Wilfrid Cumbermede

‘And they took it from you, did they? Poor child! Poor child!’

‘They didn’t take it from me, grannie. I never had it in my hands.’

‘Wouldn’t give it you then? Oh dear! Oh dear!’

I began to feel uncomfortable—grannie looked so strange and lost. The old feeling that she ought to be buried because she was dead returned upon me; but I overcame it so far as to be able to say:

‘Won’t you tell me about it then, grannie? I want so much to hear about the battle.’

‘What battle, child? Oh yes! I’ll tell you all about it some day, but I’ve forgot now, I’ve forgot it all now.’

She pressed her hand to her forehead, and sat thus for some time, while I grew very frightened. I would gladly have left the room and crept down-stairs, but I stood fascinated, gazing at the withered face half-hidden by the withered hand. I longed to be anywhere else, but my will had deserted me, and there I must remain. At length grannie took her hand from her eyes, and seeing me, started.

‘Ah, my dear!’ she said,’ I had forgotten you. You wanted me to do something for you: what was it?’

‘I wanted you to tell me about the sword, grannie.’

‘Oh yes, the sword!’ she returned, putting her hand again to her forehead. ‘They took it away from you, did they? Well, never mind. I will give you something else—though I don’t say it’s as good as the sword.’

She rose, and taking an ivory-headed stick which leaned against the side of the chimney-piece, walked with tottering steps towards the bureau. There she took from her pocket a small bunch of keys, and having, with some difficulty from the trembling of her hands, chosen one and unlocked the sloping cover, she opened a little drawer inside, and took out a gold watch with a bunch of seals hanging from it. Never shall I forget the thrill that went through my frame. Did she mean to let me hold it in my own hand? Might I have it as often as I came to see her? Imagine my ecstasy when she put it carefully in the two hands I held up to receive it, and said:

‘There, my dear! You must take good care of it, and never give it away for love or money. Don’t you open it—there’s a good boy, till you’re a man like your father. He was a man! He gave it to me the day we were married, for he had nothing else, he said, to offer me. But I would not take it, my dear. I liked better to see him with it than have it myself. And when he left me, I kept it for you. But you must take care of it, you know.’

‘Oh, thank you, grannie!’ I cried, in an agony of pleasure. ‘I will take care of it—indeed I will. Is it a real watch, grannie—as real as uncle’s?’

‘It’s worth ten of your uncle’s, my dear. Don’t you show it him, though. He might take that away too. Your uncle’s a very good man, my dear, but you mustn’t mind everything he says to you. He forgets things. I never forget anything. I have plenty of time to think about things. I never forget.’

‘Will it go, grannie?’ I asked, for my uncle was a much less interesting subject than the watch.

‘It won’t go without being wound up; but you might break it. Besides, it may want cleaning. It’s several years since it was cleaned last. Where will you put it now?’

‘Oh! I know where to hide it safe enough, grannie,’ I exclaimed. ‘I’ll take care of it. You needn’t be afraid, grannie.’

The old lady turned, and with difficulty tottered to her seat. I remained where I was, fixed in contemplation of my treasure. She called me. I went and stood by her knee.

‘My child, there is something I want very much to tell you, but you know old people forget things—’

‘But you said just now that you never forgot anything, grannie.’

‘No more I do, my dear; only I can’t always lay my hands upon a thing when I want it.’

‘It was about the sword, grannie,’ I said, thinking to refresh her memory.

‘No, my dear; I don’t think it was about the sword exactly—though that had something to do with it. I shall remember it all by-and-by. It will come again. And so must you, my dear. Don’t leave your old mother so long alone. It’s weary, weary work, waiting.’

‘Indeed I won’t, grannie,’ I said. ‘I will come the very first time I can. Only I mustn’t let auntie see me, you know.—You don’t want to be buried now, do you, grannie?’ I added; for I had begun to love her, and the love had cast out the fear, and I did not want her to wish to be buried.

‘I am very, very old; much too old to live, my dear. But I must do you justice before I can go to my grave. Now I know what I wanted to say. It’s gone again. Oh dear! Oh dear! If I had you in the middle of the night, when everything comes back as if it had been only yesterday, I could tell you all about it from beginning to end, with all the ins and outs of it. But I can’t now—I can’t now.’

