CHAPTER V
Speculations on the moral qualities of the Bandit.—Mr. Vance, with mingled emotions, foresees that the acquisition of the Bandit’s acquaintance may be attended with pecuniary loss.
Vance loosened the boat from its moorings, stepped in, and took up the oars. Lionel followed, and sat by the stern. The Artist rowed on slowly, whistling melodiously in time to the dash of the oars. They soon came to the bank of garden-ground surrounding with turf on which fairies might have danced one of those villas never seen out of England. From the windows of the villa the lights gleamed steadily; over the banks, dipping into the water, hung large willows breathlessly; the boat gently brushed aside their pendent boughs, and Vance rested in a grassy cove.
“And faith,” said the Artist, gayly,—“faith,” said he, lighting his third cigar, “it is time we should bestow a few words more on the Remorseless Baron and the Bandit’s Child! What a cock-and-a-bull story the Cobbler told us! He must have thought us precious green.”
LIONEL (roused).—“Nay, I see nothing so wonderful in the story, though much that is sad. You must allow that Waife may have been a good actor: you became quite excited merely at his attitude and bow. Natural, therefore, that he should have been invited to try his chance on the London stage; not improbable that he may have met with an accident by the train, and so lost his chance forever; natural, then, that he should press into service his poor little grandchild, natural, also, that, hardly treated and his pride hurt, he should wish to escape.”
VANCE.—“And more natural than all that he should want to extract from our pockets three pounds, the Bandit! No, Lionel, I tell you what is not probable, that he should have disposed of that clever child to a vagabond like Rugge: she plays admirably. The manager who was to have engaged him would have engaged her if he had seen her. I am puzzled.”
LIONEL.—“True, she is an extraordinary child. I cannot say how she has interested me.” He took out his purse, and began counting its contents. “I have nearly three pounds left,” he cried joyously. “L2. 18s. if I give up the thought of a longer excursion with you, and go quietly home—”
VANCE.—“And not pay your share of the bill yonder?”
LIONEL.—“Ah, I forgot that! But come, I am not too proud to borrow from you: it is not for a selfish purpose.”
VANCE.—“Borrow from me, Cato! That comes of falling in with bandits and their children. No; but let us look at the thing like men of sense. One story is good till another is told. I will call by myself on Rugge to-morrow, and hear what he says; and then, if we judge favourably of the Cobbler’s version, we will go at night and talk with the Cobbler’s lodgers; and I dare say,” added Vance, kindly, but with a sigh,—“I daresay the three pounds will be coaxed out of me! After all, her head is worth it. I want an idea for Titania.”
LIONEL (joyously).—“My dear Vance, you are the best fellow in the world.”
VANCE.—“Small compliment to humankind! Take the oars: it is your turn now.”
Lionel obeyed; the boat once more danced along the tide—thoro’ reeds,—-thoro’ waves, skirting the grassy islet—out into pale moonlight. They talked but by fits and starts. What of?—a thousand things! Bright young hearts, eloquent young tongues! No sins in the past; hopes gleaming through the future. O summer nights, on the glass of starry waves! O Youth, Youth!
CHAPTER VI
Wherein the historian tracks the public characters that fret their hour on the stage, into the bosom of private life.—The reader is invited to arrive at a conclusion which may often, in periods of perplexity, restore ease to his mind; namely, that if man will reflect on all the hopes he has nourished, all the fears he has admitted, all the projects he has formed, the wisest thing he can do, nine times out of ten, with hope, fear, and project, is to let them end with the chapter—in smoke.
It was past nine o’clock in the evening of the following day. The exhibition at Mr. Rugge’s theatre had closed for the season in that village, for it was the conclusion of the fair. The final performance had been begun and ended somewhat earlier than on former nights. The theatre was to be cleared from the ground by daybreak, and the whole company to proceed onward betimes in the morning. Another fair awaited them in an adjoining county, and they had a long journey before them.
