Chapter I.
Paul, Arrived in a Strange Land, learns many Things, and goes to meet the Man in Grey.
Fate intended me for a singularly fortunate man. Properly, I ought to have been born in June, which being, as is well known, the luckiest month in all the year for such events, should, by thoughtful parents, be more generally selected. How it was I came to be born in May, which is, on the other hand, of all the twelve the most unlucky, as I have proved, I leave to those more conversant with the subject to explain. An early nurse, the first human being of whom I have any distinct recollection, unhesitatingly attributed the unfortunate fact to my natural impatience; which quality she at the same time predicted would lead me into even greater trouble, a prophecy impressed by future events with the stamp of prescience. It was from this same bony lady that I likewise learned the manner of my coming. It seems that I arrived, quite unexpectedly, two hours after news had reached the house of the ruin of my father's mines through inundation; misfortunes, as it was expounded to me, never coming singly in this world to any one. That all things might be of a piece, my poor mother, attempting to reach the bell, fell against and broke the cheval-glass, thus further saddening herself with the conviction—for no amount of reasoning ever succeeded in purging her Welsh blood of its natural superstition—that whatever might be the result of future battles with my evil star, the first seven years of tiny existence had been, by her act, doomed to disaster.
“And I must confess,” added the knobbly Mrs. Fursey, with a sigh, “it does look as though there must be some truth in the saying, after all.”
“Then ain't I a lucky little boy?” I asked. For hitherto it had been Mrs. Fursey's method to impress upon me my exceptional good fortune. That I could and did, involuntarily, retire to bed at six, while less happily placed children were deprived of their natural rest until eight or nine o'clock, had always been held up to me as an astounding piece of luck. Some little boys had not a bed at all; for the which, in my more riotous moments, I envied them. Again, that at the first sign of a cold it became my unavoidable privilege to lunch off linseed gruel and sup off brimstone and treacle—a compound named with deliberate intent to deceive the innocent, the treacle, so far as taste is concerned, being wickedly subordinated to the brimstone—was another example of Fortune's favouritism: other little boys were so astoundingly unlucky as to be left alone when they felt ill. If further proof were needed to convince that I had been signalled out by Providence as its especial protege, there remained always the circumstance that I possessed Mrs. Fursey for my nurse. The suggestion that I was not altogether the luckiest of children was a new departure.
The good dame evidently perceived her error, and made haste to correct it.
“Oh, you! You are lucky enough,” she replied; “I was thinking of your poor mother.”
“Isn't mamma lucky?”
“Well, she hasn't been too lucky since you came.”
“Wasn't it lucky, her having me?”
“I can't say it was, at that particular time.”
“Didn't she want me?”
Mrs. Fursey was one of those well-meaning persons who are of opinion that the only reasonable attitude of childhood should be that of perpetual apology for its existence.
“Well, I daresay she could have done without you,” was the answer.
I can see the picture plainly still. I am sitting on a low chair before the nursery fire, one knee supported in my locked hands, meanwhile Mrs. Fursey's needle grated with monotonous regularity against her thimble. At that moment knocked at my small soul for the first time the problem of life.
Suddenly, without moving, I said:
“Then why did she take me in?”
The rasping click of the needle on the thimble ceased abruptly.
“Took you in! What's the child talking about? Who's took you in?”
“Why, mamma. If she didn't want me, why did she take me in?”
But even while, with heart full of dignified resentment, I propounded this, as I proudly felt, logically unanswerable question, I was glad that she had. The vision of my being refused at the bedroom window presented itself to my imagination. I saw the stork, perplexed and annoyed, looking as I had sometimes seen Tom Pinfold look when the fish he had been holding out by the tail had been sniffed at by Anna, and the kitchen door shut in his face. Would the stork also have gone away thoughtfully scratching his head with one of those long, compass-like legs of his, and muttering to himself. And here, incidentally, I fell a-wondering how the stork had carried me. In the garden I had often watched a blackbird carrying a worm, and the worm, though no doubt really safe enough, had always appeared to me nervous and uncomfortable. Had I wriggled and squirmed in like fashion? And where would the stork have taken me to then? Possibly to Mrs. Fursey's: their cottage was the nearest. But I felt sure Mrs. Fursey would not have taken me in; and next to them, at the first house in the village, lived Mr. Chumdley, the cobbler, who was lame, and who sat all day hammering boots with very dirty hands, in a little cave half under the ground, his whole appearance suggesting a poor-spirited ogre. I should have hated being his little boy. Possibly nobody would have taken me in. I grew pensive, thinking of myself as the rejected of all the village. What would the stork have done with me, left on his hands, so to speak. The reflection prompted a fresh question.
