Cripps, the Carrier: A Woodland Tale

"Luke, you take my breath away. Such wonderful things I have never heard. At least, not in our own family."

"Of course, my dear. We all accept wonders with quietude, till they come home to us. Well, when he fetched out this old bottle, it was fungus inside from heel to neck. He held it up against the light, and the glass being whiter than now they make, and the wine gone almost white with age, there you could see this extraordinary growth, like cords in the bottle, and valves across it, and a long yellow sheath like a crocus-flower. I had never seen anything like it before; but he knew all about it. 'Ah, I know a genleman,' he grunted in his throat – he never could say 'gentleman,' as you remember – 'a genleman as would give a hundred guineas for this here bottle! Quibbles, he shouldn't have it for a thousand! My boy, you and I will drink it. Say no, and I'll cut off your wife with a half-penny!' Miranda, what could I do but try to humour him to the utmost? If I had had the smallest inkling of the iniquitous will he had made, of course, I never would have sat on the head of the cask, down in his dingy and reeking vaults, by the hour together, to please him. But never mind that – in a moment he took a long-handled knife, or chopper, and holding the bottle upright, struck off the neck and a part of the shoulder, as straight as a line, at the level of the wine. 'Not many men could do that,' he said; 'none of your clumsy cork-screwers for me! Now, Quibbles, here's a real treat for you! Talk of beeswing, my boy, here's a beehive!' And really it was more like eating than drinking wine; for all the body was gone into the fungus. Nastier stuff I never tasted; but, luckily, he took the lion's share. 'Now, Quibbles, I'll tell you a secret,' he said, after swallowing at least a quart; 'a very pretty girl came and kissed me t'other day, in among these very bottles. Such a little duck – not a bit ashamed or afeared of my fungus, as my missus is. And her breath was as sweet as the violets of '20! "Well now, my little dear," thinks I, as I stood back and looked at her, "that was kind of you to kiss an old man a-dying of port wine fungus! And if he only lives another day, you shall have the right to kiss the Royal family, if you cares to do it." Quibbles, I wouldn't call in you, nor any other thief of a lawyer. Lawyers are very well over a glass; but keep 'em outside of the cellar, say I. Very good company, in their way; but the only company I put trust in is the one I have dealt with all my life, – and many a thousand pounds I have paid them – The Royal Wine Company of Oporto. So now, if anything happens to me – though I am not in such a hurry to be binned away, and walled up for the resurrection – Quibbles, wait six months; and then you go to the Royal Oporto Company, and ask for a genleman of the name of Jolly Fellows.'"

"Now, Luke, I am all anxiety to hear," exclaimed Mrs. Sharp, with a sudden interruption, "what was the end of this very strange affair. I perceive now that I have foreseen the whole of it. But it is not right that you should speak so long, without one morsel of refreshment. It is many hours since you dined, my dear, and a very poor dinner you had of it. You shall have a glass of white wine, and a slice of tongue, between a little cold roll and butter. It will not in any way interrupt you. I can get it all for you, without ringing the bell. Only let me ask you one thing first – why have you never told me this till now?"

"Because, Miranda, it would disturb your mind. And I know that you cannot endure suspense. Moreover, I scarcely knew what to think of it. Poor old Fermitage (what with the fungus already in his tubes, and what he was taking down) might be talking sheer nonsense for all that I knew. And indeed, for a long time I treated it so; and I had no stomach for a voyage to Oporto, upon mere speculation, and for the benefit only of some pretty girl. Then I found out, by the purest chance, that no voyage to Oporto was needful, that old 'Port-wine' (who departed on his cask to a better world, the day after his magnum) meant nothing more than the London stores and agency of the Oporto Company. And even after that I made one expedition to the Minories, all for nothing. Two or three very polite young dons stared at me, and thought I was come to chaff them, or perhaps had turned up from their vaults top-heavy, when I asked for 'Senhor Jolly Fellows.' And so I came away, and lost some months, and might never have thought it worth while to go again, except for another mere accident."

"My dear, what a chapter of accidents!" cried Mrs. Sharp, while feeding him. "I thought that you were a great deal too clever to allow any room for accidents."