Gentleman Waife and his Juliet Araminta had gone to their lodgings over the Cobbler’s stall. Their rooms were homely enough, but had an air not only of the comfortable, but the picturesque. The little sitting-room was very old-fashioned,—panelled in wood that had once been painted blue, with a quaint chimney-piece that reached to the ceiling. That part of the house spoke of the time of Charles I., it might have been tenanted by a religious Roundhead; and, framed-in over the low door, there was a grim, faded portrait of a pinched-faced saturnine man, with long lank hair, starched band, and a length of upper lip that betokened relentless obstinacy of character, and might have curled in sullen glee at the monarch’s scaffold, or preached an interminable sermon to the stout Protector. On a table, under the deep-sunk window, were neatly arrayed a few sober-looking old books; you would find amongst them Colley’s “Astrology,” Owen Feltham’s “Resolves,” Glanville “On Witches,” the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” an early edition of “Paradise Lost,” and an old Bible; also two flower-pots of clay brightly reddened, and containing stocks; also two small worsted rugs, on one of which rested a carved cocoa-nut, on the other an egg-shaped ball of crystal,—that last the pride and joy of the cobbler’s visionary soul. A door left wide open communicated with an inner room (very low was its ceiling), in which the Bandit slept, if the severity of his persecutors permitted him to sleep. In the corner of the sitting-room, near that door, was a small horsehair sofa, which, by the aid of sheets and a needlework coverlid, did duty for a bed, and was consigned to the Bandit’s child. Here the tenderness of the Cobbler’s heart was visible, for over the coverlid were strewed sprigs of lavender and leaves of vervain; the last, be it said, to induce happy dreams, and scare away witchcraft and evil spirits. On another table, near the fireplace, the child was busied in setting out the tea-things for her grandfather. She had left in the property-room of the theatre her robe of spangles and tinsel, and appeared now in a simple frock. She had no longer the look of Titania, but that of a lively, active, affectionate human child; nothing theatrical about her now, yet still, in her graceful movements, so nimble but so noiseless, in her slight fair hands, in her transparent colouring, there was Nature’s own lady,—that SOMETHING which strikes us all as well-born and high-bred: not that it necessarily is so; the semblances of aristocracy, in female childhood more especially, are often delusive. The souvenance flower, wrought into the collars of princes, springs up wild on field and fell.
Gentleman Waife, wrapped negligently in a gray dressing-gown and seated in an old leathern easy-chair, was evidently out of sorts. He did not seem to heed the little preparations for his comfort, but, resting his cheek on his right hand, his left drooped on his crossed knees,—an attitude rarely seen in a man when his heart is light and his spirits high. His lips moved: he was talking to himself. Though he had laid aside his theatrical bandage over both eyes, he wore a black patch over one, or rather where one had been; the eye exposed was of singular beauty, dark and brilliant. For the rest, the man had a striking countenance, rugged, and rather ugly than otherwise, but by no means unprepossessing; full of lines and wrinkles and strong muscle, with large lips of wondrous pliancy, and an aspect of wistful sagacity, that, no doubt, on occasion could become exquisitely comic,—dry comedy,—the comedy that makes others roar when the comedian himself is as grave as a judge.
You might see in his countenance, when quite in its natural repose, that Sorrow had passed by there; yet the instant the countenance broke into play, you would think that Sorrow must have been sent about her business as soon as the respect due to that visitor, so accustomed to have her own way, would permit. Though the man was old, you could not call him aged. One-eyed and crippled, still, marking the muscular arm, the expansive chest, you would have scarcely called him broken or infirm. And hence there was a certain indescribable pathos in his whole appearance, as if Fate had branded, on face and form, characters in which might be read her agencies on career and mind,—plucked an eye from intelligence, shortened one limb for life’s progress, yet left whim sparkling out in the eye she had spared, and a light heart’s wild spring in the limb she had maimed not.
“Come, Grandy, come,” said the little girl, coaxingly; “your tea will get quite cold; your toast is ready, and here is such a nice egg; Mr. Merle says you may be sure it is new laid. Come, don’t let that hateful man fret you: smile on your own Sophy; come.”
“If,” said Mr. Waife, in a hollow undertone, if I were alone in the world—”
“Oh, Grandy!”
“‘I know a spot on which a bed-post grows,
And do remember where a roper lives.’
Delightful prospect, not to be indulged; for if I were in peace at one end of the rope, what would chance to my Sophy, left forlorn at the other?”
“Don’t talk so, or I shall think you are sorry to have taken care of me.”
“Care of thee, oh, child! and what care? It is thou who takest care of me. Put thy hands from thy mouth; sit down, darling, there, opposite, and let us talk. Now, Sophy, thou hast often said that thou wouldst be glad to be out of this mode of life, even for one humbler and harder: think well, is it so?”
“Oh, yes, indeed, grandfather.”
“No more tinsel dresses and flowery wreaths; no more applause; no more of the dear divine stage excitement; the heroine and fairy vanished; only a little commonplace child in dingy gingham, with a purblind cripple for thy sole charge and playmate; Juliet Araminta evaporated evermore into little Sophy!”
“It would be so nice!” answered little Sophy, laughing merrily.
“What would make it nice?” asked the Comedian, turning on her his solitary piercing eye, with curious interest in his gaze.
