Part 49 (1/2)
”I will help, heart and soul! slight indeed any service to her or to you compared with such service to me. Free this wretched tongue from its stammer, and thought and zeal will not stammer whenever you say, 'Keep your promise.' I am so glad your little girl is still with you.”
Waife looked surprised, ”Is still with me!--why not?” The scholar bit his tongue. That was not the moment to confess; it might destroy all Waife's confidence in him. He would do so later. ”When shall I begin my lesson?”
”Now, if you like. But have you a book in your pocket?”
”I always have.”
”Not Greek, I hope, sir?”
”No, a volume of Barrow's Sermons. Lord Chatham recommended those sermons to his great son as a study for eloquence.”
”Good! Will you lend me the volume, sir? and now for it. Listen to me; one sentence at a time; draw your breath when I do.”
The three magpies p.r.i.c.ked up their ears again, and, as they listened, marvelled much.
CHAPTER III.
Could we know by what strange circ.u.mstances a man's genius became prepared for practical success, we should discover that the most serviceable items in his education were never entered in the bills which his father paid for it.
At the end of the very first lesson George Morley saw that all the elocution masters to whose skill he had been consigned were blunderers in comparison with the basketmaker.
Waife did not puzzle him with scientific theories. All that the great comedian required of him was to observe and to imitate. Observation, imitation, lo! the groundwork of all art! the primal elements of all genius! Not there, indeed to halt, but there ever to commence. What remains to carry on the intellect to mastery? Two steps,--to reflect, to reproduce. Observation, imitation, reflection, reproduction. In these stands a mind complete and consummate, fit to cope with all labour, achieve all success.
At the end of the first lesson George Morley felt that his cure was possible. Making an appointment for the next day at the same place, he came thither stealthily and so on day by day. At the end of a week he felt that the cure was nearly certain; at the end of a month the cure was self-evident. He should live to preach the Word. True, that he practised incessantly in private. Not a moment in his waking hours that the one thought, one object, was absent from his mind! True, that with all his patience, all his toil, the obstacle was yet serious, might never be entirely overcome. Nervous hurry, rapidity of action, vehemence of feeling, brought back, might at unguarded moments always bring back, the gasping breath, the emptied lungs, the struggling utterance. But the relapse, rarer and rarer now with each trial, would be at last scarce a drawback. ”Nay,” quoth Waife, ”instead of a drawback, become but an orator, and you will convert a defect into a beauty.”
Thus justly sanguine of the accomplishment of his life's chosen object, the scholar's grat.i.tude to Waife was unspeakable. And seeing the man daily at last in his own cottage,--Sophy's health restored to her cheeks, smiles to her lip, and cheered at her light fancy-work beside her grandsire's elbow-chair, with fairy legends instilling perhaps golden truths,--seeing Waife thus, the scholar mingled with grat.i.tude a strange tenderness of respect. He knew nought of the vagrant's past, his reason might admit that in a position of life so at variance with the gifts natural and acquired of the singular basketmaker, there was something mysterious and suspicious. But he blushed to think that he had ever ascribed to a flawed or wandering intellect the eccentricities of glorious Humour,--abetted an attempt to separate an old age so innocent and genial from a childhood so fostered and so fostering. And sure I am that if the whole world had risen up to point the finger of scorn at the one-eyed cripple, George Morley--the well-born gentleman, the refined scholar, the spotless Churchman--would have given him his arm to lean upon, and walked by his side unashamed.
CHAPTER IV.
To judge human character rightly, a man may sometimes have very small experience, provided he has a very large heart.
Numa Pimpilius did not more conceal from notice the lessons he received from Egeria than did George Morley those which he received from the basketmaker. Natural, indeed, must be his wish for secrecy; pretty story it would be for Humberston, its future rector learning how to preach a sermon from an old basketmaker! But he had a n.o.bler and more imperious motive for discretion: his honour was engaged to it. Waife exacted a promise that he would regard the intercourse between them as strictly private and confidential.
