Читать книгу The Idol of the Blind - Gallon Tom - Страница 7

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THE CAPTAIN PLAYS THE KNIGHT-ERRANT.

Comethup saw nothing of Brian for two days after that, and, although he seized the opportunity of making amends to the captain, he said nothing of the adventure to that gentleman. Indeed, Comethup had been haunted by the ghost he had seen, in quite a different sense from that which might have been expected, and the captain seemed altogether unequal to the occasion. He could think of nothing else; was, indeed, so desperately sorry for that lonely little ghost that it lost the terrors it might otherwise have had for him, and melted his heart with pity for its dreadful fate. He lay awake at night, thinking of it in that garden of shadows and decay, wandering alone among the trees, and always with that appealing cry upon its lips. He tried, in a subtle fashion, to put leading questions to the captain, in an endeavour to discover something of the condition of ghosts in general, and little ones in particular; but the captain, being of an eminently practical turn of mind, dismissed the subject curtly enough. So Comethup was thrown on his own resources.

On the evening of the second day, after he had left the captain at the gate, and had saluted him in the fashion they always adopted when Brian was not present, Comethup felt that he could stand this state of uncertainty no longer. He remembered that the captain had once told him that a brave man never shrinks from anything that will help his fellows—a wise and beautiful thing, which Comethup had not forgotten; and surely a ghost, and such a little one, was one of his fellows. Comethup was not quite certain what a ghost was, or what position in the scheme of things it really occupied; but, with that dogged determination which lay behind all the gentleness of his character, he determined, in his simple way, that he could not sleep in his warm and sweet-smelling bed another night while the ghost wandered crying about that desolate garden. With a horrible fear tugging at his heart, and yet with a childish courage urging him on which was greater and stronger than the fear, he took his cap and stole out of the house, and ran as fast as his legs would carry him to the house he had visited with Brian.

It was terrible work getting through that gate; and in the long drive where the shadows were it was more terrible still. But he went on slowly, with his hands spread out as if to feel his way, and with his eyes, very bright and very wide open, peering into the darkness. He coughed, and hummed a tune, but dared not look behind him; the desperate business had been begun, and Comethup Willis, trembling in every limb, had yet fully made up his mind to see the ghost before he passed again out of the gate, if it were to be seen.

He saw it at last, much nearer the house than it had been before. It came toward him, more and more slowly as the distance between them lessened. Comethup backed away a little; but it suddenly stretched out hands to him, and came forward at a run, so that there was no chance of escape. And then the horror of the thing, the tense fear that had been knocking at his heart, fell away from him in a moment. For he touched warm hands of flesh, and saw that it was a child of about his own age, looking wonderingly at him. Poor Comethup almost laughed with the sudden relief, and they remained for a moment after their hands had dropped away from each other’s, looking into each other’s faces shyly, as children do at a first meeting.

“I’m so glad!” said Comethup at last. “I thought you were a ghost. Where do you come from?”

The child stretched out an arm, and pointed to the house. “There,” she said, “with father.” She spoke in a whisper—the whisper of a person long subdued, and used to the sound only of her own voice. She was very pretty, with big, dark eyes, and a very white skin; but there was an elfish, frightened manner about her that had nothing of childhood in it.

“But the house is all shut up,” urged Comethup. “Why doesn’t your father open the shutters?”

“All those rooms are empty,” said the child; “they frighten you to go in them, because you make such a noise, and the eyes in the shutters stare at you. We live right round the other side.”

“But it’s such a dreadful place,” said Comethup, compassionately, looking from the bright, eager face of the child to the desolate garden. “Aren’t you very lonely?”

The child nodded and looked about her, and drew instinctively a little nearer to the boy.

“Doesn’t any one come to see you?” asked Comethup.

“Only Mrs. Blissett, in the morning. Mrs. Blissett makes the beds, and gives me my breakfast and my dinner; then she comes again when it’s dark, and puts me to bed. And she grumbles all the time, and keeps on asking what the Lord made brats for. That’s me, you know,” she added, innocently.

Comethup looked properly sympathetic, and asked, “What is your name?”

