Johnny Ludlow, First Series

“I don’t know what to say about it, Johnny,” she said, after a pause. “If I were willing, you know Mr. Todhetley would not be so. He can’t forgive Lease for his carelessness. Every time Lena wakes up from sleep in a fright, fancying it is another accident, his anger returns to him. We often hear her crying out, you know, down here in an evening.”

“The carelessness was no fault of Lease’s children, that they should suffer for it.”

“When you grow older, Johnny, you will find that the consequences of people’s faults fall more on others than on themselves. It is very sad the Leases should be in this state; I am sorry for them.”

“Then you’ll help them a bit, good mother.”

Mrs. Todhetley was always ready to help any one, not needing to be urged; on the other hand, she liked to yield implicitly to the opinions of the Squire. Between the two, she went into a dilemma.

“Suppose it were Lena, starving for want of food and warmth?” I said. “Or Hugh sick with fever, as that young Tom is? Those children have done no more harm than ours.”

Mrs. Todhetley put her hand up to her face, and her mild eyes looked nearly as sad as Lease’s.

“Will you take it to them yourself, Johnny, in a covered basket, and not let it be seen? That is, make it your own doing?”

“Yes.”

“Go to the kitchen then, and ask Molly. There are some odds and ends of things in the larder that will not be particularly wanted. You see, Johnny, I do not like to take an active part in this; it would seem like opposing the Squire.”

Molly was stooping before the big fire, basting the meat, in one of her vile humours. If I wanted to rob the larder, I must do it, she cried; it was my business, not hers; and she dashed the basting spoon across the table by way of accompaniment.

I gave a good look round the larder, and took a raised pork-pie that had a piece cut out of it, and a leg of mutton three parts eaten. On the shelf were a dozen mince-pies, just out of their patty-pans; I took six and left six. Molly, screwing her face round the kitchen-door, caught sight of them as they went into the basket, and rushing after me out of the house, shrieked out for her mince-pies.

The race went on. She was a woman not to be daunted. Just as we turned round by the yellow barn, I first, she raving behind, the Squire pounced upon us, asking what the uproar meant. Molly told her tale. I was a thief, and had gone off with the whole larder, more particularly with her mince-pies.

“Open the basket, Johnny,” said the Squire: which was the one Tod and I used when we went fishing.

No sooner was it done than Molly marched off with the pies in triumph. The Pater regarded the pork-pie and the meat with a curious gaze.

“This is for you and Joe, I suppose. I should like to know for how many more.”

I was one of the worst to conceal things, when taken-to like this, and he got it all out of me in no time. And then he put his hand on my shoulder and ordered me to say who the things were for. Which I had to do.

Well, there was a row. He wanted to know what I meant by being wicked enough to give food to Lease. I said it was for the children. I’m afraid I almost cried, for I did not like him to be angry with me, but I know I promised not to eat any dinner at home for three days if he would let me take the meat. Molly’s comments, echoing through the house, betrayed to Mrs. Todhetley what had happened, and she came down the road with a shawl over her head. She told the Squire the truth then: that she had sanctioned it. She said she feared the Leases were quite in extremity, and begged him to let the meat go.

“Be off for this once, you young thief,” stamped the Squire, “but don’t let me catch you at anything of this sort again.”

So the meat went to the Leases, and two loaves that Mrs. Todhetley whispered me to order for them at Ford’s. When I reached home with the empty basket, they were going in to dinner. I took a book and stayed in the parlour. In a minute or two the Squire sent to ask what I was doing that for.

“It’s all right, Thomas. I don’t want any dinner to-day.”

Old Thomas went away and returned again, saying the master ordered me to go in. But I wouldn’t do anything of the sort. If he forgot the bargain, I did not.

Out came the Squire, his face red, napkin in hand, and laid hold of me by the shoulders.

“You obstinate young Turk! How dare you defy me? Come along.”

“But it is not to defy you, sir. It was a bargain, you know; I promised.”

“What was a bargain?”

“That I should not have any dinner for three days. Indeed I meant it.”

The Squire’s answer was to propel me into the dining-room. “Move down, Joe,” he said, “I’ll have him by me to-day. I’ll see whether he is to starve himself out of bravado.”

“Why, what’s up?” asked Tod, as he went to a lower seat. “What have you been doing, Johnny?”

