Part 4 (2/2)

”Janet!--Ja-a-a-a-net!” he shouted, and sighed a sigh of relief to find that at least there was one part of him neither bandaged nor drowned in arnica.

”Deil tak' the laddie!” cried Janet, who went about her work all day with one ear c.o.c.ked toward the chamber of her brave sick soldier; ”what service is there in taking the rigging aff the hoose wi' your noise? Did ye think I was doon at Edam Cross? What do ye want, callant, that ye deafen my auld lugs like that? I never heard sic a laddie!”

But General Smith did not answer any of these questions. He well knew Janet's tone of simulated anger when she was ”putting it on.”

”Go and fetch _it_!” he said darkly.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE FAMILIAR SPIRIT.

Now there was a skeleton in the cupboard of General Napoleon Smith. No distinguished family can be respectable without at least one such. But that of the new field-marshal was particularly dark and disgraceful.

Very obediently Janet Sheepshanks vanished from the sick-room, and presently returned with an oblong parcel, which she handed to the hero of battles.

”Thank you,” he said; ”are you sure that the children are out?”

”They are sailing paper boats on the mill-dam,” said Janet, going to the window to look.

Hugh John sighed a sigh. He wished he could sail boats on the mill-dam.

”I hope every boat will go down the mill lade, and get mashed in the wheel,” he said pleasantly.

”For shame, Master Hugh!” replied Janet Sheepshanks, shaking her head at him, but conscious that he was exactly expressing her own mind, if she had been lying sick a-bed and had been compelled to listen to some other housekeeper jingling keys that once were hers, ransacking her sacredest repositories, and keeping in order the menials of the house.

Hugh John proceeded cautiously to unwrap his family skeleton.

Presently from the folds of tissue paper a very aged and battered ”Sambo” emerged. Now a ”Sambo” is a black woolly-haired negro doll of the fas.h.i.+on of many years ago. This specimen was dressed in simple and airy fas.h.i.+on in a single red sh.e.l.l jacket. As to the rest, he was bare and black from head to foot. Janet called him ”that horrid object”; but, nevertheless, he was precious in the eyes of Hugh John, and therefore in hers.

Though twelve years of age, he still liked to carry on dark and covert intercourse with his ancient ”Sambo.” In public, indeed, he preached, in season and out of season, against the folly and wickedness of dolls. No one but a la.s.sie or a ”la.s.sie-boy” would do such a thing. He laughed at Priscilla for cleaning up her doll's kitchen once a week, and for organising afternoon tea-parties for her quiet harem. But secretly he would have liked very well to see Sambo sit at that bounteous board.

Nevertheless, he instructed Toady Lion every day with doctrine and reproof that it was ”only for girls” to have dolls. And knowing well that none of his common repositories were so remote and sacred as long to escape Priscilla's unsleeping eye, or the more stormy though fitful curiosity of Sir Toady Lion, Hugh John had been compelled to take his ancient nurse and ever faithful friend Janet into his confidence. So Sambo dwelt in the housekeeper's pantry and had two distinct odours. One side of him smelt of paraffin, and the other of soft soap, which, to a skilled detective, might have revealed the secret of his dark abode.

But let us not do our hero an injustice.

It was not exactly as a doll that General Smith considered Sambo. By no means so, indeed. Sometimes he was a distinguished general who came to take orders from his chief, sometimes an awkward private who needed to be drilled, and then knocked spinning across the floor for inattention to orders. For, be it remembered, it was the custom in the army of Field-Marshal-General Smith for the Commander-in-Chief to drill the recruits with his own voice, and in the by no means improbable event of their proving stupid, to knock them endwise with his own august hand.

But it was as Familiar Spirit, and in the pursuit of occult divination, that General Napoleon most frequently resorted to Sambo.

He had read all he could find in legend and history concerning that gruesomely attractive goblin, clothed all in red, which the wicked Lord Soulis kept in an oaken chest in a castle not so far from his own father's house of Windy Standard.

And Hugh John saw no reason why Sambo should not be the very one.

Spirits do not die. It is a known fact that they are fond of their former haunts. What, then, could be clearer? Sambo was evidently Lord Soulis' Red Imp risen from the dead. Was Sambo not black? The devil was black. Did Sambo not wear a red coat? Was not the demon of the oaken chest attired in flaming scarlet, when all cautiously he lifted the lid at midnight and looked wickedly out upon his master?

Yet the General was conscious that Sambo Soulis was a distinct disappointment in the part of familiar spirit. He would sit silent, with his head hanging idiotically on one side, when he was asked to reveal the deepest secrets of the future, instead of toeing the line and doing it. Nor was it recorded in the chronicles of Soulis that the original demon of the chest had had his nose ”bashed flat” by his master, as Hugh John vigorously expressed the damaged appearance of his own familiar.

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