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Title: Piccino and other child stories
Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett
Release date: May 4, 2025 [eBook #76009]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1894
Credits: Bob Taylor, Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PICCINO AND OTHER CHILD STORIES ***
Transcriber’s Note
Italic text displayed as: _italic_
Bold text displayed as: =bold=
PICCINO
AND OTHER CHILD STORIES
[Illustration: “SO HE WENT TO SHOW IT HIS TROUSERS”]
PICCINO
AND OTHER CHILD STORIES
BY
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1897
COPYRIGHT, 1894, 1897, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK
CONTENTS
PAGE
_Two Days in the Life of Piccino_, _1_
_The Captain’s Youngest_, _87_
_Little Betty’s Kitten Tells Her Story_, _129_
_How Fauntleroy Occurred_, _157_
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
“_So he went to show it his trousers_,” _Frontispiece_
“_Piccino, who lay fast asleep_,” _13_
“_Piccino clung to the donkey, rubbing his cheek wofully
against her gray shoulder_,” _19_
“_‘I am going to wash you myself,’ said Lady Aileen,
lifting him in her strong white arms_,” _51_
“_The girl stared at him_,” _69_
“_I polished away at the Captain’s sabre_,” _91_
“_Miss Rose put her hands on his shoulders_,” _103_
“_And I shall always be fond of you, Rabbett_,” _125_
“_I did not like the swing at first_,” _143_
“_I left her lap and curled up in her arm_,” _151_
_Fauntleroy’s welcome into the world: “F’ow him in
’er fire!”_ _165_
_His initial act of charity: “Lady,” he said, “lady,
f’ont door—want b’ead,”_ _179_
“_I’m very sorry for you, Mr. Wenham, about your
wife being dead_,” _191_
“_Are you in society, Mrs. Wilkins?_” _197_
_The real Fauntleroy listening to the story of the ideal
Fauntleroy_, _215_
TWO DAYS IN THE LIFE
OF PICCINO
TWO DAYS IN THE LIFE OF PICCINO
CHAPTER I
If he lived a hundred years—to be as old as Giuseppe, who was little
Roberto’s great-grand-father, and could only move when he was helped,
and sat in the sun and played with bits of string—if he lived to be as
old as that, he could never forget them, those two strange and dreadful
days.
When sometimes he spoke of them to such of his playmates as were older
than himself—especially to Carlo, who tended sheep, and was afraid
of nothing, even making jokes about the _forestieri_—they said they
thought he had been foolish; that as it seemed that the people had been
ready to give him anything, it could not have been so bad but one could
have tried to bear it, though they all agreed that it was dreadful
about the water.
It is true, too, that as he grew older himself, after his mother died
and his father married again—the big Paula who flew into such rages and
beat him—and when he had to tend sheep and goats himself, and stay
out on the hills all day in such ragged jackets and with so little
food—because Paula said he had not earned his salt, and she had her own
children to feed—then he longed for some of the food he would not eat
during those two days, and wondered if he would do quite the same thing
again under the same circumstances. But this was only when he was very
hungry and the mistral was blowing, and the Mediterranean looked gray
instead of blue.
He was such a tiny fellow when it happened. He was not yet six years
old, and when a child is under six he has not reached the age when
human creatures have begun to face life for themselves altogether;
and even a little Italian peasant, who tumbles about among sheep and
donkeys, which form part of his domestic circle, is still in a measure
a sort of baby, whose mother or brother or sister has to keep an
occasional eye on him to see that he does not kill himself. And then
also Piccino had been regarded by his family as a sort of capital, and
had consequently had more attention paid to him than he would have had
under ordinary circumstances.
It was like this. He was so pretty, so wonderfully pretty! His
brothers and sisters were not beauties, but he was a beauty from his
first day, and with every day that passed he grew prettier. When
he was so tiny that he was packed about like a bundle, wound up in
unattractive-looking bandages, he had already begun to show what his
eyes were going to be—his immense soft black eyes, with lashes which
promised to be velvet fringes. And as soon as his hair began to show
itself, it was lovely silk, which lay in rings, one over the other, on
his beautiful little round head. Then his soft cheeks and chin were of
exquisite roundness, and in each he had a deep dimple which came and
went as he laughed.
He was always being looked at and praised. A “_Gesù bambino_” the
peasant women called him. That was what they always said when a child
had wonderful beauty, their idea of supreme child loveliness being
founded on the pictures and waxen, richly dressed figures they saw in
the churches.
But it was the _forestieri_ who admired him most, and that was why
he was so valuable. His family lived near a strange little old city
in the hills, which spread out behind one of the fashionable seaside
towns on the Italian Riviera. The strange little old city, which
was a relic of centuries gone by, was one of the places the rich
foreigners made excursions to see. It was a two or three hours’ drive
from the fashionable resort, and these gay, rich people, who seemed
to do nothing but enjoy themselves, used to form parties and drive in
carriages up the road which wound its way up from the shore through
the olive vineyards and back into the hills. It was their habit to
bring servants with them, and hampers of wonderful things to eat, which
would be unpacked by the servants and spread on white cloths on the
grass in some spot shaded by the trees. Then they would eat, and drink
wine, and laugh, and afterwards wander about and explore the old city
of Ceriani, and seem to find the queer houses and the inhabitants and
everything about it interesting.
To the children of Ceriani and its outskirts these excursion parties
were delightful festivities. When they heard of the approach of one
they gathered themselves together and went forth to search for its
encampment. When they had found it they calmly seated themselves in
rows quite near and watched it as if it were a kind of theatrical
entertainment to which they had paid for admission. They were all
accomplished in the art of begging, and knew that the _forestieri_
always had plenty of small change, and would give, either through
good-nature or to avoid being annoyed. Then they knew from experience
that the things that were not eaten were never repacked into the
hampers if there was some one to ask for them. So they kept their
places quite cheerfully and looked on at the festivities, and talked
to each other and showed their white teeth in generous grins quite
amiably, sure of reaping a pleasant harvest before the carriages drove
back again down the winding road ending at the sea and San Remo, and
the white, many-balconied hotels.
And it was through these excursion parties that Piccino’s market
value was discovered. When he was a baby and his sister Maria, who
was his small nurse—being determined not to be left behind by her
comrades—toiled after the rest of the children with her little burden
in her arms or over her shoulder, it was observed that the _forestieri_
always saw the pretty round black baby head and big soft dark eyes
before they saw anything else, and their attention once attracted by
Piccino very pleasant things were often the result. The whole party
got more cakes and sandwiches and legs of chickens and backs of little
birds, and when bits of silver were given to Maria for Piccino, Maria
herself sometimes even had whole francs given to her, because it was
she who was his sister and took care of him. And then, having begun
giving, the good-natured ones among the party of ladies and gentlemen
did not like to quite neglect the other children, and so scattered
_soldi_ among them, so that sometimes they all returned to Ceriani
feeling that they had done a good day’s work. Their idea of a good
day’s work was one when they had not run after carriages for nothing,
or had heads shaken at them when they held out their hands and called
imploringly, “_Uno soldino, bella signora—bella signora!_” Piccino had
been born one of the class which in its childhood and often even later
never fails in the belief that the English and Americans who come to
the beautiful Riviera come there to be begged from, or in some way
beguiled out of their small coin.
Maria was a sharp child. She had not lugged her little brothers and
sisters about all through the working time of her twelve years without
learning a few things. She very soon found out what it was that brought
in the _soldi_ and the nice scraps from the hampers.
“It is Piccino they give things to—_ecco_!” she said. “They see his
eyes and they want to look at him and touch his cheeks. They like to
see the dimples come when he laughs. They would not look at me like
that, or at you, Carmela. They would not come near us.”
This was quite true. The row of little spectators watching the picnics
might be picturesque, but it was exceedingly dirty, and not made up of
the material it is quite safe to come near. It was a belief current
among the parties who drove up from San Remo that soap had never been
heard of in the vicinity of Ceriani and that water was avoided as a
poisonous element, and this belief was not founded upon mere nothings.
“They are as dirty as they are cheerful and impudent,” some one had
said, “and that is saying a great deal. I wonder what would happen if
one of them were caught and washed all over.”
Nobody could have been dirtier than Piccino was. Pretty as he looked,
there were days when the most enthusiastic of the ladies dare not have
taken him in her arms. In fact, there were very few days when any one
would have liked to go quite that far—or any farther, indeed, than
looking at his velvet eyes and throwing him _soldi_ and cakes. But his
eyes always won him the _soldi_ and cakes, and the older he grew the
more he gained, so that not only Maria and her companions, but his
mother herself, began to look upon him as a source of revenue.
“If he can only sing when he grows a little older,” his mother said,
“he can fill his pockets full by going and singing before the hotels
and in the gardens of the villas. Every one will give him something.
They are a queer lot, these foreigners, who are willing to give good
money to a child because he has long eyelashes. His are long enough,
thanks to the Virgin! Sometimes I wonder they are not in his way.”
His mother was the poorest of the poor. She had seven children, and a
mere hovel to put them in, and nothing to feed and clothe them with.
Her husband was a good-for-nothing, who never worked if he could help
it, and who, if he earned a few _soldi_, got rid of them at once
before they could be scolded out of him and spent on such extravagances
as food and fire. If Piccino had not been a little Italian peasant he
would, no doubt, have starved to death or died of cold long before he
had his adventure; but on the Riviera the sun shines and the air is
soft, and people seem born with a sort of gay carelessness of most
things that trouble the serious world.
As for Piccino, he was as happy as a soft little rabbit or a young bird
or a baby fawn. When he was old enough to run about, he had the most
beautiful days. They seemed to him to be made up of warm sunshine and
warm grass, flowers looking at him as he toddled round, light filtering
through vines and the branches of olive-trees, nice black bread and
figs, which he lay on his back and munched delightedly, and days when
Maria dragged him along the road to some green place where grand
people sat and ate good things, and who afterwards gave him cakes and
delicious little bones and _soldi_, saying over and over again to each
other that he was the prettiest little boy they had ever seen, and had
the most beautiful eyes, and oh! his eyelashes!
“Look at his eyelashes!” they would exclaim. “They are as thick as
rushes round a pool, and they must be half an inch long.”
Sometimes Piccino got rather tired of his eyelashes, and wore a
resigned expression, but he was little Italian enough to feel that they
must be rather a good thing, as they brought such luck. Once, indeed,
a man came all by himself to Ceriani, and persuaded his mother to make
him sit on a stone while he put him in a picture, and when it was over
he gave his mother several francs, and she was delighted; but Piccino
was not so pleased, because he had thought it rather tiresome to sit so
long on one stone.
This was the year before the dreadful two days came.
When they came he had been put into queer little trousers, which were
much too big for him. One of his brothers had outgrown them and given
them good wear. They were, in fact, as ragged as they were big, and as
dirty as they were ragged; but Piccino was very proud of them. He went
and showed them to the donkey, whose tumble-down sleeping apartment was
next to his own, and who was his favorite playmate and companion. It
was such a little donkey, but such a good one! It could carry a burden
almost as big as its stable, and it had soft, furry ears and soft,
furry sides, and eyes and eyelashes as pretty for a donkey as Piccino’s
were for a boy. It was nearly always at work, but when it was at home
Piccino was nearly always with it. On wet and cold days he stayed with
it in its tiny, broken stable, playing and talking to it; and many
a day he had fallen asleep with his curly head on its warm little
fuzzy side. When it was fine they strolled about together and were
companions, the donkey cropping the grass and Piccino pretending it was
a little flock of sheep, and that he was big enough to be a shepherd.
In the middle of the night he used to like to waken and hear it move
and make little sounds. It was so close to him that he felt as if they
slept together.
So he went to show it his trousers, of course.
“Now I am a man,” he said, and he stood close by its head, and the two
pairs of lustrous eyes looked affectionately into each other.
After that they sauntered out together into the beautiful early
morning. When Piccino was with the donkey his mother and Maria knew he
was quite safe and so was the donkey, so they were allowed to ramble
about. They never went far, it is true. Piccino was too little, and
besides, there were such nice little rambles quite near. This time was
the loveliest of all the year. The sun was sweetly warm, but not hot,
and there were anemones and flaming wild tulips in the grass.
[Illustration: “PICCINO, WHO LAY FAST ASLEEP”]
Piccino did not know how long they were out together before Maria came
to find them. The donkey had a beautiful breakfast, and Piccino ate
his piece of black bread without anything to add to its flavor,
because his mother was at the time in great trouble and very poor,
and there was scarcely the bread itself to eat. Piccino toddled along
quite peacefully, however, and when he came upon a space where there
were red and yellow tulips swaying in the soft air he broke off a fine
handful, and when the donkey lay down he sat by it and began to stick
the beautiful, flaring things round his hat, as he had seen Maria stick
things round hers. It was a torn, soft felt hat, with a pointed crown
and a broad rim, and when he put it on again, with its adornment of red
and yellow flowers sticking up and down, and falling on his soft, thick
curls, he was a strangely beautiful little thing to see, and so like
a picture that he scarcely seemed like a real child at all, but like
a lovely, fantastic little being some artist had arranged to put on
canvas.
He was sitting in this way, looking out to where he could see a bit of
blue sea through a break in the hills, when Maria came running towards
him.
“The donkey!” she cried, “the donkey!”
She had been crying and looked excited, and took him by the hand,
dragging him towards home. His legs were so short and he was so little
that it always seemed as if she dragged him. She was an excitable
child, and always went fast when she had an object in view. Piccino
was used to excitement. They all shouted and screamed and gesticulated
at each other when any trifling thing happened. His mother and her
neighbors were given to tears and cries and loud ejaculations upon the
slightest provocation, as all Italian peasants are, so he saw nothing
unusual in Maria’s coming upon him like a whirlwind and exclaiming
disjointedly with tears. He wondered, however, what the donkey could
have to do with it, and evidently the donkey wondered too, for she got
up and trotted after them down the road.
