Johnny Ludlow, Second Series

Latin was a stumbling-block. Van Rheyn had learnt it according to French rules and French pronunciation, and he could not readily get into our English mode. “It was bad enough to have to teach a stupid boy Latin,” grumbled the under Latin master (under Dr. Frost), “but worse to have to un-teach him.” Van Rheyn was not stupid, however; if he seemed so, it was because his new life was so strange to him.

One day the boys dared him to a game at leap-frog. Some of them were at it in the yard, and Van Rheyn stood by, looking on.

“Why don’t you go in for it?” suddenly asked Parker, giving him a push. “There is to be a round or two at boxing this evening, why don’t you go in for that?”

“They never would let me do these rough things,” replied Van Rheyn, who invariably answered all the chaffing questions civilly and patiently.

“Who wouldn’t? Who’s ‘they’?”

“My mother and my Aunt Claribelle. Also, when I was starting to come here, my father said I was not to exert myself.”

“All right, Miss Charlotte; but why on earth didn’t the respectable old gentleman send you over in petticoats? Never was such a thing heard of, you know, as for a girl to wear a coat and pantaloons. It’s not decent, Miss Charlotte; it’s not modest.”

“Why do you say all this to me for ever? I am not a girl,” said poor Van Rheyn.

“No? Don’t tell fibs. If you were not a girl you’d go in for our games. Come! Try this. Leap-frog’s especially edifying, I assure you: expands the mind. Won’t you try it?”

Well, the upshot was, that they dared him to try it. A dozen, or so, set on at him like so many wolves. What with that, and what with their stinging ridicule, poor Van Rheyn was goaded out of his obedience to home orders, and did try it. After a few tumbles, he went over very tolerably, and did not dislike it at all.

“If I can only learn to do as the rest of you do, perhaps they will let me alone,” he said to me that same night, a sort of eagerness in his bright grey eyes.

And gradually he did learn to go in for most of the games: running, leaping, and climbing. One thing he absolutely refused—wrestling.

“Why should gentlemen, who were to be gentlemen all their lives, fight each other?” he asked. “They would not have to fight as men; it was not kind; it was not pleasant; it was hard.”

The boys were hard on him for saying it, mocking him fearfully; but they could not shake him there. He was of right blue blood; never caving-in before them, as Bill Whitney expressed it one day; he was only quiet and endured.

Whether the native Rouen air is favourable to freckles, I don’t know; but those on Van Rheyn’s face gradually disappeared over here. His complexion lost its redness also, becoming fresh and fair, with a brightish colour on the cheeks. The hair, growing longer, turned out to be of a smooth brown: altogether he was good-looking.

“I say, Johnny, do you know that Van Rheyn’s ill?”

The words came from William Whitney. He whispered them in my ear as we stood up for prayers before breakfast. The school had opened about a month then.

“What’s the matter with him?”

“Don’t know,” answered Bill. “He is staying in bed.”

Cribbing some minutes from breakfast, I went up to his room. Van Rheyn looked pale as he lay, and said he had been sick. Hall declared it was nothing but a bilious attack, and Van Rheyn thought she might be right.

“Meaning that you have a sick headache, I suppose?” I said to him.

“Yes, the migraine. I have had it before.”

“Well, look here, Charley,” I went on, after thinking a minute; “if I were you, I wouldn’t say as much to any of them. Let them suppose you are regularly ill. You’ll never hear the last of it if they know you lie in bed for only a headache.”

“But I cannot get up,” he answered; “my head is in much pain. And I have fever. Feel my hand.”

The hand he put out was burning hot. But that went with sick headaches sometimes.

It turned out to be nothing worse, for he was well on the morrow; and I need not have mentioned it at all, but for a little matter that arose out of the day’s illness. Going up again to see him after school in the afternoon, I found Hall standing over the bed with a cup of tea, and a most severe, not to say horror-struck expression of countenance, as she gazed down on him, staring at something with all her eyes. Van Rheyn was asleep, and looked better; his face flushed and moist, his brown hair, still uncommonly short compared with ours, pushed back. He lay with his hands outside the bed, as if the clothes were heavy—the weather was fiery hot. One of the hands was clasping something that hung round his neck by a narrow blue ribbon; it seemed to have been pulled by him out of the opening in his night-shirt. Hall’s quick eyes had detected what it was—a very small flat cross (hardly two inches long), on which was carved a figure of the Saviour, all in gold.

