There & Back

His grandfather found him, as he said, a chip of the old block; and rejoiced that Nature had granted his humble blood so potent a part in this compound of gentle and plebeian; for Richard showed himself a worthy workman! Simon Armour declared there was nothing the fellow could not do; and said to himself there never was such a baronet in the old Hall as his boy Dick would make. If only, he said, all the breeds worn out with breeding-in, would revert to the old blood of Tubal Cain, they might recover his lease of life. The day was coming, he said to himself, when there would be a sight to see at Mortgrange—a baronet that could shoe a horse better than any smith in the land! If his people then would not stand up for a landlord able to thrash every man-jack of them, and win his bread with his own hands, they deserved to become the tenants of a London grocer or American money-dealer! For his part, the French might have another try! He would not lift hammer against them!

By right of inheritance, Richard’s muscles grew sinewy and hard, and speedily was he capable of handling a hammer and persuading iron to the full satisfaction of his teacher. When it came to such heavy work as required power and skill at once, the difference between the two men was very evident: where the whole strength is tasked, skill finds itself in the lurch; but Simon understood what could not be at once, as well as what would be at length. Neither was he disappointed, for, in far less than half the time an ordinary apprentice would have taken, Richard could hold alternate swing with the blacksmith or his man, as, blow for blow, they pierced a block of metal to form the nave of a wheel. In ringing a wheel, he soon excelled; and his grandfather’s smithy being the place for all kinds of blacksmith-work, Richard had learned the trade before he left. For, as his fortnight’s holiday drew to an end, he heard from his parents that, as he was doing so well, they would like him to stay longer.

One reason for this their wish was, that he might become thoroughly attached to his grandfather: they desired to secure the prejudice of the future baronet for his own people. At the same time, by developing in him the workman, they thought to give him a better chance against further dishonouring and degrading his race, than his wretched father had ever had: the breed of Lestranges must, they said, be searched back for generations to find an honest man in it. A landlord above the selfishness, and free from the prejudices of his class, would be a new thing in the county-histories!

At the end of six weeks, Richard could shoe a sound horse as well as his grandfather himself. The old man had taken pains he would not have spent on an ordinary apprentice: it was worth doing, he said; and the return was great. Richard had made, not merely wonderful, but wonderfully steady progress. Not once had he touched the quick in driving those perfect nails through the rind of the marvellous hoof. From the first he disapproved of the mode of shoeing in use, and was certain a better must one day be discovered—one, namely, that would leave the natural motions of hoof and leg unimpeded; but in the meantime he shod as did other blacksmiths, and gave thorough satisfaction.

CHAPTER VIII. A LOST SHOE

It was now late in the autumn. Several houses in the neighbourhood were full of visitors, and parties on horseback frequently passed the door of the smithy—well known to not a few of the horses.

One evening, as the sun was going down red and large, with a gorgeous attendance of clouds, for the day had been wet but cleared in the afternoon, a small mounted company came pretty fast along the lane, which was deep in mud. They were no sooner upon the hard road by the smithy, than one of the ladies discovered her mare had lost a hind shoe.

“She couldn’t have pulled it off in a more convenient spot!” said a handsome young fellow, as he dismounted and gave his horse to a groom. “I’ll take you down, Bab! Old Simon will have a shoe on Miss Brown in no time!”

Richard followed his grandfather to the door. A little girl, as she seemed to him, was sliding, with her hand on the young man’s shoulder, from the back of the huge mare. She was the daintiest little thing, as lovely as she was tiny, with clear, pale, regular features, under a quantity of dark-brown hair. But that she was not a child, he saw the moment she was down; and he soon discovered that, not her beauty, but her heavenly vivacity, was the more captivating thing in her. At once her very soul seemed to go out to meet whatever object claimed her attention. She must know all about everything, and come into relations with every live thing! As she stood by the side of the great brown creature from which she had dismounted—huge indeed, but carrying its bulk with a grand grace—her head reaching but half-way up the slope of its shoulder, she laid her cheek against it caressingly. So small and so bright, the little lady looked a very diamond of life.