But when they reached the house it was very plain that the thing which
had occurred was not a trifle, or usual.
Piccino saw an old man standing before the door talking to his mother.
At least, he was trying to get in a word edgeways now and then, while
the mother wept and beat her breast and poured forth a torrent of
bewailing, mingled with an avalanche of scolding addressed to her
husband, who stood near her, looking at once sheepish and ill-tempered.
“Worthless brute and pig,” she proclaimed; “idle, wicked animal, who
will not work to help me to feed his children. It is only I who work
and the donkey who helps me. Without her we should starve—starve! And
he sells her—poor beast!—sells her to get money for his wickedness and
gluttony. And I am to starve without her—a fine thing! And he brings to
my door the thief he has sold her to.”
Baby as he was, Piccino began to understand. His father had sold the
donkey, and it would be taken away. He lifted up his voice in a wail of
bitter lamentation, and breaking away from Maria ran to the donkey and
clung round her front leg, rubbing his cheek wofully against her gray
shoulder.
For an hour or so they all wept and lamented while their mother
alternately wept and raved. She abused her husband and the old man who
had bought the donkey, by turns. Stray neighbors dropped in and helped
her. They all agreed that old Beppo was a usurer and a thief, who had
somehow got the better of Annibale, who was also a drunken, shameless
brute. Old Beppo was so overwhelmed by the storm of hard words and bad
names raging about him that he actually was stunned into allowing that
the donkey should remain where she was for two days, that she might
finish some work her mistress had promised to do with her aid. And he
went away grumbling, with his piece of rope over his arm.
There was nothing to eat in the house, and if there had been, the
mother was too prostrate with grief and rage to have prepared anything
like a meal. And so it seemed a great piece of good luck when dirty
little Filippo burst upon them with the news that three grand carriages
full of illustrious-looking _forestieri_ and inviting hampers were
unloading themselves at a certain turn of the road, where the grass was
thick and the trees big and close together.
“Come!” said Maria, catching at Piccino’s hand. She gave him a look
over. His crying had left a flush in his soft cheeks and a little
pathetic curve on his baby mouth, which was always like a tiny
vermilion bow. His hat, with the tulips tumbling round it, was set
on the back of his head, and the red and yellow things made his eyes
look bigger and lovelier than ever by contrast. In these respects
Maria saw that he was good for more cakes and _soldi_ than ever. And
it would never have occurred to her that tears and rubbing against
the donkey had left him dirtier than ever. In Maria’s world nobody
troubled themselves about dirt. Washing one’s self amounted almost to a
religious ceremony. But ah! that little love of a Piccino was dirty—as
dirty as he was soft and dimpled and rich-colored and beautiful!
Near the place where the pleasure-seekers had spread their feast upon
the grass there was a low, rough, stone wall at the side of the road.
[Illustration: “PICCINO CLUNG TO THE DONKEY, RUBBING HIS CHEEK WOFULLY
AGAINST HER GRAY SHOULDER”]
When the servants had spread the bright rugs and cushions upon the
ground the party sat down in little groups. No sooner had they done
this than one of the ladies looked up and broke into a little laugh.
“Look there!” she said, nodding in the direction of the low wall, which
was only a few yards from them.
And those near her looked and saw a little boy peasant, sitting
with his legs dangling, and gazing at them with the interest and
satisfaction of a person who has had the good fortune to secure the
best seat at a theatre.
“He is a sharp one,” said the lady, “he has got here first. There will
be others directly. They are like a swarm of little vultures. The
Bothwicks, who have the Villa des Palmiers, were here a week ago, and
they said children seemed to start up from the earth.”
The servants moved about in dexterous silence, unpacking the hampers
and spreading white cloths. The gentlemen sat at the ladies’ feet, and
everybody laughed and talked gayly. In a few minutes the lady looked up
and laughed again.
“Look,” she said, “now there are three!”
And there were six legs dangling, and the second and third pair were
little girls’ legs, and their owners looked on at the strangers with
cheerful composure, as if their assistance at the festive scene were
the most proper and natural thing in the world.
The lady who had seen them first was a tall and handsome Englishwoman.
She had big coils of reddish-brown hair, and large bright eyes which
looked restless and tired at the same time. Everybody seemed to pay
her a great deal of attention. The party was hers, the carriages were
hers, the big footmen were hers. Her guests called her Lady Aileen.
She was a very rich young widow with no children, and though she had
everything that wealth and rank could give she found it rather hard to
amuse herself. Perhaps this was because she had given everything to
Lady Aileen Chalmer that she could, and it had not yet occurred to her
that any one else in the world was any affair of hers.
“The Bothwicks came home in raptures over a child they had seen,” she
said; “they talked of him until it was fatiguing. They said he was as
dirty as a pig and as beautiful as an angel. The rest of the children
seemed to use him as a bait. I wish they would bring him to-day; I
should like to see him. I must say I don’t believe he was as beautiful
as they said. You know Mary Bothwick is by way of being artistic, and
is given to raptures.”
“Are you fond of children, Lady Aileen?” asked the man nearest to her.
“I don’t know,” she answered, “I never had one. But I think they are
amusing. And these little Italian beggars are sometimes very handsome.
Perhaps I should not be so bored if I had a very good-looking child. I
should want a boy. I believe I will buy one from a peasant some day.
They will give you anything for money.” She turned her face a little,
and laughed as she had done before.
“There are quite twelve on the wall now,” she said, “perhaps more.
I must count them.” When they counted them they found there were
fourteen, all in a row, all with dangling feet, all dirty, and all
staring at what was going on with a composure which had no shadow of
embarrassment touching it.
The row having gained in numbers was also beginning to be a little more
lively. The young spectators had begun to exchange conversational and
lively remarks upon the party, the big footmen, and the inviting things
being handed about and eaten.
In ten minutes from that time Lady Aileen counted again and found there
were twenty-two lookers-on, and when she reached the twenty-first she
gave a slight start.
“Dear me!” she exclaimed, and laid down her fork.
“What is it, Lady Aileen?” asked a girl who sat at her side.
“I am perfectly certain the twenty-first one is the child the
Bothwicks were talking about. And he _is_ a handsome creature!”
“Which one?” the girl exclaimed, leaning forward to look. “The
twenty-first. Oh, I am sure you mean the one next to the end. What a
beauty! Mr. Gordon, look at him!”
And Maria had the encouragement of seeing half a dozen people turn to
look at Piccino sitting by her on the wall, a marvel of soft roundness
and rich color, his velvet eyes dreamily wide open as he gazed fixedly
at the good things to eat, his crimson bow of a mouth with parted lips,
his flaming tulips nodding round his torn felt hat.
Lady Aileen looked quite interested.
“I never saw such a beautiful little animal,” she said. “I had no
idea children were ever really like that. He looks as if he had been
deliberately made to order. But I should never have had the imagination
to order anything so perfect.”
In a very few minutes everybody was looking at him and discussing him.
Maria saw them and all the other children saw them, and the whole party
began to congratulate itself and feel its spirits exhilarated, because
it knew how the matter would end. The only one who was not exactly
exhilarated was, it must be confessed, Piccino himself. He felt a
certain shy awkwardness when he was looked at and talked about so much.
He was not much more than a baby, after all, and he liked the cakes
and little birds’ backs much better than he liked being looked at by
so many grand ladies and gentlemen all at once. Perhaps, too, if the
truth were told, he was not as thrifty as Maria and her companions. He
liked the good things, but he did not like to ask for them, whereas the
others did not object to begging at all. It was second nature to them.
On this occasion Maria, seeing what effect he had produced, wanted to
lift him down from the wall and put him on the grass, and make him go
among the _signori_ and hold out his hand.
But he clung to her and shook his head and stuck out his vermilion
under lip, and would not go.
It was when he was doing this and Maria was whispering to him, and
scolding and coaxing, that Lady Aileen called to one of her footmen and
told him to bring her a plateful of cakes and some _marrons glacés_.
“Does your ladyship wish me to take them to the beggar children?” asked
Thomas, his distaste suppressed by respectful civility.
“No,” Lady Aileen answered, rising to her feet. “I am going to take
them myself.”
“Yes, my lady,” said Thomas, and stepped back. “It would have been
safer to have let me do it,” he remarked in a discreet undertone when
he returned to his fellows. “Ladies’ dresses are more liable to touch
them by accident; and one wouldn’t want to _touch_ them.”
Lady Aileen carried her plate to the line of spectators on the wall.
Mr. Gordon and two or three others of the party followed her. All along
the row eyes began to glisten and mouths to water, but Lady Aileen went
straight to Piccino. She spoke to him in Italian.
“What is your name?” she asked.
He hung back a little, keeping close to Maria. This was just what he
did not like at all—that they would come and ask him his name and try
to make him talk. He had nothing to say to people like them. He could
talk to the donkey, but then the donkey was of his own world and they
knew each other’s language.
“Tell the signora your name,” whispered Maria, furtively pushing him.
“Piccino,” he said at length, the word coming through a little
reluctant pout.
Lady Aileen laughed.
“He says his name is Piccino,” she said to her companions. “That means
‘little one,’ so I suppose it is a sort of pet name. How old is he?”
she asked Maria.
Piccino was so tired of hearing that. They always asked it. He never
asked how old they were. He did not want to know.
“He will be six in three months,” said Maria.
“Will you have some cakes?” said Lady Aileen. Piccino held out his
horribly dirty, dimpled hands, but Maria took off his hat with the
tulips round it and held it out for him.
“If the _illustrissima_ will put them in here,” she said, “he can carry
them better.”
Lady Aileen gave a little shudder, but she emptied the plate.
“What an awful hat!” she said to her friends. “They are quite like
little pigs—but he looks almost prettier without it. Look how wonderful
his hair is. It has dark red lights in it, and is as thick as a mat.
The curls are like the cherubs’ of the Sistine Madonna. If it were not
so dirty I should have liked to put my hand on it.”
She spoke in English, and Piccino wondered what she was saying about
him. He knew it was about him, and he looked at her from under his veil
of lashes.
“It would please me to have a child as handsome as that about me,” she
said.
“Why don’t you buy him?” said Mr. Gordon; “you spoke of buying one just
now. It would be like buying a masterpiece.”
“So it would,” said Lady Aileen. “That’s an idea. I think I will buy
him. I believe he would amuse me.”
“For a while, at least,” said Mr. Gordon.
“He would always be well taken care of,” said her ladyship, with a
practical air. “He would be infinitely better off than he is now.”
* * * * *
She was a person who through all her life had cultivated the habit of
getting all she had a fancy for. If one cultivates the habit, and has
plenty of money, there are not many things one cannot have. There are
some, it is true, but not many. Lady Aileen had not found many. Just
now she was rather more bored than usual. Before she had left England
something had occurred which had rather troubled her. In fact, she had
come to the Riviera to forget it in change of surroundings. She had
been to Monte Carlo and had found it too exciting and not new enough,
as she had been there often before. She had been to Nice, and had said
it was too much like a seaside Paris, and that there were so many
English people that walking down the Promenade des Anglais was like
walking down Bond Street. She had tried San Remo because it was quiet,
and she had a temporary fancy for being quiet, and then she had chanced
to meet some people she liked. So she had taken a snow-white villa high
above the sea, and with palms and orange-trees and slender yellow-green
bamboos in the garden. And she had invited her new acquaintances to
dinner and afternoon tea, and had made up excursions. Still, she was
often bored, and wanted some new trifle to amuse her. And actually,
when she saw Piccino, and Mr. Gordon suggested to her that she
should buy him, it occurred to her that she would try it. If she had
chanced to come upon a tiny, pretty, rare monkey or toy terrier, or
an unheard-of kind of parrot or cockatoo, she would have tried the
experiment of buying it; and Piccino, with his dirty, beautiful little
face and his half-inch eyelashes, did not seem much more serious to
her. He would cost more money, of course, as she would have to provide
for him in some way after he had grown too big to amuse her; but she
had plenty of money, and she need not trouble herself about him. She
need not see him if she did not wish to, after she had sent him to
school, or to be trained into some kind of superior servant. Lady
Aileen was not a person whose conscience disturbed her, and caused her
to feel responsibilities. And so, after the party had been to explore
Ceriani and the things that otherwise interested them, she asked Mr.
Gordon to go with her to the poor little tumble-down house which Maria
had pointed out to her as the home of Piccino. Maria had, in fact,
had a rich harvest. Everybody had returned full of good things, and
Piccino’s small pocket was rich with _soldi_.
“I am going to carry out your suggestion,” Lady Aileen said to Mr.
Gordon, as they walked down the road.
“What was it?” Mr. Gordon asked.
“That I should buy the child.”
“Indeed,” said Mr. Gordon. “You find you can always buy what you have a
fancy for?”
“Nearly always,” said Lady Aileen, knitting her handsome white forehead
a little; “I have no doubt I can buy this thing I have a fancy for.”
It chanced that she came exactly at the right moment. As they
approached the house they heard even louder cries and lamentations and
railings than Piccino had heard in the morning.
It appeared that old Beppo had repented his leniency and had come back
for the donkey. He would not let it stay another night. He wanted to
work it himself. He had brought his piece of rope and had fastened it
to the pretty gray head already, while Piccino’s mother, Rita, wept and
gesticulated and poured forth maledictions. The neighbors had come back
to sympathize with her and find out what would happen, and the children
had begun to cry and Annibale to swear, so that there was such a noise
filling the air that if Lady Aileen had not been a cool and determined
person she might have been alarmed.