”It is for my sake I ask this,” said Waife, frankly, ”though I might say it was for yours;” the Oxonian promised, and was bound. Fortunately Lady Montfort quitted the great house the very day after George had first encountered the basketmaker, and writing word that she should not return to it for some weeks, George was at liberty to avail himself of her lord's general invitation to make use of Montfort Court as his lodgings when in the neighbourhood; which the proprieties of the world would not have allowed him to do while Lady Montfort was there without either host or female guests. Accordingly, he took up his abode in a corner of the vast palace, and was easily enabled, when he pleased, to traverse un.o.bserved the solitudes of the park, gain the waterside, or stroll thence through the thick copse leading to Waife's cottage, which bordered the park pales, solitary, sequestered, beyond sight of the neighbouring village. The great house all to himself, George was brought in contact with no one to whom, in unguarded moments, he could even have let out a hint of his new acquaintance, except the clergyman of the parish, a worthy man, who lived in strict retirement upon a scanty stipend. For the Marquess was the lay impropriator; the living was therefore but a very poor vicarage, below the acceptance of a Vipont or a Vipont's tutor, sure to go to a worthy man forced to live in strict retirement. George saw too little of this clergyman, either to let out secrets or pick up information. From him, however, George did incidentally learn that Waife had some months previously visited the village, and proposed to the bailiff to take the cottage and osier land, which he now rented; that he represented himself as having known an old basketmaker who had dwelt there many years ago, and as having learned the basket craft of that long deceased operative. As he offered a higher rent than the bailiff could elsewhere obtain, and as the bailiff was desirous to get credit with Mr. Carr Vipont for improving the property, by reviving thereon an art which had fallen into desuetude, the bargain was struck, provided the candidate, being a stranger to the place, could furnish the bailiff with any satisfactory reference. Waife had gone away, saying he should shortly return with the requisite testimonial. In fact, poor man, as we know, he was then counting on a good word from Mr. Hartopp. He had not, however, returned for some months. The cottage, having been meanwhile wanted for the temporary occupation of an under-gamekeeper, while his own was under repair, fortunately remained unlet. Waife, on returning, accompanied by his little girl, had referred the bailiff to a respectable house-agent and collector of street rents in Bloomsbury, who wrote word that a lady, then abroad, had authorized him, as the agent employed in the management of a house property from which much of her income was derived, not only to state that Waife was a very intelligent man, likely to do well whatever he undertook, but also to guarantee, if required, the punctual payment of the rent for any holding of which he became the occupier. On this the agreement was concluded, the basketmaker installed. In the immediate neighbourhood there was no custom for basket-work, but Waife's performances were so neat, and some so elegant and fanciful, that he had no difficulty in contracting with a large tradesman (not at Humberston, but a more distant and yet more thriving town about twenty miles off) for as much of such work as he could supply. Each week the carrier took his goods and brought back the payments; the profits amply sufficed for Waife's and Sophy's daily bread, with even more than the surplus set aside for the rent. For the rest, the basketmaker's cottage being at the farthest outskirts of the straggling village inhabited by a labouring peasantry, his way of life was not much known nor much inquired into. He seemed a harmless, hard-working man; never seen at the beer-house; always seen with his neatly-dressed little grandchild in his quiet corner at church on Sundays; a civil, well-behaved man too; who touched his hat to the bailiff and took it off to the vicar.
An idea prevailed that the basketmaker had spent much of his life in foreign countries, favoured partly by a sobriety of habits which is not altogether national, partly by something in his appearance, which, without being above his lowly calling, did not seem quite in keeping with it,--outlandish in short,--but princ.i.p.ally by the fact that he had received since his arrival two letters with a foreign postmark. The idea befriended the old man,--allowing it to be inferred that he had probably outlived the friends he had formerly left behind him in England, and, on his return, been sufficiently fatigued with his rambles to drop contented in any corner of his native soil wherein he could find a quiet home, and earn by light toil a decent livelihood.
