded the Ajax in the Black Sea squadron during the Crimean War; and Ben Choppin, a Downshire man, had been boatswain's mate on board that gallant ship. It was to the death of Captain Goldsworthy's only son that the threadbare story related; but how the Captain came to be a pensioner in the same Hospital as his humble follower was one of those points which Choppin was somewhat hazy upon.

But this was an old story, likewise the history of an honest single-minded gentleman, who refused to accept his pension on the ground that he had sufficient for his own wants without drawing an income he might not earn. We hear the rest of the sorry details often enough; the simple individuals who listen to the voice of the charmer, and fondly imagine that every financial genius who floats a bogus company risks his time and money with the philanthropic intention of finding the public a safe investment for spare capital at the rate of twenty per cent.

Goldsworthy asked for nothing when the crash came save a roof, other than that of the poor-house, to cover his gray hairs. Proud to the last degree, nothing savouring of charity would he accept; and so it came to pass that, when he was jestingly offered a shelter in the Blackfriars Hospital, he surprised the patron by accepting the offer. He had no encumbrances, no one depending upon him but his daughter Sylvia, a girl now in her twentieth year. The townspeople who knew him and his story wondered that he should care to have the girl with him in company with decayed soldiers and servants; but even in the midst of these poor surroundings there was a certain innate refinement in the pair that caused their fellow-inmates to look up to and respect them.

But Sylvia Goldsworthy, lady bred and born to her dainty finger-tips, was no idle heroine of fiction, bewailing her hard lot, and waiting for the handsome lover to carry her off to his ancestral castle. There was work to be done in Castleford, music-lessons to be given to more or less refractory pupils, and painting lessons at the Ladies' College. A girl who can support herself two years in London studying at the Royal Academy and College of Music, does not fear to face the ordeal of country-town drudgery.

'I wonder,' the Captain would say, nodding his gray head with the air of a connoisseur over some pretty landscape, or listening to some brilliant piece of music, for the Hospital home boasted a piano—'I wonder you did not stay in London, Sylvia. Think what a future was before you!'

'And what was to become of you? Why will you persist in thinking me to be a genius? Oh, I assure you there are hundreds in London far more clever than I who can scarcely get a living. Besides, it was so lonely, and I am far happier here.'

Such conversations were by no means rare in the cottage. Then the Captain would nod disapprovingly, as he contemplated this modesty of true genius. 'I sometimes think, I don't know why, that you had some reason more powerful than loneliness for leaving your work in town.'

Sylvia said nothing, but bent her head closer over the canvas upon which she was engaged. There was a little brighter colour in her cheeks, though her eyes were dimmer than before. 'At any rate, I did my duty,' she replied; and some instinct warned the Captain that he had best seek no further information. There was that perfect confidence between them that exists so rarely between parent and child, yet without the vulgar curiosity which impels some fathers to probe into every secret thought and fancy.

But Ben Choppin, smoking his pipe in the peaceful sunshine, with his bosom-friend the Corporal, knew nothing of this, except that he would have cheerfully laid down his life for his young mistress, as he would persist in calling her. Not a single bit of drudgery was there in the Captain's cottage but owed something of its cleanliness to the activity of the erstwhile boatswain. Even at the moment of his perturbation at Jacob Dawson's audacity, the sight of a large tin basin of unshelled peas attracted his attention, and in the labour of shelling these, his late ill-humour vanished with every cracking hull.

'I heard last night,' he continued, in the pauses of this somewhat unmanly occupation, 'as the Hospital had been sold, Jacob.'

'We shan't have to turn out, Benjamin?' asked the Corporal, startled out of his philosophic calm. 'That don't mean as the place is to be pulled down?'

'They couldn't do it if they wanted to, 'cause Blackfriars is endowed. You see, it's just this way: one of the kings of England granted the Fotheryngsby estates on condition that they always kept up this place for such as we. The new gentleman at Fotheryngsby Court will be our new patron, that's all.'

'I hope he won't forget the Christmas 'bacca and plum-pudding, and beer,' Dawson returned practically. 'We must give him a 'int of that 'ere, Ben.'

'I don't think he's likely to forget that, because he's a soldier—a young one, it's true, but still a soldier; and they say he's very rich, far richer than Sir Reginald Fotheryngsby, our present patron.'

'Who is richer than our patron?' asked a voice at this moment, as another Hospitaller stole upon the old men unawares. Choppin looked up, and touched the brim of his cap to his fellow-resident, Captain Goldsworthy.