But she was not. She did not wait for Mr. Gordon to command order, but
walked straight into the midst of the altercation.
“What is the matter?” she demanded in Italian, “what is all this noise
about?”
Then, after their first start of surprise at seeing the grand lady, who
was so plainly one of the rich _forestieri_, Rita and all her neighbors
began to explain their wrongs at once. They praised the donkey and
reviled Annibale, and proclaimed that old Beppo was a malefactor
without a soul, and a robber of the widow and the fatherless.
“Far better,” cried Rita, “that my children should be without a father.
An idle, ugly brute, who takes their bread out of their poor mouths. To
sell their one friend who keeps them—the donkey!”
Old Beppo looked both sheepish and frightened when Lady Aileen turned
upon him as he was beginning to try to shuffle away with his property
at the end of his rope halter.
“Stay where you are!” she said.
“_Illustrissima_,” mumbled Beppo, “a thousand excuses. But I have work
to do, and the donkey is mine. I have bought it. It is my donkey,
_illustrissima_.”
Lady Aileen knew Italy very well. She drew out her purse, that he might
see it in her hand, before she turned away from him.
“Stay where you are,” she said. “I shall have something to say to you
later.”
Then she turned to Rita.
“Stop making a noise,” she said. “I want to talk to you.”
“What could the illustrious signora have to say to a wretched woman?”
Rita wept. “All her children must starve; she must starve herself;
death from cold and hunger lay before them!”
“No such thing,” said Lady Aileen. “I will buy your donkey back, and
give you food and fuel for the winter—for more than one winter—if you
will let me have what I want.”
Rita and the neighbors exclaimed in chorus. If she could have what she
wanted, the most illustrious signora! What could she want that a hovel
could hold, and what could such poor creatures refuse her?
Lady Aileen made a gesture towards Piccino, who had gone to stand by
the donkey, and had big tears on his eyelashes as he fondled its nose.
“I want you to lend me your little boy,” she said. “I want to take him
home with me and keep him. It will be much better for him.”
The neighbors all exclaimed in chorus. Rita for a moment only stared.
“Piccino!” she said at length. “You want to take him—to make him your
child!” And aside she exclaimed: “Mother of God? it is his eyelashes!”
Lady Aileen shrugged her shoulders slightly. “I cannot make him my
child,” she said, “but I will take care of him. He shall live with me,
and be fed and clothed, and shall enjoy himself.”
Maria clutched at her mother’s apron.
“Mother,” she said, “he will be a _signorino_. He will ride in the
carriage of the _illustrissima_. It will be as if he were a prince.”
“As if he were a prince!” the neighbors echoed. “As if he were a king’s
son!” And they all looked at dirty little Piccino with a growing awe.
Rita looked at him too. She had never been a very motherly person,
and these children, who had given her such hard work and hard fare,
had been a combined trial and burden to her. She had never felt it
fair that they should have come upon her. Each one had seemed an added
calamity, and when Piccino had been born he had seemed a heavier weight
than all the rest.
It was indeed well for him that his eyelashes had begun to earn his
living so early. And now, if he could save their daily bread and the
donkey for them, it would be a sort of excuse for his having intruded
himself upon the world. But Rita was not the woman to let him go for a
nothing.
“He is as beautiful as an angel,” she said. “He has brought in many a
_lira_ only because the _forestieri_ admire him so. His eyelashes are
an inch long. When he is old enough to sing——”
Lady Aileen spoke aside to Mr. Gordon.
“I told you that I believed I could buy this thing I fancied,” she
said.
To Rita she said:
“Tell me what you want. I will give you a reasonable sum. But you will
be foolish if you try to be extortionate. I want him—but not so much
that I will be robbed.”
“I should be a foolish woman if I tried to keep him,” said Rita; “he
will have nothing to eat to-night if he stays here, nor to-morrow, nor
the day after, unless a miracle happens. The illustrious signora will
give him a good home, and will buy back the donkey and save us from
starvation? I can come sometimes to the villa of the signora and see
him?”
“Yes,” said Lady Aileen, practically, “and the servants will always
give you a good meal and something to carry home with you. You can have
him back at any time if you want him.”
She said this for two reasons. One was because she knew his mother was
not likely to want him back, because he would always be a source of
small revenue. And then she herself was not a person of the affections,
and if the woman made herself in the least tiresome, she was not likely
to feel it a grief to part with the child. She only wanted him to amuse
her.
How it was all arranged Piccino did not in the least know. As he stood
by the donkey his mother and the neighbors, his father and Beppo and
the illustrious lady, all talked together. He knew they were talking
of him, because he heard his own name, but he was too little to listen
or care.
Maria listened to good purpose, however. She was wildly excited and
exhilarated. Before the bargain was half concluded she slipped over to
Piccino’s side and tried to make him understand.
“The signora is going to buy back the donkey,” she said, “and give us
money besides, and you are going back in her beautiful carriage to San
Remo, to live in her magnificent villa, and be a _signorino_, and have
everything you want. You will be dressed like the king’s son, and have
servants. You will be as rich as the _forestieri_.”
Piccino gave her a rather timid look. He was not a beloved nursery
darling, he was only a pretty little animal who was only noticed
because he was another mouth to feed; he was not of half as much
consequence as the donkey. But the dirty place where he ate and slept
was his home, and it gave him a queer feeling to think of tumbling
about in a strange house.
But Maria was so delighted, and seemed to think he had such luck, and
everybody got up a sort of excitement about him, and he did not want
the donkey to be sold, and he was too young to realize that he could
not come back as often as he liked. And in the end, when the matter
was actually settled, he found himself part of a sort of triumphal
procession which escorted him back to the place where the carriages
were. His mother and Maria and several of the neighbors walked quite
proudly along the road with him, and even old Beppo followed at a
distance, and the donkey, having been freed from the halter, and taking
an interest in her friends, loitered along also, cropping grass as she
went.
Lady Aileen and Mr. Gordon had gone on before them. When they reached
the place where the rest of the party was waiting, Lady Aileen
explained the rather remarkable thing she had done, and did so with her
usual direct coolness.
“I have bought the child with the eyelashes,” she said, “and I am going
to take him back to San Remo on the box with the coachman. He is too
dirty to come near us until he is washed.”
She was a person whom nobody thought of questioning, because she never
questioned herself. She simply did what it occurred to her to do, and
felt her own wish quite enough reason. She did not care in the least
whether people thought her extraordinary or not. That was their affair,
and not hers.
“You have bought Piccino!” one of her friends exclaimed. “Does that
mean you are going to adopt him?”
“I have not thought of it as seriously as that,” said Lady Aileen. “I
am going to take him home and have him thoroughly washed, however.
When he is clean I will decide what I shall do next. The thing that
interests me at present is, that I am curious to see what he will look
like when he has had a warm bath all over, and has been puffed with
violet powder, and had his hair combed. I want to see it done. I wonder
what he will think is happening to him. Nicholson will have to take
care of him until I find him a nurse. Look at his relatives and friends
escorting him in procession down the road. They have already begun to
regard him with veneration.”
She beckoned to one of the men servants.
“Greggs,” she said, “you and Hepburn must put the child between you on
the box. He is going back to San Remo with me. See that he does not
fall off.”
Greggs went to the coachman, with a queer expression of the nostrils.
“We’ve got a nice bunch of narcissuses to carry back between us. Her
ladyship says the boy is to go with us on the box.”
“A nice go that is for two men that’s a bit particular themselves,”
said the coachman. “Let’s hope he won’t give us both typhus fever.”
And under these auspices Piccino went forth to his strange experience.
CHAPTER II
He was too well accustomed to his dirt to think of it as being
objectionable, so the way in which Greggs lifted him up on to the seat
on the box did not at all explain itself to him. He did not realize
that in exactly the same manner the excellent Greggs would have handled
an extremely dirty little dog her ladyship had chosen to pick up by the
wayside and order him to take charge of.
But though he did not understand how he was regarded by the illustrious
_signori_ in livery who sat near him, he was conscious that he was not
comfortable, and felt that somehow they were not exactly friendly. His
place on the box seemed at an enormous height from the ground, and as
they went down hill over the winding road he was rather frightened,
particularly when they rounded a sharp curve. It seemed so probable
that he might fall off, and he was afraid to clutch at Greggs, who kept
as far from him as possible under the circumstances.
It was a long, long drive to San Remo, and it seemed longer to Piccino
than it really was. San Remo to him appeared a wonderful foreign
country. He had never been there, and only knew of it what Maria had
told him. Maria had once gone there in the small cart drawn by the
donkey, and she had never forgotten the exaltation of the adventure.
She was always willing to describe over again the streets, the white
villas, the shops, and the grand hotels.
Piccino was so tired that he fell asleep before the carriage had left
the curving road, but when it reached the city the jolting of the
wheels wakened him, and he opened his beautiful drowsy eyes and found
them dazzled by the lights. They were not very bright or numerous
lights, but they seemed so very dazzling to him that he felt bewildered
by them. If Maria had been with him he would have clung to her and
asked questions about everything, but, even if he had not been too
much a baby and too shy, he could not have asked questions of Greggs,
who was sufficiently English to feel his own language quite enough for
a sensible footman. If the Italians wished to speak Italian that was
their own taste, and they might bear the consequences of not being able
to make him understand them. English was enough for Greggs.
So Piccino was borne through the amazing streets in silence. The people
in the carriage had also become rather silent, having been lulled, as
it were, by the long drive through the woods and olive groves. Lady
Aileen, in fact, had had time to begin to wonder if her new plan would
prove as satisfactory and amusing as she had fancied it might. Mr.
Gordon was quietly speculating about it himself; the other man in the
carriage was thinking of the Battle of Flowers at Nice, and inventing
a new scheme of floral decoration for a friend’s victoria. The only
person who was really thinking of Piccino himself was the girl who sat
by Lady Aileen. She was a clever girl, and kind, and she was wondering
how he would like the change in his life, and if he had begun to feel
homesick.
The carriage had to go up-hill again before it reached Lady Aileen’s
villa. It was a snowy white villa on an eminence, and it had a terraced
garden and looked out over the sea. When they drove through the stately
gateway Piccino felt his small heart begin to thump, though he did not
know why at all. There were shadows of trees and scents of roses and
orange blossom and heliotrope. And on the highest terrace the white
house stood, with a glow of light in its portico and gleams in its
windows. Poor little dirty peasant baby, how could it be otherwise than
that all this grandeur and whiteness should alarm him!
But there was just one thing that gave him a homely feeling. And oh!
he felt it so good that it was so! As they turned in at the gate he
heard a familiar sound. It was the hysteric sniffing and jumping and
yelping whines of welcome of a dog—a poor, exiled doggie, whose kennel
was kept close by the gate, probably to guard it. He was fastened by a
chain, and evidently, being a friendly, sociable creature, did not like
being kept in this lonely place and not allowed to roam with the world.
He could not have friendly fights and associates, and he could not rush
about and jump on ladies’ dresses and gentlemen’s clothes and leave his
dusty or muddy affectionate paw-marks all over them. And so he was not
happy, and when he heard footsteps approaching always strained at his
chain, and sniffed and whined. As these returning carriages belonged to
his own domestic circle he almost went wild with joy, and leaped and
yelped and did his best to make somebody speak to him. He was adoringly
fond of Lady Aileen, who scarcely ever noticed him at all, but once
or twice had said “Good fellow! Nice dog!” as she went by, and once
had come and looked at him and given him two whole pats, while he had
wriggled and fawned himself nearly into hysterics of dog delight.
And so it happened that as the carriage turned into the beautiful
gateway Piccino heard this sound he knew—that loving, eager, pleading
dog voice, which is as much Italian as it is English, and as much
peasant as it is noble. The dogs in the hovels near Ceriani spoke just
as Lady Aileen’s dog did, and asked for just the same thing—that human
things should love them a little and believe that they themselves love
a great deal. And Piccino, who was only a beautiful little baby animal
himself, understood it vaguely, and was somehow reminded of his friend
the donkey, and felt not quite so many hundred miles from home and the
tumble-down stable and Maria. He involuntarily lifted his soft, dirty,
blooming face to Greggs in the dark.
“_A chi il cane?_” he said. (Whose dog is that?)
“What’s that he’s saying?” said Greggs to the coachman.
“Must be something about the dog,” answered Hepburn. “He said something
or other about a carney, and carney means dog. It’s a deuce of a
language to make out.”
And so, not being answered, Piccino could only resign himself, and, as
the carriage rolled up the drive, listen to the familiar homely dog
sound and wish he could get down and go to the kennel. And then the
carriage stopped before the door. And the door was thrown open by a
liveried servant, and showed the brilliantly lighted hall, where there
were beautiful pictures and ornaments, and curious things hung on
the walls, and rich rugs on the floor, and quaint seats and bits of
furniture about, so that to Piccino it looked like a grand room.
Lady Aileen spoke to the footman at the door.
“Send Nicholson to me,” she said. “Bring the child into the hall,” she
said to Greggs.
So Piccino was taken down in as gingerly a manner as he had been put
up, and Greggs set him discreetly on a bit of the floor not covered by
rugs.
He stood there without moving, his luminous eyes resting on Lady Aileen.
Lady Aileen spoke to her companions, but he did not know what she was
saying, because she spoke English.
“He is exactly like some little animal,” she said. “He does not know
what to make of it all. I am afraid he is rather stupid—but what a
beauty!”
“Poor little mite!” said the girl, “I dare say he is tired.”
Nicholson appeared almost immediately. She was a neat, tall, prim young
woman, who wore black cashmere and collar and apron of snow.
Lady Aileen made a gesture towards Piccino.