A new shoe had to be forged; those already half-made were for work-horses. Partly from pride in his skill, Simon left the task to his grandson, and stood talking to the young man. Little thought Richard, as he turned the shoe on the anvil’s beak, that he was his half-brother! He was a handsome youth, not so tall as Richard, and with more delicate features. His face was pale, and wore a rather serious, but self-satisfied look. He talked to the old blacksmith, however, without the slightest assumption: like others in the neighbourhood, he regarded him as odd and privileged. There were more ladies and gentlemen, but Richard, absorbed in his shoe, heeded none of the company.

He was not more absorbed, however, than the girl who stood beside him: she watched every point in the making of it. Heedless of the flying sparks, she gazed as if she meant to make the next shoe herself. Had Richard not been too busy even to glance at her, he might have noticed, now and then, an involuntary sympathetic motion, imitatively responsive to one of his, invariably recurrent when he changed the position of the glowing iron. Her mind seemed working in company with his hands; she was all the time doing the thing herself; Richard’s activity was not merely reflected, but lived in her. When he carried the half-forged iron, to apply it for one tentative instant to the mare’s hoof, Barbara followed him. The mare fidgeted. But her little mistress, who, noiseless and swift as a moth, was already at her head, spoke to her, breathed in her nostril, and in a moment made her forget what was happening in such a far-off province of her being as a hind foot. When Richard, back at the forge, was placing the shoe again in the fire, to his surprise her little gloved hand alighted beside his own on the lever of the bellows, powerfully helping him to blow. When once again the shoe was on the anvil, there again she stood watching—and watched until he had shaped the shoe to his intent.

Old Simon did not move to interfere: the hoof required no special attention. Almost every horse-hoof in a large circuit of miles was known to him—as well, he would remark, as the nail of his own thumb.

When Richard took up the foot, in order to prepare it for the reception of its new armour, again the mare was fidgety; and again the lady distracted her attention, comforting and soothing her while Richard trimmed the hoof a little.

“I say, my man,” cried Mr. Lestrange, “mind what you’re about there with your paring! I don’t want that mare lamed.—She’s much too good for ‘prentice hands to learn upon, Simon!”

“Keep your mind easy, sir,” answered the blacksmith. “That lad’s ain’t ‘prentice hands. He knows what he’s about as well as I do myself!”

“He’s young!”

“Younger, perhaps, than you think, sir!—but he knows his work.”

It was a pretty picture—the girl peeping round under the neck of the great creature she was caressing, to see how the smith was getting on, whose back, alas! hid his hands from her. Just as he finished driving his second nail, the nervous animal gave her foot a jerk, and the point of the nail, through the hoof and projecting a little, tore his hand, so that the blood ran to the ground in a sudden rivulet.

“Hey! that don’t look much like proper shoeing!” cried the young man. “I hope to goodness that’s not the mare!”

“She’s all right,” answered Richard, rearranging the animal’s foot.

But Simon saw the blood, and sprang to his side.

“What the devil are you about, making a fool of me, Dick!” he cried. “Get out of the way.”

“It was my fault,” said the sweetest voice from under the neck of the mare, to the top of which a tiny hand was trying to reach. “My feather must have tickled her nose!”

She caught a glimpse of the blood, and turned white.

“I am so sorry!” she said, almost tearfully. “I hope you’re not much hurt, Richard!”

Nothing seemed to escape her; she had already learned his name!

“It’s not worth being sorry about, miss!” returned Richard, with a laugh. “The mare meant no harm!”

“That I’m sure she didn’t—poor Miss Brown!” answered the girl, patting the mare’s neck. “But I wish it had been my hand instead!”

“God forbid!” cried Richard. “That would have been a calamity!”

“It wouldn’t have been half so great a one. My hand is—well, not of much use. Yours can shoe a horse!”

“Yours would have been spoiled; mine will shoe as well as before!” said Richard.