Now Hall had doubtless many virtues. One of them was docking us boys of our due allowance of sugar. But she had also many prejudices. And, of all her prejudices, none was stronger than her abhorrence of idols, as exemplified in carved images and Chinese gods.

“Do you see that, Master Ludlow?” she whispered to me, pointing her finger straight at the little cross of gold. “It’s no better than a relict of paganism.”

Stooping down, she gently drew the cross out of Van Rheyn’s hot clasped hand, and let it lie on the sheet. A beautiful little cross; the face of our Saviour—an exquisite face in its expression of suffering and patient humility—one that you might have gazed upon and been the better for. How they could have so perfectly carved a thing so small I knew not.

“He must be one of them worshipping Romanics,” said Hall, with horror, snatching her fingers from the cross as if she thought it would give her the ague. “Or else a pagan.”

And the two were no doubt alike in Hall’s mind.

“And he goes every week and says his commandments in class here, standing up before all the school! I wonder what the doctor–”

Hall cut short her complaints. Van Rheyn had suddenly opened his eyes, and was looking up at us.

“I find myself better,” he said, with a smile. “The pain has nearly departed.”

“We wasn’t thinking of pains and headaches, Master Van Rheyn, but of this,” said Hall, resentfully, taking the spoon out of the saucer, and holding it within an inch of the gold cross. Van Rheyn raised his head from the pillow to look.

“Oh, it is my little cross!” he said, holding it out to our view as far as the ribbon allowed, and speaking with perfect ease and unconcern. “Is it not beautiful?”

“Very,” I said, stooping over it.

“Be you of the Romanic sex?” demanded Hall of Van Rheyn.

“Am I– What is it Mrs. Hall would ask?” he broke off to question me, in the midst of my burst of laughter.

“She asks if you are a Roman Catholic, Van Rheyn.”

“But no. Why you think that?” he added to her. “My father is a Roman Catholic: I am a Protestant, like my mother.”

“Then why on earth, sir, do you wear such a idol as that?” returned Hall.

“This? Oh, it is nothing! it is not an idol. It does me good.”

“Good!” fiercely repeated Hall. “Does you good to wear a brazen image next the skin!—right under the flannel waistcoat. I wonder what the school will come to next?”

“Why should I not wear it?” said Van Rheyn. “What harm does it do me, this? It was my poor Aunt Annette’s. The last time we went to the Aunt Claribelle’s to see her, when the hope of her was gone, she put the cross into my hand, and bade me keep it for her sake.”

“I tell you, Master Van Rheyn, it’s just a brazen image,” persisted Hall.

“It is a keepsake,” dissented Van Rheyn. “I showed it to Monsieur Mons one day when he was calling on mamma, and told him it was a gift to me of the poor Tante Annette. Monsieur Mons thought it very pretty, and said it would remind me of the great Sacrifice.”

“But to wear it next your skin,” went on Hall, not giving in. Giving in on the matter of graven images was not in her nature. Or on any matter as far as that went, that concerned us boys. “I’ve heard of poor misdeluded people putting horse-hair next ’em. And fine torment it must be!”

“I have worn it since mamma died,” quietly answered Van Rheyn, who did not seem to understand Hall’s zeal. “She kept it for me always in her little shell-box that had the silver crest on it; but when she died, I said I would put the cross round my neck, for fear of losing it: and Aunt Claribelle, who took the shell-box then, bought me the blue ribbon.”

“That blue ribbon’s new—or almost new—if ever I saw new ribbon,” cried Hall, who was in a mood to dispute every word.

“Oh yes. It was new when I left Rouen. I have another piece in my trunk to put on when this shall wear out.”

“Well, it’s a horrid heathenish thing to do, Master Van Rheyn; and, though it may be gold, I don’t believe Miss Emma Aberleigh would ever have gave countenance to it. Leastways before she lived among them foreign French folks,” added Hall, virtually dropping the contest, as Van Rheyn slipped the cross out of view within his night-shirt. “What she might have come to, after she went off there, Heaven alone knows. Be you going to drink this tea, sir, or be you not?”

Van Rheyn drank the tea and thanked her for bringing it, his gratitude shining also out of his nice grey eyes. Hall took back the cup and tucked him up again, telling him to get a bit more sleep and he would be all right in the morning. With all her prejudices and sourness, she was as good as gold when any of us were ill.

