Читать книгу The Hillyars and the Burtons - Henry Kingsley - Страница 8

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In due time,--that is to say, a fortnight after my fifteenth birthday,--we moved into the new house. It was eight o'clock on a bright summer's morning when my father got the key from Mr. Long, unlocked the gate in the broken palings which surrounded the house, and passed into the yard, surrounded by his whole awe-stricken family.

There was no discovery made in the yard. It was commonplace. A square flagged space, with a broken water-buit in one corner under an old--fashioned leaden gargoyle. There was also a grindstone, and some odd bits of timber which lay about near the pump, which was nearly grown up with nettles and ryegrass. In front of me, as I stood in the yard, the great house rose, flushed with the red blaze of the morning sun; behind were the family,--Joe leaning on his crutch, with his great eyes staring out of his head in eager curiosity; after him the group of children, clustered round Emma, who carried in her arms my brother Fred, a large-headed stolid child of two, who was chronically black and blue in every available part of his person with accidents, and who was, even now, evidently waiting for an opportunity to distinguish himself in that line.

Joe had not long before made acquaintance with kind old Mr. Faulkner, who had coached him up in antiquities of the house; and Joe had told me everything. We boys fully expected to find Lord Essex's helmet lying on the stairs, or Queen Elizabeth's glove in the passage. So when father opened the great panelled door, and went into the dark entry, we pushed in after him, staring in all directions, expecting to see something or another strange; in which we were disappointed. There was nothing more strange than a large entrance-hall, a broad staircase, with large balustrades, somewhat rickety and out of the perpendicular, winding up one side of it to the floor above, and a large mullioned window half-way up. Our first difficulty arose from Frank, my youngest brother but one, declining to enter the house, on the grounds that Shadrach was hiding in the cellar. This difficulty being overcome, we children, leaving father and mother to inspect the ground-floor, pushed up stairs in a body to examine the delectable regions above, where you could look out of window, over Shepherd's nursery-ground, and see the real trees waving in the west.

On reaching the first floor, my youngest brother, Fred, so to speak, inaugurated, or opened for public traffic, the staircase, by falling down it from the top to bottom, and being picked up black in the face, with all the skin off his elbows and knees. Our next hitch was with Frank, who refused to go any further because Abednego was in the cupboard. Emma had to sit down on the landing, and explain to him that the three holy children were not, as Frank had erroneously gathered from their names, ghosts who caught hold of your legs through the banisters as you went up stairs, or burst suddenly upon you out of closets; but respectable men, who had been dead, lawk-a-mercy, ever so long. Joe and I left her, combating, somewhat unsuccessfully, a theory that Meshech was at that present speaking up the chimney, and would immediately appear, in a cloud of soot, and frighten us all to death; and went on to examine the house.

And really we went on with something like awe upon us. There was no doubt that we were treading on the very same boards which had been trodden, often enough, by the statesmen and dandies of Queen Elizabeth's Court, and most certainly by the mighty woman herself. Joe, devourer of books, had, with Mr. Faulkner's assistance, made out the history of the house; and he had communicated his enthusiasm even to me, the poor simple blacksmith's boy. So when we, too, went into the great room on the first floor, even I, stupid lad, cast my eyes eagerly around to see whether anything remained of the splendor of the grand old court, of which I had heard from Joe.

Nothing. Not a bit of furniture. Three broad windows, which looked westward. A broad extent of shaky floor, an immense fire-place, and over it a yellow dingy old sampler, under a broken glass, hanging all on one side on a rusty nail.

Joe pounced upon this at once, and devoured it. "Oh, Jim! Jim!" he said to me, "just look at this. I wonder who she was"?

"There's her name to it, old man," I answered. "I expect that name's hern, ain't it? For," I said hesitatingly, seeing that Joe was excited about it, and feeling that I ought to be so myself, though not knowing why,--"for, old man, if they'd forged her name, maybe they'd have done it in another colored worsted."

This bringing forth no response, I felt that I was not up to the occasion; I proceeded to say that worsteds were uncommon hard to match, which ask our Emma, when Joe interrupted me.

