Chapter XI: Mischief of Sorts

I came in all glowing to Mr. Sant, who greeted my good news with a sigh of such relief that one could have thought a nightmare had rolled off his chest.

“We have him,” he said gleefully. “You did very well, Dick; better than I could have told you. And now--h’m!”

He fell into a fit of abstraction, the fruits of which did not appear till the following day. Then, as I was leaving him after lessons, he detained me a moment.

“Are you going to meet him?” he asked.

“Yes, if he will,” I answered.

“Then,” he said, “tell him that if he likes, and can obtain his mother’s consent, he can come here with you for the future instead of going to school.”

I could only breathe a great round “O!” of rapture.

“Yes,” said Mr. Sant, between relish and severity; “I cannot have so promising a spirit warped by a sense of injustice. He has grit--I must put my foot down--he--yes, tell him I will undertake his education, if he is willing.”

I ran off, big with the delight of my mission; and, sure enough, met Harry loitering near the Playstow by the way I should come, though he would not let me suppose it was intentional. His freckled face flushed as he spied me, and he grinned. There was already observable towards him an attitude of increased respect on the part of some of his schoolfellows who played near.

“Mighty!” he exclaimed, as I accosted him, “Who’d ever a-thought o’ meeting _you_ here!”

“Harry!” I whispered, too eager to get him away to feel any embarrassment. “Come with me. I’ve got something to tell you.”

He came, looking both pleased and curious, but still with a certain half-defiant swagger.

“Tell away,” he said; “I’m listening;” and he began to whistle.

“Mr. Sant,” I said, “wants you to chuck up the old school and come and be his pupil with me, if you and your mother’s willing.”

He was fairly hipped. He stopped whistling, and rubbed his round nose till it shone; then suddenly halted, in a quiet place, and stared at me.

“Was it you axed him that?” he said.

“No, indeed.”

“Honour bright?”

“Of course. Why should I lie, you old stoopid?”

He tried to whistle again, and broke down. I didn’t know the depths of the little soul, nor what it had endured.

“I dunno,” he said, hesitating, and with a curious husky sound in his voice, “as--if it had been--I could a-brought myself to it. Now----”

He held out his hand quickly, and his eyes were shining.

“Ef you’ll let me be your friend, master, I’ll swear to be yours--till death do me part--and so help me God!”

We shook hands firmly on it. “Only,” I said, “I’m Dick to you, you know, just as you are Harry to me.”

“I’ll get used to it in time,” he answered; and so the compact was made, and I am sure we had none of us reason to regret it.

He was a pretty untamed colt at first, with a little of the savage lingering about him. But he was wonderfully sensitive and intelligent, and soon got, under Mr. Sant’s vigorous and manful tuition, not only to cultivate the graces of a scholar and the muscles of an athlete, but to understand those right principles of a gentleman, which are to temper natural combativeness with consideration for others. In this respect, no doubt, his misfortunes had helped to shape him; but I am not going to moralise over the result, which I dare say not one boy in a thousand, coming from such a stock, would have effected. Harry seemed to have inherited all the hardihood, with none of the brutality, of his father; and, for the rest, we became inseparable chums, who, so combined, were a match for any puling forces the village could bring against us.

Mischief? Of course, we were always in it. One of our first escapades was to make a parachute out of Uncle Jenico’s big sun umbrella, and, having beguiled Derrick to the cliff edge by the Gap, tie his wrists to the handle and push him over. We might have killed him; only we didn’t. He fell into a snow-drift, with no more hurt than to rasp his nose on the broken ice. But he smashed the umbrella, for which Mr. Sant made us pay with extra lines.

We scoured the coast together, and were for ever, forgetting my embargo, prowling about the Mitre, dislodging bits of the ruin and imperilling our precious necks. On such occasions Rampick was always our self-elected policeman, watching us and warning us away. Singly, I think, we had an awe of this great sinister hulk of a creature, though, together, we flouted him a good deal, resenting his interference. But he was a pet of Mr. Sant’s, which made any open affront from us difficult.