It did not occur to the lady that the youth spoke better than might have been expected of a country smith. She was one of the elect few that meet every one on the common human ground, that never fear and never hurt. Her childish size and look harmonized with the childlike in her style, but she affected nothing. She would have spoken in the same way to prince or poet-laureate, and would have pleased either as much as the blacksmith. At the same time she did have pleasure in knowing that her frankness pleased. She could not help being aware that she was a favourite, and she wanted to be; but she wanted nothing more than to be a favourite. She desired it with old Betty, sir Wilton’s dairymaid, just as much as with Mr. Lestrange, sir Wilton’s heir; and everybody showed her favour, for she showed everybody grace.

The old smith was finishing the shoeing, and the mare, well used to him, and with more faith in him, stood perfectly quiet. Richard, a little annoyed, had withdrawn, and scarce thinking what he did, had taken a rod of iron, thrust it into the fire, and begun to blow. The little lady approached him softly.

“I’m so sorry!” she said.

“I shall be sorry too, if you think of it any more, miss!” answered Richard. “Then there will be two sorry where there needn’t be one!”

She looked up at him with a curious, interested, puzzled look, which seemed to say, “What a nice smith you are!”

The youth’s manners had a certain—what shall I call it?—not polish, but rhythm, which came of, or at least was nourished by his love of the finer elements in literature. His friendly converse with books, and through them with certain of the dead who still speak, fell in with yet deeper influences, helping to set him in right atomic position toward other human atoms. His breed also contributed something. Happily for Richard, a man is not born only of his father or his grandfather; mothers have a share in the form of his being; ancestors innumerable, men and women, leave their traces in him. But what I have ventured to call the rhythm of his manner came of his love of verse, and of the true material of verse.

His hand kept on bleeding, and for a moment he was tempted, by bravado as well as kindness, to use the cautery so nigh, and prove to the girl how little he set by what troubled her; but he saw at once it would shock her, and took, instead, a handkerchief from his pocket to bind it with. Instantly the little lady was at his service, and he yielded to her ministration with a pleasure hitherto unknown to him. She took the handkerchief from his hand, but immediately gave it him again, saying, “It is too black!” and drawing her own from her pocket, deftly bound up his wound with it. Speech abandoned Richard. All present looked on in silence. Certain of the company had seen her the day before tie up the leg of a wounded dog, and had admired her for it; but this was different! She was handling the hand of a human being—man—a workman!—black and hard with labour! There was no necessity: the man was not in the least danger! It was nothing but a scratch! She was forgetting what was due to herself—and to them! Thus they thought, but thus they dared not speak. They knew her, and feared what she might say in reply. The mare was shod ere the handkerchief was tied to the lady’s mind, and Simon stood, hammer in hand, looking on like the rest in silence, but with a curious smile.

As she took her hands from his, the young blacksmith looked thankfulness into her eyes—which sparkled and shone with the pleasure of human fellowship, and without the least shyness returned his gaze.

“There! Good-bye! I am so sorry! I hope your hand will be well soon!” she said, and at once followed her mare, which the smith’s man was leading with caution through the door of the smithy, rather too low for Miss Brown.

Lestrange helped her to the saddle in silence, and before Richard realized that she was gone, he heard the merriment of the party mingling with the clang of their horses’ hoofs, as they went swinging down the road. The fairy had set them all laughing already!

The instant they were gone, Simon showed a strange concern over the insignificant wound: he had been hasty with Richard, and unfair to him! Had he driven his nail one hair’s-breadth too near the quick, Miss Brown would have made the smithy tight for them! He seemed anxious to show, without actual confession, that he knew he had spoken angrily, and was sorry for it. He could not have shod the mare better himself, he said—but why the deuce did he let her tear his hand! It was not likely to gather, though, seeing Richard drank water! He must do nothing for a day or two! To-morrow being Saturday, they would have a holiday together, and leave the work to George!