"I don't mean that, Jim. I mean, what was her history. Did she write it herself, or who wrote it for her? What a strange voice from the grave it is. Age eighteen; date 1686; her name Alice Hillyar. And then underneath, in black, one of her beautiful sisters has worked, 'She dyed 3d December, that yeare.' She is dead, Jim, many a weary year agone, and she did this when she was eighteen years old. If one could only know her history, eh? She was a lady. Ladies made these common samplers in those times. See, here is Emma. Emma, dear, see what I have found. Take and read it out to Jim."

Emma, standing in the middle of the deserted room, with the morning sunlight on her face, and with the rosy children clustering round her, read it out to us. She, so young, so beautiful, so tender and devoted, stood there, and read out to us the words of a girl, perhaps as good and as devoted as she was, who had died a hundred and fifty years before. Even I, dull boy as I was, felt there was something strange and out-of-the-way in hearing the living girl reading aloud the words of the girl who had died so long ago. I thought of it then; I thought of it years after, when Joe and I sat watching a dim blue promontory for two white sails which should have come plunging round before the full south wind.

It was but poor doggrel that Emma read out to us. First came the letters of the alphabet; then the numbers; then a house and some fir-trees; then:--"Weep not, sweet friends, my early doom. Lay not fresh flowers upon my tomb; But elder sour and briony, And yew bough broken from the tree My sisters kind and beautiful! My brothers brave and dutiful! My mother denre, beat not thy breast, Thy hunchbacked daughter is at rest. See, friends, I am not loath to go; My Lord will take me, that I know."

Poor as it was, it pleased Joe; and as I had a profound belief in Joe's good taste, I was pleased also. I thought it somewhat in the tombstone line myself, and fell into the mistake of supposing that one was to admire it on critical, rather than on sentimental grounds. Joe hung it up over his bed, and used to sit up in the night and tell me stories about the young lady, whom he made a clothes-peg on which he hung every fancy of his brain.

He took his yellow sampler to kind old Mr. Faulkner, who told him that our new house, Church Place, had been the family place of the Hillyars at the close of the seventeenth century. And then the old man put on his hat, took his stick, called his big dog, and, taking Joe by the hand, led him to that part of the old church burial-ground which lies next the river; and there he showed him her grave. She lay in that fresh breezy corner which overlooks the flashing busy river, all alone. "Alice Hillyar; born 1668, died 1686." Her beautiful sisters lay elsewhere, and the brave brothers also; though, by a beautiful fiction, they were all represented on the family tomb in the chancel, kneeling one behind the other. It grew to be a favorite place with Joe, this grave of the hunchbacked girl, which overlooked the tide; and Emma would sit with him there sometimes. And then came one and joined them, and talked soft and low to Emma, whose foot would often dally with the letters of his own surname on the worn old stone.

The big room quite came up to our expectations. We examined all the other rooms on the same floor; then we examined the floor above; and, lastly, Joe said:

"Jim, are you afraid to go up into the ghost's room?"

"N--no," I said; "I don't mind in the day time."

"When Rube comes," said Joe, "we sha'n't be let to it; so now or never."

We went up very silently. The door was ajar, and we peeped in. It was nearly bare and empty, with only a little nameless lumber lying in one corner. It was high for an attic, in consequence of the high pitch of the roof, and not dark, though there was but one window to it; this window being a very large dormer, taking up nearly half the narrow end of the room. The ceiling was, of course, lean-to, but at a slighter angle to the floor than is usual.

But what struck us immediately was, that this room, long as it was, did not take up the whole of the attic story. And, looking towards the darker end of the room, we thought we could make out a door. We were afraid to go near it, for it would not have been very pleasant to have it opened suddenly, and for a little old lady, in gray-shot silk and black mittens, to come popping out on you. We, however, treated the door with great suspicion, and I kept watch on it while Joe looked out of window.

When it came to my turn to look out of window, Joe kept watch. I looked right down on the top of the trees in the Rectory garden; beyond the Rectory I could see the new tavern, the Cadogan Arms, and away to the northeast St. Luke's Church. It was a pleasant thing to look, as it were, down the chimneys of the Black Lion, and over them into the Rectory garden. The long walk of pollard limes, the giant acacias, and the little glimpse of the lawn between the boughs, was quite a new sight to me. I was enjoying the view, when Joe said:--

"Can you see the Cadogan Arms?"

"Yes."