“Never mind,” said the Squire, putting enough mutton on my plate for two. “You eat that, Mr. Johnny?”

It went on so throughout dinner. Mrs. Todhetley gave me a big share of apple pudding; and, when the macaroni came on, the Squire heaped my plate. And I know it was all done to show he was not really angry with me for having taken the things to the Leases.

Mr. Cole, the surgeon, came in after dinner, and was told of my wickedness. Lena ran up to me and said might she send her new sixpence to the poor little children who had no bread to eat.

“What’s that Lease about, that he does not go to work?” asked the Squire, in loud tones. “Letting folks hear that his young ones are starving!”

“The man can’t work,” said Mr. Cole. “He is out on probation, you know, waiting for the verdict, and the sentence on him that is to follow.”

“Then why don’t they return their verdict and sentence him?” demanded the Squire, in his hot way.

“Ah!” said Mr. Cole, “it’s what they ought to have done long ago.”

“What will it be! Transportation?”

“I should take care it was not, if I were on the jury. The man had too much work on him that day, and had had nothing to eat or drink for too many hours.”

“I won’t hear a word in his defence,” growled the Squire.

When the jury met for the last time, Lease was ill. A day or two before that, some one had brought Lease word that Roberts, who had been lingering all that time in the infirmary at Worcester, was going at last. Upon which Lease started to see him. It was not the day for visitors at the infirmary, but he gained admittance. Roberts was lying in the accident ward, with his head low and a blue look in his face; and the first thing Lease did, when he began to speak, was to burst out crying. The man’s strength had gone down to nothing and his spirit was broken. Roberts made out that he was speaking of his distress at having been the cause of the calamity, and asking to be forgiven.

“Mate,” said Roberts, putting out his hand that Lease might take it, “I’ve never had an ill thought to ye. Mishaps come to all of us that have to do with rail-travelling; us drivers get more nor you pointsmen. It might have happened to me to be the cause, just as well as to you. Don’t think no more of it.”

“Say you forgive me,” urged Lease, “or I shall not know how to bear it.”

“I forgive thee with my whole heart and soul. I’ve had a spell of it here, Lease, waiting for death, knowing it must come to me, and I’ve got to look for it kindly. I don’t think I’d go back to the world now if I could. I’m going to a better. It seems just peace, and nothing less. Shake hands, mate.”

They shook hands.

“I wish ye’d lift my head a bit,” Roberts said, after a while. “The nurse she come and took away my pillow, thinking I might die easier, I suppose: I’ve seen her do it to others. Maybe I was a’most gone, and the sight of you woke me up again like.”

Lease sat down on the bed and put the man’s head upon his breast in the position that seemed most easy to him; and Roberts died there.

It was one of the worst days we had that winter. Lease had a night’s walk home of many miles, the sleet and wind beating upon him all the way. He was not well clad either, for his best things had been pawned.

So that when the inquest assembled two days afterwards, Lease did not appear at it. He was in bed with inflammation of the chest, and Mr. Cole told the coroner that it would be dangerous to take him out of it. Some of them called it bronchitis; but the Squire never went in for new names, and never would.

“I tell you what it is, gentlemen,” broke in Mr. Cole, when they were quarrelling as to whether there should be another adjournment or not, “you’ll put off and put off, until Lease slips through your fingers.”

“Oh, will he, though!” blustered old Massock. “He had better try at it! We’d soon fetch him back again.”

“You’d be clever to do it,” said the doctor.

Any way, whether it was this or not, they thought better of the adjournment, and gave their verdict. “Manslaughter against Henry Lease.” And the coroner made out his warrant of committal to Worcester county prison: where Lease would lie until the March assizes.

“I am not sure but it ought to have been returned Wilful Murder,” remarked the Squire, as he and the doctor turned out of the Bull, and picked their way over the slush towards Crabb Lane.

“It might make no difference, one way or the other,” answered Mr. Cole.

“Make no difference! What d’ye mean? Murder and manslaughter are two separate crimes, Cole, and must be punished accordingly. You see, Johnny, what your friend Lease has come to!”

“What I meant, Squire, was this: that I don’t much think Lease will live to be tried at all.”

“Not live!”

“I fancy not. Unless I am much mistaken, his life will have been claimed by its Giver long before March.”