Sophy left her seat, and placed herself on a stool at her grandfather’s knee; on that knee she clasped her tiny hands, and shaking aside her curls, looked into his face with confident fondness. Evidently these two were much more than grandfather and grandchild: they were friends, they were equals, they were in the habit of consulting and prattling with each other. She got at his meaning, however covert his humour; and he to the core of her heart, through its careless babble. Between you and me, Reader, I suspect that, in spite of the Comedian’s sagacious wrinkles, the one was as much a child as the other.
“Well,” said Sophy, “I will tell you, Grandy, what would make it nice: no one would vex and affront you,—we should be all by ourselves; and then, instead of those nasty lamps and those dreadful painted creatures, we could go out and play in the fields and gather daisies; and I could run after butterflies, and when I am tired I should come here, where I am now, any time of the day, and you would tell me stories and pretty verses, and teach me to write a little better than I do now, and make such a wise little woman of me; and if I wore gingham—but it need not be dingy, Grandy—it would be all mine, and you would be all mine too, and we’d keep a bird, and you’d teach it to sing; and oh, would it not be nice!”
“But still, Sophy, we should have to live, and we could not live upon daisies and butterflies. And I can’t work now; for the matter of that, I never could work: more shame for me, but so it is. Merle says the fault is in the stars,—with all my heart. But the stars will not go to the jail or the workhouse instead of me. And though they want nothing to eat, we do.”
“But, Grandy, you have said every day since the first walk you took after coming here, that if you had three pounds, we could get away and live by ourselves and make a fortune!”
“A fortune!—that’s a strong word: let it stand. A fortune! But still, Sophy, though we should be free of this thrice-execrable Rugge, the scheme I have in my head lies remote from daisies and butterflies. We should have to dwell in towns and exhibit!”
“On a stage, Grandy?” said Sophy, resigned, but sorrowful.
“No, not exactly: a room would do.”
“And I should not wear those horrid, horrid dresses, nor mix with those horrid, horrid painted people.”
“No.”
“And we should be quite alone, you and I?”
“Hum! there would be a third.”
“Oh, Grandy, Grandy!” cried Sophy, in a scream of shrill alarm. “I know, I know; you are thinking of joining us with the Pig-faced Lady!”
MR. WAIFE (not a muscle relaxed).—“A well-spoken and pleasing gentlewoman. But no such luck: three pounds would not buy her.”
SOPHIE.—“I am glad of that: I don’t care so much for the Mermaid; she’s dead and stuffed. But, oh!” (another scream) “perhaps ‘t is the Spotted Boy?”
MR. WAIFE.—“Calm your sanguine imagination; you aspire too high! But this I will tell you, that our companion, whatsoever or whosoever that companion may be, will be one you will like.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Sophy, shaking her head. “I only like you. But who is it?”
“Alas!” said Mr. Waife, “it is no use pampering ourselves with vain hopes: the three pounds are not forthcoming. You heard what that brute Rugge said, that the gentleman who wanted to take your portrait had called on him this morning, and offered 10s. for a sitting,—that is, 5s. for you, 5s. for Rugge; and Rugge thought the terms reasonable.”
“But I said I would not sit.”
“And when you did say it, you heard Rugge’s language to me—to you. And now you must think of packing up, and be off at dawn with the rest. And,” added the comedian, colouring high, “I must again parade, to boors and clowns, this mangled form; again set myself out as a spectacle of bodily infirmity,—man’s last degradation. And this I have come to—I!”
“No, no, Grandy, it will not last long! we will get the three pounds. We have always hoped on!—hope still! And, besides, I am sure those gentlemen will come here tonight. Mr. Merle said they would, at ten o’clock. It is near ten now, and your tea cold as a stone.”
She hung on his neck caressingly, kissing his furrowed brow, and leaving a tear there, and thus coaxed him till he set-to quietly at his meal; and Sophy shared it—though she had no appetite in sorrowing for him—but to keep him company; that done, she lighted his pipe with the best canaster,—his sole luxury and expense; but she always contrived that he should afford it.
Mr. Waife drew a long whiff, and took a more serene view of affairs. He who doth not smoke hath either known no great griefs, or refuseth himself the softest consolation, next to that which comes from Heaven. “What, softer than woman?” whispers the young reader. Young reader, woman teases as well as consoles. Woman makes half the sorrows which she boasts the privilege to soothe. Woman consoles us, it is true, while we are young and handsome! when we are old and ugly, woman snubs and scolds us. On the whole, then, woman in this scale, the weed in that, Jupiter, hang out thy balance, and weigh them both; and if thou give the preference to woman, all I can say is, the next time Juno ruffles thee,—O Jupiter, try the weed.
CHAPTER VII
The historian, in pursuance of his stern duties, reveals to the scorn of future ages some of the occult practices which discredit the march of light in the nineteenth century.
