Chapter II

... and the sweet smell of the fields
Past, and the sunshine came along with him.

TENNYSON’S _Pelleas and Ettarre_.

One day a party of gentlemen set out from Darley Court to shoot partridges. Old Squire Darley was an open-handed man, and loved his kind well enough to be glad to fill his house with them two or three times a year; but better than all else in the world did he love his grandson Carol, and Carol was worth loving. A brighter, truer, more boyish boy than Carol Darley did not exist in all England; he was straight as a little dart, had never had a day’s illness in his life, and was blessed, in addition to an excellent temper and tearing spirits, with a frame slight as yet, but well knit and vigorous, a broad frank face, a joyous mouth, a bright colour, a shock of golden curls, and two such honest kindly blue eyes, that you might draw gladness from them like water from a well. And the old man would have loved him had he come to him with none of these claims for affection, for was he not the point in which all his hopes and cares centred, the sole survivor of his house, the child of his dead son? The child had come to the two old people like a message straight from heaven, in their heaviest grief. The first reawakening to life after their crushing loss was the discovery that the little lips had been taught to call the old place ‘home.’

Carol was thirteen on this particular morning, and to-day, in fulfilment of a promise of long standing, his grandfather had promoted him from trotting about after the shooters, as he had hitherto done, to carrying a gun of his own. Earth seemed to have nothing more to offer as he strutted along in the clear September sunshine, bravely brushing last night’s raindrops from the heavy turnip-tops with his sturdy legs; already he foresaw himself the best shot in the county, as his father had been before him. To be sure, he had not shot anything as yet, and the little gun kicked rather and hurt his shoulder, but such trifles as these were powerless to dash his joy; only he did hope he should shoot something before he had to go home.

‘That’s a fine boy of yours, Darley,’ said one of the gentlemen; ‘he steps out well. Shall you send him into the army?’

The Squire swelled with honest pride as his eye fell on the boy. ‘Well, I hardly know yet,’ he answered; ‘it seems a good soldier wasted, and yet I have always set my heart on his making a figure in the county--going into Parliament, and all that; it wouldn’t be the first time a member had come from Darley. I used to hope his father--but there, we never know what is best for us,’ added the old man hastily. Mr. Darley felt quite sorry that he could not bestow Carol on all the careers open to him; he was so eminently qualified to adorn whichever might finally be selected for honour, that it was difficult to make a wise choice. The army was a gentlemanly calling, but Mrs. Darley would not hear of that for a moment. ‘Suppose there should be a war,’ she said. Sometimes the Squire had leanings towards the Woolsack, or if Miss Kate suggested the Church, he had visions of Carol in lawn sleeves crowning sovereigns and christening royal infants; but on the whole, though with a sense that he was defrauding all the professions, he felt that the important post of Squire of Darley was the one for which his treasure was pre-eminently fitted; and there at least I think he was right. The object of all this anxious thought was not as yet gone to Eton, which was to be the next step on his road to greatness, where he would wear a round jacket, and perhaps be whipped; but if the road we look along be straight, the eye does not accurately measure the distance.

The party of shooters were walking along a turnip-field bordered on one side by a hazel coppice, when the dogs put up a covey of six birds a little in front of them. Two got away, two fell, and the remaining two flew for the coppice, on the side on which Carol was walking.

‘Now then, sir,’ cried his grandfather, ‘the birds are waiting for you; winged, by Jove! no, missed. You little goose! Bless my soul, what was that?’

‘That’ was a sort of cry which proceeded from the coppice into which most of Carol’s charge had gone, and quite unlike any note of partridge or other bird. The boy’s bright colour faded from his cheeks, and he put down his gun as though by impulse, but could not move; he stood wide-eyed, staring at the tangle of slender hazel rods from which the sound had come. Some of the party, however, knowing that these accidents were not of a fatal kind, parted the branches and disclosed to view a small figure habited in an old holland blouse, stretched among the sticks and dry leaves which strewed the ground. The child lay quite still, and on nearer approach proved to have fainted. Carol now came near, steadying himself by his grandfather’s kind hand.

‘Is he dead?’ he asked in a whisper, all the horror of having killed his fellow-boy surging over his bright young heart like a drowning wave.

‘Dead! no, no, no,’ answered the Colonel good-naturedly (he who had asked whether Carol was to be put into the army); ‘he’s been grazed, nothing more. It’s the fright that made the poor child faint; any doctor will pick out the shot in five minutes, and to-morrow he’ll be trotting about again.’

Carol said nothing, but big tears of thankfulness swelled up in his bonnie blue eyes, and the Squire felt the boy’s grasp tighten in his. He had to turn away himself (tears are so infectious), and to adopt a jovially bustling manner, as he asked the keeper if he knew whose child this was.

‘If you please, sir,’ said the man, ‘it’s the little gentleman as lives in the old manor-house along of the old lady.’

‘Dear, dear--dear, dear! take him home, some one; I will send down this evening and inquire. Anything that is wanted, if they will only let us know, we will be too happy; remember to say that; be sure you say we shall be so glad to send anything.’

