Part 5 (1/2)

[Ill.u.s.tration: '_A great book open on his knee . . . a score or so disposed within easy reach_']

Spent with the rapture, I paused a moment and caught my friend's eye over the edge of a folio. 'But as for these Germans,' he began abruptly, as if we had been in the middle of a discussion, 'the scholars.h.i.+p is there, I grant you; but the spark, the fine perception, the happy intuition, where is it? They get it all from us!'

'They get nothing whatever from _us_,' I said decidedly: the word German only suggesting Bands, to which Aunt Eliza was bitterly hostile.

'You think not?' he rejoined doubtfully, getting up and walking about the room. 'Well, I applaud such fairness and temperance in so young a critic. They are qualities--in youth--as rare as they are pleasing. But just look at Schrumpffius, for instance--how he struggles and wrestles with a simple ??? in this very pa.s.sage here!'

I peeped fearfully through the open door, half dreading to see some sinuous and snark-like conflict in progress on the mat; but all was still. I saw no trouble at all in the pa.s.sage, and I said so.

'Precisely,' he cried, delighted. 'To you, who possess the natural scholar's faculty in so happy a degree, there is no difficulty at all.

But to this Schrumpffius----' But here, luckily for me, in came the housekeeper, a clean-looking woman of staid aspect.

'Your tea is in the garden,' she said severely, as if she were correcting a faulty emendation. 'I've put some cakes and things for the little gentleman; and you'd better drink it before it gets cold.'

He waved her off and continued his stride, brandis.h.i.+ng an aorist over my devoted head. The housekeeper waited unmoved till there fell a moment's break in his descant; and then, 'You'd better drink it before it gets cold,' she observed again, impa.s.sively. The wretched man cast a deprecating look at me. 'Perhaps a little tea would be rather nice,' he observed feebly; and to my great relief he led the way into the garden.

I looked about for the little gentleman, but, failing to discover him, I concluded he was absent-minded too, and attacked the 'cakes and things'

with no misgivings.

After a most successful and most learned tea a something happened which, small as I was, never quite shook itself out of my memory. To us at parley in an arbour over the high road, there entered, slouching into view, a dingy tramp, satellited by a frowsy woman and a pariah dog; and, catching sight of us, he set up his professional whine; and I looked at my friend with the heartiest compa.s.sion, for I knew well from Martha--it was common talk--that at this time of day he was certainly and surely penniless. Morn by morn he started forth with pockets lined; and each returning evening found him with never a sou. All this he proceeded to explain at length to the tramp, courteously and even shamefacedly, as one who was in the wrong; and at last the gentleman of the road, realising the hopelessness of his case, set to and cursed him with gusto, vocabulary, and abandonment. He reviled his eyes, his features, his limbs, his profession, his relatives and surroundings; and then slouched off, still oozing malice and filth. We watched the party to a turn in the road, where the woman, plainly weary, came to a stop.

Her lord, after some conventional expletives demanded of him by his position, relieved her of her bundle, and caused her to hang on his arm with a certain rough kindness of tone, and in action even a dim approach to tenderness; and the dingy dog crept up for one lick at her hand.

'See,' said my friend, bearing somewhat on my shoulder, 'how this strange thing, this love of ours, lives and s.h.i.+nes out in the unlikeliest of places! You have been in the fields in early morning?

Barren acres, all! But only stoop--catch the light thwartwise--and all is a silver network of gossamer! So the fairy filaments of this strange thing underrun and link together the whole world. Yet it is not the old imperious G.o.d of the fatal bow--???? a???ate ??a?--not that--nor even the placid respectable st????--but something still unnamed, perhaps more mysterious, more divine! Only one must stoop to see it, old fellow, one must stoop!'

The dew was falling, the dusk closing, as I trotted briskly homewards down the road. Lonely s.p.a.ces everywhere, above and around. Only Hesperus hung in the sky, solitary, pure, ineffably far-drawn and remote; yet infinitely heartening, somehow, in his valorous isolation.

s...o...b..UND

TWELFTH-NIGHT had come and gone, and life next morning seemed a trifle flat and purposeless. But yester-eve, and the mummers were here! They had come striding into the old kitchen, powdering the red brick floor with snow from their barbaric bedizenments; and stamping, and crossing, and declaiming, till all was whirl and riot and shout. Harold was frankly afraid: unabashed, he buried himself in the cook's ample bosom.

Edward feigned a manly superiority to illusion, and greeted these awful apparitions familiarly, as d.i.c.k and Harry and Joe. As for me, I was too big to run, too rapt to resist the magic and surprise. Whence came these outlanders, breaking in on us with song and ordered masque and a terrible clas.h.i.+ng of wooden swords? And after these, what strange visitants might we not look for any quiet night, when the chestnuts popped in the ashes, and the old ghost stories drew the awe-stricken circle close? Old Merlin, perhaps, 'all furred in black sheep-skins, and a russet gown, with a bow and arrows, and bearing wild geese in his hand!' Or stately Ogier the Dane, recalled from Faery, asking his way to the land that once had need of him! Or even, on some white night, the Snow-Queen herself, with a chime of sleigh-bells and the patter of reindeer's feet, halting of a sudden at the door flung wide, while aloft the Northern Lights went shaking attendant spears among the quiet stars!

[Ill.u.s.tration: '_But yester-eve and the mummers were here!_']

This morning, house-bound by the relentless indefatigable snow, I was feeling the reaction. Edward, on the contrary, being violently stage-struck on this his first introduction to the real Drama, was striding up and down the floor, proclaiming 'Here be I, King Gearge the Third,' in a strong Berks.h.i.+re accent. Harold, accustomed, as the youngest, to lonely antics and to sports that asked no sympathy, was absorbed in 'clubmen': a performance consisting in a measured progress round the room arm-in-arm with an imaginary companion of reverend years, with occasional halts at imaginary clubs, where--imaginary steps being leisurely ascended--imaginary papers were glanced at, imaginary scandal was discussed with elderly shakings of the head, and--regrettable to say--imaginary gla.s.ses were lifted lipwards.

Heaven only knows how the germ of this dreary pastime first found way into his small-boyish being. It was his own invention, and he was proportionately proud of it. Meanwhile Charlotte and I, crouched in the window-seat, watched, spell-stricken, the whirl and eddy and drive of the innumerable snow-flakes, wrapping our cheery little world in an uncanny uniform, ghastly in line and hue.

Charlotte was sadly out of spirits. Having 'countered' Miss Smedley at breakfast, during some argument or other, by an apt quotation from her favourite cla.s.sic (the _Fairy Book_), she had been gently but firmly informed that no such things as fairies ever really existed. 'Do you mean to say it's all lies?' asked Charlotte bluntly. Miss Smedley deprecated the use of any such unladylike words in any connexion at all.

'These stories had their origin, my dear,' she explained, 'in a mistaken anthropomorphism in the interpretation of nature. But though we are now too well informed to fall into similar errors, there are still many beautiful lessons to be learned from these myths----'

'But how can you learn anything,' persisted Charlotte, 'from what doesn't exist?' And she left the table defiant, howbeit depressed.

'Don't you mind _her_,' I said consolingly; 'how can she know anything about it? Why, she can't even throw a stone properly!'