CHAPTER IX. A HOLIDAY

Richard was willing enough, and it only remained to settle what they would do with their holiday. Suppressing a chuckle, Simon proposed that they should have a walk, and a look at Mortgrange: it was a place well worth seeing! “And then,” he added, giving his grandson a poke, “we can ask after the mare, and learn how her new shoe fits.” They had known him there, he said, the last thirty years, and would let them have the run of the place, for sir Wilton and his lady were from home. Richard had never—to his knowledge—heard of Mortgrange, for Simon had hitherto avoided even mentioning the place; but he was ready to go wherever his grandfather pleased. Jessie would have company of her own, Simon said, with a nod and a wink: they need not trouble themselves about her!

So the next day, as soon us they had had their breakfast, they set out to walk the four or five miles that, by the road, lay between them and Mortgrange. It was a fine frosty morning. Not a few yellow leaves were still hanging, and the sun was warm and bright. It was one of those days near the death of the year, that make us wonder why the heart of man should revive and feel strong, while nature is falling into her dreary trance. Richard was dressed in a tradesman’s Sunday clothes, but tradesman as he was, and was proud to be, he did not altogether look one. He was in high spirits—for no reason but that his spirits were high. He was happy because he was happy—“like any other body!” he would have said: where was the wonder such a fine day, with a pleasant walk before him, and his jolly grandfather for company! That he could not make one hair white or black, one hour blessed or miserable, did not occur to him. Yet he believed that joy or sorrow determined whether life was or was not worth living! He had never said to himself, “Here I am, and cannot help being, and yet can order nothing! Even to-day I am happy only because I cannot help it!” He had indeed begun to learn that a man has his duty to mind before his happiness, and that was much; but he had not yet been tried in the matter of doing his duty when unhappy. How would he feel then? Would he think duty without happiness worth living for? He was happy now, and that was enough! The putting forth of their strength and skill doubtless makes many men feel happy—so long as they are in health; but how when they come to feel that that health is nowise in their power? While they have it, it seems a part of their being inalienable; when they have lost it, a thing irrecoverable. Richard took the thing that came, asked no questions, returned no thanks. He found himself here:—whence he came he did not care; whither he went he did not inquire. The present was enough, for the present was good; when the present was no longer good, why, then,—!

There are those to whom the present cannot be good save as a mode of the infinite. In such their divine origin asserts itself. Once known for what it is, the poorest present is a phial holding the elixir of life.

On their way Simon talked about the place they were going to see, and said its present owner was an elderly man, not very robust, with a second wife, who looked as if she had not a drop of warm blood, and yet as if she might live for ever.

“That was their son that came with the little lady,” he said.

“And the little lady was their daughter, I suppose!” rejoined Richard, with an odd quiver somewhere near his heart.

“She’s an Australian, they say,” answered his grandfather; “—no relation, I fancy.”

“Is Mortgrange a grand place?” asked Richard.

“It’s a fine house and a great estate,” answered Simon. “More might be made of it, no doubt; and I hope one day more will be made of it.”

“What do you mean by that, grandfather?”

“That I hope the son will make a better landlord than the father.”

They came to a great iron gate, standing open, without any lodge.

“We’re in luck!” said the blacksmith. “This will save us a long round! Somebody must have rode out, and been too lazy to shut it! We’d better leave it as we find it, though! Or say we bring the two halves together without snapping the locks! I know the locks; I put ‘em both on myself.—See now what a piece of work that gate is! All done with the hand! None o’ your beastly casting there! Up to your work, that, I’m thinking, lad!”

“Indeed it is! Those gates are worth reducing, for plates to stamp the covers of a right precious volume with!”

Simon misunderstood, and was on the point of flaring up, but what Richard followed with quieted him.

“I could almost give up bookbinding to work a pair of gates like those!” he said.

“I believe you, my boy!” returned his grandfather. “Come and live with me, and you shall!”

“But who would buy them when I had worked them?”

“If nobody had the sense, we’d put ‘em up before the cottage!”

“Like a door-lock on a prayer-book!”

“No matter! They would be worth the worth of themselves!”

“You would have to make the wall so high, there would be no light in the house!” persisted Richard.