“Nurse, where did I come from?”
“Why, I've told you often. The stork brought you.”
“Yes, I know. But where did the stork get me from?” Mrs. Fursey paused for quite a long while before replying. Possibly she was reflecting whether such answer might not make me unduly conceited. Eventually she must have decided to run that risk; other opportunities could be relied upon for neutralising the effect.
“Oh, from Heaven.”
“But I thought Heaven was a place where you went to,” I answered; “not where you comed from.” I know I said “comed,” for I remember that at this period my irregular verbs were a bewildering anxiety to my poor mother. “Comed” and “goned,” which I had worked out for myself, were particular favourites of mine.
Mrs. Fursey passed over my grammar in dignified silence. She had been pointedly requested not to trouble herself with that part of my education, my mother holding that diverging opinions upon the same subject only confused a child.
“You came from Heaven,” repeated Mrs. Fursey, “and you'll go to Heaven—if you're good.”
“Do all little boys and girls come from Heaven?”
“So they say.” Mrs. Fursey's tone implied that she was stating what might possibly be but a popular fallacy, for which she individually took no responsibility.
“And did you come from Heaven, Mrs. Fursey?” Mrs. Fursey's reply to this was decidedly more emphatic.
“Of course I did. Where do you think I came from?”
At once, I am ashamed to say, Heaven lost its exalted position in my eyes. Even before this, it had puzzled me that everybody I knew should be going there—for so I was always assured; now, connected as it appeared to be with the origin of Mrs. Fursey, much of its charm disappeared.
But this was not all. Mrs. Fursey's information had suggested to me a fresh grief. I stopped not to console myself with the reflection that my fate had been but the fate of all little boys and girls. With a child's egoism I seized only upon my own particular case.
“Didn't they want me in Heaven then, either?” I asked. “Weren't they fond of me up there?”
The misery in my voice must have penetrated even Mrs. Fursey's bosom, for she answered more sympathetically than usual.
“Oh, they liked you well enough, I daresay. I like you, but I like to get rid of you sometimes.” There could be no doubt as to this last. Even at the time, I often doubted whether that six o'clock bedtime was not occasionally half-past five.
The answer comforted me not. It remained clear that I was not wanted either in Heaven nor upon the earth. God did not want me. He was glad to get rid of me. My mother did not want me. She could have done without me. Nobody wanted me. Why was I here?
And then, as the sudden opening and shutting of the door of a dark room, came into my childish brain the feeling that Something, somewhere, must have need of me, or I could not be, Something I felt I belonged to and that belonged to me, Something that was as much a part of me as I of It. The feeling came back to me more than once during my childhood, though I could never put it into words. Years later the son of the Portuguese Jew explained to me my thought. But all that I myself could have told was that in that moment I knew for the first time that I lived, that I was I.
The next instant all was dark again, and I once more a puzzled little boy, sitting by a nursery fire, asking of a village dame questions concerning life.
Suddenly a new thought came to me, or rather the recollection of an old.
“Nurse, why haven't we got a husband?”
Mrs. Fursey left off her sewing, and stared at me.
“What maggot has the child got into its head now?” was her observation; “who hasn't got a husband?”
“Why, mamma.”
“Don't talk nonsense, Master Paul; you know your mamma has got a husband.”
“No, she ain't.”
“And don't contradict. Your mamma's husband is your papa, who lives in London.”
“What's the good of him!”
Mrs. Fursey's reply appeared to me to be unnecessarily vehement.
“You wicked child, you; where's your commandments? Your father is in London working hard to earn money to keep you in idleness, and you sit there and say 'What's the good of him!' I'd be ashamed to be such an ungrateful little brat.”