“’Linda. I think it’s a longer name than that, but father calls me ’Linda. What is your name?”

Comethup got it out trippingly; it was always a difficult matter, in those early years, to get the uncouth thing off his tongue. The girl looked puzzled, and begged him to repeat it; he did so, with a flush upon his face. He was already beginning to understand, by the surprise with which the name was always received, that there was something remarkable and even ridiculous about it. But this girl apparently liked it; laughed softly and turned it over on her tongue, and said “Comethup,” with a little break in the middle of it; “yes, it’s a pretty name.”

Comethup was gratified, and had a sudden wish that he had paid her the same compliment. They stood awkwardly and shyly looking at each other, until the slow, heavy steps of some one trudging through the dead leaves bestirred them to a recollection of time and place.

“That’s Mrs. Blissett,” said the child with a sigh, “and I shall have go to bed. Come back here where she won’t see you. Can’t you hear her coming, and grumbling to herself all the way?” The question ended with a little ripple of laughter, and Comethup, glancing at the child, saw all her white teeth showing in a smile, and her eyes dancing with it. She drew him back among the shadows of the trees while the heavy-footed, murmuring Mrs. Blissett pounded solemnly along toward the house. They stood quite still, until the footsteps had died away, and then, to Comethup’s great surprise and consternation, this small girl-child caught him by his jacket, kissed him swiftly, and cried in a breath: “Good-night, Comethup; come and see me to-morrow,” and sped away from him through the trees.

Comethup stood, in a dazed condition, looking after her for some moments, and softly rubbing his cheek with one hand where her lips had touched him; and then, with very mixed emotions, set off for home. But though the garden was the same, and though the wind whispered through the trees, and the dead leaves drove at him, it had no further terrors for him; had, indeed, become a place of wonder and delight, as everything else seemed to become in his small world. His father, his little room at home, his mother’s sleeping place among the green mounds in the churchyard, the captain and the building of the forts, Brian and his reckless expeditions—all these were things of delight to the boy. And now, in the midst of them, had sprung up a new wonder, growing beautifully in the midst of the terrors which had seemed to be about her. He went home with a fast-beating heart, full of his new discovery, and anxious to unbosom himself regarding it to some one of sympathy.

He was never quite sure of his father; he loved him very dearly, and thought his soft voice and the quiet, caressing words he used better than all the music he played in the church. But his father had a dreamy way of looking over him, or right through him, when some question of moment was being discussed; of losing himself suddenly in the maze of his thoughts, and wandering off somewhere where Comethup could not follow him. So that Comethup often hesitated about giving a confidence to him, because he feared, in his sensitive little soul, that his father might not follow it out—whatever it might be—patiently to the end, as it should be followed; might forget what the all-important subject was before the tale had half been told. He hesitated now, and was obliged to confess, sitting up in bed in the moonlight, with his hands clasped round his linen-covered knees, that his father might not understand, and might—worst thought of all—look dreamily at him, and stroke his hair, and say, with a maddening smile: “Yes, yes, my boy. Of course; just so,” and begin to hum an air from some of his beloved music and straightway forget all else. It was quite certain that it was impossible for him to tell his father.

Brian, perhaps, had a right to know; Brian had been in the garden with him, and still believed that the garden held a ghost. But Comethup shrank more strongly still from the idea of telling his cousin; shook his head very decidedly in the moonlight when he thought of it. It may have been purely a matter of instinct, probably was; but in his childish mind that garden, with its dim shadows and its quaint little figure whose kiss still seemed hot upon his cheek, was a fairyland into which he jealously desired to go alone, and in which Brian, in the imagination, seemed an uncouth figure.

The list of possible sympathizers was narrowing down; there remained only the captain; and slowly there grew in Comethup’s mind the idea that the captain was, after all, the right person. The boy acted over to himself a little interview, in which he seemed to know, with exactitude, what the captain would say and what the captain would do; was sure of him, so to speak, from the outset. For, in Comethup’s mind, the captain might be abrupt and might be severe; but his rules of conduct were such that, if followed, a small boy would sleep soundly in his bed at night, and would not fear the darkness. So he decided to tell the captain, and, comforted with the thought, fell asleep.