“I have brought this child from Ceriani,” she said. “Take him up-stairs
and take his rags off and burn them. Give him a bath—perhaps two or
three will be necessary. Get his hair in order. Modesta can change my
dress for me. I shall come into the bathroom myself presently.”
Piccino was watching her fixedly. What was she saying? What were they
going to do to him?
She turned away and went into the _salon_ with her guests, and
Nicholson came towards him. She gave him the same uncomfortable feeling
Greggs had given him. He felt that she did not like him, and she spoke
in English.
“Come up-stairs with me. I am going to wash you,” she said.
But Piccino did not understand and did not move. So she had to take
hold of his hand to lead him, which she objected very much to doing.
She took him up the staircase, and through landings and corridors where
he caught glimpses of wonderful bedrooms that were of dainty colors and
had silk and lace and frills and cushions in them, and made him feel
more strange than ever. And at last she opened a door and took him into
a place which was all blue and white porcelain—walls and floors and
everything else—including a strange large object in one corner, which
had shining silver things at one end. And she released his hand and
went to the silver things and twisted them round, and, as if by magic,
two streams of clear water gushed out and began to fill the blue and
white trough as the bed of a torrent is filled by the spring rains.
Piccino’s eyes grew bigger and more lustrous every second as he stared.
Was she doing this interesting but rather alarming thing to amuse him?
Maria had never seen anything like this in San Remo, or she would
certainly have told him. He was seeing more than Maria. For a moment or
so he was not sorry he had come. If the rich _forestieri_ had things
like this to play with, they must have other things as amusing. And
somehow the water was hot. He could see the pretty white steam rise
from it. He came a little closer to look. “Nicola,” as he called her in
his mind, having heard Lady Aileen speak to her as “Nicholson”—Nicola
moved to and fro and collected curious things together—a white cake
of something, a big, light, round thing made of holes, large pieces
of thick, soft, white cloth with fringe at the ends, something—these
last—which must be like the things Maria had heard of as being used in
churches by the priests.
“_Che fai?_” (What are you doing?) he said to Nicola.
But she did not understand him, and only said something in English as
she took off her white cuffs and rolled up her sleeves.
By this time the two rushing streams had splashed and danced into the
bed of the torrent until it was nearly full. Nicola twisted the silver
things as before, and by magic again the rushing ceased and the clear
pool was still, the light vapor rising from it.
Nicola came to him and began to take off his clothes with the very tips
of her fingers, speaking in English as she did it. He did not know that
she was saying:
“A pretty piece of work for a lady’s maid to do. My own clothes may go
into the washtub and the rag-bag after it. The filth of such people
is past bearing. And it’s her ladyship all over to have such a freak.
There’s no end to her whims. Burn them! she might well say burn them.
The sooner they are in the fire the better.” She took off the last rag
and kicked it aside with her foot. Piccino stood before her, a little,
soft, brown cherub without wings.
“Upon my word!” she said, “he is pretty. I suppose that’s the reason.”
Piccino was beginning to feel very queer indeed. The rushing water was
amusing, but what was her intention in taking off all his clothes? That
was not funny. Surely the _forestieri_ wore clothes when they were
in San Remo. And, besides, she had given his cherished trousers—the
beautiful trousers of Sandro which had been given him for his own—a
kick which had no respect in it, and which sent them flying into a
corner. His little red mouth began to look unsteady at the corners.
“Yes, that’s the reason,” she said. “It’s because he’s so pretty.” And
she picked him up in her arms and bore him to the bath.
Piccino looked down into the blue and white pool which seemed to him so
big and deep. He felt himself being lowered into it, and uttered a wild
shriek. They were going to drown him—to drown him—to drown him!
He was in the water. He felt it all around him—nearly up to his
shoulders. He clung to Nicola and uttered shriek after shriek, he
kicked and splashed and beat with his feet, the water leaped and foamed
about him, and flew into his eyes and nose and mouth.
“_Lasciatemi! Lasciatemi!_” (Let me go! Let me go!) he screamed.
Nicholson tried her best to hold him.
“My goodness!” she exclaimed, “I can’t manage him. He is like a little
wildcat. Keep quiet, you naughty boy! Be still, you bad little pig, and
let me wash you! Good gracious! what am I to do?”
But Piccino would not be drowned without a struggle. To be held in
water like that! to be suffocated by its splashing in his nose and
mouth, and blinded by its dashing in his eyes! He fought with feet and
teeth, used his head like a battering-ram, and shrieked and shrieked
for aid.
“_Io non ho fatto niente! Io non ho fatto niente!_ (I have done
nothing.) Maria! Maria!”
And the noise was so appalling that almost immediately footsteps were
to be heard upon the stairs, swift movement in the corridor, and the
bathroom door opened.
It was Lady Aileen who came in, amazed, frowning, and rather alarmed.
The girl friend who had wondered if Piccino would like his surroundings
was with her.
Piccino threw back his head at sight of them and battled and shrieked
still more wildly. He thought they must have come to his aid.
“_M’amazza! M’amazza! Aiuto!_” he wailed.
“Bless me, what is the matter?” exclaimed Lady Aileen, and came towards
the bath.
“He doesn’t like to be washed, my lady,” panted Nicholson, struggling;
“he seems quite frightened.”
Suddenly Lady Aileen began to laugh.
“Take him out for a moment, Nicholson,” she said, “take him out.
Isobel,” to the girl, her words broken with laughter, “he thinks
Nicholson is drowning him. Soap and water are such unknown quantities
to him that he thinks that in this proportion they mean death.”
Nicholson had lifted her charge out at once, only too glad of the
respite. Piccino stood, wet and quaking and sobbing, by the bathtub.
Lady Aileen began to take off her gloves and bracelets.
“Give _me_ an apron,” she said to Nicholson. And on having one handed
to her she tied it over her dress and knelt down before her new
plaything.
“Little imbecile,” she said in Italian, taking hold of his wet
shoulders, “no one is going to hurt you. You are only going to be made
clean. You are too dirty to be touched, and the water will wash the
dirt off.”
Piccino only looked up at her, sobbing. At least, she had had him
taken out of the great pool; but what did she mean by wanting his dirt
removed by such appalling means?
“I am going to wash you myself,” said Lady Aileen, lifting him in her
strong white arms. “Don’t let me have any nonsense. If you make a
noise and fight I _will_ drown you.” She was laughing, but Piccino was
struck dumb with fear. She looked so tall and powerful and such a grand
lady, that he did not know what she might feel at liberty to do in her
powerfulness.
“It is only a bath,” said the girl Isobel in a kind voice. “The water
won’t go over your head. Don’t be frightened, it won’t hurt.”
Lady Aileen calmly put him back in the tub.
Her white hands were so firm and steady that he felt the uselessness of
struggle. And if he fought she might drown him. He looked up piteously
at the signorina with the encouraging face and voice, and stood in the
water, aghast, and with big tears rolling down his cheeks, but passive
in helpless despair.
But ah! what strange things were done to him!
The illustrious signora took the cake of white stuff and the big porous
thing, and rubbed them together in the water and made quantities of
snow-white froth; then she rubbed him over and over and over, then
she splashed the water over him until she washed the foam off his
body, then she scrubbed him with something, then she did strange
things to his ears, then she took a little brush and scrubbed his
finger-nails—covering them with the white froth and then washing it
off—then she did the same thing to his feet and rubbed them with a
piece of stone.
[Illustration: “‘I AM GOING TO WASH YOU MYSELF,’ SAID LADY AILEEN,
LIFTING HIM IN HER STRONG WHITE ARMS”]
Then she began with his head. Poor neglected little mop of matted
silk, what did she not do to it? She rubbed it with the cake of white
stuff till it was a soft, slippery ball of foam, then she scrubbed and
scrubbed and thrust her hands in it and shook it about, and almost
drowned him with the water she poured on it. If he had not been so
frightened he would have yelled. But people who will do such things
to you, what will they not do if you make them angry! Under this
avalanche of snowy stuff and this torrent of water a wild, despairing
memory of Maria and the donkey came back to him. Only last night he
had fallen asleep in his corner among all the familiar sights and
sounds and smells, and without water coming near him. And now he was
nearly up to his neck in it, it was streaming from his hair, his ears,
his body—he could hear and see and taste nothing else. Oh! could it
be possible that he had been all wrong in that first imagining that
perhaps the rushing streams were to amuse him? Could it be that this
was all to amuse the _forestieri_ themselves? That they had brought
him to San Remo to make him live in water like a fish? That they would
never let him out?
Suddenly the magnificent signora lifted him out of the pool. She set
him streaming upon something soft and white and dry, which Nicola had
spread upon the blue and white tiles of the floor.
“There!” she said. “Now I think he is clean, for the first time in his
life. Nicholson, you may rub him dry.”
She stood up, laughing, and rather flushed with exertion.
“It has amused me,” she said to Isobel; “I would not have believed it,
but it _has_ amused me. Almost anything new will amuse one the first
time one does it. When you have brushed his hair, Nicholson, put him to
bed.”
She laid aside the apron and picked up her gloves.
She went out of the room, smiling, and Piccino was left to the big
white cloths and Nicola.
What happened then was even more tiresome than the bath, though it was
not so alarming. He was rubbed as if he were a little horse, and his
hair received treatment which seemed to him incredible. When it was
dry, strange instruments were used upon it. The knots and tangles were
struggled with and dragged out. Sometimes it seemed as if his curls
were being pulled out by the roots, sometimes as if his head itself
was to be taken off. It seemed to him that he stood hours by Nicola’s
knee, whimpering. If Maria had been rash enough to attempt to subject
him to such indignities he would have kicked and screamed and fought,
but in this wonderful house, among these wonderful people who were all
_forestieri_, he was terror-stricken by his sense of strangeness. To be
plunged into water—to be rubbed and scrubbed—to have the hair dragged
from one’s head—who would not be terrified? Suddenly he buried his face
in Nicola’s lap and broke into woful weeping. “_Voglio andare a casa.
Lasciammi andare a Maria ed il ciuco!_” (I want to go home. Let me go
home to Maria—and the donkey!) he cried.
“Well, well, it is nearly done now,” said Nicholson, “and a nice job it
has been. And what I am to put you to bed in I don’t know, unless in
one of her ladyship’s own dressing-jackets.”
“_Voglio andare a casa!_” he wept. But Nicholson did not understand
him in the least. She went and found one of the dressing-jackets and
brought it back to the bathroom. It was covered with rich lace and tied
with ribbons; it was too big, and he was lost in it; but when Nicholson
bundled him up in it, and he stood with the lace frills dangling over
his hands, and his beautiful little face and head rising above the
great, rich ruff they made, he was a wonderful sight to see.
But he was not aware of it, and only felt as if he were dressed in
strange trickery; and when he was picked up and carried out of the
room—the beautiful trousers of Sandro being left on the floor in the
corner—he felt that the final indignity had been offered.
She carried him into one of the wonderful rooms he had caught a glimpse
of. It was all blue, and was so amazing with its frills and blue
flowers and lace and ornaments that he thought it must be a place where
some other strange thing was to be done to him. But Nicola only put him
down on a soft place covered with lace, and with a sort of tent of
lace and silk at the top of it.
She said something to him in English, and went away and left him.
He sat and stared about him. Was it a place where people slept? Did
the _forestieri_ lay their heads on those white things? Was this soft
wonder he sat on, a bed? He looked up above him at the beautiful tent,
and felt so lost and strange that he could almost have shouted for
Maria again. If she had been there, or if he could have understood what
Nicola said, it would not have been so awful. But it was so grand and
strange, and Ceriani and Maria and the donkey seemed in another world
thousands of miles away. It was as if suddenly he had been taken to
Paradise, and had found himself frightened and homesick because it was
so far from Ceriani, and so different.
Nicola came back with a plate. There were things to eat on it, and
she offered them to him. And then he realized that a strange thing
had happened to him, which had never happened before in his life.
There before him was a plateful of good things—things such as the
_forestieri_ brought in their hampers. And he did not want them!
Something seemed to have filled up his throat, and he could not eat.
He, Piccino, actually could not eat! The tears came into his eyes, and
he shook his head.
“_Non ho fame_” (I am not hungry,) he whimpered. And he poked the plate
away.
“I suppose he has been stuffed with cakes all day,” said Nicholson,
“and he is too sleepy. Good gracious, how pretty he is!”
She turned down the frilled and embroidered sheets, and gave the
pillows a little thump. Then she picked Piccino up again, put him
into the bed and covered him up. He lay among the whiteness, a lovely
picture put to bed, his eyes wide open, and shining with his awe.
“Go to sleep,” she said, “and don’t be a bad boy.” And then she turned
out the light and walked out of the room, leaving the door a little
open.
Piccino lay among the softness, his eyes growing bigger and bigger in
the dark. He was so little, and everything around him seemed so large
and magnificent. This was the way the king’s son was put to bed—bundled
up in a strange garment, with lace frills tickling his ears and cheeks,
and with big sleeves which prevented his using his hands. And he could
not hear the donkey in her stable—the donkey, who must be there this
very moment, because she had not been taken away, but had been bought
back from Beppo. Oh, if he could hear her now! but perhaps—perhaps he
never could get to the stable again; the _forestieri_—the strange,
rich lady, would never let him go back—never!
A little sob broke from him, under Lady Aileen’s dressing-jacket his
breast heaved piteously, he turned and buried his face upon the pillow,
and wept and wept and wept.