The Squire stopped and looked at Cole. “What’s the matter with him? This inflammation—that you went and testified to?”

“That will be the cause of death, as returned to the registrar.”

“Why, you speak just as if the man were dying now, Cole!”

“And I think he is. Lease has been very low for a long time,” added Mr. Cole; “half clad, and not a quarter fed. But it is not that, Squire: heart and spirit are alike broken: and when this cold caught him, he had no stamina to withstand it; and so it has seized upon a vital part.”

“Do you mean to tell me to my face that he will die of it?” cried the Squire, holding on by the middle button of old Cole’s great-coat. “Nonsense, man! you must cure him. We—we did not want him to die, you know.”

“His life or his death, as it may be, are in the hands of One higher than I, Squire.”

“I think I’ll go in and see him,” said the Squire, meekly.

Lease was lying on a bed close to the floor when we got to the top of the creaky stairs, which had threatened to come down with the Squire’s weight and awkwardness. He had dozed off, and little Polly, sitting on the boards, had her head upon his arm. Her starting up awoke Lease. I was not in the habit of seeing dying people; but the thought struck me that Lease must be dying. His pale weary face wore the same hue that Jake’s had worn when he was dying: if you have not forgotten him.

“God bless me!” exclaimed the Squire.

Lease looked up with his sad eyes. He supposed they had come to tell him officially about the verdict—which had already reached him unofficially.

“Yes, gentlemen, I know it,” he said, trying to get up out of respect, and falling back. “Manslaughter. I’d have been present if I could. Mr. Cole knows I wasn’t able. I think God is taking me instead.”

“But this won’t do, you know, Lease,” said the Squire. “We don’t want you to die.”

“Well, sir, I’m afraid I am not good for much now. And there’d be the imprisonment, and then the sentence, so that I could not work for my wife and children for some long years. When people come to know how I repented of that night’s mistake, and that I have died of it, why, they’ll perhaps befriend them and forgive me. I think God has forgiven me: He is very merciful.”

“I’ll send you in some port wine and jelly and beef-tea—and some blankets, Lease,” cried the Squire quickly, as if he felt flurried. “And, Lease, poor fellow, I am sorry for having been so angry with you.”

“Thank you for all favours, sir, past and present. But for the help from your house my little ones would have starved. God bless you all, and forgive me! Master Johnny, God bless you.”

“You’ll rally yet, Lease; take heart,” said the Squire.

“No, sir, I don’t think so. The great dark load seems to have been lifted off me, and light to be breaking. Don’t sob, Polly! Perhaps father will be able to see you from up there as well as if he stayed here.”

The first thing the Squire did when we got out, was to attack Mr. Cole, telling him he ought not to have let Lease die. As he was in a way about it, Cole excused it, quietly saying it was no fault of his.

“I should like to know what it is that has killed him, then?”

“Grief,” said Mr. Cole. “The man has died of what we call a broken heart. Hearts don’t actually sever, you know, Squire, like a china basin, and there’s always some ostensible malady that serves as a reason to talk about. In this case it will be bronchitis. Which, in point of fact, is the final end, because Lease could not rally against it. He told me yesterday that his heart had ached so keenly since November, it seemed to have dried up within him.”

“We are all a pack of hard-hearted sinners,” groaned the Squire, in his repentance. “Johnny, why could you not have found them out sooner? Where was the use of your doing it at the eleventh hour, sir, I’d like to know?”

Harry Lease died that night. And Crabb Lane, in a fit of repentance as sudden as the Squire’s, took the cost of the funeral off the parish (giving some abuse in exchange) and went in a body to the grave. I and Tod followed.

VII.

AUNT DEAN

Timberdale was a small place on the other side of Crabb Ravine. Its Rector was the Reverend Jacob Lewis. Timberdale called him Parson Lewis when not on ceremony. He had married a widow, Mrs. Tanerton: she had a good deal of money and two boys, and the parish thought the new lady might be above them. But she proved kind and good; and her boys did not ride roughshod over the land or break down the farmers’ fences. She died in three or four years, after a long illness.

Timberdale talked about her will, deeming it a foolish one. She left all she possessed to the Rector, “in affectionate confidence,” as the will worded it, “knowing he would do what was right and just by her sons.” As Parson Lewis was an upright man with a conscience of his own, it was supposed he would do so; but Timberdale considered that for the boys’ sake she should have made it sure herself. It was eight-hundred a year, good measure.