The opportunity occurred the very next day. Comethup went to tea with the captain, firmly resolved to unbosom himself about the whole matter. But he let the precious moments slip by, and talked of everything else under the sun, and tried to appear interested in all that the captain said, while his mind was leaping back to that desolate garden and to the little figure wandering alone in it. He remembered, too, with a sudden hot sensation of shame, that the child had cried, “Come again to-morrow!” and here was to-morrow. Yet he sat there, saying never a word of what filled his mind, until the moment arrived when it was necessary for him to return home. For the captain was punctual in all things, and Comethup arrived at the house at an exact hour, and left it at another equally rigidly defined.

Comethup got as far as the doorstep before he made up his mind to say anything; and then, as he brought his hand down from the salute, he said hurriedly, “I—I wanted to speak to you—about something—sir.”

The captain looked down at the small figure gravely. “Important?” he asked.

Comethup felt his courage oozing. “Not—not very,” he replied.

“Keep it till to-morrow,” said the captain, nodding at him. “No time now, you know. Good-bye.”

Comethup saluted again, and went miserably away. He returned home, and sat for a long time at the window, thinking about the child. He had not promised that he would go again to see her; but it had seemed like a promise, and he could not bear the thought that she might be waiting there, with her great, dark, eager eyes straining toward the gate, looking for him. It was the first time that any real or definite sorrow had touched his life—the first time that any living thing had seemed dependent on him for happiness. With the captain it was different; it was impossible for Comethup’s mind to grasp the idea that he was all-important in the captain’s bare existence; that the captain watched for him, day after day, and felt his old heart jump a little as the boy swung up the garden path, as he might have felt it jump, in years gone by, at the coming of a woman. Comethup did not understand that; he saw only in the captain’s kindness and patronage of himself a very great and sweet graciousness, a something that the captain went out of his way to do, because he was very kind and very great. Comethup adored the captain, but he did not know that the captain would have willingly consented to be pierced through and through with his own old sword hanging over the dim little looking-glass in his cottage parlour, if he could thereby have served Comethup.

The hunger at Comethup’s heart grew stronger as the evening wore on. A wind had sprung up, bringing with it some gusts of rain, and flinging little splashes on to Comethup’s face as he sat with his chin in his hands at the open window. At last, heedless of wind or rain, he caught up his cap, and set off at a run for the captain’s house.

The captain was pacing up and down the little parlour, turning abruptly on his heel when he reached the edge of the hearthrug, and again when he almost breasted the old oak bureau at the other side of the room. Seeing the boy standing panting and white-faced in the doorway with his cap in his hand, the captain stopped dead, and faced him. Comethup was trembling so much that he even forgot to salute.

“Oh, sir!” he burst out, almost on the verge of tears. “The little girl—I thought she was a ghost—in the garden—and it’s raining—and I promised to go and see her—and I haven’t been—and Mrs. Blissett says she’s a brat, and—oh, sir—what am I to do?” And poor Comethup burst into tears and hid his face in the lining of his cap.

It may naturally be supposed that the captain was startled. The first idea he grasped, however, was that the boy was in distress, and that was sufficient to stir him to action; he put his arm tenderly round Comethup’s shoulders, stooping a little and trying to draw the cap away from his face, and led him over to a chair. There, seating himself, he drew the boy against his knee, saying nothing, but gripping him tightly with his arm, so that the very presence of that comforting, encircling thing should make itself felt without the necessity for words. In a few moments Comethup was calmer, and could give an intelligent account of what he wanted.

The captain questioned him closely, and Comethup knew whether or not he was pleased, at each point of the recital, by the tightening or loosening of the arm about him. When he had finished, and had expressed his determination to go to the house and see the child, the arm held him very closely indeed.

