Chapter LV. The wheel rests for a time
That part of the human race which is fond of dolls, may now imagine the pleasure of the cook in going to the town in the omnibus to buy everything for a live doll so big as Clare! In a very few days she had him dressed to her heart’s content, and the satisfaction of her mistress, who would not have him in livery, but in a plain suit of dark blue cloth: for she loved blue, all her men-people being, or having been in the navy. Thus dressed, he looked as much of a gentleman as before: his look of refinement had owed nothing to the contrast of his rags. Better clothes make not a few seem commoner.
When Mrs. Mereweather came back from the town the first day, she found that the ragged boy had got her kitchen and scullery as nice and clean, and everything as ready to her hand, as if she had got her work done before she went, which the omnibus would not permit. This rejoiced her much; but being a woman of experience, she continued a little anxious lest his sweet ways should go after his rags, lest his new garments should breed bumptiousness and bad manners. For such a change is no unfrequent result of prosperity. But such had been Mr. Porson’s teaching and example, such Mrs. Person’s management, and such the responsiveness of the boy’s disposition, that the thought never came to him whether this or that was a thing fit for him to do: if the thing was a right thing, and had to be done, why should not he do it as well as another! To earn his own and Abdiel’s bread, he would do anything honest, setting up his back at nothing. But when about a thing, he forgot even his obligation to do it, in the glad endeavour to do it well.
As the days went on, Mrs. Mereweather was not once disappointed in him. He did everything with such a will that both she and the housemaid were always ready to spare and help him. Very soon they began to grow tender over him; and on pretence of his being the earlier drest to open the door, did certain things themselves which he had been quite content to do, but which they did not like seeing him do. Many—I am afraid most boys would have presumed on their generosity, but Clare was nowise injured by it.
Nothing could be kinder than the way his mistress treated him. Having lent him some books, and at once perceived that he was careful of them, she let him have the run of her library when his day’s work was over. For he not only read but respected books. Nothing shows vulgarity more than the way in which some people treat books. No gentleman would write his remarks on the margins of another person’s book; no lady would brush her hair as she read one of her own.
From hungry days and cold nights, Clare and Abdiel found themselves in clover—the phrase surely of some lover of cows!—and they were more than content. Clare had longed so much for work, and had for so many a weary day sought it in vain, that he valued it now just because it was work. And he seemed to know instinctively that a man ranks, not according to the thing he does, but according to the way he does it. In life it is far higher to do an inferior thing well than to do a superior thing passably.
Clare made good use of his privileges, and read much, educating himself none the worse that he did it unconsciously. He read whatever came in his way. He read really—not as most people read, leaving the sentences behind them like so many unbroken nuts, the kernel of whose meaning they have not seen. He learned more than most boys at school, more even than most young men at college; for it is not what one knows, but what one uses, that is the true measure of learning. Whatever he read, he read from the point of practice. In history or romance he saw—not merely what a man ought to be or do, but what he himself must, at that moment, be or do. There is a very common sort of man calling himself practical, but neglecting to practise the most important things, who would laugh at the idea of Clare being practical, seeing he did not trouble his head about money, or “getting on in the world”—what servants call “bettering themselves;” but such a practical man will find he has been but a practical fool. Clare took heed to do what was right, and grow a better man. Such a life is the only really practical one.
People wondered how Miss Tempest had managed to get hold of such a nice-looking page, and the good lady was flattered by their wonder. But she knew the world too well to be sure of him yet. She knew that it is difficult, in the human tree, to distinguish between blossom and fruit. Deeds of lovely impulse are the blossom; unvarying, determined Tightness is the fruit.
Chapter LVI. Strategy
Miss Tempest was the last of an old family, with scarce a relation, and no near one, in the world. Hence the pieces of personal property that had continued in the possession of various branches of the family after land and money, through fault or misfortune, were gone, had mostly drifted into the small pool of Miss Tempest’s life now slowly sinking in the sands of time, there to gleam and sparkle out their tale of its old splendour. She did not think often of their money-worth: had she done so, she would have kept them at her banker’s; but she valued them greatly both for their beauty and their associations, constantly using as many of them as she could. More than one of her friends had repeatedly tried to persuade her that it was not prudent to have so much plate and so many jewels in the house, for the fact was sure to be known where it was least desirable it should: she always said she would think about it. At times she would for a moment contemplate sending her valuables to the bank; but her next thought—by no means an unwise one—would always be, “Of what use will they be at the bank? I might as well not have them at all! Better sell them and do some good with the money!—No; I must have them about me!”