“Not bathe! Not bathe! I say, you fellows, here’s a lark. Bristles thinks he’d better not try the water.”

It was a terribly hot evening, close upon sunset. Finding ourselves, some half-dozen of us, near the river, Van Rheyn being one, the water looked too pleasant not to be plunged into. The rule at Dr. Frost’s was, that no boy should be compelled to bathe against his inclination: Van Rheyn was the only one who had availed himself of it. It was Parker who spoke: we were all undressing quickly.

“What’s your objection, Miss Charlotte? Girls bathe.”

“They would never let me go into cold water at home,” was the patient answer. “We take warm baths there.”

“Afraid of cold water? well I never! What an everlasting pussy-cat you are, Miss Charlotte! We’ve heard that pussies don’t like to wet their feet.”

“Our doctor at Rouen used to say I must not plunge into cold water,” said poor Van Rheyn, speaking patiently as usual, though he must have been nearly driven wild. “The shock would not be good for me.”

“I say, who’ll write off to Evesham for a pair of waterproofs to put over his shoes? Just give us the measure of your foot, Miss Charlotte?”

“Let’s shut him up in a feather-bed!”

“Why, the water’s not cold, you donkey!” cried Bill Whitney, who had just leaped in. “It’s as warm as new milk. What on earth will you be fit for, Bristles? You’ll never make a man.”

“Make a man! What are you thinking of, Whitney? Miss Charlotte has no ambition that way. Girls prefer to grow up into young ladies, not into men.”

“Is it truly warm?” asked Van Rheyn, gazing at the river irresolutely, and thinking that if he went in the mockery might cease.

I looked up at him from the water. “It is indeed, Van Rheyn. Quite warm.”

He knew he might trust me, and began slowly to undress. We had continued to be the best of comrades, and I never went in for teasing him as the rest did; rather shielded him when I could, and took his part.

By the time he was ready to go in—for he did nothing nimbly, and undressing made no exception—some of us were ready to come out. One of Dr. Frost’s rules in regard to bathing was stringent—that no boy should remain in the water more than three minutes at the very extent. He held that a great deal of harm was done by prolonged bathing. Van Rheyn plunged in—and liked it.

“It is warm and pleasant,” he exclaimed. “This cannot hurt me.”

“Hurt you, you great baby!” shouted Parker.

Van Rheyn had put his clothes in the tidiest manner upon the grass; not like ours, which were flung down any way. His things were laid smoothly one upon another, in the order he took them off, though I dare say I should not have noticed this but for a shout from Jessup.

“Halloa! What’s that?”

Those of us who were out, and in the several stages of drying or dressing, turned round at the words. Jessup, buttoning his braces, was standing by Van Rheyn’s heap, looking down at it. On the top of the flannel vest, exposed to full view, lay the gold cross with the blue ribbon.

“What on earth is it?” cried Jessup, picking it up; and at the moment Van Rheyn, finding all the rest out of the water, came out himself. “Is it a charm?”

“It is mine—it is my gold cross,” spoke Van Rheyn, catching up one of the wet towels. The bath this evening had been impromptu, and we had only two towels between us, which Parker and Whitney had brought. In point of fact, it had been against rules also, for we were not expected to go into the river without the presence of a master. But just at this bend it was perfectly safe. Jessup passed the blue ribbon round his neck, letting the cross hang behind. This done, he turned himself about for general inspection, and the boys crowded round to look.

“What do you say it is, Bristles?”

“My gold cross.”

“You don’t mean to tell us to our faces that you wear it?”

“I wear it always,” freely answered Van Rheyn.

Jessup took it off his neck, and the boys passed it about from one to another. They did not ridicule the cross—I think the emblem on it prevented that—but they ridiculed Van Rheyn.

“A friend of mine went over to the tar-and-feather islands,” said Millichip, executing an aggravating war-dance round about Charley. “He found the natives sporting no end of charms and amulets—nearly all the attire they did sport—rings in the nose and chains in the ears. What relation are those natives to you, Miss Charlotte?”

“Don’t injure it, please,” pleaded Van Rheyn.

“We’ve an ancient nurse at home who carries the tip of a calf’s tongue in her pocket for luck,” shrieked Thorne. “And I’ve heard—I have heard, Bristles—that any fellow who arms himself with a pen’orth of blue-stone from the druggist’s, couldn’t have the yellow jaundice if he tried. What might you wear this for, pray?”