He cried so that he found he was beginning to make little sounds in
spite of himself, and he tried to smother them, because he did not know
what the _forestieri_ did to children who made a noise—perhaps held
them under the rushing streams of water. But just at the moment when
he was trying to stifle his sobs and prevent their becoming wails, a
strange thing happened. The door was pushed open and some one came into
the room. At least, he heard a sound of feet on the floor, though he
did not see any one even when he peeped. Feet? They were not Nicola’s
feet, but softer and more pattering. He held his breath to listen. They
came to his bed and stopped. And then he heard something else—a soft,
familiar panting, almost as familiar as the donkey’s stirring in the
stable. He sat up in bed.
“_E un cane_” (It is a dog,) he cried.
And the answer was a leap, and a rough, dear, hairy body was beside
him, while a warm, excitedly lapping, affectionate tongue caressed his
hands, his face, his neck.
For in some mysterious way the lonely dog at the entrance gate had
slipped his collar, and in rushing through the house to find some one
to love and rejoice over had heard the little smothered sobs, and come
in at once to answer and comfort him, knowing in his dog heart that
here was one who was lonely and exiled too.
And Piccino fell upon him and caught him in his arms, dragging him
close to his side, rubbing his wet cheeks upon the rough, hairy coat,
and so holding him, nestled against and pillowed his head upon him,
rescued from his loneliness and terror almost as he might have been if
the dog had been the donkey.
CHAPTER III
It was a great comfort to go to sleep embracing and embraced by a
shaggy friend of one’s own world, but when the morning came it seemed
that, somehow, to the _forestieri_ it appeared a different thing. When
Nicola came in she uttered an exclamation of horror.
“The dirty little thing!” she cried. “Ah, my goodness, he has been
asleep all night with that dusty, muddy dog! What _will_ my lady say?
Look at his face, and the sheets, and her ladyship’s jacket!”
Piccino sat up in his silk and lace tent, holding on to the dog.
Something was wrong, he saw, though he understood nothing. What could
it be?
“Get out!” cried Nicholson, slapping the dog vigorously. “Get out! How
in the world did you get here?” and she pushed the shaggy friend off
the bed and ran after him, driving him out of the room.
Lady Aileen met her on the threshold.
“What is that animal doing here?” she asked.
“Indeed, my lady, I don’t know,” said Nicholson. “He never did such a
thing before. He must have sniffed out the child. He has been sleeping
with him all night.”
“Sleeping with him!” exclaimed Lady Aileen. She stepped into the
bedroom and stood for a moment gazing at Piccino.
The dog had been both muddy and dusty. Both Piccino and the bed
revealed unmistakable signs of the fact.
“Dear me!” said her ladyship. “Nicholson, take him at once and wash
him.”
And so he was taken again into the blue and white porcelain bathroom.
He could not believe the evidence of his senses when Nicola turned
the silver things again, and the streams came rushing forth. He stood
and looked at her, quaking. And she came and took off his fantastic
nightgown as she had taken off his rags the night before. And she
lifted him up and put him into the deep water again, and soaped and
splashed and washed him almost as hard as she had done it the first
time.
He began to feel stunned and dazed. He did not scream or fight or
struggle. He simply gave himself up and stared into space. Moment by
moment Ceriani removed itself farther and farther. The dog had brought
it nearer, but the dog had been torn away from him. And here he was in
the water, being scrubbed once more.
He was taken out and rubbed dry, and Nicola left him for a moment
again. When she came back she carried white things. She began to put
them on him—a strange little fine shirt with lace, curious little short
things for his legs—not the beautiful masculine trousers of Sandro,
alas! but short white things trimmed with embroidery, and only just
reaching to his knees—and then—a petticoat! Yes, it was a petticoat!
Just as if he had never been a man at all. He pushed it aside, his
cheeks crimson with indignation.
“_Roba di donna! No! no! Dove sono i miei pantaloni! Io porto
pantaloni!_” (Not women’s clothes! Where are my trousers? I wear
trousers.)
Nicholson gave him a sharp slap. She was tired of his Italian
exclaimings.
“You naughty child!” she said, “behave yourself! I don’t know what you
mean, but I won’t have it!” And so, in spite of himself, the indignity
was put upon him. He was dressed in _roba di donna_, just like a girl.
And round his waist was tied a broad sash, and round his neck was put
a lace collar, and on his brown legs short socks, which did not reach
his calves. And at his back there was a big bow, and under his chin a
smaller one; and combs were dragged through his hair as before, and
brushes plied on it. And when it was all done he stood feeling like a
mountebank, and dumb and scarlet under his sense of insult.
Let him once get away—let him once get away, and he would show them
whether they would get him again! He did not know how far it was to
Ceriani, but if he could steal out of a door when no one was looking,
and walk back, they might take the donkey if they liked, but he would
scream and kick and fight and bite until they were afraid to touch him,
before they should buy him again.
This was rankling in his mind as Nicholson pulled him after her down
the staircase and through the hall to the breakfast-room. Nicholson was
getting rather cross. She had not been engaged as a nurse, but as a
maid. And she had had to go through all that scrubbing in the evening,
and in the morning had had to rush out and borrow clothes for the child
to wear from one of Lady Aileen’s married friends, and she had not
enjoyed having to get up and take a walk so early.
But her grievance was not so deep a one as Piccino’s.
When he was taken into the breakfast-room Lady Aileen made him feel
sulkier than ever. It was the way she looked at him, though he did not
in the least know why. If he had been old enough he might have known
that to be looked at as if one was not a person, but only a curious
little animal, is enough to make any one rebellious. She called him to
her just as she would have called her black poodle.
“Come here!” she said.
He went to her, sticking his red mouth out.
“What are you pouting for?” she asked. “What is the matter, Nicholson?”
“I don’t know, my lady,” answered Nicholson, with rather acid
respectfulness. “He doesn’t like to be washed, and he doesn’t like to
be dressed. I suppose he’s not used to being kept tidy.”
“Kept tidy!” said Lady Aileen, “I should think not. You look very nice
in your new clothes,” she added to Piccino, in Italian.
“_Ma queste sono vestite di ragazza_,” (But these are girl’s clothes,)
he said, pouting.
“You will wear what I wish,” said Lady Aileen. “Nicholson, give him
some porridge. I am going to feed him as English children are fed.
Heaven knows how he will behave at table! I am curious to see.”
It was only that—she was curious to see.
And the queer breakfast was given to him; not nice black bread and
figs, or _pasta_ or salad, but oatmeal porridge, which he had never
seen before. He did not like it. It seemed sloppy and flavorless to
him, and he would not eat it. He pushed it back, and sat and pouted,
and Lady Aileen was amused, and sat and talked English to the visitors
who were at table with her, and they told each other how pretty he was
and how like a picture, and how interesting it was that, in spite of
being dressed like an English child and given porridge to eat, he was
still more than ever nothing but a beautiful little Italian peasant.
And all the day was like that, and baby as he was he raged within his
little soul, knowing somehow that he was only there to be looked at and
remarked upon, and to amuse them by being a curiosity.
They took him out in a grand carriage and drove him about the town,
taking him to shops and buying clothes for him—always _roba di
donna_—and when they were tried on, and he looked angry, Lady Aileen
laughed, and even the men or women in the shops made jokes aside. He
would have liked to fly at them and kill them, but they were so big and
he was so little—only Piccino from Ceriani.
And then they took him back to the villa—the poor dog leaping and
straining at his chain by which he was fastened again when they passed
the gate—and his face and hands were washed once more, and his hair
combed, and he was given more strange things for dinner. A solid
underdone English chop without sauce seemed a horrible thing to him,
and nursery rice pudding filled him with amazement. He stared at the
big potato Nicola put on his plate, and wondered if he was to be made
to starve.
“Goodness, what does the child want?” exclaimed Nicholson. “I am sure
he has never had such a dinner set before him before.”
That was exactly it. He had lived on things so different that this
substantial nursery food quite revolted him.
He thought of himself only as a prisoner. He began to feel empty and
furious. He was possessed by but one thought—how he could get away.
In the afternoon he was dressed again—in another girl’s frock and sash
and lace collar—and a lot of ladies and gentlemen came to see Lady
Aileen. Her five-o’clock teas were very popular, and this afternoon
every one wanted to see the child she had picked up at Ceriani. People
were always curious about her whims. So Piccino was talked about and
examined and laughed over as the most charming of jokes, and the more
he hung back and pouted the more he was laughed at, until his cheeks
were crimson all the time, and he would not eat the cakes people kept
giving him, just as they would have fed a parrot to make it talk, or a
poodle to make it play tricks.
“He seems rather a sulky child,” said Lady Aileen, “and he evidently
detests civilization. He thought Nicholson was going to drown him, and
fought like a little tiger when she put him in his bath. The watch-dog
broke loose and came and slept with him last night. He has hardly eaten
anything to-day. I wonder if one could civilize him.”
While all the gay people were drinking tea and chocolate, and eating
cakes in the _salon_, and sauntering in groups among the flowers on
the terrace, some strolling musicians came into the grounds. A man and
woman and some children, who played guitars and mandolins and sang
peasant songs, seeing the bright dresses and hearing the voices, were
attracted by them. At such places they often got money.
When they began to play and sing Piccino ran to the window. They sang
as the people at Ceriani did, and he was wild to see them. When he
saw them he wanted to get near them. There was a boy, who sang with
the father and mother, and a girl about the age of Maria, who was not
singing. It was she who went round to beg for money, and she stood
aside, calmly munching a piece of black bread. She had other pieces of
something tied in her apron, and she looked so like Maria did when she
had begged something good, that Piccino’s mouth watered and a bold idea
came to him.
Everybody was so busy amusing themselves that for a while he was
forgotten. He glanced furtively about him, and slipped out of a side
door.
The next minute the girl who was like Maria almost jumped. From
among the rose-trees and palms she stood by, there came a strange
little figure. It was a child dressed grandly, as if he belonged to
the richest of the _forestieri_, but he had a beautiful little dark,
rich-colored face and immense black eyes, and he looked at her only as
one little peasant looks at another, and he spoke in the Italian only
spoken by peasant children.
“I am hungry,” he said. “I have had nothing to eat. Give me some of
your bread.”
The girl stared at him, bewildered.
“Some bread!” she exclaimed; “do you live here?”
“I live at Ceriani,” he said; “I am Piccino. The signora took me away.
Give me some bread.”
She broke off a big piece, still staring wildly. She had a vague idea
that perhaps he would give her something for it. In her apron she had a
piece of Salame sausage, well flavored with garlic, and she broke off a
piece of that and gave it to him too.
[Illustration: “THE GIRL STARED AT HIM”]
Piccino seized it and devoured it. Never in his life had anything
seemed so good to him. He ate like a little wolf, alternate bites of
black bread and sausage. His face and hands became smeared and covered
with grease, he clutched his Salame so hungrily and ate in such a hurry.
“Don’t they feed you?” asked the girl.
“They have lumps of raw meat, and I cannot eat their pasta,” said
Piccino.
It was in this guise mutton chops, oatmeal porridge, and rice pudding
appeared to him.
Mr. Gordon, who was one of the visitors, chanced to look out of the
window. He put up his eyeglass suddenly.
“Piccino is fraternizing with the little girl musician, Lady Aileen,”
he said with a laugh, “and they are eating bread and sausage.”
“Horrors!” exclaimed Lady Aileen.
She sent Greggs out to bring him in at once.
Greggs returned in a few minutes, bringing him, hanging back
reluctantly, his cheeks and mouth glossy with sausage grease, and
exhaling such fragrance that people became aware of him as he
approached, and stepped aside, making a pathway.
“Horrors!” said Lady Aileen again, “he _reeks_ with garlic! Take him
away at once, Greggs. Take him to Nicholson and—and tell her to _wash_
him.”
And so for the third time that day Piccino was deluged with soap
and water. But it was not possible for Nicholson to wash away
the fragrance of the garlic. Even when he shone with cleanliness
outwardly, and had had still another frock put on, he was redolent of
it and perfumed all the air about him. He was not, of course, able to
translate the names Nicholson called him, but he knew very well that
he was being called names. He had often heard Maria scolded at home,
but he had not been exactly used to ratings himself. But he could
not mistake Nicholson. She was in a rage, and thought him a dirty,
troublesome little pig. She had been dressed trimly for the afternoon,
and had been enjoying herself looking on at the party in the garden,
and to be called to wash and dress again a greasy little peasant,
smelling of garlic, was more than her temper could stand. In fact, it
happened at last, at some movement of resentment of Piccino’s, she gave
him a sound slap for the second time that day.
He opened his mouth, gave one howl of rage, and then as suddenly
stopped. If he had been twenty-six instead of six he would have stuck
his knife into her, if he had had one. He belonged to a race of
people who used knives. As it was, the look in his handsome eyes gave
Nicholson a queer feeling.
He could not be taken back to the _salon_, and Nicholson did not intend
to sit in the room with him and inhale garlic. So she set him smartly
in an arm-chair and left him, going out and shutting the door after
her. She was going to stay in an adjoining chamber and look out of the
window, coming to give him a glance now and then.
And there he sat, breathing passion and garlic, after she had gone.
Upon the wall opposite to him there hung an oval mirror with a frame
of flowers in Dresden china. He could see himself in it—his beautiful
little face, his flashing eyes, and fiercely pouting mouth, his lace
collar and bow, and his _vestite di ragazza_ altogether. He did not
know he was pretty, he only felt he was ridiculous—that they had kept
putting him in water, that the servants despised him and did not want
to touch him, that he had been scolded and slapped, and that the
donkey would not know him. Suddenly big tears rushed into his eyes.
Was he going to stay here always and be put in water every few hours,
and called names, and have no one to play with, and never understand
anybody, and never see Maria and the donkey—never—never! The big tears
rolled hot and angry as well as miserable down his soft cheeks.
“_Voglio andare a casa!_” he sobbed. “_Voglio andare a casa!_” (I want
to go home! I want to go home!)