He was somewhat younger than the others, though his hair was white; and his blue eyes burned with all the fire and brilliancy of youth. His face, tanned by long exposure to tropical suns and ocean gales, bore a kindly, gentle expression, totally unsoured by misfortune; yet the face, and the slim upright figure, clad in a somewhat faded uniform of a Commander in Her Majesty's navy, bore the unmistakable hallmark of gentleman; the same as he did when on Sundays, in his 'seemly coat of red,' he attended with the rest in the Hospital chapel. Mr Choppin touched his cap again, and unfolded his budget of news at much greater length than before.

'It will not affect us, as you say, Dawson,' remarked the Captain with a smile; 'but I am truly sorry for Sir Reginald all the same. Why, he and I were boys together, gracious me! half a century ago; and now he is forced to sell his very house, and I——' He broke off abruptly, and commenced to pace the narrow strip of turf in front of the two old men, as if it had been the Ajax quarter-deck, striding so many measured paces backwards and forwards, with his eyes fixed upon the soft August sky. Memory, finding us with mental food as we grow older, was busy among the faded rose-leaves of the past 'He was a sailor, too, like all his race. He joined me in '45 on the Bloodhound; or was it the Ocean Hawk?—I forget which.'

'The Greyhound, Captain,' Choppin struck in, suspending his occupation for the moment; 'Captain Seymour, afterwards Admiral Sir Guyer Seymour, Commander. It was on that very voyage that your honour got mastheaded for——'

'It's a great piece of presumption on your part to insinuate such a thing,' the Captain replied gravely, a merry twinkle in his eye, nevertheless. 'Dear me! how time changes us all, and to think—— Who is to be our new patron, Ben?'

'Mr, at least, Lieutenant Debenham, of Leckington Hall. Your honour will be sure to remember old Squire Debenham.'

'Ay; I remember him well enough,' Goldsworthy replied with a sternness of face and manner which fairly startled the boatswain.—'Can this news be true?'

'Well, sir, if his steward—who used to be an honest man, and a good blacksmith to boot, before he became rich at other people's expense, and is own brother-in-law to myself—is any judge, it is sure to be.'

But the Captain caught but faintly the drift of this complicated and not too complimentary explanation. So perturbed did he seem, that the Corporal, who had remained silent through the interview, ventured to heal this anxiety by the information that the Hospitallers might still look forward with tolerable equanimity to their usual good cheer at the festive season.

'Do you imagine that is all we think of?' asked the Captain sternly. 'Pah! man, I know one who would rather starve than taste his hospitality;' and saying these words, the speaker turned abruptly towards his cottage, leaving the unhappy Corporal on the verge of tears.

In the tiny cottage parlour, gay with flowers, and bright as the hands of a refined woman could render it, Sylvia sat at her easel painting, with the shadows cast by the chapel walls throwing her face in the shade. A sweet girlish face, a more beautiful copy of the Captain's, looked up at him from a frame of deep chestnut-hued hair, and as her eyes encountered his and she saw the unhappiness there, she laid her brush aside and placed one hand lovingly upon his shoulder. 'What is it, dear?' she asked simply.

'The Hospital is sold; and to whom, do you think? None other than the son of my friend, Crichton Debenham, the scoundrel who induced me to place my all where he declared his money was—the wretch who persuaded me to buy into a concern so that he might come out unscathed.—Sylvia, we must say good-bye to Blackfriars.'

'But, father, the son should not be answerable for the father. He may not be such another; nay, I am convinced he is not. Hugh Debenham I know to be one of the noblest and best of men.' Sylvia spoke quickly, almost passionately, her eyes bright and glittering, though her cheeks were pale and her hands trembled.

The Captain, hard and stern, changed and quivered strangely as he caught the light in his daughter's eyes and read its meaning. 'You—you know him?' he asked. 'And yet you never told me.'

Sylvia bowed her head under the gentleness of this reproach. 'It was in London,' she faltered, 'months ago, and we used to meet where I was a teacher. I—I will tell you all presently. Then one day he—he asked me to be his wife.'

'And you refused him.—Ah, I am glad of that.'

'I did not, I dared not. I was cowardly enough to run away. You see, if we had been in the same station in life, I might have thought——' She could say no more, another word would have choked her.

The Captain drew her closer to his side and kissed her gently. 'This is a pleasant finding,' said he, with a jocularity he was far from feeling. 'What hypocrites you women are! I should like to know, very much like to know, how this thing is going to end?'

'The very thing,' said Sylvia, smiling through her tears, 'that gives me so much anxiety.'