She moaned and rocked herself to and fro.

‘Never mind, grannie,’ I said cheerfully, for I was happy enough for all eternity with my gold watch; ‘I will come and see you again as soon as ever I can.’ And I kissed her on the white cheek.

‘Thank you, my dear. I think you had better go now. They may miss you, and then I should never see you again—to talk to, I mean.’

‘Why won’t they let me come, and see you, grannie?’ I asked.

‘That’s what I wanted to tell you, if I could only see a little better,’ she answered, once more putting her hand to her forehead. ‘Perhaps I shall be able to tell you next time. Go now, my dear.’

I left the room, nothing loth, for I longed to be alone with my treasure. I could not get enough of it in grannie’s presence even. Noiseless as a bat I crept down the stair. When I reached the door at the foot I stood and listened. The kitchen was quite silent. I stepped out. There was no one there. I scudded across and up the other stair to my own room, carefully shutting the door behind me. Then I sat down on the floor on the other side of the bed, so that it was between me and the door, and I could run into the closet with my treasure before any one entering should see me.

The watch was a very thick round one. The back of it was crowded with raised figures in the kind of work called repoussée. I pored over these for a long time, and then turned to the face. It was set all round with shining stones—diamonds, though I knew nothing of diamonds then. The enamel was cracked, and I followed every crack as well as every figure of the hours. Then I began to wonder what I could do with it next. I was not satisfied. Possession I found was not bliss: it had not rendered me content. But it was as yet imperfect: I had not seen the inside. Grannie had told me not to open it: I began to think it hard that I should be denied thorough possession of what had been given to me, I believed I should be quite satisfied if I once saw what made it go. I turned it over and over, thinking I might at least find how it was opened. I have little doubt if I had discovered the secret of it, my virtue would have failed me. All I did find, however, was the head of a curious animal engraved on the handle. This was something. I examined it as carefully as the rest, and then finding I had for the time exhausted the pleasures of the watch, I turned to the seals. On one of them was engraved what looked like letters, but I could not read them. I did not know that they were turned the wrong way. One of them was like a W. On the other seal—there were but two and a curiously-contrived key—I found the same head as was engraved on the handle—turned the other way of course. Wearied at length, I took the precious thing into the dark closet, and laid it in a little box which formed one of my few possessions. I then wandered out into the field, and went straying about until dinner-time, during which I believe I never once lifted my eyes to the place where the sword had hung, lest even that action should betray the watch.

From that day my head, and as much of my heart as might be, were filled with the watch. And, alas! I soon found that my bookmending had grown distasteful to me, and for the satisfaction of employment, possession was a poor substitute. As often as I made the attempt to resume it, I got weary, and wandered almost involuntarily to the closet to feel for my treasure in the dark, handle it once more, and bring it out into the light. Already I began to dree the doom of riches, in the vain attempt to live by that which was not bread. Nor was this all. A certain weight began to gather over my spirit—a sense almost of wrong. For although the watch had been given me by my grandmother, and I never doubted either her right to dispose of it or my right to possess it, I could not look my uncle in the face, partly from a vague fear lest he should read my secret in my eyes, partly from a sense of something out of joint between him and me. I began to fancy, and I believe I was right, that he looked at me sometimes with a wistfulness I had never seen in his face before. This made me so uncomfortable that I began to avoid his presence as much as possible. And although I tried to please him with my lessons, I could not learn them as hitherto.

One day he asked me to bring him the book I had been repairing.

‘It’s not finished yet, uncle,’ I said.

‘Will you bring it me just as it is. I want to look for something in it.’

I went and brought it with shame. He took it, and having found the passage he wanted, turned the volume once over in his hands, and gave it me back without a word.

Next day I restored it to him finished and tidy. He thanked me, looked it over again, and put it in its place. But I fairly encountered an inquiring and somewhat anxious gaze. I believe he had a talk with my aunt about me that night.