* * * * *
When Nicholson came to look at him he was lying against the cushioned
arm of the chair, fast asleep.
“Goodness knows I am not going to waken him!” she said. “I shall let
him sleep until I have had my dinner and it is time to give him his. If
her ladyship intends to keep him she must have a regular nurse.”
CHAPTER IV
It was dusk when he wakened. Lady Aileen’s callers had departed some
time ago, and Lady Aileen herself had departed to take a twilight
drive, which was a thing she was fond of doing. The servants were
enjoying themselves in their own fashion in the kitchen, and all the
house seemed very quiet.
It seemed so still to Piccino when he slipped off his chair and stood
on his feet rubbing his eyes, that for a moment he felt a little
frightened. He was so accustomed to living in a hovel crowded with
children and only partitioned off from the donkey, that Lady Aileen’s
villa seemed enormous to him. It was not enormous, but it seemed so. He
looked round him and listened.
“Nobody is here!” he said. “Everybody has gone away. Nicola has gone
away.”
He certainly did not want Nicholson, but his sense of desolation
overwhelmed him.
And then, as he stood there, there came a sound which seemed to alter
everything. It came through the window, which was open, and which he
ran towards at once. It was the voice of the friend who had come to
him the night before—the dog who lived in the fine kennel at the gate,
and wanted human things so much, and was so unhappy.
Piccino listened to him a moment, and his breath began to come quickly.
He turned round and went to the door. It was not locked—Nicholson had
not thought of that. It was easy enough to open, and when he had opened
it he made his way quickly towards the stairs.
He did not go out at the big front door at which he had been brought
in. That was shut, and he knew he was too little to open it, but he
remembered the side entrance into the garden, out of which he had
slipped when he went to the girl who looked like Maria. He found it
again and passed through it, and was out among the flowers in a moment,
running quickly down the broad drive to the gate.
How the dog jumped and yelped and covered him with caresses when he
reached the kennel! He knew his small bed-fellow again well enough.
Perhaps, too, he liked the fragrance of the garlic, which was still as
perceptible as ever. The two embraced and rubbed against each other,
and tumbled affectionately about, until Piccino was quite dirty enough
for the bathtub again. But there was to be no more bathtub if he could
help it. He wanted the dog to come with him, though, and help him to
find his way; and he fumbled and struggled with the chain and collar
until his friend was loose, and, finding that nothing held him, began
to race up and down in breathless rapture and run in circles, darting
like a wild thing.
“Come,” said Piccino, “come with me. I am going home.”
He did not realize the number of chances there might be that he would
be caught and carried back into bondage. He was not old enough to think
much of that, but he just knew enough to teach him that it was best to
keep in the shade when he saw any one coming. He trudged along, keeping
under trees and near walls, and he was clever enough to do it until he
turned off the highway which led through the city. He passed by houses
and shops and villas and gardens, but at last he turned into the road
which sloped up among the olive vineyards, into the hills. Then he felt
that he was at home. He did not know that he was still miles and miles
away from Ceriani; he only knew that the big trees and the little ones
were familiar things, that when he lifted his face he could see the
sky he knew so well, and that the wind that blew softly up from the
sea among his curls was something he seemed to have been far away from
during these last strange two days. These things made him feel that
Ceriani must be near.
He was used to running about and being on his legs all day, or he would
have been tired out long before he was. When he did begin to be tired
he sat down on the grass, and the dog sat with him. In their own way
they talked to each other. Then they would get up and trudge on.
They had rested and trudged on many times before he began to be really
discouraged. But his legs were so short, and in time he began to feel
as if Ceriani was too far away! Stars were beginning to come out, and
he suddenly realized that he was very little, and it had taken the big
carriages of the _forestieri_ quite a long time to return to San Remo
after their picnic. He sat down suddenly and began to cry.
“We can’t find it!” he said to the dog. “We can’t find it!”
The dog looked very much grieved. It is probable that he knew quite
well what Piccino said. He shook his head until his ears made a
flapping noise. Then he pushed close to Piccino and kissed him, lapping
the salt tears off his soft cheeks as they rolled down. He knew he
could have found the place all by himself, and got there without any
particular trouble, but he could not leave his friend, and such a
little friend, too, by the roadside. So he pressed close to him and
looked sympathetic, and kissed his tears off cheeringly.
“We can’t find it!” wailed Piccino. “Maria! Maria! Maria! Ma-ri-a!”
Up the curve of the road below there toiled a donkey dragging a cart.
It was one of the little peasant carts, floored with a lattice-work of
ropes, and there were three people in it. They were a boy and two very
young men. They had been to a _festa_, and the boy was fast asleep, and
the two young men were in very good spirits. They had been dancing and
enjoying themselves, and had had so much wine that they were not quite
sure of what they were doing. They alternately sang songs and made
jokes and laughed at each other. One of the favorite jokes was about a
pretty peasant girl they had both been dancing with, and as it chanced,
her name was Maria. After a good deal of such joking they had both been
silent for a while, being a little stupid with the wine they had had,
and quieted a little by the motion of the cart as the donkey jogged
along with it. It was very peaceful in this place, with the gentle wind
from the sea, and the occasional rustle of the olives, and the stars
shining sweetly above the many shadows.
“What are you thinking of, Pietro?” said one to the other at last, with
a little laugh.
“Maria! Maria! Ma-ri-a!” wailed Piccino, a few hundred feet above them.
They both burst out laughing at once.
“Of Maria! Maria!” said Alessandro. “The very trees call out to you!”
And they found this such a beautiful joke that they laughed until the
very donkey was afraid they would roll off the cart.
By the time they stopped they were close to Piccino, and, whether
because she wanted a rest or from some queer instinct, the donkey
stopped too.
“Maria!” cried Piccino. “_Voglio andare a casa! Voglio an-dar-e!_”
“It is a child,” said Pietro. “It is lost!” They had had wine enough
to be good-natured, and ready for any adventure. Pietro got out of the
cart and rather unsteadily went to the side of the road, where Piccino
sat crying with his dog.
“Who are you?” he said, “and what are you doing here?”
Piccino answered him with sobs. He was not so clear as he thought he
was, and Pietro and Alessandro laughed a good deal. They thought he
was a great joke—all the more when they saw how he was dressed. Their
heads were not clear enough to permit them to quite understand what
was meant by the childish rambling and disconnected story about the
_forestieri_ and the water and Nicola and the donkey, but they found
out that somehow the young one lived near Ceriani and wanted to get
home to Maria. They themselves lived not far from Ceriani, and if they
had been quite sober might have put this and that together and guessed
something of the truth; but as it was, it happened to seem enough of a
joke for them to be inclined to carry it out.
“Let us take him in the cart as far as we go,” said Alessandro. “He
can find his way home after we leave him. Perhaps he will talk to us
about his Maria. She may be prettier than the other one.” And so he
was lifted into the cart, and the dog trotted joyfully by the donkey’s
side. The two probably talked to each other confidentially, and
everything was explained between them as far as the dog could explain
it. At all events, he could explain the loneliness of living in a
kennel with a chain round your neck, and grand people passing you,
laughing and talking, and taking no notice, however much you jumped and
whined and begged to have a pat and a word, and not seeing that you
loved everybody.
Piccino sat in the cart and leaned against Pietro or the boy, and
enjoyed himself. He answered questions about Maria, and did not
know why his rescuers laughed at everything he said. Maria seemed a
very mature person to him, and he did not know that the young men’s
impression that she was a pretty young woman was not the correct one.
Pietro had some good things he had brought from the _festa_ in a paper,
and he gave him some. That he was such a pretty, soft, rabbit-like
little thing, made things pleasant for him even when he was picked
up from the roadside by two young peasants full of cheap wine. They
laughed at his disconnected babbling, and thought him great fun, and
when he was sleepy let him cuddle down and be comfortable.
He was very fast asleep when they wakened him, having reached the end
of their journey.
“Here!” they said, shaking him good-naturedly enough, “you can find
your way to Maria now.”
He stood unsteadily in the road where Pietro put him, rubbing his eyes,
and feeling the dog greeting him again by jumping at him and kissing
him.
“Where is Maria?” he said, sleepily.
Pietro and Alessandro were sleepy too by this time; they had almost had
time to forget him while he was asleep.
“Go on and you will find her,” they said. “Ceriani is near here.”
When he saw the donkey led away Piccino was on the point of crying
because he was to be left, but before he quite began he saw by the
light of the moon, which had risen since he fell asleep, a familiar
tree—a big-twisted and huge-trunked olive he had sat under many a time
when he had strayed down the road with Maria. It made his heart begin
to beat fast and his rising tears dry in their fountain. It was true!
He was near Ceriani! He was near home! He could find it! He began to
run as fast as his short legs could carry him. The white villa and the
grand _signori_ who had joked about him all day, the bathtub and Nicola
and the dreadful _pasta_, seemed as far away now as Ceriani and the
donkey had been this morning. The tears that had dried for joy suddenly
began to rise again for joy. He did not know anything about it himself,
but it was joy which made him begin to choke—this beautiful little
savage peasant who had been taken away to a world so much too grand for
him.
He ran and ran, and at every yard he saw something that he knew, and
felt that he loved it because he knew it. The late moon shone down on
him, a little white figure running eagerly; the trees rustled as he
passed.
“Maria! Maria!” he said, but he did not say it loud, but softly.
And at last he had reached it—his own dear hovel which he seemed to
have left a thousand years ago. He stood and beat on the door with his
little soft fists.
“Maria! Maria!” he said, “open the door! I have come home. Let me in!”
But inside they slept the heavy sleep of wornout peasants and of tired
childhood. They could not have heard him even if he had been able to
make more noise. His child hands could make very little. They slept so
heavily that he could hear them.
And there he stood in the moonlight, thumping on the old door,
unanswered. And the dog stood by him, wagging his tail and looking up
at him with such a companionable air that he could not feel he was
alone, and actually did not begin to cry. At all events he had got
home, and was among the hills again, with the trees growing close
around him, and Maria and the donkey.
His whimper lost itself in a sudden sense of relief. Yes, there was the
donkey in her stable, and the door would keep nobody out.
“The donkey will let us in,” he said to the dog. “Let us go in there.”
And a few moments later the donkey was roused from her sleep by
something soft stumbling against her as she lay down, and, being a
donkey with a memory, she realized that a familiar friend had come to
her at this untimely hour, and she knew the little voice that spoke,
and the little body which cuddled against her side as if she were a
pillow, and being also affectionate and maternal, she did not resent
the intrusion by any unfriendly moving.
And in the early, early morning, when Rita opened the stable door and
let in a shaft of the gold sunlight which was lighting up the darkness
of the olive-trees, the first thing it shone upon was the beautiful,
tired little travel-stained figure of Piccino, who lay fast asleep
against the donkey’s gray side, his arms around her neck, and the dog’s
body pressed close and lovingly against his own.
* * * * *
Upon the whole, Lady Aileen was not very much surprised and not at
all disturbed when it was found that he was gone. She sent some one
to Ceriani, and when the news was brought back to her that he was
discovered there, she only laughed a little. In fact, she had found
it too tiresome an amusement to undertake the management of a lovely
little wild animal, to whom civilization only represented horror and
dismay. She sent Rita some money—not too much, but enough to make her
feel quite rich for a few weeks. For the rest, she only remembered
Piccino as part of an anecdote it was rather amusing to tell to those
of her friends in London who were entertained by anecdotes.
“He thought we were savages or mad,” she used to say. “I think he might
have borne anything, perhaps, but the bathtub. He said that we ‘put him
in water!’”
THE CAPTAIN’S YOUNGEST
THE CAPTAIN’S YOUNGEST
There never were another like him, that’s certain. I’ve seen a good
many young gentlemen in my day, being in the army, and under officers
as was what you may call swells, and had families of their own, some
of them, but I never saw a young gentleman as could hold a candle to
Master Lionel; no, nor as were fit to black his boots, for the matter
of that. And I knew him, too, from the time he were a young gentleman
in long clothes, being carried about in his ayah’s arms, and many’s
the time I’ve carried him myself, and been proud to do it. I had no
children of my own, though I’d always been taken with them. I wasn’t
a married man, and knew I never should be, for that matter, after
curly-headed little Maggie Shea died of the fever that blazing hot year
when the disease was like a plague among us. She’d given me her promise
only a week before; and I never saw the woman I wanted after her.
Sometimes I’ve thought I was fonder of the children because of it. She
had been fond of them, and like a little mother she was to the seven
that were sisters and brothers to her. And there was a sort of reason
Master Lionel was more to me than the rest. I’d known his father,
Captain Dalgetty, in his best days, when he first came out to India
with his regiment at the time of the Mutiny, and won such a name by his
dare-devil bravery and determination. That was before he offended his
crusty old father by marrying pretty Miss Rosie Terence, the drunken
old Irish major’s daughter, who had nothing to her fortune but her
dimples and her big blue eyes and black lashes, except the coaxing ways
that drove the whole station wild with love for her. It _were_ said as
Miss Rosie’s mother sent her out to her father to make a match, but if
she did the old lady must have been terribly disappointed, because no
sooner did the captain’s father hear of the marriage than he sent for
his lawyer, and sat down then and there and made a will cutting the
poor fellow off with a shilling, and leaving all his money to hospitals
and churches.