Harry, by virtue of his training, knew a heap about animals. I am afraid we snared, in our time, more than one of the Squire’s rabbits, fixing loops of copper wire in the runs under the hedgerows. The “kill” went to Mrs. Harrier, whose poverty I used for salve to my conscience, and whose rather weak fondness accepted the tribute with some nervous deprecation. But it was not long before our mighty reverence for Mr. Sant, both as a gentleman and a sportsman, cured us of this temporary obliquity. A poacher gives no “law” to the game he kills; a gentleman does; we gave no “law”; _ergo_ we were poachers, _ergo_ we were not gentlemen. The revelation came upon us one day when our tutor was illustrating some forgotten parable. “The man of honour,” said he, “the God’s gentleman, don’t bet on a certainty, or run his fox with a line tied to his tail, or kill a disarmed enemy, or shoot his pheasant sitting. He sports for the glory of the battle, the test between skill and skill.”

Harry and I looked at one another, and then down. After lessons he addressed me rather resentfully--

“It’s all very well for you, as was brought up to it.”

“What do you mean?” I answered; “that you ain’t going to take the hint?”

“If ever I snare another,” he said, growling, “may I be shot myself and nailed to a barn door!”

“Well, then,” I said, “for all my being brought up to it, as you call it, you’re the better gentleman, because I was still in two minds about giving it up, it was such fun.”

“You’ll have to,” he said. He was grown more loyal even than I to Mr. Sant.

“O! shall I?” I retorted. “Who’s going to make me?”

We were both bristling for a moment. Then Harry chuckled.

“Guess you won’t catch a-many without me to help you, anyhow,” he said; which was so disgustingly true that I had to laugh in my turn.

Before this moral reformation occurred, however, we made some thrilling captures. One day it was a hare, which Harry caught in the most wonderful way with his hands alone. We were crossing an open space between two copses, when he suddenly threw down his hat in the snow, bidding me at the same time to take no notice, but walk on with him as if unconcerned. There were tufts of gorse and withered bracken projecting all over the clearing. We advanced briskly a short distance, then quickly wheeled and came back, making a crooked line for the hat. As we neared it, Harry, as swift as thought, swerved aside to a patch of red dead fern and bramble, and, plunging down his hand, brought up what looked like a mat of leaves and snow. But it was a hare, which in that unerring swoop he had clutched behind the poll; and before the startled creature could shriek or struggle, he had seized its hind legs in his other hand, stretched its body, and cracked its neck upon his knee. I could not have imagined such quickness of eye and action. It could only be done, he told me, in cold weather, when the frost gets in the animals’ brains and makes them stupid. They are sort of fascinated by the hat thrown down, watching for it to move; and when the steps return, finding themselves, as it were, between two fires, they can think of nothing but to crouch close. I have seen Harry bring out rats from a rick in the same way. It was just a question of unwincing nerve; but I never had the courage to try it myself. They say that if one has the resolution to hold one’s hand unmoved to a snapping dog, the beast’s teeth will close on it without inflicting an injury. It may be true; only the first time I put it to the test will be in boxing-gloves.

A more legitimate poaching of ours--but that was later, in the spring--was on the preserves of a beautiful unfamiliar sea-bird, which came nesting upon our coasts, driven there by storms probably. We were on the Mitre one day, when we saw it fly out from the top of the Abbot’s well, and swoop down upon the shore, where, no one being by, it gorged itself on a heap of dead dog-fish. We immediately fell flat on the cliff edge to watch for its return. The broken top of the well was perhaps thirty feet below us, but the ground sloping obtusely from where we lay, prevented us from seeing far into it. Presently the bird came back and settled on the rim, so that we could mark it plainly. It was gull-shaped, but unlike any of the species we knew--white-waistcoated, yellow-beaked, and a tender ash colour on the wings--a St. Kilda’s petrel, in fact, we came to learn, which had likely been driven down from the Orkneys. It hopped into the well and disappeared.

“Mighty!” said Harry. “It’s got its nest there, I do believe.”

By-and-by the mother bird showed herself, and the fact was virtually settled. Then there was nothing for it but to climb the well and see. Harry accomplished it somehow, when the village was at dinner and the beach deserted. He got up, claw and toe (the well inclined a little outwards from the land), and availing himself of every hole and projection reached the top and sprawled over the edge, so that I could see nothing but his legs waving in the air. The birds shot out, and wheeled screaming about him. I heard him utter a cry; and then he emerged and descended with a very blank face, coming down the last yard or two with a run. His hands were barked and bloody, and the right one smeared with an orange slime.

“There was one egg,” he said, “white and a whopper; but it just broke to pieces when I clawed it.”