George, though naturally curious to know what had been the result of his communication to Mrs. Crane,--whether it had led to Waife's discovery or caused him annoyance,--had hitherto, however, shrunk from touching upon a topic which subjected himself to an awkward confession of officious intermeddling, and to which any indirect allusion might appear an indelicate attempt to pry into painful family affairs. But one day he received a letter from his father which disturbed him greatly, and induced him to break ground and speak to his preceptor frankly. In this letter, the elder Mr. Morley mentioned incidentally, amongst other sc.r.a.ps of local news, that he had seen Mr. Hartopp, who was rather out of sorts, his good heart not having recovered the shock of having been abominably ”taken in” by an impostor for whom he had conceived a great fancy, and to whose discovery George himself had providentially led (the father referred here to what George had told him of his first meeting with Waife, and his visit to Mrs. Crane); the impostor, it seemed, from what Mr. Hartopp let fall, not being a little queer in the head, as George had been led to surmise, but a very bad character. ”In fact,”
added the elder Morley, ”a character so bad that Mr. Hartopp was too glad to give up to her lawful protectors the child, whom the man appears to have abducted; and I suspect, from what Hartopp said, though he does not like to own that he was taken in to so gross a degree, that he had been actually introducing to his fellow-townsfolk and conferring familiarly with a regular jail-bird,--perhaps a burglar. How lucky for that poor, soft-headed, excellent Jos Hartopp, whom it is positively as inhuman to take in as it would be to defraud a born natural, that the lady you saw arrived in time to expose the snares laid for his benevolent credulity. But for that, Jos might have taken the fellow into his own house (just like him!), and been robbed by this time, perhaps murdered,--Heaven knows!”
Incredulous and indignant, and longing to be empowered to vindicate his friend's fair name, George seized his hat, and strode quick along the path towards the basketmaker's cottage. As he gained the water-side, he perceived Waife himself, seated on a mossy bank, under a gnarled fantastic thorntree, watching a deer as it came to drink, and whistling a soft mellow tune,--the tune of an old English border-song. The deer lifted his antlers from the water, and turned his large bright eyes towards the opposite bank, whence the note came, listening and wistful.
As George's step crushed the wild thyme, which the thorn-tree shadowed, ”Hus.h.!.+” said Waife, ”and mark how the rudest musical sound can affect the brute creation.” He resumed the whistle,--a clearer, louder, wilder tune,--that of a lively hunting-song. The deer turned quickly round,--uneasy, restless, tossed its antlers, and bounded through the fern. Waife again changed the key of his primitive music,--a melancholy belliny note, like the belling itself of a melancholy hart, but more modulated into sweetness. The deer arrested its flight, and, lured by the mimic sound, returned towards the water-side, slowly and statelily.
”I don't think the story of Orpheus charming the brutes was a fable; do you, sir?” said Waife. ”The rabbits about here know me already; and, if I had but a fiddle, I would undertake to make friends with that reserved and unsocial water-rat, on whom Sir Isaac in vain endeavours at present to force his acquaintance. Man commits a great mistake in not cultivating more intimate and amicable relations with the other branches of earth's great family. Few of them not more amusing than we are; naturally, for they have not our cares. And such variety of character too, where you would least expect it!”
GEORGE MORLEY.--”Very true. Cowper noticed marked differences of character in his favourite hares.”
WAIFE.--”Hares! I am sure that there are not two house-flies on a window-pane, two minnows in that water, that would not present to us interesting points of contrast as to temper and disposition.
If house-flies and minnows could but coin money, or set up a manufacture,--contrive something, in short, to buy or sell attractive to Anglo-Saxon enterprise and intelligence,--of course we should soon have diplomatic relations with them; and our despatches and newspapers would instruct us to a T in the characters and propensities of their leading personages. But, where man has no pecuniary nor ambitious interests at stake in his commerce with any cla.s.s of his fellow-creatures, his information about them is extremely confused and superficial. The best naturalists are mere generalizers, and think they have done a vast deal when they cla.s.sify a species. What should we know about mankind if we had only a naturalist's definition of man? We only know mankind by knocking cla.s.sification on the head, and studying each man as a cla.s.s in himself. Compare Buffon and Shakspeare! Alas, sir! can we never have a Shakspeare for house-flies and minnows?”