“My Aunt Annette gave it me as a present when she was dying,” answered poor helpless Charley, who had never the smallest notion of taking chaff otherwise than seriously, or of giving chaff back again.

He had dressed himself to his trousers and shirt, and stood with his hand stretched out, waiting for his cross.

“In the Worcester Journal, one day last June, I read an advertisement as big as a house, offering a child’s caul for sale,” cried Snepp. “Any gentleman or lady buying that caul and taking it to sea, could never be drowned. Bristles thinks as long as he wears this, he won’t come to be hanged.”

“How’s your grandmother, Miss Charlotte?”

“I wish you would please to let me alone,” said he patiently. “My father would not have placed me here had he known.”

“Why don’t you write and tell him, Bristles?”

“I would not like to grieve him,” simply answered Charley. “I can bear. And he does so much want me to learn good English.”

“This cross is gold, I suppose?” said Bill Whitney, who now had it.

“Yes, it is gold,” answered Van Rheyn.

“I wouldn’t advise you to fall amongst thieves, then. They might ease you of it. The carving must be worth something.”

“It cost a great deal to buy, I have heard my aunt say. Will you be so good as to give it me, that I may finish to dress myself?”

Whitney handed him the cross. Time was up, in fact; and we had to make a race for the house. Van Rheyn was catching it hot and sharp, all the way.

One might have thought that his very meekness, the unresisting spirit in which he took things, would have disarmed the mockery. But it did not. Once go in wholesale for putting upon some particular fellow in a school, and the tyranny gains with use. I don’t think any of them meant to be really unkind to Van Rheyn; but the play had begun, and they enjoyed it.

I once saw him drowned in tears. It was at the dusk of evening. Charley had come in for it awfully at tea-time, I forget what about, and afterwards disappeared. An hour later, going into Whitney’s room for something Bill asked me to fetch, I came upon Charles Van Rheyn—who also slept there. He was sitting at the foot of his low bed, his cheek leaning on one of his hands, and the tears running down swiftly. One might have thought his heart was broken.

“What is the grievance, Charley?”

“Do not say to them that you saw me,” returned he, dashing away his tears. “I did not expect any of you would come up.”

“Look here, old fellow: I know it’s rather hard lines for you just now. But they don’t mean anything: it is done in sport, not malice. They don’t think, you see, Van Rheyn. You will be sure to live it down.”

“Yes,” he sighed, “I hope I shall. But it is so different here from what it used to be. I had such a happy home; I never had one sorrow when my mother was alive. Nobody cares for me now; nobody is kind to me: it is a great change.”

“Take heart, Charley,” I said, holding out my hand. “I know you will live it down in time.”

Of all the fellows I ever met, I think he was the most grateful for a word of kindness. As he thanked me with a glad look of hope in his eyes, I saw that he had been holding the cross clasped in his palm; for it dropped as he put his hand into mine.

“It helps me to bear,” he said, in a whisper. “My mother, who loved me so, is in heaven; my father has married Mademoiselle Thérèsine de Tocqueville. I have no one now.”

“Your father has not married that Thérèsine de Tocqueville?”

“Why, yes. I had the letter close after dinner.”

So perhaps he was crying for the home unhappiness as much as for his school grievances. It all reads strange, no doubt, and just the opposite of what might be expected of one of us English boys. The French bringing-tip is different from ours: perhaps it lay in that. On the other hand, a French boy, generally speaking, possesses a very shallow sense of religion. But Van Rheyn had been reared by his English mother; and his disposition seemed to be naturally serious and uncommonly pliable and gentle. At any rate, whether it reads improbable or probable, it is the truth.

I got what I wanted for Billy Whitney, and went down, thinking what a hard life it was for him—what a shame that we made it so. Indulged, as Van Rheyn must have always been, tenderly treated as a girl, sheltered from the world’s roughness, all that coddling must have become to him as second nature; and the remembrance lay with him still. Over here he was suddenly cut off from it, thrown into another and a rougher atmosphere, isolated from country, home, home-ties and associations; and compelled to stand the daily brunt of this petty tyranny.

Getting Tod apart that night, I put the matter to him: what a shame it was, and how sorry I felt for Charley Van Rheyn; and I asked him whether he thought he could not (he having a great deal of weight in the school) make things pleasanter for him. Tod responded that I should never be anything but a muff, and that the roasting Van Rheyn got treated to was superlatively good for him, if ever he was to be made into a man.