I had not meant to be ungrateful. My words were but the repetition of a conversation I had overheard the day before between my mother and my aunt.
Had said my aunt: “There she goes, moping again. Drat me if ever I saw such a thing to mope as a woman.”
My aunt was entitled to preach on the subject. She herself grumbled all day about all things, but she did it cheerfully.
My mother was standing with her hands clasped behind her—a favourite attitude of hers—gazing through the high French window into the garden beyond. It must have been spring time, for I remember the white and yellow crocuses decking the grass.
“I want a husband,” had answered my mother, in a tone so ludicrously childish that at sound of it I had looked up from the fairy story I was reading, half expectant to find her changed into a little girl; “I hate not having a husband.”
“Help us and save us,” my aunt had retorted; “how many more does a girl want? She's got one.”
“What's the good of him all that way off,” had pouted my mother; “I want him here where I can get at him.”
I had often heard of this father of mine, who lived far away in London, and to whom we owed all the blessings of life; but my childish endeavours to square information with reflection had resulted in my assigning to him an entirely spiritual existence. I agreed with my mother that such an one, however to be revered, was no substitute for the flesh and blood father possessed by luckier folk—the big, strong, masculine thing that would carry a fellow pig-a-back round the garden, or take a chap to sail in boats.
“You don't understand me, nurse,” I explained; “what I mean is a husband you can get at.”
“Well, and you'll 'get at him,' poor gentleman, one of these days,” answered Mrs. Fursey. “When he's ready for you he'll send for you, and then you'll go to him in London.”
I felt that still Mrs. Fursey didn't understand. But I foresaw that further explanation would only shock her, so contented myself with a simple, matter-of-fact question.
“How do you get to London; do you have to die first?”
“I do think,” said Mrs. Fursey, in the voice of resigned despair rather than of surprise, “that, without exception, you are the silliest little boy I ever came across. I've no patience with you.”
“I am very sorry, nurse,” I answered; “I thought—”
“Then,” interrupted Mrs. Fursey, in the voice of many generations, “you shouldn't think. London,” continued the good dame, her experience no doubt suggesting that the shortest road to peace would be through my understanding of this matter, “is a big town, and you go there in a train. Some time—soon now—your father will write to your mother that everything is ready. Then you and your mother and your aunt will leave this place and go to London, and I shall be rid of you.”
“And shan't we come back here ever any more?”
“Never again.”
“And I'll never play in the garden again, never go down to the pebble-ridge to tea, or to Jacob's tower?”
“Never again.” I think Mrs. Fursey took a pleasure in the phrase. It sounded, as she said it, like something out of the prayer-book.
“And I'll never see Anna, or Tom Pinfold, or old Yeo, or Pincher, or you, ever any more?” In this moment of the crumbling from under me of all my footholds I would have clung even to that dry tuft, Mrs. Fursey herself.
“Never any more. You'll go away and begin an entirely new life. And I do hope, Master Paul,” added Mrs. Fursey, piously, “it may be a better one. That you will make up your mind to—”
But Mrs. Fursey's well-meant exhortations, whatever they may have been, fell upon deaf ears. Here was I face to face with yet another problem. This life into which I had fallen: it was understandable! One went away, leaving the pleasant places that one knew, never to return to them. One left one's labour and one's play to enter upon a new existence in a strange land. One parted from the friends one had always known, one saw them never again. Life was indeed a strange thing; and, would a body comprehend it, then must a body sit staring into the fire, thinking very hard, unheedful of all idle chatter.
That night, when my mother came to kiss me good-night, I turned my face to the wall and pretended to be asleep, for children as well as grown-ups have their foolish moods; but when I felt the soft curls brush my cheek, my pride gave way, and clasping my arms about her neck, and drawing her face still closer down to mine; I voiced the question that all the evening had been knocking at my heart:
“I suppose you couldn't send me back now, could you? You see, you've had me so long.”
“Send you back?”
“Yes. I'd be too big for the stork to carry now, wouldn't I?”
My mother knelt down beside the bed so that her face and mine were on a level, and looking into her eyes, the fear that had been haunting me fell from me.