"I wonder what the Earl of Essex would have thought if--"

At this moment there was a rustling of silk in the dark end of the room, and we both, as the Yankees say, "up stick" and bolted. Even in my terror I am glad to remember that I let Joe go first, though he could get along with his crutch pretty nearly as fast as I could. We got down stairs as quick as possible, and burst in on the family, with the somewhat premature intelligence, that we had turned out the ghost, and that she was, at that present moment, coming down stairs in gray-shot silk and black mittens.

There was an immediate rush of the younger ones towards my mother and Emma, about whom they clustered like bees. Meanwhile my father stepped across to the shop for a trifle of a striking-hammer, weight eighteen pounds, and, telling me to follow him, went up stairs. I obeyed, in the first place, because his word was law to me, and, in the second, because in his company I should not have cared one halfpenny for a whole regiment of old ladies in gray silk. We went up stairs rapidly, and I followed him into the dark part of the room.

We were right in supposing that we had seen a door. There it was, hasped--or, as my father said, hapsed--up and covered with cobwebs. After two or three blows from the hammer, it came open, and we went in.

The room we entered was nearly as large as the other, but dark, save for a hole in the roof. In one corner was an old tressel bed, and at its head a tattered curtain, which rustled in the wind, and accounted for our late panic. I was just beginning to laugh at this, when I gave a cry of terror, for my right foot had gone clean through the boards.

My father pulled me out laughing; but I had hurt my knee, and had to sit down. My father knelt down to look at it; when he had done so, he looked at the hole I had made.

"An ugly hole in the boards, old man; we must tell Rube about it, or he'll break his leg, may be. What a depth there is between the floor and the ceiling below!" he said, feeling with his hammer; "I never did, surely."

After which he carried me down stairs, for I had hurt my knee somewhat severely, and did not get to work for a week or more.

When father made his appearance among the family, carrying me in his arms, there was a wild cry from the assembled children. My mother requested Emma to put the door-key down her back; and then, seeing that I was really hurt, said that she felt rather better, and that Emma needn't.

Some one took me from my father, and said, in a pleasant, cheery voice,--

"Hallo! here's our Jim been a-trotting on the loose stones without his knee-caps. Hold up, old chap, and don't cry; I'll run round to the infant--school for a pitch-plaster, and call at the doctor's shop as I go for the fire--engine. That's about our little game, unless you think it necessary for me to order a marvel tomb at the greengrocer's. Not a-going to die this bout? I thought as much."

I laughed. We always laughed at Reuben,--a sort of small master in the art of cockney chaff; which chaff consisted in putting together a long string of incongruities in a smart, jerky tone of voice. This, combined with consummate impudence; a code of honor which, though somewhat peculiar, is rarely violated; a reckless, though persistent, courage; and, generally speaking, a fine physique, are those better qualities of the Londoner ("cockney," as those call him who don't care for two black eyes, et cetera), which make him, in rough company, more respected and "let alone" than any other class of man with whom I am acquainted. The worst point in his character, the point which spoils him, is his distrust for high motives. His horizon is too narrow. You cannot get him on any terms to allow the existence of high motives in others. And, where he himself does noble and generous things (as he does often enough, to my knowledge), he hates being taxed with them, and invariably tries to palliate them by imputing low motives to himself. If one wanted to be fanciful, one would say that the descendant of the old London 'prentice had inherited his grandsires' distrust for the clergy and the aristocracy, who were to the city folk, not so intimate with them as the country folk, the representatives of lofty profession and imperfect practice. However this may be, your Londoner's chief fault, in the present day, is his distrust of pretensions to religion and chivalrous feeling. He can be chivalrous and religious at times; but you must hold your tongue about it.

Reuben was an average specimen of a town-bred lad; he had all their virtues and vices in petto. He was a gentle, good-humored little fellow, very clever, very brave, very kind-hearted, very handsome in a way, with a flat-sided head and regular features. The fault as regarded his physical beauty, was, that he was always "making faces,"--"shaving," as my father used to call it. He never could keep his mouth still. He was always biting his upper-lip or his under-lip, or chewing a straw, or spitting in an unnecessary manner. If he could have set that mouth into a good round No, on one or two occasions, and kept it so, it would have been better for all of us.