The next morning, I was seated by the bedside, with my secret in my hand, when I thought I heard the sound of the door-handle, and glided at once into the closet. When I came out in a flutter of anxiety, there was no one there. But I had been too much startled to return to what I had grown to feel almost a guilty pleasure.

The next morning after breakfast, I crept into the closet, put my hand unerringly into the one corner of the box, found no watch, and after an unavailing search, sat down in the dark on a bundle of rags, with the sensations of a ruined man. My world was withered up and gone. How the day passed, I cannot tell. How I got through my meals, I cannot even imagine. When I look back and attempt to recall the time, I see but a cloudy waste of misery crossed by the lightning-streaks of a sense of injury. All that was left me now was a cat-like watching for the chance of going to my grandmother. Into her ear I would pour the tale of my wrong. She who had been as a haunting discomfort to me, had grown to be my one consolation.

My lessons went on as usual. A certain pride enabled me to learn them tolerably for a day or two; but when that faded, my whole being began to flag. For some time my existence was a kind of life in death. At length one evening my uncle said to me, as we finished my lessons far from satisfactorily—

‘Willie, your aunt and I think it better you should go to school. We shall be very sorry to part with you, but it will be better. You will then have companions of your own age. You have not enough to amuse you at home.’

He did not allude by a single word to the affair of the watch. Could my aunt have taken it, and never told him? It was not likely.

I was delighted at the idea of any change, for my life had grown irksome to me.

‘Oh, thank you, uncle!’ I cried, with genuine expression.

I think he looked a little sad; but he uttered no reproach.

My aunt and he had already arranged everything. The next day but one, I saw, for the first time, a carriage drive up to the door of the house. I was waiting for it impatiently. My new clothes had all been packed in a little box. I had not put in a single toy: I cared for nothing I had now. The box was put up beside the driver. My aunt came to the door where I was waiting for my uncle.

‘Mayn’t I go and say good-bye to grannie?’ I asked.

‘She’s not very well to-day,’ said my aunt. ‘I think you had better not. You will be back at Christmas, you know.’

I was not so much grieved as I ought to have been. The loss of my watch had made the thought of grannie painful again.

‘Your uncle will meet you at the road,’ continued my aunt, seeing me still hesitate. ‘Good-bye.’

I received her cold embrace without emotion, clambered into the chaise, and looking out as the driver shut the door, wondered what my aunt was holding her apron to her eyes for, as she turned away into the house. My uncle met us and got in, and away the chaise rattled, bearing me towards an utterly new experience; for hardly could the strangest region in foreign lands be more unknown to the wandering mariner than the faces and ways of even my own kind were to me. I had never played for one half-hour with boy or girl. I knew nothing of their play-things or their games. I hardly knew what boys were like, except, outwardly, from the dim reflex of myself in the broken mirror in my bed-room, whose lustre was more of the ice than the pool, and, inwardly, from the partly exceptional experiences of my own nature, with which even I was poorly enough acquainted.

CHAPTER VIII. I GO TO SCHOOL, AND GRANNIE LEAVES IT

It is an evil thing to break up a family before the natural period of its dissolution. In the course of things, marriage, the necessities of maintenance, or the energies of labour guiding ‘to fresh woods and pastures new,’ are the ordered causes of separation.

Where the home is happy, much injury is done the children in sending them to school, except it be a day-school, whither they go in the morning as to the labours of the world, but whence they return at night as to the heaven of repose. Conflict through the day, rest at night, is the ideal. A day-school will suffice for the cultivation of the necessary public or national spirit, without which the love of the family may degenerate into a merely extended selfishness, but which is itself founded upon those family affections. At the same time, it must be confessed that boarding-schools are, in many cases, an antidote to some of the evil conditions which exist at home.

To children whose home is a happy one, the exile to a school must be bitter. Mine, however, was an unusual experience. Leaving aside the specially troubled state in which I was when thus carried to the village of Aldwick, I had few of the finer elements of the ideal home in mine. The love of my childish heart had never been drawn out. My grandmother had begun to do so, but her influence had been speedily arrested. I was, as they say of cats, more attached to the place than the people, and no regrets whatever interfered to quell the excitement of expectation, wonder, and curiosity which filled me on the journey. The motion of the vehicle, the sound of the horses’ hoofs, the travellers we passed on the road—all seemed to partake of the exuberant life which swelled and overflowed in me. Everything was as happy, as excited, as I was.