For some moments the captain sat perfectly still; then he got up, walked across to the window, and looked out. Darkness had already fallen, and the wind and rain were making havoc among the captain’s roses. It was characteristic of the captain that he took the whole matter from the boy’s standpoint; never appeared to consider for an instant that he might be interfering in some one else’s business. He saw only, as Comethup had done, the child alone in the garden, haunted by fears of the echoing, half-empty house, and of Mrs. Blissett. Finally, with a grunt, he turned sharply away from the window, walked across the room to a long cupboard, and pulled open its double doors with a jerk; then he pulled out from it a long, old-fashioned military cloak, very rusty and faded, and swung it round his shoulders with a single movement of his arm. “We’ll go and find her, boy,” he said, and Comethup followed him obediently from the room.

The captain took down his hat from the peg in the hall and rammed it on his head a little more tightly than usual, and opened the cottage door. A drifting spray of rain drove in at them, and the captain threw out a fold of his cloak, like a huge wing, and drew it round the boy. Then they passed out of the cottage together.

Comethup had only a dim remembrance afterward of that walk; of passing people in the streets, and seeing only their feet and ankles; of hearing everything muffled and blurred through the heavy cloak; of catching glimpses of a storm-twisted sky through certain tiny moth-holes and thinnesses of the cloak as it touched his face. Presently the captain threw back an edge of it, and Comethup saw that they were standing before the iron gates.

“Go first,” said the captain, in a low voice, “and call to her. Don’t frighten her if she is there.”

So Comethup stepped softly into the garden, treading cautiously over the wet leaves, and feeling the heavy rain drops from the branches above him tumbling on his hair and shoulders. He called “’Linda! ’Linda!” as he went.

Out of the darkness near the house came the little figure at last, as he had hoped; not joyfully, or with laughter on its lips, but bedraggled, and wet, and trembling, and piteous. She ran to him and caught him eagerly, whispering his name brokenly between her sobs, and hiding her tear-stained face against his childish shoulder. She did not see the captain, who stood with his arms folded beneath his military cloak, looking down at them.

“’Linda, dear,” said the boy, “you are all wet. Don’t shake so; nothing can hurt you. And here’s my friend the captain; he’s a soldier, you know, and fights people.” This last as a reassurance to the child that she had powerful friends indeed.

The girl looked up at the captain, looked at him for a long moment in silence. Comethup, turning about, saw that the captain had thrown back his cloak and had dropped on one knee, and was holding out his long, thin old arms toward the child; the cloak fell all about him like a tent. She scarcely seemed to hesitate a moment, but went within the shelter of the tent, and was drawn close there, with the captain’s head bent above her. Comethup was so surprised that he did not even think how the captain would be spoiling the knee of his trousers in the wet grass.

“Little maid, little maid,” said the captain, “what brings you out here in this dreadful place alone? Is there no one to care for you, poor baby?”

“I came out to see—Comethup,” said the child, getting over the name with difficulty, “and Mrs. Blissett saw me and said I should stop here in the dark, and banged the door and went in. I ’spects she’s forgotten me.”

The captain murmured something concerning Mrs. Blissett behind his heavy mustache, and suddenly gathered the child up in his arms and rose to his feet. And when he spoke, although his voice was very gentle, it was very determined.

“Where’s your father, baby?”

“He’s writing, and talking to himself,” replied the child.

“I’ll talk to him,” said the captain. “Which way do I go—round here?”

The child told him the way, and he marched steadily through the wet leaves and the long grass, with Comethup following him, until he came to a door. Still holding the child in his arms, he began vigorously to kick at the door, flinging his foot at it at regular intervals like musket-shots. A sharp and querulous voice replied suddenly from the other side:

“Stay where ye be, ye brat! I bean’t goin’ to ’ave ye runnin’ in and out just as ye likes. And stop a-kickin’ that door.”

“Open the door!” cried the captain, in a very loud voice.

There was a shuffling of feet on the other side, and the door was pulled open. A candle had been set down on some bare, uncarpeted stairs near at hand, and was flaring in the wind; a heavy, surprised-looking country-woman stood in the doorway, looking out at the little group.

“Are you Mrs. Blissett?” asked the captain, rapping out the words fiercely.