There are predatory persons in every large town, who either know or are learning to know the houses in it worth the risk of robbing. When it falls to the lot of this or that house to be attempted, one of the gang will make the acquaintance of some servant in it, with the object of discovering beforehand where its treasure lies, and so reducing the time to be spent in it, and the risk of frustration or capture. Often they seduce one of the household to let them in, or hand out the things they want. Any such gang, however, must soon have become convinced that at Miss Tempest’s corruption was impossible, and that they could avail themselves solely of their own internal resources.
It was well now for Miss Tempest that she was so faithful herself as to encourage faithfulness in others: gladly would she have had Abdiel sleep in her room, but she would not take the pleasure of his company from his old master and companion in suffering. The dog therefore slept on Clare’s bed, just as he did when the bed was as hard to define as to lie upon, only now he had to take the part neither of blanket nor hot bottle.
One night, about half-past twelve, watchful even in slumber, he sprang up in his lair at his master’s feet, listened a moment, gave a low growl, again listened, and gave another growl. Clare woke, and found his bed trembling with the tremor of his little four-footed guardian. Telling him to keep quiet, he rose on his elbow, and in his turn listened, but could hear nothing. He thought then he would light his candle and go down, but concluded it wiser to descend without a light, and listen under cloak of the darkness. If he could but save Miss Tempest from a fright! He crept out of bed, and went first to the window—a small one in the narrowing of the gable-wall of his attic room: the night was warm, and, loving the night air, he had it open. Hearkening there for a moment, he thought he heard a slight movement below. Very softly he put out his head, and looked down. There was no moon, but in the momentary flash of a lantern he caught sight of a small pair of legs disappearing inside the scullery window, which was almost under his own. Swift and noiseless he hurried down, and reached the scullery door just in time for a little fellow who came stealing out of it, to run against him.
Now Clare had heard the housemaid read enough from the newspapers to guess, the moment he looked from the garret window, that the legs he saw were those of a boy sent in to open a door or window, and when the boy, feeling his way in the dark, came against him, he gripped him by the throat with the squeeze that used to silence Tommy. The prowler knew the squeeze. The moment Clare relaxed it, in a piping whisper came the words,
“Clare! Clare! they said they’d kill me if I didn’t!”
“Didn’t what?”
“Open the door to them.”
“If you utter one whimper, I’ll throttle you,” said Clare.
He tightened his grasp for an instant, and Tommy, who had not forgotten that what Clare said, he did, immediately gave in, and was led away. Clare took him in his arms and carried him to his room, tied him hand and foot, and left him on the floor, fast to the bedstead. Then he crept swiftly to the servants’ room, and with some difficulty waking them, told them what he had done, and asked them to help him.
Both women of sense and courage, they undertook at once to do their part. But when he proposed that they should open a window, as if it were done by Tommy, and so enticing the burglars to enter, secure the first of them, they, naturally enough, and wisely too, declined to encounter the risk.
The burglars, perplexed by the lack of any sign from Tommy yet the utter quiet of the house, concluded probably that he had fallen somewhere, and was lying either insensible, or unable to move and afraid to cry out—in which case they would be at the mercy of what he might say when he was found.
Those within could hear as little noise without. They went from door to window, wherever an attempt might be made, but all was still. Then it occurred to Clare that he had left the scullery window unwatched. He hastened to it—and was but just in time: two long thin legs were sticking through, and showed by their movements that considerable effort was being made by the body that belonged to them, to enter after them. Legs first was the wrong way, but the youth feared the unknown fate of Tommy, and being pig-headed, would go that way or not at all.
A boy in courage equal to Clare, but of less coolness, would at once have made war on the intrusive legs; but Clare bethought him that, so long as that body filled the window, no other body could pass that way; so it would be well to keep it there, a cork to the house, making it like the nest of a trap-door-spider. He begged the women, therefore, who had followed him, to lay hold each of an ankle, and stick to it like a clamp, while he ran to get some string.
The women, entering heartily into the business, held on bravely. The owner of the legs made vigorous efforts to release them, more anxious a good deal to get out than he had been to get in, but he was not very strong, and had no scope. His accomplices laid hold of him and pulled; then, with good mother-wit, the women pulled away from each other, and so made of his legs a wedge.
Clare came back with a piece of clothes-line, one end of which he slipped with a running knot round one ankle, and the other in like fashion round the other. Then he cut the line in halves, and drawing them over two hooks in the ceiling, some distance apart, so that the legs continued widespread like a V upside down, hauled the feet up as high as he could, and fastened the ends of the lines. Hold lines and hooks, it was now impossible to draw the fellow out.