“Who has been talking foolishly to a foolish little boy?” asked my mother, keeping my arms still clasped about her neck.
“Oh, nurse and I were discussing things, you know,” I answered, “and she said you could have done without me.” Somehow, I did not mind repeating the words now; clearly it could have been but Mrs. Fursey's fun.
My mother drew me closer to her.
“And what made her think that?”
“Well, you see,” I replied, “I came at a very awkward time, didn't I; when you had a lot of other troubles.”
My mother laughed, but the next moment looked grave again.
“I did not know you thought about such things,” she said; “we must be more together, you and I, Paul, and you shall tell me all you think, because nurse does not quite understand you. It is true what she said about the trouble; it came just at that time. But I could not have done without you. I was very unhappy, and you were sent to comfort me and help me to bear it.” I liked this explanation better.
“Then it was lucky, your having me?” I said. Again my mother laughed, and again there followed that graver look upon her childish face.
“Will you remember what I am going to say?” She spoke so earnestly that I, wriggling into a sitting posture, became earnest also.
“I'll try,” I answered; “but I ain't got a very good memory, have I?”
“Not very,” smiled my mother; “but if you think about it a good deal it will not leave you. When you are a good boy, and later on, when you are a good man, then I am the luckiest little mother in all the world. And every time you fail, that means bad luck for me. You will remember that after I'm gone, when you are a big man, won't you, Paul?”
So, both of us quite serious, I promised; and though I smile now when I remember, seeing before me those two earnest, childish faces, yet I think, however little success it may be I have to boast of, it would perhaps have been still less had I entirely forgotten.
From that day my mother waxes in my memory; Mrs. Fursey, of the many promontories, waning. There were sunny mornings in the neglected garden, where the leaves played round us while we worked and read; twilight evenings in the window seat where, half hidden by the dark red curtains, we would talk in whispers, why I know not, of good men and noble women, ogres, fairies, saints and demons; they were pleasant days.
Possibly our curriculum lacked method; maybe it was too varied and extensive for my age, in consequence of which chronology became confused within my brain, and fact and fiction more confounded than has usually been considered permissible, even in history. I saw Aphrodite, ready armed and risen from the sea, move with stately grace to meet King Canute, who, throned upon the sand, bade her come no further lest she should wet his feet. In forest glade I saw King Rufus fall from a poisoned arrow shot by Robin Hood; but thanks to sweet Queen Eleanor, who sucked the poison from his wound, I knew he lived. Oliver Cromwell, having killed King Charles, married his widow, and was in turn stabbed by Hamlet. Ulysses, in the Argo, it was fixed upon my mind, had discovered America. Romulus and Remus had slain the wolf and rescued Little Red Riding Hood. Good King Arthur, for letting the cakes burn, had been murdered by his uncle in the Tower of London. Prometheus, bound to the Rock, had been saved by good St. George. Paris had given the apple to William Tell. What matter! the information was there. It needed rearranging, that was all.
Sometimes, of an afternoon, we would climb the steep winding pathway through the woods, past awful precipices, spirit-haunted, by grassy swards where fairies danced o' nights, by briar and bracken sheltered Caves where fearsome creatures lurked, till high above the creeping sea we would reach the open plateau where rose old Jacob's ruined tower. “Jacob's Folly” it was more often called about the country side, and by some “The Devil's Tower;” for legend had it that there old Jacob and his master, the Devil, had often met in windy weather to wave false wrecking lights to troubled ships. Who “old Jacob” was, I never, that I can remember, learned, nor how nor why he built the Tower. Certain only it is his memory was unpopular, and the fisher folk would swear that still on stormy nights strange lights would gleam and flash from the ivy-curtained windows of his Folly.
But in day time no spot was more inviting, the short moss-grass before its shattered door, the lichen on its crumbling stones. From its topmost platform one saw the distant mountains, faint like spectres, and the silent ships that came and vanished; and about one's feet the pleasant farm lands and the grave, sweet river.