“Yes, sir, I be,” said the woman, hurriedly bending herself at the knees, in a sort of staggering courtesy.

“Then what the devil do you mean by putting this baby out in the rain?” exclaimed the captain. “Stand aside, and let me in. Where’s your master!”

The woman was at first too startled to reply; she backed against the wall, and waved one hand feebly toward the stairs. The captain nodded at the candle, and the woman, with her eyes blinking nervously, groped for it, picked it up, and backed away with it.

“Go first,” said the captain, “and tell your master that a gentleman wishes to see him.—Comethup, follow me.”

The woman hesitated for a moment, and then went before them heavily up the stairs with the candle. The door leading into the garden remained open, and Comethup felt the wet wind blowing about his legs as he followed the captain, who marched steadily close behind the woman. The child had stolen an arm up round the captain’s neck, under his cloak; and he was holding her against his breast with one arm, while his tall old silk hat, dripping with rain, swung in his disengaged hand.

At the top of the first flight of stairs the woman stopped at a door and bent her head as though listening, and then rapped with her knuckles. After a moment or two, receiving no answer, she turned the handle and went hesitatingly in, the captain following her closely, and Comethup hard on the heels of the captain.

The room in which they found themselves was so very dark that for a moment those unused to it would not have noticed that it had any light in it at all, or any occupant. But, far away in one corner of it, Comethup saw a little round gleam of light, which reminded him of the gleam of lanterns he had seen men carry on country roads on winter nights, and, close beside the gleam, watching them intently and frowningly, a face. Even before the lips parted, and the harsh voice spoke, Comethup had that face indelibly impressed upon his mind, to haunt him long afterward, in its curious detached circle of light, while he lay in his bed under his father’s roof.

It was a stern, strong, forbidding face—a face of hard lines and straight firmnesses, without a single tender curve or hollow about it, to proclaim that there was any softness in the man to whom it belonged. The patch of light showed a great, high forehead, from which the hair had long been pushed back and pushed off by impatient hands; beneath this, straight black eyebrows almost meeting, and, under them, eyes as cold and piercing as steel in moonlight. The man, as he sat, was literally hemmed in by books; as the light of the candle carried by Mrs. Blissett penetrated farther through the shadows, Comethup saw that there were piles of books all about his feet, and about the legs of the desk at which he sat; the desk itself was loaded with them, and staggering heaps of them leaned against the wall and perched perilously on chairs and other articles of furniture. In the silence which followed their entry, while the man looked at them from beside his little shaded reading-lamp, Comethup could distinctly hear the heavy, agitated breathing of Mrs. Blissett.

“Well, what’s this, what’s this? What has happened? What do you all want? Can’t you speak? Is the house on fire?” All these questions were rapidly jerked out in harsh, impatient tones, with a little querulous note at the end of each, like the fretful tones of a child.

Mrs. Blissett was eagerly commencing a voluble reply which should excuse her own delinquencies, when the captain stepped forward, with the child still easily resting on his arm, bent his head stiffly and spoke.

“Sir, I ask your pardon for intruding at such an hour, but I am a blunt man, trained all my life to prompt action. I found this mite—this baby—wandering in the grounds outside this house, drenched to the skin, and crying as it hurts a man to hear a child cry. I understood that she lived here, and had been shut out in the rain by this woman” (the captain indicated the trembling Mrs. Blissett with a jerk of his head). “So I brought her in.” The captain stepped forward a little, and uncovered the face of the child; she was sleeping peacefully, with her head against his breast.

The man did not reply; he got up abruptly from his desk, kicking over some of the piles of books about his feet as he moved, and began striding up and down that end of the room, with something of the appearance of a hunted animal, turning his face furtively toward them as he turned in his walk, yet keeping always at the greatest possible distance away. As he came to the desk once or twice, and fumbled nervously among the papers and books upon it, Comethup was able to see that his dress was very unkempt and shabby, and stained as a man might stain it who read during hurriedly snatched meals, and was careless how he ate. He spoke at last, in the same querulous voice; he spoke like a man labouring under the lash of some secret trouble, and yet desirous of putting himself right with the world. These people might have been sternly arrayed against him, so strongly and petulantly did he offer his excuses.