“Tut, man! did you never hear of a joke? All I say is, that if you’ll come and work with me—I don’t need to slave more than I like; I’ve got a few pounds in the bank!—if you’ll work, I’ll teach you. Leave me to find a fit place for what comes of it! They do most things at the foundries now, but there’s a market yet for hammer-work—if it be good enough, and not too dear; for them as knows a good thing when they sees it, ain’t generally got much money to buy things. It’s my opinion the only way to learn the worth of a thing, is to have to go without it.”

“Few people fancy iron gates, I fear.”

“More might fancy them if they were to be had good,” returned the old man.

The gate had admitted them to a long winding road, with clumps of trees here and there on the borders of it. The road was apparently not much used, for it was more than sprinkled with grass all over. A ploughed field was on one side, and a wild heathy expanse, dotted with fir-trees, on the other. Suddenly on the side of the field, gradually on that of the heath, the ground changed to the green sward of a park.

“A grand place for thinking!” said Richard to himself.

But in truth Richard had hardly yet begun to think. He only followed the things that came to him; he never said to things, Come; neither, when they came, did he keep them, and make them walk up and down before him till he saw what they were; he did not search out their pedigree, get them to give an account of themselves, show what they could do, or, in short, be themselves to him. He had written a few verses—not bad verses, but with feeling only, not thought in them. For instance, he had addressed an ode to the allegorical personage called Liberty, in which he bepraised her until, had she been indeed a woman, she must have been ashamed: she was the one essential of life! the one glory of existence! he was no man who would not die for her! But what was the thing he thus glorified? Liberty to go where you pleased, do what you liked, say what you chose!—that was all. Of inward liberty, of freedom from mental or spiritual oppression, from passion, from prejudice, from envy, from jealousy, from selfishness, from unfairness, from ambition, from false admiration, from the power of public opinion, from any motive energy save that of love and truth—a freedom of which outward freedom is scarce the shadow—of such liberty, for all the good books he had read, for all the good poems he had admired, Richard had not yet begun to dream, not to say think. Then again, he would write about love, and he had never been in love in his life! All he knew of love was the pleasure of imagining himself the object of a tall, dark-eyed, long-haired, devoted woman’s admiration. He had never even thought whether he was worthy of being loved. He was indeed more worthy of love than many to whom it is freely given; but he knew no more about it, I say, than a chicken in the shell knows of the blue sky. The shabby spinster, living with her cousin the baker in the house opposite, knew a hundred times better than he what the word love meant: she had a history, he had none.

I will not describe the house of Mortgrange. It seemed to Richard the oldest house he had ever seen, and it moved him strangely. He said to himself the man must be happy who called such a house his own, lived in it, and did what he liked with it. The road they had taken brought them to the back of the Hall, as the people on the estate called the house. The blacksmith went to a side-door, and asked if he and his grandson might have a look at the place: he had heard the baronet was from home! The man said he would see; and returning presently, invited them to walk in.

Knowing his grandson’s passion, Simon’s main thought in taking him was to see him in the library, with its ten thousand volumes: it would be such a joke to watch him pondering, admiring, coveting his own! As soon, therefore, as they were in the great hall, he asked the servant whether they might not see the library. The man left them again, once more to make inquiry.

It was a grand old hall where they stood, fitter for the house of a great noble than a mere baronet; but then the family was older than any noble family in the county, and the poor baronetcy, granted to a foolish ancestor, on carpet considerations, by the needy hand of the dominie-king, was no great feather in the cap of the Lestranges. The house itself was older than any baronetcy, for no part of it was later than the time of Elizabeth. It was of fine stone, and of great size. The hall was nearly sixty feet in height, with three windows on one side, and a great one at the end. They were thirty feet from the floor, had round heads, and looked like church-windows. The other side was blank. Mid-height along the end opposite the great window ran a gallery.

To the sudden terror of Richard, who stood absorbed in the stateliness of the place, an organ in the gallery burst out playing. He looked up trembling, but could see only the tops of the pipes. As the sounds rolled along the roof, reverberated from the solid walls, and crept about the corners, it seemed to him that the soul of the place was throbbing in his ears the words of a poem centuries old, which he had read a day or two before leaving London:—