Leaving the women to watch, and telling them to keep a hand on each of the lines because the scullery was pitch-dark, he went next to his room and looked again from the window. He feared they might be trying to get in at some other place, for they would not readily abandon their accomplices, and doubtless knew what a small household it was! He would see first, therefore, what was doing outside the scullery, and then make a round of doors and windows!
Right under him when he looked out, stood a short, burly figure; another man was taking intermittent hauls at the arms of their leg-tied companion, regardless of his stifled cries of pain when he did so. Clare went and fetched his water-jug, which was half full, and leaning out once more, with the jug upright in his two hands, moved it this way and that until he had it, as nearly as he could determine, just over the man beneath him, and then dropped it. The jug fell plumb, and might have killed the man but that he bent his head at the moment, and received it between his shoulders. It knocked the breath out of him, and he lay motionless. The other man fled. The window-stopper, hearing the crash of the jug, wrenched and kicked and struggled, but in vain. There he had to wait the sunrise, for not a moment sooner would the cook open the door.
When they went out at last, the stout man too was gone. He had risen and staggered into the shrubbery, and there fallen, but had risen once more and got away.
Their captive pretended to be all but dead, thinking to move their pity and be set free. But Clare went to the next house and got the man-servant there to go for the police, begging him to make haste: he knew that his tender-hearted mistress, if she came down before the police arrived, would certainly let the fellow go, and Tommy with him; and he was determined the law should have its way if he could compass it What hope was there for the wretched Tommy if he was allowed to escape! And what right had they to let such people loose on their neighbours! It was selfishness to indulge one’s own pity to the danger of others! He would be his brother’s keeper by holding on to his brother’s enemy!
Going at last to his room, he found Tommy asleep. The boy was better dressed, but no cleaner than when first he knew him. Clare proceeded to wash and dress. Tommy woke, and lay staring, but did not utter a sound.
“Have your sleep out,” said Clare. “The police won’t be here, I daresay, for an hour yet.”
“I believe you!” returned Tommy, as impudent as ever. His contemplation of Clare had revived his old contempt for him. “I mean to go. I ‘ain’t done nothing.”
“Go, then,” said Clare, and took no more heed of him.
“If it’s manners you want, Clare,” resumed Tommy, “please let me go!”
Clare turned and looked at him. The evil expression was hardened on his countenance. He gave him no answer.
“You ain’t never agoin’ to turn agin an old pal, aire you?” said Tommy.
“I ain’t a pal of yours, Tommy, or of any other thief’s!” answered Clare.
“I’ll take my oath on it to the beak!”
“You’ll soon have the chance; I’ve sent for the police.” Tommy changed his tone.
“Please, Clare, let me go,” he whined.
“I will not. I did what I could for you before, and I’ll do what I can for you now. You must go with the police.”
Tommy began to blubber, or pretend—Clare could not tell which.
“This beastly string’s a cuttin’ into me!” he sobbed.
Clare examined it, and found it easy enough.
“I won’t undo one knot,” he answered, “until there’s a policeman in the room. If you make a noise, I will stuff your mouth.”
His dread was that his mistress might hear, and spoil all. “It’s her house,” he said to himself, “but they’re my captives!”
Tommy lay still, and the police came.
When they untied and drew out the cork of the scullery window, Clare thought he had seen him before, but could not remember where. One of the policemen, however, the moment his eyes fell on his face, cried out joyfully,
“Ah, ha, my beauty! I’ve been a lookin’ for you!”
“Never set eyes on ye afore,” growled the fellow.
“Don’t ye say now ye ain’t a dear friend o’ mine,” insisted the policeman, “when I carry yer pictur’ in my bosom!”
He drew out a pocket-book, and from it a photograph, at which he gazed with satisfaction, comparing it with the face before him. In another moment Clare recognized the lad sent by Maidstone to exchange band-boxes with him.
“Her majesty the queen wants you for that robbery, you know!” said the policeman.
A boy who loved romance and generosity more than truth and righteousness, would now have regretted the chance he had lost of doing a fine action, and sought yet to set the rascal free. There are men who cheat and make presents; there are men who are saints abroad and churls at home, as Bunyan says; there are men who screw down the wages of their clerks and leave vast sums to the poor; men who build churches with the proceeds of drunkenness; men who promote bubble companies and have prayers in their families morning and evening; men, in a word, who can be very generous with what is not their own; for nothing ill-gotten is a man’s own any more than the money in a thief’s pocket: Clare was not of the contemptible order of the falsely generous.
Profiting, doubtless, by Maidstone’s own example, the fellow had, as Clare now learned, run away from his master, carrying with him the contents of the till: whether he deserved punishment more than his master, may be left undiscussed.