"Women think so. Men know better," the lawyer replied sententiously; his ability was too well-known to need his vindication. "And, Miranda, you forget that I had as yet no personal interest in the question. But when I happened to have a Portuguese gentleman as a client – a man who had spent many years in England – and happened to be talking of our language to him, I told him one part of the story, and asked if he could throw any light on it. He told me at once that the name which had so puzzled me must be Gelofilos – a Portuguese surname, by no means common. And the next time I was in town, I had occasion to call in St. John's Street, and found myself, almost by accident again, not far from the Company's offices."

"Mr. Sharp, you left such a thing to chance, when you knew that it might pull down that dreadful woman's insolence!"

"My dear, it is not the duty of my life to mitigate feminine arrogance. And to undertake such a crusade, gratis! I am equal to a bold stroke, as you will see, if your patience lasts – but never to such a vast undertaking. When it comes before me, in the way of business, naturally I take it up. But this was no business of my own; and the will was proved, and assets called in; for the old rogue did not owe one penny. Well, I went again, and this time I got hold of the right man – Miranda, I hear the bell!"

The new office-bell, the successor to the one that succumbed to Russel Overshute, rang as hard as ring it could. A special messenger was come from London, and in half an hour Mr. Luke Sharp was sitting on the box of the night up mail.

CHAPTER XXXV.

NIGHTINGALES

This sudden departure of Mr. Luke Sharp, in the very marrow of his story, left his good wife in a trying and altogether discontented state of mind. She knew that she could have no more particulars until he came back again; for Sharp had even less faith in the post than the post of that period deserved. She might have to wait for days and days, with a double anxiety urging her.

In the first place, although she felt nothing but pity for poor old Mrs. Fermitage, and would have been really sorry to hear of anything likely to vex her, she could not help being desirous to know if there were any danger of a thing so sad. But her second anxiety was a great deal keener, being sharpened by the ever moving grit of love; in the dreadful state of mind her son was in, how would all this act upon him? His father had been forced, by some urgency of things, to put on his box-coat, and make off, without even time for a hurried whisper as to the residue of his tale. Mrs. Sharp felt that there might be something which her husband feared to spread before her, without plenty of time to lead up to it; and having for many years been visited (whenever she was not quite herself) with poignant doubts whether Mr. Sharp was anchored upon Scriptural principles, she almost persuaded herself for the moment that he meant to put up with the loss of the money.

However, a little reflection sufficed to clear away this sadly awful cloud of scepticism, and to assure her that Mr. Sharp, however he might swerve in theory, would be orthodox enough in practice to follow the straight path towards the money. And then she began to think of nothing except her own beloved Kit.

The last hurried words of her husband had been – "Not one word to Kit, or you ruin all; let him groan as he likes; only watch him closely. I shall be back by Saturday night. God bless you, my dear! Keep up your spirits. I have the whip-hand of the lot of them."

Herein lay her faith and hope. She never had known her husband fail, when he really made up his mind to succeed; and therefore in the bottom of her heart she doubted the genuine loss of Grace Oglander. Sharp had discovered, and traced to their end, clues of the finest gossamer, when his interest led him to do so. That he should be baffled, and own himself to be so, was beyond her experience. Therefore, although as yet she had no more than a guess at her husband's schemes, she could not help fancying, after his words, that they might have to do with Grace Oglander.

Before she had time to think out her thoughts, Christopher, their main subject, returned from Wytham Wood, after holding long rivalry of woe with nightingales. He still carried on, and well-carried off, the style of the love-lorn Romeo. He swung his cloak quite as well as could be expected of an Englishman – who is born to hate fly-away apparel, all of which is womanish; but the necessities of his position had driven him now to a very short pipe. His favourite meerschaum had fallen into sorrow as terrible as his own. In a highly poetical moment he had sucked it so hard that the oil arose, and took him with a hot spot upon a white tongue, impregnated then with a sonnet. All sonnets are of the tongue and ear; but Kit misliked having his split up, just when it was coming to the final kick. Therefore he gave his pipe a thump, beyond such a pipe's endurance; and being as sensitive as himself, and of equally fine material, it simply refused to draw any more, as long as he breathed poetry. Still breathing poetry, he marched home, with the stump of a farthing clay, newly baked in the Summertown Road, to console him.