Smaller and poorer the world has grown since then. Now, behind those hills lie naught but smoky towns and dingy villages; but then they screened a land of wonder where princesses dwelt in castles, where the cities were of gold. Now the ocean is but six days' journey wide, ending at the New York Custom House. Then, had one set one's sail upon it, one would have travelled far and far, beyond the golden moonlight, beyond the gate of clouds; to the magic land of the blood red shore, t'other side o' the sun. I never dreamt in those days a world could be so small.
Upon the topmost platform a wooden seat ran round within the parapet, and sitting there hand in hand, sheltered from the wind which ever blew about the tower, my mother would people for me all the earth and air with the forms of myth and legend—perhaps unwisely, yet I do not know. I took no harm from it, good rather, I think. They were beautiful fancies, most of them; or so my mother turned them, making for love and pity, as do all the tales that live, whether poems or old wives fables. But at that time of course they had no meaning for me other than the literal; so that my mother, looking into my eyes, would often hasten to add: “But that, you know, is only an old superstition, and of course there are no such things nowadays.” Yet, forgetful sometimes of the time, and overtaken homeward by the shadows, we would hasten swiftly through the darkening path, holding each other tightly by the hand.
Spring had waxed to summer, summer waned to autumn. Then my aunt and I one morning, waiting at the breakfast table, saw through the open window my mother skipping, dancing, pirouetting up the garden path. She held a letter open in her hand, which as she drew near she waved about her head, singing:
“Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, then comes Wednesday morning.”
She caught me to her and began dancing with me round the room.
Observed my aunt, who continued steadily to eat bread and butter:
“Just like 'em all. Goes mad with joy. What for? Because she's going to leave a decent house, to live in a poky hole in the East End of London, and keep one servant.”
To my aunt the second person ever remained a grammatical superfluity. Invariably she spoke not to but of a person, throwing out her conversation in the form of commentary. This had the advantage of permitting the party intended to ignore it as mere impersonal philosophy. Seeing it was generally uncomplimentary, most people preferred so to regard it; but my mother had never succeeded in schooling herself to indifference.
“It's not a poky hole,” she replied; “it's an old-fashioned house, near the river.”
“Plaistow marshes!” ejaculated my aunt, “calls it the river!”
“So it is the river,” returned my mother; “the river is the other side of the marshes.”
“Let's hope it will always stop there,” said my aunt.
“And it's got a garden,” continued my mother, ignoring my aunt's last remark; “which is quite an unusual feature in a London house. And it isn't the East End of London; it is a rising suburb. And you won't make me miserable because I am too happy.”
“Drat the woman!” said my aunt, “why can't she sit down and give us our tea before it's all cold?”
“You are a disagreeable thing!” said my mother.
“Not half milk,” said my aunt. My aunt was never in the least disturbed by other people's opinion of her, which was perhaps well for her.
For three days my mother packed and sang; and a dozen times a day unpacked and laughed, looking for things wanted that were always found at the very bottom of the very last box looked into, so that Anna, waiting for a certain undergarment of my aunt's which shall be nameless, suggested a saving of time:
“If I were you, ma'am,” said Anna, “I'd look into the last box you're going to look into first.”
But it was found eventually in the first box-the box, that is, my mother had intended to search first, but which, acting on Anna's suggestion, she had reserved till the last. This caused my mother to be quite short with Anna, who she said had wasted her time. But by Tuesday afternoon all stood ready: we were to start early Wednesday morning.
That evening, missing my mother in the house, I sought her in the garden and found her, as I had expected, on her favourite seat under the great lime tree; but to my surprise there were tears in her eyes.
“But I thought you were glad we were going,” I said.
“So I am,” answered my mother, drying her eyes only to make room for fresh tears.
“Then why are you crying?”
“Because I'm sorry to leave here.”
Grown-up folks with their contradictory ways were a continual puzzle to me in those days; I am not sure I quite understand them even now, myself included.
We were up and off next day before the dawn. The sun rose as the wagon reached the top of the hill; and there we paused and took our farewell look at Old Jacob's Tower. My mother cried a little behind her veil; but my aunt only said, “I never did care for earwigs in my tea;” and as for myself I was too excited and expectant to feel much sentiment about anything.
