Читать книгу Little Hearts - Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall - Страница 4

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Mr. Sampson might have written in his philosophy book of the effect of suddenness on the human understanding. Does a man get married suddenly? His friends are sure of a romance. Does he inherit money suddenly? They foretell ruin. And he who suddenly dies is given a breathless sort of interest, a tiptoeing hush in the crowd; as when a small boy on the outskirts of a circus, fated or heroic, crawls under the canvas and is seen of his fellows no more. One moment, the machine; the next, the god made actual. And being thrown over a wall is as good a way of attaining actuality as any other.

Mr. Sampson stood as one stunned, staring at the man in the violet bed. The first thing he said was, “Praise heaven the cover was up or he’d have broke it to bits.” The next, “Where did he come from?”

Malachi did not answer. He was over at the garden door, peeping through a crack. He returned rapidly to his master, who said again, “Where did he come from?”

“Never you mind that,” returned Malachi crisply, as if he knew; “you’ve got to decide what you’re a-going to do.”

“Pull him off the violets,” suggested Mr. Sampson hopefully.

Malachi spat and jerked his head in the direction of the wall. His master became aware of a sound of pounding feet and hard breathing, not of horses but of men. Then came a thump.

“Do you listen to them at the door,” said Malachi composedly, “and think what you’re about.”

“Who are ‘them at the door’?” demanded Mr. Sampson, with irritation.

“Sojers.”

“Sojers?”

“Ay, two on ‘em. Winded like bullocks. You can hear ‘em, puff, puff, and their bellows a-creaking.”

“But why? Why here?...”

Malachi nodded at the motionless guest in the cold-frame. “Arter him, in course. We’ll have to let ‘em in when they gets their wind to shout. They’re kicking now. You’ll have to come to making your mind up.”

Michael Sampson stared. “What about, pray?”

“Him. If so be they’re to get him and hang him. Likely he’s a tobyman, master.”

“What do I care?” roared Mr. Sampson. No man so hot as your scholar jerked untimely from his dreams. “I do not know him. What does it matter to me if they hang the creature? And he’s ruined the violets. He is—”

“Younger than you be,” grunted Malachi.

In a warm rage with circumstances, and the suddenness of them in particular, Mr. Sampson stooped above the cold-frame, and the breath of dying violets rose in his face as pitifully as a prayer. Perhaps it all lay with the violets; there would have been no such appeal to him in crushed cucumbers... He had no more than a minute. Of all the builded moments of his life, perhaps no more than this one was laid in his hands to do with as he would. He saw no more than the aforesaid sprawl of stained claret cloth, dark hair loose and unpowdered, a straight olive nose, and a triangle of lighter forehead with a deep cut on it. One brown hand, ungloved, curled with a curious innocence among white violet buds. And in the time Malachi hobbled round the bed that contained hope of spring carrots, if the mice didn’t eat the seed, the thing took Michael Sampson.

It can be told best in words used long ago:

And he looked on him, and loved him.

“H’open—in the name of’s Most Gracious Maj’sty—the King.”

The enemy—he had no time for astonishment that in the twinkling of an eye he should have come to regard the pipe-clayed pillars of law and order as the enemy—the enemy were become articulate. He looked up with a light in his eyes.

“Open the door.”

“But——”

“Open that door, curse you,” said Mr. Sampson savagely, “or I’ll throw you over it.”

He seized the inert leg trailing outside the frame, thrust it inside, lowered the cover, sat himself upon it, and pulled out his book.

“God grant,” he heard himself muttering rapidly in a sort of delirium—“God grant he don’t wake up and kick. O, God send he don’t wake up and kick...”

With a grinding of ancient bolts, Malachi opened the door.

Mr. Sampson sat rigid as an angel on a tomb, reading in his philosophy book.

There dawns now in the sad-coloured courtyard of the old house a flame of scarlet, arrestive as the flare of trumpets or the roll of drums. True, it was a little stained with moss and mud, but it clothed in dignity the persons of two soldiers, a corporal and a private, rarely seen in those quiet parts—real soldiers who had even been in the Low Countries and doubtless learned much there besides swearing. They were still somewhat winded and they entered the garden so suddenly they must have been leaning against the door. Malachi was effaced behind it, and the corporal at once addressed himself to the one shabby shirt-sleeved figure in full view.

“Hi, you there...”

Mr. Sampson, his heart beating somewhere in the roof of his mouth, looked up slowly from his book and raised his eyebrows.

The corporal stiffened automatically. “I ask your pardon, sir, but——” His hand was at the salute.

Mr. Sampson flicked a dry violet leaf from his book, and said, “Why, a good day to you. It is not often we see the military here. What may you want of me, my man?”

The corporal’s hand fell with a sharp smack. “Why, sir, some information, if you’ll be so good. There’s a man passed along there nigh under your wall, we’ve reason to believe——”

“Ah? Yes, corporal?”

“—a-riding on hoss-back, sir. We thought you might have clapped eyes on him.”

Mr. Sampson pulled out an ancient snuff-box, finely set with crystal, opened it, gazed remotely at the contents, and returned it to his pocket. The crystals impressed the corporal, who could not know that the box contained but the dry brown dust of poppy-heads—an excellent thing, Mr. Sampson found, for making the eyes water.

“Never an eye,” said that gentleman, “have I clapped on any man a-riding past my wall. I heard, as I thought, a few forest ponies. But I do assure you that hereabouts we take small note of such.”