Now, if this young man had failed of one of the triple human combination – weed, and clay, and fire – where and how might he have ended not only that one evening, but all the rest of the evenings of his young life? His appearance and manner had at first imported to any one whom he came across – and he truly did come across them in his wide and loose march out of Oxford city – that he might be sought for in a few hours' time, and only the inferior portion found. His mother worried him, so did his father, so did all humanity, save one – who worried him more than any, or all of it put together. The trees and the road, and the singing of the birds, and the gladness of the green world worried him. Luckily for himself he had bought a good box of German tinder, and from ash to ash his spirit glowed slowly into a more philosophic state. Gradually the beauty of the trees and hedges and the sloping fields began to steal around him; the warbled pleasure of the little birds made overture to his sympathy, and the lustrous calm of shadowed waters spread its picture through his mind.

His body also responded to the influences of the time of day, and the love of nature freshened into the natural love of cupboard. Hunger awoke in his system somewhere, and spread sweet pictures in a tasteful part. For a "moment of supreme agony" he wrestled with the coarse material instinct, then turned on his heel, as our novelists say, and made off for his father's kitchen.

His poor mother caught him the moment he came in, and pulled off his hat and his opera-cloak, and frizzled up his curls for him. She seemed to think that he must have been for a journey of at least a hundred leagues; that the fault of his going was hers, and the virtue of his ever coming back was all his own. Then she looked at him slyly, and with some sadness, and yet a considerable touch of pride, by the light of a three-wicked cocoa-candle; and feeling quite sure that she had him to herself, trembled at the boldness of the shot she made:

"Oh, Kit, why have you never told me? I have found it all out. You have fallen in love!"

Christopher Fermitage Sharp, Esquire – as he always entitled himself, upon the collar of spaniel or terrier – had nothing to say for a moment, but softly withdrew, to have his blush in shadow. Of all the world, best he loved his mother – before, or after, somebody else – and his simple, unpractised, and uncored heart, was shy of the job it was carrying on. Therefore he turned from his mother's face, and her eager eyes, and expectant arms.

"Come and tell me, my darling," she whispered, trying to get a good look at his reluctant eyes, and wholly oblivious of her promise to his father. "I will not be angry at all, Kit, although you never should have left me to find it out in this way."

"There is nothing to find out," he answered, making a turn towards the kitchen stairs. "I just want my supper, if there is anything to eat."

"To eat, Kit! And I thought so much better of you. After all, I must have been quite wrong. What a shame to invent such stories!"

"You must have invented them, yourself, dear mother," said Kit with recovered bravery. "Let me hear it all out when I have had my supper."

"I will go down this moment, and see what there is," replied his good mother eagerly. "Is there anything, now, that can coax your appetite?"

"Yes, mother, oysters will be over to-morrow. I should like two dozen fried with butter, and a pound and a quarter of rump-steak, cut thick, and not overdone."

"You shall have them, my darling, in twenty minutes. Now, be sure that you put your fur slippers on; I saw quite a fog coming over Port Meadow, as much as half an hour ago. This is the worst time of year to take cold. 'A May cold is a thirty-day cold.' What a stupe I must be," she continued to herself, "to imagine that the boy could be in love! I will take care to say not another word, or I might break my promise to his father. What a pity! He has a noble moustache coming, and only his mother to admire it!"

In spite of all disappointment, this good mother paid the warmest heed to the ordering, ay, and the cooking, of the supper of her only child. A juicier steak never sat on a gridiron; fatter oysters never frizzled with the pure bubble of goodness. Kit sat up, and made short work of all that came before him.

"Now, mother, what is it you want to say?" His tone was not defiant, but nicely self-possessed, and softly rich with triumph of digestion. And a silver tankard of Morel's ale helped him to express himself.

"My dear boy, I have nothing to say, except that you have lifted a great weight off my mind, a very great weight beyond description, by leaving behind you not even a trace of the existence of that fine rump-steak."

CHAPTER XXXVI.