It was a pity we had not left it alone, for, as it turned out, the bird was a rarity on our coasts, and, laying as it does only a single egg, would not likely outstay so cruel a welcome. Which, indeed, proved to be the case; and the only reward we got for our venture was the knowledge that the well was choked with sand to near its top, a discovery which dissipated for ever some long-cherished dreams of ours as to the ineffable secrets it would reveal if once surmounted and looked down into.

During all this time, I am afraid, I neglected Uncle Jenico a good deal. He was so sweet and kind, he made no complaint, but only rejoiced that I had found a companion more suited than he to my years.

“He’s a fine boy, Richard,” he would say; “a fine promising boy. And if he reconciles you to staying here----”

“Do _you_ want to leave Dunberry, uncle?”

Then he would look at me wistfully.

“I, my dear? No, no; I am content, if you are. We are doing wonderfully well. It’s a place of really extraordinary possibilities. Do you know, Richard, I shouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be our promised land, after all. The extent of coast to be explored makes it a little tiring sometimes, but that’s a trifle. We can’t expect to find all Tom Tiddler’s ground in an acre or so, can we?”

That should have been a jog to my conscience; but youth, I fear, is selfish. A dull day’s hunt with Uncle Jenico through the shingle had come to show very blank by contrast with the exciting adventures contrived by Harry and me. So I kept my deaf side to the calls of duty, and Uncle Jenico pursued his hobby alone.

During the continuance of the frost he had, however, to divert his imagination into other channels, as the beach was impracticable; and really, I think, the distraction did him no harm. Being confined much to the house, he turned his thoughts to an old invention of his for cleaning chimneys, with which he had competed ages ago for a prize offered by a syndicate of anti-climbing-boy philanthropists. I am sure, if simplicity and economy counted for anything, Uncle Jenico ought easily to have come out first; but it was the usual story of showiness being preferred to plain utility. The contrivance was homeliness itself; just a huge compressible ball of wool, attached through its centre to the middle of a cord of indefinite length; and the only objection to it--which was, after all, an extremely idle one--was that it required two operators, one to stand on the roof, and the other on the hearth below. But, once they were in a position, the task was a pastime rather than a labour. The top-sawyer, so to speak, lowered one end of the cord, weighted, down the flue; his companion seized it, and between them they worked the ball up and down till every particle of soot was dislodged. Could anything be more obvious? And yet the committee rejected it! Well, all I can say is that Harry and I proved its efficacy beyond a doubt; though, of course, Mrs. Puddephatt, while she benefited by it, was sarcastic about an invention which had failed to recommend itself to the particularity of London.

“It _may_ be all right,” she would say; “and so may the himage of a piece of fat pork pulled up and down one’s throat with a string, which, I am told, is hemployed at sea to encourage ’eaving. At the same time, sir, I may venture to remark, that there are remedies known to Londoners to be worse than their diseases.”

Uncle Jenico, in the first instance, secretly inveigled Fancy-Maria into helping him in his experiment. The parlour fire was extinguished, and the worthy girl despatched to the roof through a trap-door, where she performed her share of the task with such inflexible tenacity that when my uncle tugged at his end of the cord, which she had dutifully lowered, he pulled her head into the chimney, and would have ended by drawing her bodily down, I believe, if her gasps and chokings reaching him below had not warned him in time. Then he slackened his hold, and commended her excess of loyalty and instructed her further; but in the end she descended from the roof an absolute negress, and for days afterwards shed soot from her boots and sneezed it from her hair in little clouds that flavoured everything.

Subsequently, Harry and I were taken into his confidence and made his operators, much to our gratification. Climbing-boys, indeed! It was become a luxury to be a sweep, thanks to Uncle Jenico; and the world called him a crank! Every one but himself might profit by his inventions. Certainly Harry and I did. We polished every flue in Mrs. Puddephatt’s house as clean as a whistle, and, until we tired of the sport, whatever other chimneys in the village the housewives would lay open to us. And it was only when we took to angling with the great sooty ball over parapets for unsuspecting faces pausing below, that Mr. Sant, giving ear to furious complaints, stepped in with his authority, and put an end to the game.

So, on us, black and joyous and inseparable, I will let down the act-drop of our little stage, to raise it on a later development of the drama I set out to record.

END OF PART I.