“I don’t know you, sir; I have no desire to know you. There is an old adage which says something about fools stepping in where angels fear to tread. What if the child was in the rain? What if every living creature that bears the brand of her sex wandered homeless and outcast to-night? Would the world be the poorer? Would any single thing that affects its progress, or its virtue, or its beauty, if you will have it so, be changed or stand still? This woman”—he fiercely indicated Mrs. Blissett—“was given a certain duty, and, like all of her class, having received payment for it, she neglects to perform it. Don’t you know enough of the world yet, or where have you been living all your days, that you don’t know that?” Then, with a certain sudden jealousy, he made a movement toward the captain, and asked, “What do you want with the child? How does she concern you?”

The captain’s arm tightened a little round the sleeping child. “I do you the justice to suppose, sir, that, in spite of what you have said, even you would not leave a baby out of doors on such a night as this,” he said.

“Well, well, who said I should? But there are more important things in the world than children; I have work to do here, and have no time to give to the guardianship of babies.”

“She is your child?” said the captain. “I have already heard how the mite wanders round this place at night, lonely and neglected. Is there no one to care for her?”

The man laughed, in a curious, hard fashion, and looked straight at the captain. “No, no one,” he said. “Really, sir, you take a great deal upon yourself. You trespass on my property, and you interfere with my domestic affairs. Is there anything else about which you would care to make an inquiry?”

The sarcastic note was lost on the captain; he answered bluntly and simply, as was his habit:

“I am an old and a very lonely man, sir, and, although I was brought up to the profession of a soldier, I have thought sometimes that I am not altogether fitted for it. I have some tenderness of heart still left in me, and I could not have slept in my bed to-night with the knowledge that this child was neglected and unhappy. I have no desire to interfere in any business which does not concern me; but it must occur to you that it is a strange life for a child to be——”

“Well, the fault of that is not mine,”, said the man, swinging about suddenly and facing the captain. “She—she has no mother, and I am occupied with—with other things. You—you should not trouble; what can I do?” He spoke like a fretful child, walked to his desk, and began turning over the leaves of a book.

The captain was puzzled; saw no prospect, with such a creature as this, of making him understand the responsibilities of a parent. He turned to Mrs. Blissett and put the child in her arms, and said with some sternness: “Take her away, and warm and dry her, and put her to bed. And be tender with her.”

Mrs. Blissett vanished hurriedly with ejaculations of “My precious! The dear lamb!” and the like, and the captain faced the father once more. That gentleman, now that the chief object of the disturbance was gone, seemed only anxious to be rid of his visitor; he seated himself at his desk, and appeared to be busied with his books.

“Perhaps,” said the captain stiffly, “after this intrusion I ought to give you my name. I am Captain Garraway-Kyle, at present living in this town, and I beg you to believe that my intrusion here to-night was with the best possible motives. I assure you——”

“Yes, yes, I quite understand,” exclaimed the petulant voice of the other. “And my name is Vernier—Doctor Vernier; you may have heard of me.”

“No,” replied the captain, “I regret that I have not.”

“Ah! Good-night!” Dr. Vernier’s head was down among his books, so that, by the glow of the lamp, they could only see the top of it. But the captain had not finished yet.

“I am sorry for the little child, and for her loneliness,” he said, “and if I might be permitted——”

The hard face glanced up for a moment and the brows were drawn together in a straight dark line. “Thank you; I desire no one to assist me in the management of my house. Once more—good-night.”

The captain bowed stiffly, turned on his heel, and walked out of the room, followed by Comethup, whose presence the doctor had not even appeared to notice. They found their way out of the dark house, and through the garden into the road. There the captain stood upright for a moment, thinking deeply, and then looked down at Comethup. “Comethup,” he said, “we won’t be put off like this, eh?”

“No,” said Comethup.

“We must go and see her again, and—and look after her, eh?”

“I think so,” said Comethup.

They solemnly shook hands on that decision, the captain bending a little to perform the operation, and then walked away homeward.