When first Miss Tempest’s friends heard of the attempt to break into her house, they said—what could she expect if she took tramps into her service! They were consider-ably astonished, however, when they read in the newspaper the terms in which the magistrate had spoken of the admirable courage and contrivance of Miss Tempest’s page, and the resolution with which the women of her household had seconded him. If every third house were as well defended, he said, the crime of burglary would disappear.
After the trial, Clare begged and was granted an interview with the magistrate. He told him what he knew about Tommy, and entreated he might be sent to some reformatory, to be kept from bad company until he was able to distinguish between right and wrong, which he thought he hardly could at present The magistrate promised it should be done, and with kind words dismissed him.
Things returned to their old way at Miss Tempest’s. Her friends never doubted she would now at last commit her plate to her banker’s strong room, but they found themselves mistaken: she was convinced that, with such servants and Abdiel, it was safe where it was.
The leader of the gang, injured by Clare’s water-jug, was soon after captured, and the gang was broken up.
Chapter LVII. Ann Shotover
So void of self-assertion was Clare, so prompt at the call of whoever needed him, so quiet yet so quick, so silent in his sympathetic ministrations, so studious and so capable, that, after two years, Miss Tempest began to feel she ought to do what she could to “advance his prospects,” even at the loss to herself of his services.
He never came to regard Miss Tempest as he did the other women who had saved him: he never thought of her as his fourth mother. Truly good and kind she was, but she had a certain manner which prevented him from feeling entirely comfortable with her. It did not escape him, however, that Abdiel was thoroughly at his ease in her company; and he believed therefore that the dog knew her better, or at least was more just to her, than he.
The fact was Miss Tempest kept down all her feelings, with a vague sense that to show them would be to waste her substance: it was the one shape that the yet lingering selfishness of a very unselfish person took. Thus she kept him at a distance, and he stayed at a distance, she on her part wondering that he did not open out to her more, but neither doubting that all was right between them. Nothing, indeed, was wrong—only they might have come a little nearer. Perhaps, also, Miss Tempest was a little too conscious of being his patroness, his earthly saviour.
It was natural that, after the defeated robbery, Clare should become a little known to the friends of the mistress he had so well served; when, therefore, Miss Tempest spoke to her banker concerning the ability of her page, mentioning that, in his spare time, he had been reading hard, as well as attending an evening-school for mathematics, where he gained much approbation from his master, she spoke of one already known by him to one accustomed to regard character.
The banker listened with a solemn listening from which she could not tell what he was thinking. No one ever could tell what Mr. Shotover was thinking: his face was not half a face; it was more a mask than a face. High in the world’s regard, rich, and of unquestioned integrity, he was believed to have gathered a large fortune; but he kept his affairs to himself. That he liked his own way so much as never to yield it, I give up to the admiration of such as himself: often kind—when the required mode of the kindness pleased him, a constant church-goer and giver of money, always saying less the more he made up his mind, he had generally no trouble in getting it.
Priding himself on his moral discrimination, he had, now and then, as suited his need, taken from a lower position a young man he thought would serve his purpose, and modelled him to it. He had had his eye on Clare ever since reading the magistrate’s eulogy of his contrivance and courage; but when Miss Tempest spoke, he had not made up his mind about him, for something in the boy repelled him. He had scarcely troubled himself to ask what it was, nor do I believe he could have discovered, for the root of the repulsion lay in himself.
Moved in part, however, by the representations of Miss Tempest, in part also, I think, by a desire to discover that the boy was a hypocrite, Mr. Shotover consented to give him a trial, whereupon Miss Tempest made haste to disclose to her protegé the grand thing she had done for him.
She was disappointed at the coolness and lack of interest with which Clare heard her great news. She could not but be gratified that he did not want to leave her, but she was annoyed that he seemed unaware of any advantage to be gained in doing so—high as the social ascent from servitude to clerkship would by most be considered. But Clare’s horizon was not that of the world. He had no inclination to more of figures and less of persons. Miss Tempest, however, insisting that she knew what was best for him, and what it was therefore his duty to do, he listened in respectful silence to all she had to say. But what she counted her most powerful argument—that he owed it to himself to rise in the world—did not even touch him, did not move the slightest response in a mind nobly devoid of ambition. Her argument was in truth nonsense; for a man owes himself nothing, owes God everything, and owes his neighbour whatever his own conscience goes on to require of him for his neighbour. Feeling at the same time, however, that she had a huge claim on his compliance with her wishes, Clare consented to leave her kitchen for her friend’s bank, where he had of course to take the lowest position, one counted by the rest of the clerks, especially the one just out of it, menial, requiring him to be in the bank earlier by half an hour than the others, to be the last to go away at night, and to sleep in the house—where a not uncomfortable room in the attic story was appointed him.
