Across the Stream

"I touched it," he said. "I wetted my finger and rubbed it on the crown, and some of it came off."

"Well, dear, of course you shouldn't have done it, if I had told you not to," she said. "But don't bother about it any more. What made you come and tell me so long after?"

Archie grew more solemn still.

"I was leaning out of the nursery-window," he said, "and I heard Charles singing 'A few more years shall roll.' So I came and told you before I 'was asleep within the tomb.'"

His mother laughed, quite as if she was amused.

"We'll hope there'll be more than a few years before that, darling," she said.

"And shall I be forgiven now I've told you?" asked Archie.

"Yes, of course. Don't think anything more about it."

Archie would have preferred a more sentimental treatment of his offence, and rather wished his mother bore a stronger resemblance to Mrs. Montgomery, in the Wide, Wide World, whose edifying tears fell so fast and frequently, and after this he tended to keep his misdeeds more to himself and repent of them in secret. Simultaneously also the copy of the Wide, Wide World, which he had discovered in a passage book-case, mysteriously vanished, and no one appeared to have the slightest idea where it had gone. So, unable to stuff himself further with that brand of mawkishness, the desire that his mother should be more like Mrs. Montgomery faded somewhat, and there seemed but little pleasure in repentance at all, if your confessions were received in so unsentimental a manner, and it was no fun really keeping them to oneself. But for some weeks Sunday morning service in church (he had expressed a wish to go to evening church as well, but his mother had told him that once was as much as was good for him) became the emotional centre of his life, though his religion was strangely mixed up with a far more mundane attraction. There was a particular choir-boy there with blue eyes, pink cheeks, and a crop of yellow curls who sang solos, and thrilled Archie with a secret and perfectly sexless emotion. Only last Sunday he had sung "Oh, for the wings of a dove," and religion and childish adoration together had brought Archie to the verge of tears. He longed to be good, to live, until a few more years should roll (for he felt that he was going to die young), a noble and beautiful life; he longed also to fly away and be at rest with the choir-boy. He made up pathetic scenes in which he should be lying on his death-bed, with his weeping family round him, and the choir-boy would sing to him as he died, and they would smile at each other. When this vision proved almost too painful for contemplation he would console himself by picturing an alternative scheme, in which there were to be no death-beds at all, but instead he would get into the church choir, and sit next the choir-boy, and they would sing duets together before a rapt congregation. But, adorable though his idol was, he did not really want to know him, or even find out who he was. The idol existed for him in some remote sphere, becoming incarnate just for an hour on Sunday morning, a golden-haired surpliced voice, that suggested the vanished thrills of the Wide, Wide World. He pronounced certain words rather oddly, and had a slight lisp which Archie tried to copy, until one day his father told him never to say "Yeth" again, or he should write out "Yes" a hundred times.

Then came the most exciting discovery: this vocal angel proved to be the son of the head-keeper, and it was therefore perfectly easy to make his acquaintance. The notion of meeting him face to face, of exchanging a "good-morning" with him was almost overpowering, and yet Archie instinctively shrank from bringing the idol into contact with actual life. He began to choose for his walk the rather dank and gloomy path that led past the keeper's cottage, and yet, when that abode where the idol lived came within sight, Archie, with beating heart would avert his eyes, for fear he should see him. Then one day, as they got opposite the gate, a small boy in corduroy knickerbockers with a rather greasy scarf round his neck and a snuffling nose came out, and touched his cap. There could be no doubt about his identity, and Archie suffered the first real disillusionment of his life. The fading of Abracadabra was nothing to this: that had been a gradual disillusionment, whereas this was sudden as a lightning-stroke. He was a shattered idol, and from that moment Archie could hardly recall what it had been about, or recapture the faintest sense of the emotion which had filled him before that encounter in the wood which caused it to reel and totter and fall prone from its unsubstantial pedestal. This blow, on the top of the robust reception of his confession, did much to restore Archie to the ways of normal boyhood, and it was really rather a relief to his mother, when his expanding experimenting nature took a very different turn, and he became for a time obstreperously naughty. She thought, quite rightly, that this evinced a greater vigour. That it undoubtedly did, and the imagination contained in some of Archie's exploits rivalled the more visionary power that constructed death-bed scenes for himself and the idealization (cruelly shattered) of the choir-boy.