MAY MORN

It was the morn when the tall and shapely tower of Magdalen is crowned with a fillet of shining white, awaiting the first step of sunrise. Once a year, for generations, this has been the sign of it – eager eyes, and gaping mouths, little knuckles blue with cold, and clumsy little feet inclined to slide upon the slippery lead. All are bound to keep together for the radiant moment; all are a little elated at their height above all other boys; all have a strong idea that the sun, when he comes, will be full of them; and every one of them longs to be back beneath his mother's blankets.

It is a tradition with this choir (handed, or chanted, down from very ancient choral ancestry) that the sun never rises on May-day without iced dew to glance upon. Scientific record here comes in to prop tradition. The icy saints may be going by, but they leave their breath behind them. And the poets, who have sent forth their maids to "gather the dews of May," knew, and meant, that dew must freeze to stand that operation.

But though the sky was bright, and the dew lay sparkling for the maidens, the frost on this particular morning was not so keen as usual. The trees that took the early light (more chaste without the yellow ray) glistened rather with soft moisture than with stiff encrustment; and sprays, that kept their sally into fickle air half latent, showing only little scolloped crinkles with a knob in them, held in every downy quillet liquid, rather than solid, gem.

Christopher Sharp, looking none the worse for his excellent supper of last night, laid his fattish elbow on the parapet of the bridge, and mused. Poetical feeling had fetched him out, thus early in the morning, to hear the choir salute the sun, and to be moved with sympathy. The moon is the proper deity of all true lovers, and has them under good command when she pleases. But for half the weeks of a month, she declines to sit in the court of lunacy; at least, as regards this earth, having her own men and women to attend to. This young man knew that she could not be found, with a view to meditation, now; and his mind relapsed to the sun – a coarse power, poetical only when he sets and rises.

With strength and command of the work of men, and leaving their dreams to his sister, the sun leaped up, with a shake of his brow and a scattering of the dew-clouds. The gates of the east swung right and left; so that tall trees on a hill seemed less than reeds in the rush of glory; and lines (like the spread of a crystal fan) trembled along the lowland. Inlets now, and lanes of vision (scarcely opened yesterday, and closed perhaps to-morrow) guided shafts of light along the level widening ways they love. Tree and tower, hill and wall, and water and broad meadow, stood, or lay, or leaned (according to the stamp set on them), one and all receiving, sharing, and rejoicing in the day.

Between the battlements, and above them, burst and rose the choral hymn; and as the laws of sound compelled it to go upward mainly, the part that came down was pleasing. Christopher, seeing but little of the boys, and not hearing very much, was almost enabled to regard the whole as a vocal effort of the angels: and thus in solemn thought he wandered as far as the high-tolled turnpike gate.

"I will hie me to Cowley," said he to himself, instead of turning back again; "there will I probe the hidden import of impending destiny. This long and dark suspense is more than can be brooked by human power. I know a jolly gipsy-woman; and if I went home I should have to wait three hours for my breakfast."

With these words he felt in the pockets of his coat, to be sure that oracular cash was there, and found a silk purse with more money than usual, stored for the purchase of a dog called "Pablo," a hero among badgers.

"What is Pablo to me, or I to Pablo?" he muttered with a smothered sigh. "She told me she thought it a cruel and cowardly thing to kill fifty rats in five minutes. Never more – alas, never more!" With a resolute step, but a clouded brow, he buttoned his coat, and strode onward.

Now, if he had been in a fit state of mind for looking about him, he might have found a thousand things worth looking at. But none of them, in his present hurry, won from him either glimpse or thought. He trudged along the broad London road at a good brisk rate, while the sun glanced over the highlands, and the dewy ridges, away on the left towards Shotover. The noble city behind him, stretched its rising sweep of tower, and spire, and dome, and serried battlement, stately among ancient trees, and rich with more than mere external glory to an Englishman. And away to the right hand sloped broad meadows, green with spring, and fluttered with the pearly hyaline of dew, lifting pillars of dark willow in the distance, where the Isis ran.

But what are these things to a lover, unless they hit the moment's mood? The fair, unfenced, free-landscaped road for him might just as well have been wattled, like a skittle-alley, and roofed with Croggon's patent felt. At certain – or rather uncertain – moments, he might have rejoiced in the wide glad heart of nature spread to welcome him; and must have felt, as lovers feel, the ravishment of beauty. It happened, however, that his eyes were open to nothing above, or around, or before him, unless it should present itself in the image of a gipsy's tent.