Here a grateful pressure from the little hand in his caused him to look at his grandson. The boy was still white, and the old man took alarm at once. ‘Why, Carol--boy, come home, come home; it’s nothing, sir; didn’t you hear what the Colonel said? All right to-morrow,’ and he departed, dragging his unwilling grandson after him, unheeding his entreaties to be allowed to accompany those of the party who undertook, guided by the keeper, to convey our wounded hero to the experienced care of Mrs. Quitchett, for whom, now that he was come to himself, he had begun in a feeble way to ask.

That lady considered it due to herself to betray no emotion in the presence of ‘the gentlemen’ further than a violent pull at a wandering string of her cap, which caused that erection to assume a sidelong position, and imparted to her a certain wildness of appearance, strangely at variance with the studied impassiveness of her bearing.

There was something distrustful, even defiant, in her manner, thinly disguised under an assumption of extreme deference, as she ‘thanked them for the trouble they had been at, and sent her duty to Mr. Darley; but they had all that they wanted, she thanked him.’ Then, when she had bowed them out, paying but scant attention to expressions of interest and concern, she bundled off the garden-boy post-haste for the doctor, and undressed her charge and got him to bed with wonderful celerity.

When the doctor came he made light of her anxiety, assuring her the boy was hardly scratched, picked out the shot, at which Tim winced, and departed, promising to look in in the morning.

After the tumult comes peace, and in the course of the long, drowsy afternoon, when his kind nurse brought her work to sit by him, Tim narrated the events of the morning in his own fashion.

‘You know I hate the guns,’ he began, ‘and I’d gone up by the hazel coppice above Beech Farm, because I thought I should be out of the way of them, and I was sitting in there; it’s one of my houses, you know,--in the dining-room I was. We were having dinner--make-believe dinner, you know--I and the squirrel--only I had to make-believe the squirrel too, because he wouldn’t come near enough--I suppose he thought I should hurt him, but he needn’t have thought that, need he? Well, just then I heard voices in the field outside, and there were the dogs quite close. I stayed quiet, for I thought they would go by; but there came a sound of wings, and quick, one after the other, two shots--bang, bang, and I jumped up to run; but there were shouts, and then another shot, and I felt I was hit, and fell down, for I thought I was killed; and I don’t remember much more till I got back here.’

So far all was coherent enough, a rare virtue in Tim’s account of events, in which, as a rule, his fancy made such havoc of mere prose facts, that it was hard to distinguish what he only thought had happened from what had actually taken place. But after a minute or two of silence he added--

‘And, nurse, do you know, I think there was an angel there.’

‘Lor’ bless the child!’ thought Mrs. Quitchett; ‘now he’s off, I suppose.’

‘It was in the part I don’t much remember,’ Tim went on; ‘it was only the face. I didn’t notice it at the time, but I can remember it now quite plain. It had golden hair, where the sun shone on it, like the angels in my window in church, and big blue eyes. I remember it now, though I did not notice it then, which is odd, nurse, isn’t it?’

‘There, there,’ said Mrs. Quitchett hastily, ‘that’ll do; you’ve talked as much as is good for you, and more too; maybe you did see one. Now you just lie quiet and go to sleep.’ And Tim obeyed and went to sleep; and in the evening when the groom from the Court came ‘to enquire,’ a most satisfactory account of his condition was returned to the Darleys, which comforted Carol not a little.

That youth, as a gentleman who went out shooting and dined late, considered himself as formed, and spoke of the infantile brown holland Tim as ‘poor child’ with lofty compassion. Now that all was going well, he forgot his fright, and bragged quite grandly about the day’s sport to the lady next him at dinner. ‘Thirty brace and a few rabbits to six guns; not a bad bag, was it, for a half day?’

‘And how much of it did _you_ shoot?’ asked his neighbour tartly, who was too young herself to tolerate the boy’s youthful boasting; damsels of eighteen do not like a spoilt boy about the house. Carol blushed a fine pink, and then burst out laughing at his own discomfiture.

‘Don’t you know,’ said his friend the Colonel, who sat on the other side of Miss, ‘that you must never ask a man that question? You ask what the bag was, and politely take it for granted that each of us contributed his fair share. Our friend there, who, with the modesty of all truly great men, blushes at the record of his own deeds, can’t tell you in my presence how he had to cover my deficiencies; besides,’ he added, with a knowing look at poor Carol, which deepened the glow on the lad’s face, ‘bringing down a very remarkable head of large game, the like of which, I will undertake to say, is not in any bag in the county.’

Carol, you may be sure, sat over his wine with the other gentlemen, feeling that that was due to himself, though his thoughts wandered continually to some mysterious telegraphic tackle in one of the trees on the lawn, the condition of which he was burning to inspect, while he busied himself with collecting various provisions from the dishes nearest to him, to be conveyed, by and by, to a squirrel, his prisoner and dependant. The Squire always liked to have the boy near himself, and used to say, ‘We are all the better, I take it, for having to be a little careful what we say.’ The conversation did not interest the lad for the most part, being mainly political (for Mr. Darley was a keen politician); but presently his attention was attracted by hearing the Colonel talking of the event of the morning.