[Illustration: “I POLISHED AWAY AT THE CAPTAIN’S SABRE”]
So the captain and Miss Rosie began life on love and short commons;
and, neither of them understanding economy, made a good many mistakes,
as might have been expected. They didn’t know how to contrive, and they
got into debt, and when the children came and expenses grew heavier
they lost spirit and patience, like a good many more, and let things
go their own way. The captain lost his temper and the mistress
grew careless and fretted, and when the young master was born—the one
as I’m telling about—things were about as bad and as comfortless as
they could be. Not wishing to say a disrespectful word, or a harmful
one, I _must_ say as I’d even thought the captain were getting tired
of his love-match, for he was aging uncommon fast and his temper was
getting uncommon sharp, and now and then Mrs. Dalgetty and him would
have words, as would end in him striding out of the bungalow, leaving
her crying and worriting among the children. I can’t say even as he
were over fond of the children, or that they were over welcome when
they came—six girls, one after another—though they were pretty little
things, all of them. But when Master Lionel were born it struck me as
he _were_ rather better pleased than he had been before, for he were
the first boy.
Well I remember the day the captain came out of his quarters and told
me about his having made his appearance rather unexpected.
I had been so long with them, and there were so many little things I
could do as was a help, that I’d got into the way of doing them; and
I happened this morning to be polishing about, and sees the captain
coming out, looking half-way pleased with something or other; and when
I drew myself up and saluted as usual, says he:
“Rabbett,” says he, “there’s a change in the programme this time.”
I drops my swab in a minute and draws up and salutes again.
“What, sir?” says I. “Boy, sir?”
“Yes,” says he. “Boy, and a fine little fellow too.”
So in the course of a week I smartens myself up a bit more than common,
in honor of the occasion, and goes into the house and gets the ayah to
let me have a look at the young gentleman as he lay in his cradle in
the nursery, next to the mistress’s room. They was rather fond of me in
that nursery, I may say, and it wasn’t the first time I’d been there
by many a one. But though I stepped light enough for fear of wakening
the little fellow, somehow or other he did waken that very minute. As
I bent over his cradle he opens his eyes, and he actually stares at me
as if he was asking me a question or so. At least it looked that way to
me, and then, as sure as I’m a living man, he does something with his
face as if he was doing his best to laugh; and when I laughs back and
lifts his bit of a red hand, he opens it out and lets it lay on mine,
quite friendly and sociable.
I won’t say as he knew what he were doing, but I will say as he looked
as if he did. And from that minute to the last hour of his life Master
Lionel and me was friends fast and firm. Not being a family man, as
I have said before, I took to him all the more, and I’m happy to say
he did the same by me. When he got big enough to be carried out by his
ayah I used to meet the woman, and take him off her hands whenever
she would let me; which was often enough, because she knew both the
captain and Mrs. Dalgetty knew I was safe to trust. I’d take him off
into the shade and walk about with him—him a-layin’ his cheek against
my red coat, sometimes laughing at the jokes I’d make with him, suiting
them to his size, and sometimes a-staring up at me serious, but both
of us always understanding each other and being cheerful, whatever
was a-goin’ on betwixt us. The fact was that I got that there used
to him, with nursing him so much, that when he’d have a little choke
or a disturbance of any kind, I got to be as handy as a woman about
settling him and turning him over and patting his back, and though it
may sound like a exaggeration to outsiders, I must say as I saw clear
enough he had his own way of thanking me and showing me his gratitude
for any small favors of the kind. Ay, and many an hour I’ve thought how
it might have been if little Maggie Shea had got through that blazing
summer—many and many an hour as I walked up and down, him nestling up
against me as my own flesh and blood might have done, but never would.
So we began by being fond of one another, and we keeps on a-bein’ fond
of one another, and what’s more, we gets fonder and fonder of each
other as we grows older.
And such a boy as he were, and such ways as he had! There weren’t no
end to him, he were that manly and handsome and well-grown and ready,
by the time he were seven or eight year old. People as never looked
at a child looked at him and was took by him, and the ladies at the
station run wild about his beauty. Tall he was and well set up, and
with a way of carrying himself a brigadier-general might have been
proud of. And a fine-cut face, and a big, brave black eye as looked at
a man as if he was equal to leading a regiment; and yet was thoughtful
and loving, and had a softness, too, when he was talking to a friend.
And that quick he were to notice things as others of his age would
never have seen. Why, he was only six years when one day, as he was
standing by watching me at work, he looks up at me all at once and says
he:
“Rabbett,” he says, “my mamma is very pretty, isn’t she?”
“Well,” says I, “Master Lionel, I should say she _were_!”
“I thought so,” he says; “I thought everybody must think she was
pretty, just as I do, only I am very fond of her, you see.” And he
rather puzzles me by looking at me again in a wistful, questioning
sort of way.
“Just so, Master Lionel,” I answers, “just so, sir.”
“Yes,” he goes on, “I am very fond of her, and—and I suppose my papa is
very fond of her, too.”
Being a trifle upset by this, I polished away at the captain’s sabre
for a minute or so, and even then I could only say:
“Yes, sir; nat’rally, sir, of course.” For the truth were as things
had been getting worse and worse, and the tiffs had been growing into
rows—rows as couldn’t go on without being heard in a bungalow, where
walls was thin and rooms not over far from each other. And what he had
heard the Lord only knows, but it had been a-workin’ in his innercent
mind and troubling him, and he was coming to me for comfort, and that I
saw in his fine, loving, wistful black eye, and in his handsome little
chin, as was not quite steady.
“Yes, of course, he is very fond of her,” he said, “and she is very
fond of him; because people who are married—people who are married
always are, aren’t they, Rabbett?”
“Ah, sir,” says I, “that they are; there ain’t nothin’ like it.”
“No,” he says, his little face trying to keep itself steady, “and I’m
very glad of—of that—I’m very glad of that.” And quite sudden he faces
round and walks off, a-holding his head up like a field officer. But
well I knowed why he’d gone. Something had hurt his little heart and
set him to thinking, so that he could not manage his looks even before
Rabbett. And, gentleman as he was, he was not willing to let it be
known what his child’s trouble was.
When the family began to grow up the regiment was ordered back to
England; and I came back with them, you see. The captain was not
rich, and as the family expenses got bigger, year by year, money got
scarcer with him, and they couldn’t live as they did before; and so,
somehow—I think it was because I liked the children, and especially my
young master—I fell into a way of being part valet, part waiter, part
man-of-all-work for the captain and his.
That wasn’t all. The captain’s fine way—for he was handsome still, and
a gentleman born, and no mistake—brought him fine friends; and his fine
friends brought him debt, because he was obliged to keep up with them.
Everything was badly managed, because Mrs. Dalgetty, as I said, knew
nothing about managing; so the servants ran wild, and were nothing but
trouble and expense, and there were nothing but struggling to keep up,
and threatening to break down, from day to day.
“The captain is worse than ever,” Mrs. Dalgetty would say, sometimes,
when things looked bad, and she had a crying fit on. “And Rose is so
expensive, and the other girls are growing up. I wish Lionel was older.
He is the only one who seems to feel for me at all.”
The real truth were, as Lionel were that sweet-natured he felt for them
all; and I must say as they couldn’t help being as fond of him in their
way as he was of them in his.
“Rabbett,” says he to me once, when they was all going out—he was about
nine years old then, or thereabout—“Rabbett, if you would like to see
Rose before she goes, just stand in the passage, when I go into the
drawing-room with her cloak and handkerchief. She has just sent me for
them.”
Now my young master loved his mother dearly, but he loved Rose even
better; he was allers talking to me of her beauty.
So says I, “I would like to see her.” And he runs up-stairs, quite
pleased, and is down again in a minute.
“I’ll leave the door open,” he says. And in he goes, with the cloak
over his arm, and does leave it open, quite wide enough for me to see
through.
Miss Rose was standing by the fire, and beautiful she looked, in her
grand evening dress, and so like what her mother had been that it gave
me quite a start. There was a gentleman at her side, a-laughing and
talking to her, and when Master Lionel goes in this party turns toward
the door, to look at him, and I sees his face, and I gives a start
again, for it were Captain Basil Roscoe.
Now I knew sum’at of Captain Basil Roscoe, you see, and that’s what
made me give a start. If ever there was a villain, and he to be called
a gentleman, Captain Basil Roscoe were one. I knew things of him that
he little guessed; we servants get to know many queer things. I felt,
when I sees him, as if I saw a snake.
“Here comes the wrap,” says Captain Basil, and he held out his hand, as
if he meant to put it on for himself, but Miss Rose laughs and stops
him.
“No,” says she. “Lionel wouldn’t like that. Would you, Lionel? He
always puts my cloak on for me.”
The captain drew back a bit, and gave the boy a sharp glance, but Miss
Rose did not see it, for she was bending down to have the cloak put
over her white shoulders, and Master Lionel was a-folding it around
her, as pleased as could be, laughing, too, boy-like, but, for all
that, doing it as deft and graceful as if he’d been born to it.
And then, when it was done, Miss Rose put her little hands on the
shoulders of his jacket, and kissed him half-a-dozen times, so coaxing
and merry and happy that I could not bear to think the time would ever
come when life would look harder to her than it did just then—going out
to a grand ball, in a pretty dress, and with her lover by her side.
Unless it is true that the devil shrinks from and hates them as has no
sins of their own, I should like to know why it was that Basil Roscoe
were so ready in taking a dislike to a innocent-faced boy, as never
harmed or differed with him; for nothing is more certain than that from
the first he did take a dislike to Master Lionel. It struck me, once or
twice, as he not only couldn’t bear the sight of him, but that, if he
had had the chance, he would not have been sorry to do him a harm. His
sneering manner showed it, and his ill-looking, handsome face showed
it, apart from a hundred other bits of things. Master Lionel himself
found it out soon enough.
“Rabbett,” says he, private and confidential, “he doesn’t like me and I
don’t like him, and I wish he wasn’t so fond of Rose. I never did him
any harm, you know, Rabbett.”
Natural enough, his spirit is hurt about it, and he takes it a bit
hard. But he never says much about it, until one night he comes to me,
and I sees he is wonderful quiet, and after a while I made bold to ask
what ails him. And the minute I asks him I sees, by the look in his
eyes, that what ails him is something uncommon.
“It’s something about Rose,” he says, “and it’s something about Captain
Roscoe.”
A slight huskiness comes in my throat, as makes it necessary for me to
clear it.
“Oh!” I says. “Indeed, sir?”
“Yes,” he answers. “As I was coming here I passed him, standing at
the corner of the street with a gentleman, and they were both talking
aloud, Rabbett, and laughing. And they were talking about Rose.”
Knowing the man so well, and having heard so much of his villany, my
blood fairly boiled at the thought of what he might have been saying;
but I made up my mind to speak quietly.
“Did you hear what they said, sir?” I asked. “Are you sure it was her
they were speaking of?”
“Yes,” says he, “sure, for I heard the gentleman say, ‘What? Pretty
Rose Dalgetty?’ And then Roscoe answered, ‘Even she might get
tiresome.’ And they both laughed. Rabbett”—and he turned his troubled,
questioning boy’s face to me, as if he was just awakening to some sort
of bewildered fear, and wanted help—“what did he mean when he said she
might get tiresome? And what made them laugh as they did? They were
laughing at her—my sister Rose.”
“No gentleman would have done it, sir,” I answered, not knowing what
else to say.
[Illustration: “MISS ROSE PUT HER HANDS ON HIS SHOULDERS”]
“I know that,” he says. “But what did they mean? You are older than
me, Rabbett, and perhaps you can understand more than that it was not
what a gentleman would have done.”
But of course I could not tell him that. If it meant nothing worse,
it at least did mean as Miss Rose’s lover had so little respect for
her that he could bandy her name among his companions with something
like a sneer; so I tried my best to lead him away from the subject. If
he’d been an ordinary kind of young gentleman, and he so very young
yet, I might have managed it; but being the little fellow he was, the
suspicion that his sister had been somewhat slighted stuck to him, and
settled itself deep in his mind, and made him thoughtful beyond his
years.
And this was far from being the end of it. Little by little I began to
hear a whisper here and there, even among the men, about what people
said of Captain Roscoe being so friendly with the Dalgettys, and
partic’ler with Miss Rosie. There was not one of them but said that it
would do the pretty young creature no good, if it did her no harm, to
be so ready to let him be attentive. He had been such an open rascal in
his time, and his character was so well known, that no careful mother
would have let her daughter be seen with him, and he was only tolerated
in his own set, and among those who were as bad as himself. But Mrs.
Dalgetty was too thoughtless and indifferent to see the wrong in
him, or to be troubled by what she heard, and the captain was rarely
at home; so Miss Rose was left to herself, and, of course, did as any
other innocent girl would have done, fell in love with a handsome face,
and believed in it.
But at last so much was said by outsiders that something came to the
captain’s ears as must have roused him, for one evening he comes up to
the house in a towering rage, and shuts himself up with Miss Rose and
her mother in the parlor, and has a tremendous row, and makes them both
cry, and ends up by forbidding them to speak to Roscoe again.
But though Mrs. Dalgetty gave in, as she always did when the captain
gave his orders, of course Miss Rose would not believe anything against
her lover. Things had gone so far by that time that she would have
stood out for him against the whole world; and as she dared not openly
disobey her father, she fretted until she lost her pretty color and
bright spirits, and went about the house looking ill and wretched.
But the matter was not put an end to, as you may imagine. Once or
twice, in going from the house to the barracks, I found Captain Basil
Roscoe loitering about not far from the street’s end, and more than
once I could have sworn that I passed him at dusk with a familiar
little figure clinging to his arm. And one night Miss Rosie calls her
brother to her, as he was going out on an errand, and, as she bends
over him in the doorway, slips a note into his hand, crying pitifully.
“You will take that for me, won’t you, dear?” she says. “He is waiting
in the square for it, and he does want it so—so much.” And she kisses
him, and gives a little sob and runs up-stairs.