One very dreary November afternoon, shortly after his seventh birthday, he was sitting alone in his mother's room. All day the sullen heavens had poured their oblique deluge on the earth, and sheets of water were being flung against the windows by the cold south-easterly gale. Archie was suffering from a slight cold, and had not been out of doors for a couple of days, and this unusual detention in the house had caused him to be very cross, and also had dammed up within him a store of energy which could not disperse itself innocuously in violent movement. Jeannie had gone for a motor-drive with his mother, Marjorie and Miss Bampton were closely engaged over their rotten German, and Archie that morning had been stingingly rebuked by his father for sliding down the banisters in the hall, a mode of progress strictly forbidden. Blessington had not been less stinging, for an hour ago Archie had been extremely rude to her, and, with a dignity that he both respected and resented, she had said, "Then I've nothing more to say to you, Master Archie, till you've remembered your manners again." And had thereupon continued her sewing.

Archie knew he had been rude, but his sense of that was not yet strong enough to enable him to apologize, though of sufficient energy to make him feel woebegone and neglected. He had been allowed by his mother to sit in her room that afternoon, when she went out with Jeannie, and to investigate what was known as her "work-box," which contained her "treasures." In earlier days these had been a source of deep delight: there was a minute china elephant with a silk palanquin on his back; there was a porcupine's quill, there was a set of dolls' tea-things, a pink umbrella, the ferrule of which was a pencil, a chain of amber. Once these had held magic for Archie: they were "mummy's treasures," and could only be seen on wet afternoons or in hours of toothache. But to-day they appeared to him perfectly rubbishy; not a gleam of glamour remained; they were as dull as the leaden skies of this interminable afternoon.

Archie lay in the window-seat, and wondered that his sailor-trousers only a year ago had given him so complete a sense of happiness. He rubbed one leg against the other, trying to recollect how it was that that rough serge against his bare calf felt so manly. He tried to interest himself in Alice in Wonderland, and marvelled that he could have cared about an adventure with a pack of cards. He longed to throw the book at the foolish Dresden shepherdess that stood on the mantelpiece. He supposed there would be trouble if he did, that his mother would be vexed, but trouble was better than this nothing-at-all. Probably it would rain again to-morrow, and he would have another day indoors, and the thought of Nothing Happening either to-day or to-morrow seemed the same as the thought of nothing happening for ever and ever.

There was a bright fire in the hearth and beyond the steel fender a thick hearthrug of long white sheep's wool. Suddenly Archie remembered the odour that diffused itself when, one day, a fragment of hot coal flew out of the fire, and lodged in this same hearthrug. There was a fatty, burning smell, most curious, and simultaneously the wild, irresistible desire of doing something positively wicked enthralled him. Instantly he knew what he was going to do, and with set, determined face, he took the fire-shovel in one hand and the tongs in the other, and heaped the shovel high with burning coals. He emptied them on the hearthrug.

The smoke of singeing, burning wool arose, and he took several more lumps of glowing coal from the fire-place and deposited them on the rug. Then a panic seized him, and he tried to stamp the conflagration out. But he only stamped the glowing coals more firmly in, and, though amazed at his audacity, he did not really want to extinguish it. He wanted something to happen. Quite deliberately, though with cheeks burning with excitement, he walked out of the room, leaving the door open, and simultaneously heard the crunch of the gravel under the wheels of his mother's returning motor. He did not wish to see her, and went straight to the night-nursery (now his exclusive bedroom) and locked himself in. But he was not in the least sorry for what he had done: if anything he wished he had put more coals there. Nor was he frightened at the thought of possible consequences. Merely, he did not care what happened, so long as something happened. That, he reflected, it was pretty certain to do. But he made no plans.