When we entered the village, behold it was a region of glad tumult! Were there not three dogs, two carts, a maid carrying pails of water, and several groups of frolicking children in the street—not to mention live ducks, and a glimpse of grazing geese on the common? There were also two mothers at their cottage-doors, each with a baby in her arms. I knew they were babies, although I had never seen a baby before. And when we drove through the big wooden gate, and stopped at the door of what had been the manor-house but was now Mr Elder’s school, the aspect of the building, half-covered with ivy, bore to me a most friendly look. Still more friendly was the face of the master’s wife, who received us in a low dark parlour, with a thick soft carpet and rich red curtains. It was a perfect paradise to my imagination. Nor did the appearance of Mr Elder at all jar with the vision of coming happiness. His round, rosy, spectacled face bore in it no premonitory suggestion of birch or rod, and although I continued at his school for six years, I never saw him use either. If a boy required that kind of treatment, he sent him home. When my uncle left me, it was in more than contentment with my lot. Nor did anything occur to alter my feeling with regard to it. I soon became much attached to Mrs Elder. She was just the woman for a schoolmaster’s wife—as full of maternity as she could hold, but childless. By the end of the first day I thought I loved her far more than my aunt. My aunt had done her duty towards me; but how was a child to weigh that? She had taken no trouble to make me love her; she had shown me none of the signs of affection, and I could not appreciate the proofs of it yet.

I soon perceived a great difference between my uncle’s way of teaching and that of Mr Elder. My uncle always appeared aware of something behind which pressed upon, perhaps hurried, the fact he was making me understand. He made me feel, perhaps too much, that it was a mere step towards something beyond. Mr Elder, on the other hand, placed every point in such a strong light that it seemed in itself of primary consequence. Both were, if my judgment after so many years be correct, admirable teachers—my uncle the greater, my school-master the more immediately efficient. As I was a manageable boy to the very verge of weakness, the relations between us were entirely pleasant.

There were only six more pupils, all of them sufficiently older than myself to be ready to pet and indulge me. No one who saw me mounted on the back of the eldest, a lad of fifteen, and driving four of them in hand, while the sixth ran alongside as an outrider—could have wondered that I should find school better than home. Before the first day was over, the sorrows of the lost watch and sword had vanished utterly. For what was possession to being possessed? What was a watch, even had it been going, to the movements of life? To peep from the wicket in the great gate out upon the village street, with the well in the middle of it, and a girl in the sunshine winding up the green dripping bucket from the unknown depths of coolness, was more than a thousand watches. But this was by no means the extent of my new survey of things. One of the causes of Mr Elder’s keeping no boy who required chastisement was his own love of freedom, and his consequent desire to give the boys as much liberty out of school hours as possible. He believed in freedom. ‘The great end of training,’ he said to me many years after, when he was quite an old man, ‘is liberty; and the sooner you can get a boy to be a law to himself, the sooner you make a man of him. This end is impossible without freedom. Let those who have no choice, or who have not the same end in view, do the best they can with such boys as they find: I chose only such as could bear liberty. I never set up as a reformer—only as an educator. For that kind of work others were more fit than I. It was not my calling.’ Hence Mr Elder no more allowed labour to intrude upon play, than play to intrude upon labour. As soon as lessons were over, we were free to go where we would and do what we would, under certain general restrictions, which had more to do with social proprieties than with school regulations. We roamed the country from tea-time till sun-down; sometimes in the Summer long after that. Sometimes also on moonlit nights in Winter, occasionally even when the stars and the snow gave the only light, we were allowed the same liberty until nearly bedtime. Before Christmas came, variety, exercise, and social blessedness had wrought upon me so that when I returned home, my uncle and aunt were astonished at the change in me. I had grown half a head, and the paleness, which they had considered a peculiar accident of my appearance, had given place to a rosy glow. My flitting step too had vanished: I soon became aware that I made more noise than my aunt liked, for in the old house silence was in its very temple. My uncle, however, would only smile and say—

‘Don’t bring the place about our ears, Willie, my boy. I should like it to last my time.’