Parson Lewis had a sister, Mrs. Dean, a widow also, who lived near Liverpool. She was not left well-off at all; could but just make a living of it. She used to come on long visits to the Parsonage, which saved her cupboard at home; but it was said that Mrs. Lewis did not like her, thinking her deceitful, and they did not get on very well together. Parson Lewis, the meekest man in the world and the most easily led, admitted to his wife that Rebecca had always been a little given to scheming, but he thought her true at heart.

When poor Mrs. Lewis was out of the way for good in Timberdale churchyard, Aunt Dean had the field to herself, and came and stayed as long as she pleased, with her child, Alice. She was a little woman with a mild face and fair skin, and had a sort of purring manner with her. Scarcely speaking above her breath, and saying “dear” and “love” at every sentence, and caressing people to their faces, the rule was to fall in love with her at once. The boys, Herbert and Jack, had taken to her without question from the first, and called her “Aunt.” Though she was of course no relation whatever to them.

Both the boys made much of Alice—a bright-eyed, pretty little girl with brown curls and timid, winsome ways. Herbert, who was very studious himself, helped her with her lessons: Jack, who was nearer her age, but a few months older, took her out on expeditions, haymaking and blackberrying and the like, and would bring her home with her frock torn and her knees damaged. He told her that brave little girls never cried with him; and the child would ignore the smart of the grazed knees and show herself as brave as a martyr. Jack was so brave and fearless himself and made so little of hurts, that she felt a sort of shame at giving way to her natural timidity when with him. What Alice liked best was to sit indoors by Herbert’s side while he was at his lessons, and read story books and fairy tales. Jack was the opposite of all that, and a regular renegade in all kinds of study. He would have liked to pitch the books into the fire, and did not even care for fairy tales. They came often enough to Crabb Cot when we were there, and to our neighbours the Coneys, with whom the Parsonage was intimate. I was only a little fellow at the time, years younger than they were, but I remember I liked Jack better than Herbert. As Tod did also for the matter of that. Herbert was too clever for us, and he was to be a parson besides. He chose the calling himself. More than once he was caught muffled in the parson’s white surplice, preaching to Jack and Alice a sermon of his own composition.

Aunt Dean had her plans and her plots. One great plot was always at work. She made it into a dream, and peeped into it night and day, as if it were a kaleidoscope of rich and many colours. Herbert Tanerton was to marry her daughter and succeed to his mother’s property as eldest son: Jack must go adrift, and earn his own living. She considered it was already three parts as good as accomplished. To see Herbert and Alice poring over books together side by side and to know that they had the same tastes, was welcome to her as the sight of gold. As to Jack, with his roving propensities, his climbing and his daring, she thought it little matter if he came down a tree head-foremost some day, or pitched head over heels into the depths of Crabb Ravine, and so threw his life away. Not that she really wished any cruel fate for the boy; but she did not care for him; and he might be terribly in the way, when her foolish brother, the parson, came to apportion the money. And he was foolish in some things; soft, in fact: she often said so.

One summer day, when the fruit was ripe and the sun shining, Mr. Lewis had gone into his study to write his next Sunday’s sermon. He did not get on very quickly, for Aunt Dean was in there also, and it disturbed him a little. She was of restless habits, everlastingly dusting books, and putting things in their places without rhyme or reason.

“Do you wish to keep out all three of these inkstands, Jacob? It is not necessary, I should think. Shall I put one up?”

The parson took his eyes off his sermon to answer. “I don’t see that they do any harm there, Rebecca. The children use two sometimes. Do as you like, however.”

Mrs. Dean put one of the inkstands into the book-case, and then looked round the room to see what else she could do. A letter caught her eye.

“Jacob, I do believe you have never answered the note old Mullet brought this morning! There it is on the mantelpiece.”

The parson sighed. To be interrupted in this way he took quite as a matter of course, but it teased him a little.

“I must see the churchwardens, Rebecca, before answering it. I want to know, you see, what would be approved of by the parish.”

“Just like you, Jacob,” she caressingly said. “The parish must approve of what you approve.”

“Yes, yes,” he said hastily; “but I like to live at peace with every one.”