‘That was a strange little mortal that got hurt to-day,’ he was saying. To which the Squire, who was a little deaf, answered promptly, ‘Ah! thank you; the groom came back just before dinner. The doctor says it was nothing. Going on as well as possible, thank God; but it might have been a nasty thing.’

‘I am glad he’s all right, poor child. Whose child, by the way, did you say he was? Surely not the old cat’s in the Egyptian headgear.’

‘Ah! ’pon my life, it’s a sad story. I remember their first coming down here, nine or ten years ago it must be. They took the old manor-house,--it should have been my poor dear Harry’s, but his wife couldn’t bear the place; but there, she’s gone, poor woman, and it’s all over now. What was I saying? Ah! the little boy. Yes. Ebbesley their name was. He must have been going on for forty; looked older, a good deal older, than his wife; a very handsome woman I recollect. He had made money in India; men get on young there--bar, civil service, I don’t know what. He’s gone back there now; been there ever since, ...’ and here the old gentleman, observing Master Carol’s blue eyes very big and fixed on him, mumbled something to his friend that had Latin words in it; Carol heard _debetur pueris_, but did not know what they meant.

‘And the child you saw to-day was their son,’ the Squire went on; ‘he was born soon after they came here.’

‘And does he live there all by himself, with that old woman?’

‘I believe he must. The old woman must be his nurse; I never thought of him much till to-day. Lord knows how he’s got educated, or if he ever has. He must have had a dull childhood; perhaps I ought to have seen after him, but we were never over intimate with the parents. My wife didn’t take to Mrs. Ebbesley from the first: you see our Kate was a young girl then, and we had to be careful for her, you know. But the poor little boy must be very lonely. Will you have some more wine? No? Then we’ll have our coffee with the ladies.’

‘My dear,’ said Mrs. Darley to her husband, as he came in last of the black coats from the dining-room, ‘didn’t you say that Carol turned quite white when he heard that little boy scream?’

‘As white as your cap, ma’am.’

‘There,’ said Mrs. Darley triumphantly to her daughter, ‘and the doctor has told me so often that after a sudden shock any one ought always to take a little dose.’

Miss Kate, a kind-hearted but stern lady of two-and-thirty, who loved her nephew dearly, but was forced to act as a sort of permanent drag on her parents’ exuberant affection, protested vainly that the boy looked as well as she had ever seen him. When he went to bed his grandmother drew him mysteriously into her dressing-room, and presented him with a small round globule, and directions for use. She would have been less pleased, I fear, with his improved appearance next morning had she seen him, on reaching his apartment, pound the medicine up fine, and cautiously scatter the dust out of the window, where, we will hope, some dyspeptic sparrow was benefited by it, for no one else ever was. It is a sad fact that a great part of the contents of the good old lady’s medicine-chest was disposed of in this fashion.

At Carol’s age, however, a good night will repair most nervous shocks without artificial aids, and he was up early next morning, and down in the garden as soon as breakfast was over. The art of coaxing was an open book to Carol, and he attacked the old Scotch gardener,--with whom, as with every one else, he was a prime favourite,--in his most fascinating manner. After much judiciously administered sympathy for his friend’s pet grievances, ‘Please, I want a bunch of grapes,’ he said presently.

‘I mayna let ye have the greeps, Masterrr Carrel.’

‘Oh but, M‘Allan, they’re not for me; they are for some one who is ill. I must really have a bunch, please. I’m sure grandpapa wouldn’t mind,--and some leaves, please, to put in this basket.’

Of course he had his way in the end, and set off with his booty in the direction of the manor-house, as hard as his legs would carry him. Mrs. Quitchett saw him coming as she stood in the doorway, shading her spectacles with her hand, looking out for the doctor. Did she forecast in her mind some part of what should follow on this visit? She was certainly far from guessing the whole of it.

Tim had passed a rather restless night, full of short broken dreams, in all of which, the ‘angel’ of his adventure had played a prominent part. Now that he was up and dressed, he still felt tired, and was lying on his favourite window-seat looking out at the already changing trees. He heard the door open but did not turn his head, till a strange voice, young and clear, quite unlike the doctor’s, which he had expected, said, with a pretty hesitation, ‘I have brought you some grapes; I hope you are all right this morning; I ...’ and there stopped, for Tim had started up and was sitting staring, with his heart in his eyes. There within a few feet of him was the face he had seen in his dreams, the face of his ‘angel.’ It seemed quite natural to him to hold out his arms; God had sent his angel to comfort him. Carol was not fond of kissing, and had all a boy’s horror of being seen to perform that operation, but he could not resist the mute appeal of those outstretched arms, though he did not know what prompted it. He went forward half frank and half embarrassed, and stooping down, kissed Tim’s poor little pale face. Then Mrs. Quitchett said, ‘Here’s young Master Darley has brought you some grapes,’ and Tim bounced back to earth out of his dreamland, and was taken very shy, scarce finding words to say ‘Thank you.’