‘I’m afraid,’ my aunt would interpose, ‘Mr Elder doesn’t keep very good order in his school.’

Then I would fire up in defence of the master, and my uncle would sit and listen, looking both pleased and amused.

I had not been many moments in the house before I said—

‘Mayn’t I run up and see grannie, uncle?’

‘I will go and see how she is,’ my aunt said, rising.

She went, and presently returning, said

‘Grannie seems a little better. You may come. She wants to see you.’

I followed her. When I entered the room and looked expectantly towards her usual place, I found her chair empty. I turned to the bed. There she was, and I thought she looked much the same; but when I came nearer, I perceived a change in her countenance. She welcomed me feebly, stroked my hair and my cheeks, smiled sweetly, and closed her eyes. My aunt led me away.

When bedtime came, I went to my own room, and was soon fast asleep. What roused me I do not know, but I awoke in the midst of the darkness, and the next moment I heard a groan. It thrilled me with horror. I sat up in bed and listened, but heard no more. As I sat listening, heedless of the cold, the explanation dawned upon me, for my powers of reflection and combination had been developed by my enlarged experience of life. In our many wanderings, I had learned to choose between roads and to make conjectures from the lie of the country. I had likewise lived in a far larger house than my home. Hence it now dawned upon me, for the first time, that grannie’s room must be next to mine, although approached from the other side, and that the groan must have been hers. She might be in need of help. I remembered at the same time how she had wished to have me by her in the middle of the night, that she might be able to tell me what she could not recall in the day. I got up at once, dressed myself, and stole down the one stair, across the kitchen, and up the other. I gently opened grannie’s door and peeped in. A fire was burning in the room. I entered and approached the bed. I wondered how I had the courage; but children more than grown people are moved by unlikely impulses. Grannie lay breathing heavily. I stood for a moment. The faint light flickered over her white face. It was the middle of the night, and the tide of fear inseparable from the night began to rise. My old fear of her began to return with it. But she lifted her lids, and the terror ebbed away. She looked at me, but did not seem to know me. I went nearer.

‘Grannie,’ I said, close to her ear, and speaking low; ‘you wanted to see me at night—that was before I went to school. I’m here, grannie.’

The sheet was folded back so smooth that she could hardly have turned over since it had been arranged for the night. Her hand was lying upon it. She lifted it feebly and stroked my cheek once more. Her lips murmured something which I could not hear, and then came a deep sigh, almost a groan. The terror returned when I found she could not speak to me.

‘Shall I go and fetch auntie?’ I whispered.

She shook her head feebly, and looked wistfully at me. Her lips moved again. I guessed that she wanted me to sit beside her. I got a chair, placed it by the bedside, and sat down. She put out her hand, as if searching for something. I laid mine in it. She closed her fingers upon it and seemed satisfied. When I looked again, she was asleep and breathing quietly. I was afraid to take my hand from hers lest I should wake her. I laid my head on the side of the bed, and was soon fast asleep also.

I was awaked by a noise in the room. It was Nannie laying the fire. When she saw me she gave a cry of terror.

‘Hush, Nannie!’ I said; ‘you will wake grannie:’ and as I spoke I rose, for I found my hand was free.

‘Oh, Master Willie!’ said Nannie, in a low voice; ‘how did you come here? You sent my heart into my mouth.’

‘Swallow it again, Nannie,’ I answered, ‘and don’t tell auntie. I came to see grannie, and fell asleep. I’m rather cold. I’ll go to bed now. Auntie’s not up, is she?

‘No. It’s not time for anybody to be up yet.’

Nannie ought to have spent the night in grannie’s room, for it was her turn to watch; but finding her nicely asleep as she thought, she had slipped away for just an hour of comfort in bed. The hour had grown to three. When she returned the fire was out.

When I came down to breakfast the solemn look upon my uncle’s face caused me a foreboding of change.

‘God has taken grannie away in the night, Willie,’ said he, holding the hand I had placed in his.