On the journey I sat next to an exceptionally large and heavy man, who in his sleep—and he slept often—imagined me to be a piece of stuffing out of place. Then, grunting and wriggling, he would endeavour to rub me out, until the continued irritation of my head between the window and his back would cause him to awake, when he would look down upon me reprovingly but not unkindly, observing to the carriage generally: “It's a funny thing, ain't it, nobody's ever made a boy yet that could keep still for ten seconds.” After which he would pat me heartily on the head, to show he was not vexed with me, and fall to sleep again upon me. He was a good-tempered man.
My mother sat occupied chiefly with her own thoughts, and my aunt had found a congenial companion in a lady who had had her cap basket sat upon; so I was left mainly to my own resources. When I could get my head free of the big man's back, I gazed out of the window, and watched the flying fragments as we shed the world. Now a village would fall from us, now the yellow corn-land would cling to us for awhile, or a wood catch at our rushing feet, and sometimes a strong town would stop us, and hold us, panting for a space. Or, my eyes weary, I would sit and listen to the hoarse singing of the wheels beneath my feet. It was a monotonous chaunt, ever the same two lines:
“Here we suffer grief and pain,
Here we meet to part again,”
followed by a low, rumbling laugh. Sometimes fortissimo, sometimes pianissimo; now vivace, now largo; but ever those same two lines, and ever followed by the same low, rumbling laugh; still to this day the iron wheels sing to me that same song.
Later on I also must have slept, for I dreamt that as the result of my having engaged in single combat with a dragon, the dragon, ignoring all the rules of Fairyland, had swallowed me. It was hot and stuffy in the dragon's stomach. He had, so it appeared to me, disgracefully overeaten himself; there were hundreds of us there, entirely undigested, including Mother Hubbard and a gentleman named Johnson, against whom, at that period, I entertained a strong prejudice by reason of our divergent views upon the subject of spelling. Even in this hour of our mutual discomfort Johnson would not leave me alone, but persisted in asking me how I spelt Jonah. Nobody was looking, so I kicked him. He sprang up and came after me. I tried to run away, but became wedged between Hop-o'-my-Thumb and Julius Caesar. I suppose our tearing about must have hurt the dragon, for at that moment he gave vent to a most fearful scream, and I awoke to find the fat man rubbing his left shin, while we struggled slowly, with steps growing ever feebler, against a sea of brick that every moment closed in closer round us.
We scrambled out of the carriage into a great echoing cave that might have been the dragon's home, where, to my alarm, my mother was immediately swooped down upon by a strange man in grey.
“Why's he do that?” I asked of my aunt.
“Because he's a fool,” answered my aunt; “they all are.”
He put my mother down and came towards us. He was a tall, thin man, with eyes one felt one would never be afraid of; and instinctively even then I associated him in my mind with windmills and a lank white horse.
“Why, how he's grown,” said the grey man, raising me in his arms until my mother beside me appeared to me in a new light as quite a little person; “and solid too.”
My mother whispered something. I think from her face, for I knew the signs, it was praise of me.
“And he's going to be our new fortune,” she added aloud, as the grey man lowered me.
“Then,” said my aunt, who had this while been sitting rigid upon a flat black box, “don't drop him down a coal-mine. That's all I say.”
I wondered at the time why the grey man's pale face should flush so crimson, and why my mother should whisper angrily:
“Flow can you be so wicked, Fanny? How dare you say such a thing?”
“I only said 'don't drop him down a coal-mine,'” returned my aunt, apparently much surprised; “you don't want to drop him down a coal-mine, do you?”
We passed through glittering, joyous streets, piled high each side with all the good things of the earth; toys and baubles, jewels and gold, things good to eat and good to drink, things good to wear and good to see; through pleasant ways where fountains splashed and flowers bloomed. The people wore bright clothes, had happy faces. They rode in beautiful carriages, they strolled about, greeting one another with smiles. The children ran and laughed. London, thought I to myself, is the city of the fairies.
It passed, and we sank into a grim city of hoarse, roaring streets, wherein the endless throngs swirled and surged as I had seen the yellow waters curve and fret, contending, where the river pauses, rock-bound. Here were no bright costumes, no bright faces, none stayed to greet another; all was stern, and swift, and voiceless. London, then, said I to myself, is the city of the giants. They must live in these towering castles side by side, and these hurrying thousands are their driven slaves.