However, before another week ran out, Dr. Frost interfered. How he obtained an inkling of the reigning politics we never knew. One Saturday afternoon, when old Fontaine had taken Van Rheyn out with him, the doctor walked into the midst of us, to the general consternation.

Standing in the centre of the schoolroom, with a solemn face, all of us backing as much as the wall allowed, and the masters who chanced to be present rising to their feet, the doctor spoke of Van Rheyn. He had reason to suspect, he said, that we were doing our best to worry Van Rheyn’s life out of him: and he put the question deliberately to us (and made us answer it), how we, if consigned alone to a foreign home, all its inmates strangers, would liked to be served so. He did not wish, he went on, to think he had pitiful, ill-disposed boys, lacking hearts and common kindness, in his house: he felt sure that what had passed arose from a heedless love of mischief; and it would greatly oblige him to find from henceforth that our conduct towards Van Rheyn was changed: he thought, and hoped, that he had only to express a wish upon the point, to ensure obedience.

With that—and a hearty nod and smile around, as if he put it as a personal favour to himself, and wanted us to see that he did, and was not angry, he went out again. A counsel was held to determine whether we had a sneak amongst us—else how could Frost have known?—that Charley himself had not spoken, his worst enemy felt sure of. But not one could be pitched upon: every individual fellow, senior and junior, protested earnestly that he had not let out a syllable. And, to tell the truth, I don’t think we had.

However, the doctor was obeyed. From that day all real annoyance to Charles Van Rheyn ceased. I don’t say but what there would be a laugh at him now and then, and a word of raillery, or that he lost his names of Bristles and Miss Charlotte; but virtually the sting was gone. Charley was as grateful as could be, and seemed to become quite happy; and upon the arrival of a hamper by grande vitesse from Rouen, containing a huge rich wedding-cake and some packets of costly sweetmeats, he divided the whole amongst us, keeping the merest taste for himself. The school made its comments in return.

“He’s not a bad lot after all, that Van Rheyn. He will make a man yet.”

“It isn’t a bit of use your going in for this, Van Rheyn, unless you can run like a lamplighter.”

“But I can run, you know,” responded Van Rheyn.

“Yes. But can you keep the pace up?”

“Why not?”

“We may be out for three or four hours, pelting like mad all the time.”

“I feel no fear of keeping up,” said Van Rheyn. “I will go.”

“All right.”

It was on a Saturday afternoon; and we were turning out for hare and hounds. The quarter was hard upon its close, for September was passing. Van Rheyn had never seen hare and hounds: it had been let alone during the hotter weather: and it was Tod who now warned him that he might not be able to keep up the running. It requires fleet legs and easy breath, as every one knows; and Van Rheyn had never much exercised either.

“What is just the game?” he asked in his quaintly-turned phrase. And I answered him—for Tod had gone away.

“You see those strips of paper that they have torn out of old copybooks, and are twisting? That is for the scent. The hare fills his pockets with it, and drops a piece of it every now and then as he runs. We, the hounds, follow his course by means of the scent, and catch him if we can.”

“And then?” questioned Van Rheyn.

“Then the game is over.”

“And what if you not catch him?”

“The hare wins; that’s all. What he likes to do is to double upon us cunningly and lead us home again after him.”

“But in all that there is only running.”

“We vault over the obstructions—gates, and stiles, and hedges. Or, if the hedges are too high, scramble through them.”

“But some hedges are very thick and close: nobody could get through them,” debated Van Rheyn, taking the words, as usual, too literally.

“Then we are dished. And have to find some other way onwards, or turn back.”

“I can do what you say quite easily.”

“All right, Charley,” I repeated: as Tod had done. And neither of us, nor any one else, had the smallest thought that it was not all right.

Millichip was chosen hare. Snepp turned cranky over something or other at the last moment, and backed out of it. He made the best hare in the school: but Millichip was nearly as fleet a runner.

What with making the scent, and having it out with Snepp, time was hindered; and it must have been getting on for four o’clock when we started. Which docked the run considerably, for we had to be in at six to tea. On that account, perhaps, Millichip thought he must get over the ground the quicker; for I don’t think we had ever made so swift a course. Letting the hare get well on ahead, the signal was given, and we started after him in full cry, rending the air with shouts, and rushing along like the wind.