He turned to the left, before the road entered the new enclosures towards Iffley, and trod his own track towards Cowley Marsh. The crisp dew, brushed by his hasty feet, ran into large globes behind him; and jerks of dust, brought up by pressure, fell and curdled on them. In the haze of the morning, he looked much larger than he had any right to seem, and the shadow of his arms and hat stretched into hollow places. There was no other moving figure to be seen, except from time to time, of a creature, the colonist of commons, whose mental frame was not so unlike his own just now, as bodily form and style of walking might in misty grandeur seem. Though Kit was not such a stupid fellow, when free from his present bewitchment.

Scant of patience he came to a place where the elbow of a hedge jutted forth upon the common. A mighty hedge of beetling brows, and over-hanging shagginess, and shelfy curves, and brambly depths, and true Devonian amplitude. High farming would have swept it down, and out of its long course ploughed an acre. Young Sharp had not traced its windings far, before he came upon a tidy-looking tent, pitched, with the judgment of experience, in a snug and sheltered spot. The rest of the camp might be seen in the distance, glistening in the sunrise. This tent seemed to have crept away, for the sake of peace and privacy.

Christopher quickened his steps, expecting to be met by a host of children, rushing forth with outstretched hands, and shaggy hair, and wild black eyes. But there was not so much as a child to be seen, nor the curling smoke of a hedge-trough fire, nor even the scattered ash betokening cookery of the night before. The canvas of the tent was down; no head peeped forth, no naked leg or grimy foot protruded, to show that the inner world was sleeping; even the dog, so rarely absent, seemed to be really absent now.

The young man knew that the tent was not very likely to be unoccupied; but naturally he did not like to peep into it uninvited; and he turned away to visit the chief community of rovers, when the sound of a low soft moan recalled him. Still for a moment he hesitated, until he heard the like sound again, low, and clear, and musical from the deepest chords of sorrow. Kit felt sure that it must be a woman, in storms of trouble helpless; and full as he was of his own affairs he was impelled to interfere. So he lifted back the canvas drawn across the opening, and looked in.

There lay a woman on the sandy ground, with her back turned towards the light, her neck and shoulders a little raised by the short support of one elbow, and her head, and all that therein was, fixed in a rigour of gazing. Although her face was not to be seen, and the hopeless moan of her wail had ceased, Kit Sharp knew that he was in the presence of a grand and long-abiding woe.

He drew back, and he tried to make out what it was, and he sighed for concert – even as a young dog whimpers to a mother who has lost her pups – and, little as he knew of women, from his own mother, or whether or no, he judged that this woman had lost a child. That it was her only one, was more than he could tell or guess. The woman, disturbed by the change of light, turned round and steadily gazed at him, or rather at the opening which he filled; for her eyes had no perception of him. Kit was so scared that he jerked his head back, and nearly knocked his hat off. He never had seen such a thing before; and, if he had his choice he never would see such a thing again. The great dark, hollow eyes had lost similitude of human eyes: hope and fear and thought were gone; nothing remained but desolation and bare, reckless misery.

Christopher's gaze fell under hers. It would be a sheer impertinence to lay his small troubles before such woe.

"What is it? Oh! what is it?" asked the woman, at last having some idea that somebody was near her.

"I am very sorry; I assure you, ma'am, that I never felt more sorry in all my life," said Kit, who was a very kind-hearted fellow, and had now espied a small boy lying dead. "I give you my word of honour, ma'am, that if I could have guessed it, I would never have looked in."

Without any answer, the gipsy-woman turned again to her dead child, and took two little hands in hers, and rubbed them, and sat up, imagining that she felt some sign of life. She drew the little body to her breast, and laid the face to hers, and breathed into pale open lips (scarcely fallen into death), and lifted little eyelids with her tongue, and would not be convinced that no light came from under them; and then she rubbed again at every place where any warmth or polish of the skin yet lingered. She fancied that she felt the little fellow coming back to her, and she kept the whole of her own body moving to encourage him.