“There was more than that, your Honour. The man I speak of, he was riding with them—curse his cunning tricks!—riding a lean brown mare with three white stockings and a white star, as your Honour can see for yourself by looking at the tracks outside.”

He on the cold-frame smiled, wondering why his lips were so stiff. “I vow I’ll take your word for it, corporal, since I fear I have scarce enough skill to read so much from the mark of a hoof. And who’s the man, if I may inquire?”

“We’ve reason to believe——”

“You seem to have a good many reasons to believe,” put in Mr. Sampson. “I wish I had as many.”

“—that he’s one who’ll make little for His Majesty’s peace or your Honour’s if he’s in this neighbourhood,” finished the corporal gruffly, “and have received orders according. And which orders I endeavour to act up to, now and hence-forward.”

“You speak above your station, corporal,” commented Mr. Sampson quietly, and a fleeting expression showed for a moment on the face of the private. “But who is the man? And what has he done?”

The corporal here became involved in a fog of phrases, from which nothing emerged clearly but one Ensign Weatherly. The fog of Time has in its turn so involved Ensign Weatherly that of him, his deeds, his opinions, all the innumerous small interlacings of cause and effect that go to make up a life, nothing is left but this:—He sat on horseback before the Old Bull at Burnley one wet day, drinking strong ale out of a tankard, when there came a stranger riding by, splashed to the saddle, on a lank bay mare. To him the Ensign took instant antipathy and called out, bidding him come drink to the King, and adding words of a provocative nature concerning the stranger’s past. “I’ll drink,” says the man on the bay mare, riding close up to the Ensign, who handed him the dregs of the tankard with a grin and a reference to His Highness of Cumberland. He on the mare took the tankard; he also took the Ensign under the near knee and heaved him out of the saddle into a puddle as deep as a duckpond which stood handy. (“A dirty trick,” thought the corporal. But the private thought, “Not near so dirty as the Ensign when he crawled out of it.”) Then, standing his mare over the Ensign in the deeps of the puddle, who was afraid to move for a hoof in his face, the stranger drank the health of his king delicately in the last of the beer. “It’s a health I never refuse,” he explained to Weatherly, “or I’d think twice before I set my lips where your dirty mouth’s been, Butcher’s Boy.” Then the Ensign had his breath, and roared to his men in the tavern-yard, and the stranger rode for it, laughing into the rain. “But the odds of it is, we’re to get him, or——”

“Or?...” Mr. Sampson spoke with a certain haste.

“Get him one way or another,” finished the corporal.

Mr. Sampson rose, picked up his coat, which had fallen to the ground, shook it, and spread it carefully on the cold-frame as if to air. The corporal set him down as an eccentric young gent who was fond of gardening. “We saw him to-day,” the corporal went on, “while me and Bill Rattray was a-drinking of a little ale at the Leaf and Acorn by Betsworth”—(Mr. Sampson said something about a singular unanimity of custom amongst His Majesty’s forces)—“we saw him, on the edge of the trees, a-foot——”

“And give chase,” put in the private hoarsely, “leaving of all the ale...”

“You be still, Bill, till you’re ordered to speak, though you are my own first cousin.”

“I will,” muttered the private darkly, “till I gets out of my uniform.”

“We saw him a-foot and give chase a-foot,” continued the corporal, with dignity, “but he had his horse somewhere about, and so he’s diddled us. Come a good few miles from Betsworth, I lay we have, and all for nought. Damn all Jacobites and fly-by-nights.”

“By all means,” assented Mr. Sampson cordially, “though I trouble little about politics so long as I have my poets, my philosophers. Kings may be very well in their places, but I dare assure you there is better company. Shakespeare, for an instance. How charmingly hath he writ of—of violets. ‘Violets dim, but sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes...’ Ah, corporal, there’s a sweet poet, finer as I venture to think than any of your Dryden, your Corneille. What is your Calprenède, your Scudéry, in the comparison of the delicate devices that took flesh in Arden? What is there in the pace of the ‘Astræa Redux’ to move the heart like the fire, the gallop——” Mr. Sampson lost his countenance, stopped, and said, “Malachi, go and fetch some ale. These gentlemen will doubtless refresh themselves before they go.”

So the threatening flame of scarlet dies out again; stayed with speech, comforted with good ale—there was no more in the barrel—and swearing that the gentleman in the shirt-sleeves was a real gentleman for all his wild talk. And Mr. Sampson put on his coat and lifted the cover of the violet frame with a fine sense that he was letting into his world more than ever Madam Pandora did.

He propped the cover up with a stick, and said, “Do you think he is... dead?”

“Lord bless ye, no.” Malachi was very busy. “No more than what you be, only cracked on the head. Saw your great-uncle, Sir Gregory, carried home so on a gate, and fine they screeched. Now then, Master Michael...”

Mr. Sampson—he had dropped his book and stood unconsciously with one foot on it—looked hard at his servant. “You presume, Malachi,” was all he said. He himself took the head, Malachi, all astare, attached himself to the booted legs. Between them they got the unknown to the house, and a much bigger job it was than they had looked to find it. They put him to bed in the master’s own room, there being no spare mattresses. The philosophy book lay all day in the garden with a snail walking on it. And Mr. Sampson, feeling of his own pulses and the heat of his head, went into the kitchen and brewed himself a drink of camomile flowers against the fever.