Chapter III

... for Enoch seem’d to them
Uncertain as a vision or a dream,
Faint as a figure seen in early dawn
Down at the far end of an avenue,
Going we know not where....

TENNYSON’S _Enoch Arden_.

Carol did not stay long, but promised to come soon again, which left Tim in a quiver of excitement, and thinking him the kindest, the handsomest, the most brilliant person he had ever seen. It is odd that these two boys should have lived so near one another so long without becoming acquainted; but it must be remembered that Tim’s life had been one of cloistral seclusion. If he had been dimly conscious at times that people spoke of the Squire’s grandson, he had paid as little attention to that as to other things that they said. Since Darley had been his home, Carol had been much away at school, and in his holidays, had noticed Tim, if he saw him, as he noticed any other child about the village, without attaching any particular identity to him, for it is fair to acknowledge that there was nothing remarkable in Tim’s appearance shrinking into the hedge with his burden of wildflowers, as the other boy flashed by on his pony. But now that the child was weak and ill, and, above all, reduced to that condition by an act of his, all Carol’s generous young soul was stirred in his behalf; and the bunch of grapes was the first result of this blind instinct of obligation to protect and cherish the innocent victim of his bow and spear. You may fancy if the old people at the Court rejoiced over this touching and beautiful action of their darling when they came to hear of it.

‘What a dear good boy that is, upon my soul!’ said the Squire, squeezing his old wife’s hand; and she, with a tear in her eye, answered, ‘We’ve great cause to be thankful, Hugh! The Lord has taken away, but He’s given again; it’s like having Harry back.’ And they shook their kind old heads, recalling other instances of singular goodness in Carol, and traits of likeness to his father. Harry had given his sixpence to the blind beggar, and Carol had saved up his pennies to buy a crutch for the lame boy at the shoemaker’s. Once the Squire had met his grandson assisting a certain crone, of great age and most forbidding aspect, to carry a load of faggots she had been collecting in the Court woods for her wretched little fire. This goody was, I regret to say, a most abandoned old woman, and a sworn enemy of Mrs. Darley; refusing point-blank to attend church, and strongly suspected of foxlike visits to the good lady’s hen-roost. Moreover, the Squire was very particular about the sanctity of the timber in his woods. But on this occasion he not only pardoned the trespasser, but gave her permission to boil her skinny pot over his sticks for the future; until some fresh outrage on her part put her once more without the pale of society. So the objects of Carol’s kindness shone with a borrowed light, and were dear to his relatives as so many proofs of the extraordinary amiability of the lad’s disposition.

Tim became an object of great interest to the Darleys: Miss Kate came to see him, and Mrs. Darley, bringing jelly and other good things, such as soft fussy old ladies love to take to sick folk. And the Squire came himself, saying that ‘Upon his word, Tim was a very nice little fellow, and when he got better must come to see them at the Court,’ a prospect that alarmed him not a little. And they had plenty of chances of visiting the child, for Tim was ill longer than could have been expected. One day, when the doctor had seen him, he stopped as he left the house and said to Mrs. Quitchett, ‘You must take care of this little man, nurse; he is by temperament an excitable child. So slight a scratch as he got would have had no effect on most boys, but the shock has evidently told on him; he is a little feverish and must be kept quiet.’

Then he paused a little, pulling at the clematis round the porch, as though weighing the desirability of saying more, decided to do so, and added with just a shade more impressiveness in his voice--

‘Things will affect him more than other people all his life; what would be nothing to an ordinary person might kill him.’

Mrs. Quitchett sat down on a seat near, rather hastily, and looked hard out, up the path.

‘You don’t mean to say he’s in any danger?’ she said.

‘Danger, dear, dear, no! Don’t run away with any notion of that sort. The child has a skin scratch that is half healed already; that’s all. I only mean that, considering how very slightly he’s hurt, it’s odd he isn’t running about again as well as ever. The boy must have an odd constitution.’