Mr. Shotover himself lived above the bank—with his family, consisting of his wife and two daughters. Mrs. Shotover suffered from a terrible disease—that of thinking herself ill when nothing was the matter with her except her paramount interest in herself—the source of at least half the incurable disease among idle people. The elder daughter was a high-spirited girl about twenty, with a frank, friendly manner, indicating what God meant her to be, not what she was, or had yet chosen to be. She was not really frank, and seemed far more friendly than she was, being more selfish than she knew, and far more selfish than she seemed: she was merry, and that goes a great way in seeming. Her mother spent no regard upon her; her heart was too full of herself to have in it room for a grown-up daughter as well, with interests of her own. The younger was a child about six, of whom the mother took not so much care by half as a tigress of her cub.
One morning, a little before eight o’clock, as Clare was coming down from his room to open the windows of the bank, he just saved himself from tumbling over something on the attic stair, which was dark, and at that point took rather a sharp turn. The something was a child, who gave a low cry, and started up to run away: there was not light enough for either to discern easily what the other was like. But Clare, to whom childhood was the strongest attraction he yet knew, bent down his face from where he stood on the step above her, and its moonlight glow of love and faith shone clear in the eyes of the little girl. The moment she saw his smile, she knew the soul that was the light of the smile, and her doll dropped from her hands as she raised them to lay her arms gently about his neck.
“Oh!” she said, “you’re come!”
He saw now, in the dusk, a pale, ordinary little face, with rather large gray eyes, a rather characterless, tiny, up-turned nose, and a rather pretty mouth.
“Yes, little one. Were you expecting me?” he returned, with his arms about her.
“Yes,” she answered, in the tone of one stating what the other must know.
“How was it I frightened you, then?”
“Only at first I thought you was an ogre! That was before I saw you. Then I knew!”
“Who told you I was coming?”
“Nobody. Nobody knew you was coming but me. I’ve known it—oh, for such a time!—ever since I was born, I think!”
She turned her head a little and looked down where the doll lay a step or two below.
“You can go now, dolly,” she said. “I don’t want you any more.” Here she paused a while, as if listening to a reply, then went on: “I am much obliged to you, dolly; but what am I to do with you? You won’t never speak! It has made me quite sad many a time, you know very well! But you can’t help it! So go away, please, and be nobody, for you never would be anybody! I did my best to get you to be somebody, but you wouldn’t! Thank you all the same! I will take you and put you where you can be as dull as you please, and nobody will mind.”—Here she left Clare, went down, and lifted her plaything.—“Dolly, dolly,” she resumed, “he’s come! I knew he would! And you don’t know it because you’re nobody!”
Without looking back, or a word of adieu to Clare, she went slowly down the steps, one by one, with the doll in her arms, manifesting for it neither contempt nor tenderness. Many a child would have carried the discrowned favourite by one leg; she carried her in both hands.
Clare waited a while on the narrow, closed-in, wooden stair, not a little wondering, and full of thought. His wonder, however, had no puzzlement in it. The child’s behaviour involved no difficulty. The two existences came together, and each understood the other in virtue of its essential nature. In after years Clare could put the thing into such words; he sought none at the time. The child was lonely. She had done her best with her doll, but it had failed her. It was not companionable. The moment she looked in Clare’s face, she knew that he loved her, and that she had been waiting for him! She was not surprised to see him; how should it be otherwise than just so! He was come: good bye, dolly! The child had imagination—next to conscience the strongest ally of common sense. She knew, like St. Paul, that an idol is nothing. As men and women grow in imagination and common sense, more and more will sacred silly dolls be cast to the moles and the bats. But pretty Fancy and limping Logic are powerful usurpers in commonplace minds.
Clare saw nothing more of her that day, neither tried to see her; but he did his work in an atmosphere of roses. The work was not nearly so interesting as house-work, but Clare was an honest gentleman, therefore did it well: that it was not interesting was of no account; it was his work! But to know that a child was in the house, not merely a child for him to love, but a child that already loved him so that he could be her servant indeed, changed the stupid bank almost into the dome of the angels.
His fellow clerks took little notice of him beyond what, in the routine of the day, was unavoidable. He had been a page-boy: the less they did with him the better! Were they not wronged by his introduction into their company? The poorest creature of them believed he would have served out the burglars better if the chance had been his.