But this passed also, and we sank lower yet until we reached a third city, where a pale mist filled each sombre street. None of the beautiful things of the world were to be seen here, but only the things coarse and ugly. And wearily to and fro its sunless passages trudged with heavy steps a weary people, coarse-clad, and with dull, listless faces. And London, I knew, was the city of the gnomes who labour sadly all their lives, imprisoned underground; and a terror seized me lest I, too, should remain chained here, deep down below the fairy city that was already but a dream.
We stopped at last in a long, unfinished street. I remember our pushing our way through a group of dirty urchins, all of whom, my aunt remarked in passing, ought to be skinned. It was my aunt's one prescription for all to whom she took objection; but really in the present instance I think it would have been of service; nothing else whatever could have restored them to cleanliness. Then the door closed behind us with an echoing clang, and the small, cold rooms came forward stiffly to greet us.
The man in grey went to the one window and drew back the curtain; it was growing dusk now. My aunt sat on a straight, hard chair and stared fixedly at the three-armed gaselier. My mother stood in the centre of the room with one small ungloved hand upon the table, and I noticed—for I was very near—that the poor little one-legged thing was trembling.
“Of course it's not what you've been accustomed to, Maggie,” said the man in grey; “but it's only for a little while.”
He spoke in a new, angry voice; but I could not see his face, his back being to the light.
My mother drew his arms around us both.
“It is the best home in all the world,” she said; and thus we stayed for awhile.
“Nonsense,” said my aunt, suddenly; and this aroused us; “it's a poky hole, as I told her it would be. Let her thank the Lord she's got a man clever enough to get her out of it. I know him; he never could rest where he was put. Now he's at the bottom; he'll go up.”
It sounded to me a very disagreeable speech; but the grey man laughed—I had not heard him laugh till then—and my mother ran to my aunt and kissed her; and somehow the room seemed to become lighter.
For some reason I slept downstairs that night, on the floor, behind a screen improvised out of a clothes horse and a blanket; and later in the evening the clatter of knives and forks and the sound of subdued voices awoke me. My aunt had apparently gone to bed; my mother and the man in grey were talking together over their supper.
“We must buy land,” said the voice of the grey man; “London is coming this way. The Somebodies” (I forget the name my father mentioned) “made all their money by buying up land round New York for a mere song. Then, as the city spread, they became worth millions.”
“But where will you get the money from, Luke?” asked the voice of my mother.
The voice of the grey man answered airily:
“Oh, that's merely a matter of business. You grant a mortgage. The property goes up in value. You borrow more. Then you buy more—and so on.”
“I see,” said my mother.
“Being on the spot gives one such an advantage,” said the grey man. “I shall know just when to buy. It's a great thing, being on the spot.”
“Of course, it must be,” said my mother.
I suppose I must have dozed, for the next words I heard the grey man say were:
“Of course you have the park opposite, but then the house is small.”
“But shall we need a very large one?” asked my mother.
“One never knows,” said the grey man. “If I should go into Parliament—”
At this point a hissing sound arose from the neighbourhood of the fire.
“It looks,” said my mother, “as if it were done.”
“If you will hold the dish,” said the grey man, “I think I can pour it in without spilling.”
Again I must have dozed.
“It depends,” said the grey man, “upon what he is going to be. For the classics, of course, Oxford.”
“He's going to be very clever,” said my mother. She spoke as one who knows.
“We'll hope so,” said the grey man.
“I shouldn't be surprised,” said my mother, “if he turned out a poet.”
The grey man said something in a low tone that I did not hear.
“I'm not so sure,” answered my mother, “it's in the blood. I've often thought that you, Luke, ought to have been a poet.”
“I never had the time,” said the grey man. “There were one or two little things—”
“They were very beautiful,” interrupted my mother. The clatter of the knives and forks continued undisturbed for a few moments. Then continued the grey man:
“There would be no harm, provided I made enough. It's the law of nature. One generation earns, the next spends. We must see. In any case, I think I should prefer Oxford for him.”
“It will be so hard parting from him,” said my mother.
“There will be the vacations,” said the grey man, “when we shall travel.”