Before very long he heard some one turning the handle of his door, and he kept quite still. Then his father's voice said:

"Are you there, Archie?" And still he said nothing.

The voice grew louder and the handle rattled.

"Archie, open your door immediately," said his father.

Not in the least knowing why, Archie proceeded to do so. He still felt absolutely defiant and desperate, but for some instinctive reason he obeyed.

Enormous and terrible, his father stood before him.

"Did you put those coals on your mother's hearthrug?" asked Lord

Davidstow.

"No," said Archie.

"Then how did you know they were there?" asked his father.

Archie had something of the joy of the desperate adventurer.

"Because I put them there," he said.

"Then you have lied to me as well."

"Yes," said Archie.

Lord Davidstow pointed to the door.

"Go downstairs at once," he said, "and wait in my study."

Archie obeyed, still not knowing why. At the top of the stairs was standing his mother, who took a step forward towards him.

"Archie, my darling – " she began.

"Leave the boy to me," said his father, who was following him. Archie marched downstairs, still without a tremor. It occurred to him that his father was going to kill him, as Cyrus killed the thrush. There was a whispered conversation between his mother and father and he heard his mother say, "No, don't, don't," and he felt sure that this referred to his being killed. But he was quite certain that, whatever happened, he was not going to say he was sorry.

He went into his father's study and shut the door. On the table he noticed that there was standing one of Miss Schwarz's medicine-bottles, and a syphon beside it, and wondered whether Miss Schwarz had come back. But there was no other sign of her.

In another moment his father entered.

"Now, you thoroughly deserve a good whipping, Archie," he said. "You might have burned the house down, and if you were a poor boy you'd have been put into prison for this. But your mother has been pleading for you, and, if you'll say you are sorry, and beg her pardon for burning her hearthrug, I'll let you off just this time."

Well, he was not going to be killed, but he was going to be whipped. Archie felt his heart beating small and fast with apprehension; but he was not sorry, and did not intend to say he was.

"Well?" said his father.

"I'm not sorry," said Archie.

"I'll give you one more chance," said his father, moving towards a cupboard above one of the bookcases.

"I'm not sorry," said Archie again.

His father opened the cupboard.

"Lock the door," he said.

But, before he could lock it, it was opened from without, and his mother entered. His father had already a cane in his hand, and he turned round as she came in. She looked at him and then at Miss Schwarz's medicine-bottle on the table.

"Go away, Marion," he said. "I'm going to give the boy a lesson."

She pointed at the bottle.

"You had better learn yours first," she said.

"Never mind that. Archie says he's not sorry. It is my duty to teach him."

Suddenly Archie felt tremendously interested. He had no idea what all this was about, or what his father's lesson was, but he felt he was in the presence of some drama apart from his own. It was with a sense of the interruption of this that he saw his mother turn to him.

"Archie, my dear," she said. "You have vexed and grieved me very much. Supposing I had felt wicked and had burned you stylograph pen, shouldn't I be sorry for having injured you? And aren't you sorry for having burned my hearthrug? What had I done to deserve that? Hadn't I given you leave to sit in my room, and look at my treasures? Why did you hurt me?"

Immediately the whole affair wore a different aspect. Instead of anger and justice, there was the sound of love. His heart melted, and he ran to her.

"Oh mummy, I didn't mean to vex you," he cried. "I didn't think of that.

You hadn't done anything beastly to me."

He burst into tears.

"Oh, mummy, forgive me," he said. "I don't mind being whipped, at least not much; but I'm sorry; I beg your pardon. Please stop my allowance till I've paid for it."

"Yes, dear, it's only right that you should pay some of it. You shall have no more allowance for three weeks. Now go straight upstairs, and go to bed till I come to you and tell you that you may get up. And Blessington tells me you have been rude to her. Go and beg her pardon first."