“May I come in?” asked the Cobbler, outside the door. “Certainly come in,” said Gentleman Waife. Sophy looked wistfully at the aperture, and sighed to see that Merle was alone. She crept up to him.
“Will they not come?” she whispered. “I hope so, pretty one; it be n’t ten yet.”
“Take a pipe, Merle,” said Gentleman Waife, with a Grand Comedian air.
“No, thank you kindly; I just looked in to ask if I could do anything for ye, in case—in case ye must go tomorrow.”
“Nothing: our luggage is small, and soon packed. Sophy has the money to discharge the meaner part of our debt to you.”
“I don’t value that,” said the Cobbler, colouring.
“But we value your esteem,” said Mr. Waife, with a smile that would have become a field-marshal. “And so, Merle, you think, if I am a broken-down vagrant, it must be put to the long account of the celestial bodies!”
“Not a doubt of it,” returned the Cobbler, solemnly. “I wish you would give me date and place of Sophy’s birth that’s what I want; I’d take her horryscope. I’m sure she’d be lucky.”
“I’d rather not, please,” said Sophy, timidly.
“Rather not?—very odd. Why?”
“I don’t want to know the future.”
“That is odder and odder,” quoth the Cobbler, staring; “I never heard a girl say that afore.”
“Wait till she’s older, Mr. Merle,” said Waife: “girls don’t want to know the future till they want to be married.”
“Summat in that,” said the Cobbler. He took up the crystal. “Have you looked into this ball, pretty one, as I bade ye?”
“Yes, two or three times.”
“Ha! and what did you see?”
“My own face made very long,” said Sophy,—“as long as that—,” stretching out her hands.
The Cobbler shook his head dolefully, and screwing up one eye, applied the other to the mystic ball.
MR. WAIFE.—“Perhaps you will see if those two gentlemen are coming.”
SOPHY.—“Do, do! and if they will give us three pounds!”
COBBLER (triumphantly).—“Then you do care to know the future, after all?”
SOPHY.—“Yes, so far as that goes; but don’t look any further, pray.”
COBBLER (intent upon the ball, and speaking slowly, and in jerks).—“A mist now. Ha! an arm with a besom—sweeps all before it.”
SOPHY (frightened).—“Send it away, please.”
COBBLER—“It is gone. Ha! there’s Rugge,—looks very angry,—savage, indeed.”
WAIFE.—“Good sign that! proceed.”
COBBLER.—“Shakes his fist; gone. Ha! a young man, boyish, dark hair.”
SOPHY (clapping her hands).—“That is the young gentleman—the very young one, I mean—with the kind eyes; is he coming?—is he, is he?”
WAIFE—“Examine his pockets! do you see there three pounds?”
COBBLER (testily).—“Don’t be a-interrupting. Ha! he is talking with another gentleman, bearded.”
SOPHY (whispering to her grandfather).—“The old young gentleman.”
COBBLER (putting down the crystal, and with great decision).—“They are coming here; I see ‘d them at the corner of the lane, by the public-house, two minutes’ walk to this door.” He took out a great silver watch: “Look, Sophy, when the minute-hand gets there (or before, if they walk briskly), you will hear them knock.”
Sophy clasped her hands in mute suspense, half-credulous, half-doubting; then she went and opened the room-door, and stood on the landing-place to listen. Merle approached the Comedian, and said in a low voice, “I wish for your sake she had the gift.”
WAIFE.—“The gift!—the three pounds!—so do I!”
COBBLER.—“Pooh! worth a hundred times three pounds; the gift,—the spirituous gift.”
WAIFE.—“Spirituous! don’t like the epithet,—smells of gin!”
COBBLER.—“Spirituous gift to see in the crystal: if she had that, she might make your fortune.”
WAIFE (with a ‘sudden change of countenance).—“Ah! I never thought of that. But if she has not the gift, I could teach it her,—eh?”
COBBLER (indignantly).—“I did not think to hear this from you, Mr. Waife. Teach her,—you! make her an impostor, and of the wickedest kind, inventing lies between earth and them as dwell in the seven spheres! Fie! No, if she hasn’t the gift natural, let her alone: what here is not heaven-sent is devil-taught.”
WAIFE (awed, but dubious).—“Then you really think you saw all that you described, in that glass egg?”
COBBLER.—“Think!—am I a liar? I spoke truth, and the proof is—there—!” Rat-tat went the knocker at the door.
“The two minutes are just up,” said the Cobbler; and Cornelius Agrippa could not have said it with more wizardly effect.
“They are come, indeed,” said Sophy, re-entering the room softly: “I hear their voices at the threshold.”
The Cobbler passed by in silence, descended the stairs, and conducted Vance and Lionel into the Comedian’s chamber; there he left them, his brow overcast. Gentleman Waife had displeased him sorely.