He dipped his pen into the ink, and wrote a line of his sermon. The open window looked on to the kitchen-garden. Herbert Tanerton had his back against the walnut-tree, doing nothing. Alice sat near on a stool, her head buried in a book that by its canvas cover Mrs. Dean knew to be “Robinson Crusoe.” Just then Jack came out of the raspberry bushes with a handful of fruit, which he held out to Alice. “Robinson Crusoe” fell to the ground.

“Oh, Jack, how good they are!” said Alice. And the words came distinctly to Aunt Dean’s ears in the still day.

“They are as good again when you pick them off the trees for yourself,” cried Jack. “Come along and get some, Alice.”

With the taste of the raspberries in her mouth, the temptation was not to be resisted; and she ran after Jack. Aunt Dean put her head out at the window.

“Alice, my love, I cannot have you go amongst those raspberry bushes; you would stain and tear your frock.”

“I’ll take care of her frock, aunt,” Jack called back.

“My darling Jack, it cannot be. That is her new muslin frock, and she must not go where she might injure it.”

So Alice sat down again to “Robinson Crusoe,” and Jack went his way amongst the raspberry bushes, or whither he would.

“Jacob, have you begun to think of what John is to be?” resumed Aunt Dean, as she shut down the window.

The parson pushed his sermon from him in a sort of patient hopelessness, and turned round on his chair. “To be?—In what way, Rebecca?”

“By profession,” she answered. “I fancy it is time it was thought of.”

“Do you? I’m sure I don’t know. The other day when something was being mentioned about it, Jack said he did not care what he was to be, provided he had no books to trouble him.”

“I only hope you will not have trouble with him, Jacob, dear,” observed Mrs. Dean, in ominous tones, that plainly intimated she thought the parson would.

“He has a good heart, though he is not so studious as his brother. Why have you shut the window, Rebecca? It is very warm.”

Mrs. Dean did not say why. Perhaps she wished to guard against the conversation being heard. When any question not quite convenient to answer was put to her, she had a way of passing it over in silence; and the parson was too yielding or too inert to ask again.

“Of course, Brother Jacob, you will make Herbert the heir.”

The parson looked surprised. “Why should you suppose that, Rebecca? I think the two boys ought to share and share alike.”

“My dear Jacob, how can you think so? Your dead wife left you in charge, remember.”

“That’s what I do remember, Rebecca. She never gave me the slightest hint that she should wish any difference to be made: she was as fond of one boy as of the other.”

“Jacob, you must do your duty by the boys,” returned Mrs. Dean, with affectionate solemnity. “Herbert must be his mother’s heir; it is right and proper it should be so: Jack must be trained to earn his own livelihood. Jack—dear fellow!—is, I fear, of a roving, random disposition: were you to leave any portion of the money to him, he would squander it in a year.”

“Dear me, I hope not! But as to leaving all to his brother—or even a larger portion than to Jack—I don’t know that it would be right. A heavy responsibility lies on me in this charge, don’t you see, Rebecca?”

“No doubt it does. It is full eight-hundred a year. And you must be putting something by, Jacob.”

“Not much. I draw the money yearly, but expenses seem to swallow it up. What with the ponies kept for the boys, and the cost of the masters from Worcester, and a hundred a year out of it that my wife desired the poor old nurse should have till she died, there’s not a great deal left. My living is a poor one, you know, and I like to help the poor freely. When the boys go to the university it will be all wanted.”

Help the poor freely!—just like him! thought Aunt Dean.

“It would be waste of time and money to send Jack to college. You should try and get him some appointment abroad, Jacob. In India, say.”

The clergyman opened his eyes at this, and said he should not like to see Jack go out of his own country. Jack’s mother had not had any opinion of foreign places. Jack himself interrupted the conversation. He came flying up the path, put down a cabbage leaf full of raspberries on the window-sill, and flung open the window with his stained fingers.

“Aunt Dean, I’ve picked these for you,” he said, introducing the leaf, his handsome face and good-natured eyes bright and sparkling. “They’ve never been so good as they are this year. Father, just taste them.”

Aunt Dean smiled sweetly, and called him her darling, and Mr. Lewis tasted the raspberries.

“We were just talking of you, Jack,” cried the unsophisticated man—and Mrs. Dean slightly knitted her brows. “Your aunt says it is time you began to think of some profession.”