* * * * *

The effect of this episode on Archie's mind was that his mother understood, and his father didn't. The prospect of a whipping had not made him falter in his resolve not to say he was sorry, so long as he wasn't sorry, but the moment his mother had put his misdeeds in a sensible light he saw them sensibly, and would not have minded being whipped if by that drastic method he could have borne witness to the reality of his sorrow. But only three days later he received six smart cuts with that horrible cane for climbing on to the unparapetted roof of the house out of his bedroom window, which he had been expressly forbidden to do. But then there was no question of being sorry or not – as a matter of fact he was not – summary justice was executed for mere disobedience, and, before doing the same thing again, he added up the pleasure of going on the roof, and balanced it against the pain inflicted on the tight seat of his sailor-trousers as he bent over a chair, and found it wanting.

It was during this same month which saw his seven completed years that he did a very strange and unintelligible thing, though he suffered it rather than committed it. He did it, that is to say, quite involuntarily, and did not know he was doing it till it was done. This was the manner of it.

Miss Bampton had set him one of her delightful exercises in handwriting in his copy-book. "Never brush your teeth with the housemaid's broom" she had written in her beautiful copper-plate hand at the top of the page, and Archie was sitting with his tongue out copying this remarkable maxim, and amusing himself with conjectures as to what other strange habits such people as were likely to brush their teeth with the housemaid's broom might be supposed to have – perhaps they would lace their boots with the tongs, or write their letters with a poker… He had got about half-way down the page when suddenly there came over him that sensation with which he was beginning to become familiar, that feeling of extension and expansion within himself, that falling away of the limitations of consciousness which opened some new interior world to him.

His pen paused, and then in the wrist of his right hand and in the fingers that still held his pen he felt a curious imperative kind of twitching, and knew that they wanted to write of their own volition, as it were, though it was not his copy that they were concerned with. Under this sensation of absolute compulsion, he took a sheet of paper that lay at his elbow, and let his pen rest on it, watching with the intensest curiosity what it would do. He had no idea what would happen, but he felt that something had to be written. For a couple of minutes perhaps his pen traced random lines on the paper, moving from left to right with a much greater speed than it was wont to go, and the letters began to form themselves with a rapidity and certainty unknown to his careful, halting calligraphy, and in firm upright characters. He saw his own name traced on the paper followed by a sentence, and then his pen (still apparently obedient to some unknown impulse from his fingers) gave a great dash and stopped altogether. And this is what he read:

"Archie, do let me talk to you sometimes.

"MARTIN."

The queer sensation had ceased altogether, and Archie stared blankly at the words that he knew his hand had written. But what they meant, he had no notion, nor did he know who Martin was. The whole thing was quite unintelligible to him, both the impulse that made him write, and that which he had written.

Miss Bampton had left the room on some errand, when she had set Archie his copy, and came back at this moment expecting to find the copy finished. She looked over his shoulder to see how he was getting on.

"My dear, haven't you got further than that?" she said. "I thought you would have finished it by this time."

She saw the other piece of paper half-concealed by Archie's left hand.

"Why, you've been writing something else," she said. "That's why you haven't got on further. Let me look."

"Please not," said Archie. "It's private."

Miss Bampton remembered that, a week ago, Archie had been seized with a strong desire for literary composition, and had composed a very remarkable short story, which may be given in full.

"CHAPTER I

"There was once a merderer with yellow eyes, and his wife said to him,

"'If you merder me you will be hung.'

"And he was hung on Tuesday next.

"FINIS."

When Archie had brought this yarn to her she had laughed so uncontrollably that he was hurt. So, in the hope of finding another such (though Archie had no business to write stories in lesson-time) she said:

"My dear, do show me; I won't laugh."

Archie hesitated; he felt shy about disclosing this sentence he had written, but, on the other hand, Miss Bampton, who appeared to know everything, might help him towards the interpretation.

"Well, it's not a story," he said. "It's just this. I wrote it without knowing. Oh, Miss Bampton, what does it mean, and who is Martin?"

If it was Archie who hesitated before, it was Miss Bampton who hesitated now. Suddenly she had a clever thought.

"My dear, you've been thinking about the Martins that built in the sandpit last spring," she said. "Don't you remember how you and Jeannie made up a story about them?"