‘He was never remarkably strong,’ Mrs. Quitchett answered, with a touch of irony; ‘the wonder was that we reared him. Such a baby as he was! you didn’t know if you had him in your arms or not. But she was a good nurser, though I verily believe she’d have had a wet-nurse if I hadn’t shamed her out of it. She said the babe was a drag on her; she didn’t let him stay so long, poor lamb. He owes what health he’s got to you and me, sir, under Providence, though I say it that should not.’ Mrs. Quitchett was not a great talker as a rule, certainly no gossip, and probably to no one but so old a friend as the doctor would she have touched on the subject of Mrs. Ebbesley’s shortcomings.

‘Well, nurse,’ said the doctor cheerfully, ‘still under Providence, we’ll have him healthier yet before we’ve done with him; depend on it, he’ll bury many stronger people.’

But Mrs. Quitchett laid by the doctor’s words in her heart. ‘What would be nothing to an ordinary person might kill him.’ The sentence made a place for itself deep in her memory, to be recalled only too well years after it was spoken. She had a great regard for the doctor,--he was one of the few people whose opinion she respected,--and she whispered to herself as she got Tim’s tea ready, ‘He tried to smooth it away, but it’s better to face things. He means what he says, for he’s a man of sense, which is more than most.’ Some relic of her anxiety must have lingered in her face when she carried in the little tray, for Tim said, ‘Why, nurse, how grave you look; what’s doctor been telling you?’ but broke off to add, ‘Please, I want you to let _him_ stay to tea with me; may he?’ ‘Him’ was Carol, who was there again, to inquire after Tim’s progress, and whom that youth was still very shy of mentioning by name. Carol came nearly every day now, and his visits did more for Tim than either the doctor’s medicine or Mrs. Darley’s jelly.

‘Master Darley can have his tea with you and welcome, if he thinks his grandmamma would not object,’ said Mrs. Quitchett, glad, as on a former occasion, to escape the first of Tim’s questions by answering the second,--glad too of any chance to make the boy look so happy.

Carol had a fine appetite and ate more than his host, in spite of the dinner that would follow, for him, by and by.

‘Do you never eat more than that?’ he asked in wondering pity.

‘Oh yes, sometimes I eat a great deal, when I’ve been running about,’ answered Tim.

‘He makes a hearty tea mostly,’ added Mrs. Quitchett, ‘though he never was much of a boy for his dinner.’ Tim sighed; he began to fear he was not ‘much of a boy’ for anything. He had never thought about himself before, but Carol seemed to present a standard by which to measure creation, and he felt for his part that he fell far short of the desired point. Carol’s next question was not calculated to reassure him; it was one boys always ask, and grown-up men too sometimes, and is of all others the most difficult to answer--

‘What do you do with yourself all day?’

Now Tim’s days were always well filled, but on a sudden it seemed to him that none of his pursuits were worthy of mention, so he said the best thing he could under the circumstances--

‘I don’t know; I never thought; sometimes I do one thing, sometimes another.’

‘Do you read much? Ain’t you dull all by yourself?’

‘Oh no, I’m never dull. I like reading; not geography and that sort of thing; I hate that, but fairy-tales. Do you read the _Arabian Nights_?’

‘Yes, I’ve read some. I like Aladdin: what a clever chap he was. What else do you do?’

‘Oh! I get flowers, and I find out new walks, and make-believe seeking adventures, and I tell stories to Bess,’ says Tim, grown bolder.

‘What, the dog? What a rum idea!’

Tim felt he had said something foolish. ‘Do you care for flowers?’ he said hastily.

‘Yes, I’m very fond of them; Aunt Kate is teaching me botany.’

‘I don’t know what that is,’ says downright Tim, ‘but I’m glad you like flowers. I was afraid you wouldn’t care for them; that you’d think it was childish or something.’

‘Not I. I bet I could beat you at the names of wildflowers; but I like birds better. Our keeper knows birds by their flight, and I do some of ’em now. I’ve got a cabinet of eggs. I’ll show you when you come and see me.’ Tim was grateful and interested.

‘Oh! and I tell you what--you shall help me with my telegraph; I’ve got a telegraph from one tree to another, made with string and a basket; but it’s no fun sending messages to oneself, and Aunt Kate’s no good at climbing trees.’