This was true enough, but it failed to satisfy Archie. Also he had a notion that Miss Bampton had made a call on her ingenuity in offering this explanation.

"But isn't there any other Martin?" he asked.

"None that you ever knew, Archie," she said. "I think it's one of those in the sandpit. Now get on with your copy, and we'll walk there before your dinner."

The incident passed into the medley of impressions that were crowding so quickly into the storehouse of Archie's consciousness, but it did not lie there quite unconnected with others. He laid it on the same shelf, so to speak, as that which held the memory of his waking vision one night in remote days, and held also the fact of his knowing what Miss Bampton had thought of in the guessing game. But those were among the secret things of which he spoke to nobody. One more impression for secret pondering, though of different sort from those, he had lately added to his store, and that was when a whipping seemed imminent, and he saw one of Miss Schwarz's medicine-bottles standing on his father's table.

CHAPTER IV

Lady Davidstow and Miss Bampton were sitting together that night in Lady Davidstow's bedroom. She had sent her maid away, saying that she would not want her again that night, and now she held in her hand the sheet of paper covered with lines of meaningless scribbles, with the one intelligible sentence at the end, which Archie had written that day when he should have been doing his copy. In the other hand she held a letter written in ink that was now rather faded, and she was comparing the two. She looked at them for some time in silence, then turned to Miss Bampton.

"Yes, you are quite right, Cathie," she said. "What Archie wrote might actually be in Martin's handwriting. Look for yourself: there's the last letter he ever wrote to me."

Miss Bampton took the two papers from her.

"There's absolutely no difference," she said. "The moment I saw what Archie had written, I thought of Martin's handwriting. And then it was signed 'Martin.' Are you sure he has never heard of him? Not that that would account for the handwriting."

Lady Davidstow shook her head.

"I think it's impossible," she said. "Jeannie assured me she had never spoken to him about Martin, nor has Blessington. He may have heard his name. He probably has heard his name mentioned. I remember mentioning it in Archie's hearing the other day, but he didn't pay the slightest attention. And he can't possibly recollect him even in the vaguest way. It is five years now since Martin died, and Archie was then only just two, and for six months before that Martin was with me at Grives."

Cathie Bampton laid down the two papers.

"I can't think why you never told Archie about him," she said.

Lady Davidstow's great grey eyes grew dim.

"Ah, my dear, if you were Martin's mother and Archie's mother you would know," she said. "If you had seen your eldest son die of consumption and your second son threatened with it, you would understand how natural it was not to tell Archie yet of the brother he had never consciously seen. Jack agreed with me, too. I have long been prepared for Archie asking questions, which certainly I would answer truthfully, and let the knowledge come to him quietly by degrees. I may have done wrong; I don't know. But I think I did right. I couldn't begin saying to Archie, 'You had a brother, but he died.' More would have come out; that he died of consumption; that for fear of that Archie lives so much in the open air."

"But, my dear, how will Archie begin to know unless you tell him?"

"Oh, in many ways. There is Martin's picture, for instance, in my room. Archie may ask who it is. Or, when he hears Martin's name mentioned, he will ask some time who Martin was. Indeed, I have often thought it odd that he hasn't. Only the other day Jack was talking to me about it, suggesting that it was time that Archie knew. Indeed, he rather urged me to tell him. And now, all of a sudden, we find Archie writing in Martin's handwriting, and signing with Martin's name."

"Shall you tell Lord Davidstow?" asked Miss Bampton.

"No, I certainly shall not. Jack hates all that approaches the neighbourhood of anything that might be called occult or spiritualistic. He says 'Pshaw,' as you know, if even hypnotism is mentioned. I did tell him about Archie's intuition in that guessing game, and, as you again know, he asked you not to play it any more, though at the same time he insisted that it was a mere guess on Archie's part."

Cathie was silent a moment.

"And those scribbles of Archie's?" she asked. "Do they not make it more difficult for you to tell him about Martin now? A sensitive boy like that might get it into his head that his dead brother was writing to him."

"Certainly I don't want Archie to think that," said his mother. "No, I shall put off telling him now."