‘I’m afraid I shouldn’t be much.’

‘Oh yes you will; I’ll show you how, and you shall have the easy tree. I’m afraid it’s too far, or we’d have a telegraph from our house to this, but I should never get enough string.’ And so the talk would go on, with, ‘Oh! do you do that? so do I,’ and ‘Oh! that’s just what I always think,’--delightful discoveries of unexpected sympathies, in spite of great unlikeness in most things, and innocent remarks on Tim’s part, which made Carol shout with laughter, and then stop and explain very kindly and carefully why he was amused, as he saw the pained look spring into his friend’s face at his mirth.

‘Do you play games?’ he asked once.

‘I don’t care much for games,’ Tim answered innocently, ‘but I play draughts sometimes of an evening with Mrs. Quitchett.’

‘Oh! I didn’t mean _that_ sort of game,’ said Carol; ‘I meant cricket and that sort of thing; the kind of games we play at school.’

‘No,’ Tim owned reluctantly; ‘you see I’ve had no one to play with, but I should like to learn, if you’ll teach me.’

‘Oh yes, I’ll teach you; of course you couldn’t have learnt with no one to play with. Mrs. Quitchett doesn’t look as if she’d be much good at bowling,’ and then both boys laughed.

‘By the way,’ Carol asked, after a little, ‘how comes it that you and she live here all alone? She’s no relation of yours, is she?’

‘No, she’s my nurse,--was, you know, of course I mean.’ Tim was beginning to be dimly conscious that as Carol had no nurse, it was not the right thing. ‘But,’ he added with compunction at disowning dear Mrs. Quitchett, ‘I love her as if she was my mother.’

‘And is your mother dead?’

‘I don’t know; I think I never had a mother.’

‘Oh, you must have had one. I suppose she’s dead; mine is--my father too’; and a sweet gravity stole over the bright young face.

‘Poor dear,’ said Tim, forgetting in his pity for his friend that he was himself far more alone in the world. He accepted Carol’s explanation of the utter absence of his mother from his life, supposing him right on all subjects. ‘She must have died when you were a baby, before you could remember; they do sometimes,’ his instructor had said; he knew so much more than Tim about everything. That youth believed in him firmly. ‘Carol says so,’ became a formula with which he would confront Mrs. Quitchett herself, who smiled superior, but left him his comfortable reliance.

The wisdom of Solomon was nothing in Tim’s eyes to that of this radiant being, who was not only a proficient in such unknown arts as cricket, but actually beat him on his own ground of wildflowers and fairy-tales, having acquired a smattering of Greek mythology endlessly astonishing and delightful. Had any one dared to deny that Carol was the born prince of all mankind, I don’t know what Tim would have said to him. He counted the hours between his friend’s visits, brightened visibly when he came into the room, seemed to lose all heart when he left it, and watched his every motion with looks of jealous love. Carol, on his side, grew to have quite a protecting kindness for the pale child, perhaps not sorry to show off a little to such an appreciative audience; finding Tim too not an unpleasant novelty and variation from the companionlessness of the Court.

It was getting on towards October now, but Tim had entirely forgotten the approaching advent of his father, so completely did Carol engross all his thoughts, until one day Carol himself was the means of recalling it to him.

‘Where’s your father?’ he asked, pausing in an attempt to reproduce the features of Bess on a small lump of wax used by Mrs. Quitchett for waxing her thread, with the aid of that lady’s best scissors.

‘He’s in India,’ answered Tim, mechanically giving the reply always given to him; and then remembering suddenly his father’s letter, ‘At least,’ he added, ‘I believe he’s coming home soon. I must ask Mrs. Quitchett when he’s coming.’

‘What! don’t you know? Why didn’t you tell me? Shan’t you be glad to see him?’ persists inquisitive Carol.

‘I don’t think I care much: don’t believe I ever did see him.’

‘And how do you know he’s coming?’

‘I forget: dreamed it, I fancy; or else Mrs. Quitchett had it in a letter.’

‘That’s more likely, _I_ should think,’ said Carol, laughing; and so the matter dropped, Mrs. Quitchett not being at hand for reference as to date. And that was the only occasion on which Mr. Ebbesley’s name was mentioned between the two boys. The circles widened round it in Tim’s memory like those round a pebble in a stream till they merged by degrees into the even flow of his new friendship.

Mrs. Quitchett, on the contrary, who had not made a new friend these twenty years, had wondered several times that she received no second letter from her employer; wondered too, not without misgiving, what he would think of the Court intimacy, but felt it was none of her doing, so put it aside among the things to be accepted, not curable, even if harmful, by any amount of speculation.

One day--the 16th of September I think it was--a heavy gray day, dull and cheerless, when out of doors felt like a stuffy room, and Mrs. Quitchett said there was thunder in the air, Tim was restless and uncomfortable. In vain his nurse had tried to interest him in his accustomed pursuits. Pari-banou could do nothing for him; he had grown tired of drawing princes and princesses with strange sausage-shaped bodies and long elbowless arms that projected before and behind; and still Carol did not come. The days were getting shorter now, and there was not much of the afternoon left.

Ah! there he comes at last. The gate swings creaking, and Carol, hot and breathless, stirs the air in the dull house with his lusty cry of ‘Tim, where are you?’ ‘Yes, he knows he is late; he’s very sorry, but he had much to do; has been, among other things, to get some blackberries, and has brought them to Tim,’--not quite all, perhaps, to judge from certain stains on the fair face, unless he picked them with his teeth, but still a goodly show of squashy purple berries in a pocket-handkerchief;--Tim must have them for his tea; yes, that will be delightful, and Carol will stop and help eat them.

‘I’ve been out in the garden to-day,’ Tim says; ‘the Virginia creeper is quite red in some places, and there is hardly a rose left.’

‘The time’s getting on, and that reminds me I had something to ask you: will you take care of my squirrel for me when I go away? He doesn’t want much looking after,--only nuts, and to have the hay changed for his bed once in three days. Hulloa! don’t you feel well? shall I call Mrs. Quitchett?’

‘No, no, I’m all right; but what did you say? are you going away?’

‘Oh, is that all? I thought you knew it; I must have told you; every one else knows it: I’m going to Eton next week; didn’t I tell you?’

‘No--you--didn’t--tell--me,’ poor Tim answered very slowly. ‘You talked about school, but--but--I don’t know--I didn’t think; I thought you’d always come and see me.’

‘Oh! never mind, you know,’ Carol said, rather disturbed at this unexpected effect of his announcement; ‘you’ll get on all right; and then I shall write, and the holidays ’ll come in no time, and all that.’

The consolation was vague, but effectual. After all, the separation would not be eternal, and there would be the squirrel. Would Tim take care of him? wouldn’t he? How that squirrel got over-fed when he came to live at the manor-house!

Once started on the subject of going to Eton, Carol had much to tell, and Tim was a wonderful listener. This was Carol’s first promotion from the ranks of a private school, second only in importance to that of having a gun. The topic lasted through tea, and was still engrossing them when they were startled by the sound of wheels, which stopped at the gate.

‘What can it be?’ said Tim; ‘the doctor’s not coming to-day.’ Tim was lying on the sofa, and Carol sitting beside him. They heard some unwonted commotion in the hall, and Mrs. Quitchett’s voice in accents of keenest surprise.

Carol jumped up and was for going to see what had happened; but he had not long to wait, for the next moment the door opened, and he found himself struggling fiercely in the arms of a tall yellow-faced gentleman, with grizzled hair and whiskers, who was straining him passionately to his heart.

‘Let me go; what are you doing?’ he called out, kicking frantically; and Tim, supposing some damage was intended to his idol, set up a feeble wail. It was at this moment that Mrs. Quitchett entered, and called out--

‘Law, Mr. Ebbesley, sir, that’s young Master Darley from the Court you’ve got hold of.’ Then pointing to the sofa, where Tim lay crying, whiter and thinner even than usual, she added, ‘That one’s your son.’