I don’t think it could have been more than three minutes after that
when he comes to me, all pale and breathless with running, and lays
that there note on the table.
“She wants me to take it to him, Rabbett,” he says, “and she was crying
when she asked me, and—what must we do?”
It is not to be expected as we two hadn’t talked things over, being the
friends we were. I got up and took the note from the table, making a
resolution all of a sudden.
“If you’ll stay here, sir,” I said, “I’ll take it myself.” And take it
I did, and found the rascal waiting, as Miss Rose had said he would be.
He gave a black enough scowl when he saw it were me, and it certainly
didn’t die out when I spoke to him.
“Sir,” says I, “I’ve come here on a poor errand, and I’ve come
unwilling enough, God knows. I’ve got a note in my hand here—a pitiful
little letter from a trusting, innocent girl to a man who, if he does
not mean her harm, surely cannot mean her good, or he would not be
leading her to meet him, and write to him in underhand ways. And I’ve
been making up my mind, as I came along, to make a appeal to that man,
as surely he’ll listen to if he has a man’s heart in his breast. She is
scarcely more than a child, sir, and she knows nothing of the world.
Leave her alone, and she may be a happy woman; go on as you’ve begun,
and it will be death and heartbreak to her, and her wrongs will lie at
your door.”
He stands there and looks at me, and by the light of the lamp we
was standing under I sees his handsome, devilish face, sneering and
triumphing and scorning me, as if I was a worm in the dirt under his
feet.
“My good fellow,” he says, “you are a little too late. Hand me that
letter, and be off, before I find it necessary to help you. How you got
hold of the note I don’t know, but I _do_ know it was never given to
you to deliver, and that I should be well warranted in kicking you back
to your quarters, for your deuced impudence and presumption.”
But I held to the letter tight.
“Very well, sir,” I answers, respectful, but firm as a rock. “This
letter goes back to the house, and before night is over the captain
will have read it himself, and can judge for himself what is best——”
I didn’t finish, for the next thing I knew was that he strode up to me
and grasped hold of me by my collar, and the minute I saw what he meant
to do I felt I had made a mistake in bringing the letter at all, and in
fancying that any appeal could touch or move him. There was a struggle
between us, but it did not last long; he being strong and lithe, and
so much the younger man, gave me no chance; and it were scarcely three
seconds before he threw me on the pavement, and leaving me there, a
trifle stunned, walked off with the letter in his hand.
I knew things must be pretty bad then. He would never have been so
desperate and determined if he had not meant to do his worst, and when
I made my way back I felt sick with fear. Master Lionel was sitting by
the bit of fire in the grate when I opened the door, and he turns round
and looks at me, and changes color.
“Rabbett,” he says, “there is blood on your face.”
“Perhaps so, sir,” I says. “I’ve had a fall.”
And then I sits down and tells him all about it; about what I had meant
to do, and what I had done, and I ends up by asking him what he thinks
we had better do, now that my plans had failed.
“Master Lionel,” I says, “it would seem a dreadful hard sort of thing
to do, if we spoke to the captain.”
He turns quite pale at the thought of it.
“Oh, no,” he says, “Rabbett, I wouldn’t do it. He would be so angry
with Rose, and even with mamma. You remember my telling you what he
said before.”
I remembered well enough, and a pretty hard thing it was to say, even
if it had been said in a passion, and not half meant. He had threatened
to turn Miss Rose out of doors if she spoke to Roscoe again. He must
have heard something bad enough, to have been so roused.
“Well,” I ventures, “what can we do, sir?”
“Watch,” says he. “I can think of nothing else to do just yet, Rabbett.
I will watch Rose, and you shall watch Roscoe; and if the worst comes,
and we must tell papa, we must. I suppose, Rabbett, that Roscoe will
try to run away with Rose, as Farquhar ran away with that pretty Miss
Lewis?”
“Yes, sir,” I answers, “I’m afraid he will. But he is a worse man than
Farquhar; and if Miss Rose goes away with him, I’m afraid he’ll treat
her hard enough when he tires of her, as such men as him always tires
of young ladies.”
“It would be better, Rabbett,” says he, fixing his dark eyes solemnly
on the fire, “it would be better that Rose should die. I know that.”
“I am afeard, sir,” says I, “that you are right.”
God knows how he had learned to understand, but understand he did, and
he were that sad and wise about it that my very heart ached. He had
seen an old enough side of life, had Master Lionel, living among the
set he did, but he were a young gentleman as nothing could spoil, his
nature were that fine-grained.
We kept our watch faithful all that week and part of the next, but we
found out very little, though we had our suspicions, Master Lionel and
me, as things were going on pretty badly in a secret way. But at last
the very worst thing as could have happened burst upon us all at once.
I was up at the house one evening, doing something or other for Mrs.
Dalgetty, when of a sudden I heard a tremendous loud ring at the
doorbell; and, going in a hurry to answer it, the captain himself
strode past me into the hall, all in a flame with the wine he had been
drinking and the passion he were in. I had seen him in towering enough
tempers often before, but I had never seen him look as he did then. It
was my impression he were pretty near mad; indeed, I thought so then,
and have thought so since. How could he have done what he did that
night, unless he had not been quite himself?
“Rabbett,” says he, “where’s Miss Rose?”
“In her own room, sir,” says I, wishing with all my heart that I could
have told him she were not in.
“Rabbett,” says he, “where’s Mrs. Dalgetty?”
“In _her_ own room,” says I, “lying down, a-trying to get rid of a
headache.”
“Then,” says he, “go and tell Miss Rose to come down to me at once.”
I think I must have looked upset, myself, when I knocked at Miss Rose’s
door to deliver the captain’s message, for the minute the words were
out of my mouth she turned quite pale and scared-looking, and began to
tremble.
“Oh, Rabbett,” she says, the tears coming into her great, pretty dark
eyes, “is anything the matter? does he look angry?”
“I must say, miss,” I answers, “as he seems a bit more pepperyer than
common, but I hope it’s nothing much.”
“Oh, Rabbett,” she says, beginning to cry, and wringing her poor little
helpless hands, “I know it is something dreadful. I daren’t go down. I
am so frightened.”
But she were obliged to go down, and go down she did, a-trembling all
over, and out-and-out faint with fear. She had always been a timid
little affectionate creature, and the captain were pretty hard to face
when his temper were up.
I am not ashamed to confess as I stayed as near within hearing
distance as I could, without positively eavesdropping. I own up as I
had my fears as to what the end of it all would be, knowing the captain
were drove too wild to be wise, or even reasonable, and I wanted to be
near enough to see Miss Rose when she came out of the room, and say a
comforting word to her, if she seemed to need one.
But she came out of the room in a different manner to what even I had
expected. The minute she went in I heard the sound of Mrs. Dalgetty
crying and the captain storming, and for a quarter of an hour after
the storm fairly raged. The captain stamped and swore, Mrs. Dalgetty
sobbed, and tried to put in a word now and then, but Miss Rose seemed
to be too much stunned to speak. I never heard her voice after the
first few moments, and at last the door opened again, and she came
running out, her beautiful dark eyes wide open, her innocent face as
white as death. She did not see me, but ran past where I stood, up to
her own bedroom, and there was that in her look as brought my heart
into my mouth, and, queer as it may seem to you, the first thing I
thought of was Master Lionel.
“There’s harm been done,” says I to myself, “deadly harm, and no one
can undo it but one as loves her, and that she’s fond of herself in her
girl’s way; the one as she needs now is that there fine little fellow
as was almost like a little lover to her.”
And when she came down I feels surer of it than ever; for in three
minutes more she did come down, with her hat and jacket on, ready to go
out. And her face was even whiter than before; and when she sees me she
holds out her hand, her eyes looking big and bright with a dangerous
sort of shine.
“Good-by, Rabbett,” she says. “I am going.”
“Miss Rose,” says I, “where are you going to?”
Then she smiles sad and bitter, and a bit hard.
“Ask papa,” she answers. “He ought to know. He sent me away. I don’t
exactly know myself, unless—unless one person in the world loves me
well enough to take me.”
“Miss Rose,” I breaks out, “for God’s sake don’t go to Basil Roscoe!”
She dragged her hand away from mine, and her eyes flashed fire.
“You all hate him!” she cried; “but I have chosen him before all the
world. Papa said I must choose, and I have chosen. I am going to Basil
Roscoe!”
And before I could speak another word she had darted out of the door,
all on fire, and desperate, as one might say, and was gone.
I knew it would be of no use speaking to the captain. Since he had as
good as turned the poor innocent creature out of house and home, he
was not the one to go to for help. When he was cooler he would see his
mistake, and repent it bitter enough; but just now to go to him would
only make him madder than ever.
Well, just at that very minute in come Master Lionel. There might have
been some sort of a fate in it. He jumps up them stone steps, two at
a time, and bangs at that open front door, clean out of breath, and
looking wonderful like his sister, in his excitement.
“Where’s Rose gone to, Rabbett?” he says. “I have just seen her walking
fast—almost running—down the street, and she would not stop for me.
What has been the matter?”
I ups and tells him. I weren’t afeard of doing it. I knew him to be
that there ready and brave and affectionate.
“Rabbett,” he said, in a jiffy, “come along with me.”
“Master Lionel,” I asks, “where to?” For the fact were my head weren’t
as clear as his, and I were a bit bothered as to what would be the best
thing to be done first.
“I am going to Captain Roscoe’s lodgings,” he answers, as steady as you
please.
And so, if you’ll believe me, off we goes, out into the street, him
a-keeping step beautiful, as he always did, but not saying a word
until at last I speak to him.
“Master Lionel,” I says, “what are you thinking about?”
“I am thinking,” he answers, his dark eyes shining, “about what I am
going to say to Roscoe.”
But it weren’t so easy to find Roscoe. We did not know exactly where
his lodgings were, and so we had to inquire in first one place and then
another. The people we fancied could tell us knew nothing definite,
when we went to them; and when we got the name of the street, it were
hard to find. But we did find it at last, after a great deal of trouble
and a great deal of delay, which was worse. The delay was what upset
us, for both of us felt pretty certain that Captain Basil Roscoe would
lose very little time in getting Miss Rose away out of the reach of her
friends, if he once found her willing to go with him.
By the time we reached the end of the street where he lived, Master
Lionel were that worked up and excited that he was growing paler and
paler, and his eyes were like lanterns in his face, and he caught hold
of my hand and held it hard and fast.
“Rabbett,” he says, “what if we should be too late?”
“I can’t think such bad luck could happen to us, sir,” I answers him
back.
And then it were—just at that instant—as his sharp young eyes spied
something out ahead of us, for he drew his hand away, and started
running, just throwing back a word or so to me.
“There’s a carriage before the door,” he said, “and they are getting
into it.”
He were up that street like a deer, and in half a minute I were
with him; but when I comes up, all out of breath, he were on the
carriage-step, holding the door open; and, what’s more, holding at bay
the black rascal who stood near, sneering and raging at him by turns.
“Rabbett,” he cries out, “help me to hold the door open. No—go to the
horses’ heads. Now, Rose, get out.”
I went to the horses’ heads, as I would have done if the captain
himself had give the order, instead of “The Captain’s Youngest.” It
made my heart ache, too, to hear the ring in the little chap’s voice,
so like his father’s, and then to remember what the captain might have
been—and what he were. Even the driver were struck all of a heap by the
youngster’s pluck, and were so busy looking at him that he let me take
my stand, without a word against it.
“Look here, mate,” he says to me, “here’s a rum go!”
“It’s bad enough,” says I. “Perhaps you’ll oblige me with them reins?”
“If you don’t come down from that step,” says Roscoe, saying every word
slow, as if he was trying to hold himself back from striking the boy a
blow as would kill him, “you impudent young devil, I will take the whip
from the box there and cut you to pieces!”
Then Miss Rose bends forward. It is my impression as the cruel,
murderous sound in the fellow’s voice was something she had never heard
before, and it frightened her.
“Don’t speak to him in that way, Basil,” she says. “Oh, Lionel, dear,
you shouldn’t have come. You must go back. You must, indeed. I shall
never come home again, Lionel.” And she burst out crying.
“I shall go back, Rose,” says the boy, “but you must come with me.
Rabbett and I came to fetch you, and we shall not leave you.” And then
he looks at Roscoe square. “I am not afraid of your cutting me to
pieces with your whip, sir,” he says. “Rabbett will see to that. But,”
and the fire blazed up in his voice and his face and his eyes, as grand
as if he had been the captain himself, “if I had come alone I would not
have left this carriage door unless Rose had come with me. You might
have used your whip, but you couldn’t have made me do that.”
“Am I,” says Roscoe, panting with the passion he dare not let out, “am
I to throw you into the street under the horses’ hoofs, you impudent
young devil?”
But Master Lionel’s back was turned to him. He was pleading with his
sister.
“Rose, dear,” he says, “come home with me. You will come home with me,
I know.” And he caught hold of her hand.
God knows how it all happened—I don’t. If I had only been quick enough
to see in time, the captain’s youngest might have been alive this day,
a brave young fellow, such as the captain had been in those first days
in India—a brave, handsome young soldier, as would have been a honor to
his country, and a stanch friend yet to me.
But that weren’t to be. Just as he stood there, his foot on the
carriage-step, a-holding his sister’s hand, the passion in the heart
of the rascal watching him broke forth. He caught him by the shoulder,
there were a short struggle as the boy tried to free himself, and
before I could reach them he had whirled him away from the door—with
greater force than he intended, I’ve tried to believe. The frightened
horses lashed out their hoofs and sprang forward, struggling over the
child’s very body as he lay stunned under their feet.
Scoundrel as he was, I never could make it look square to myself as
the man meant the harm he did. His face was out and out deathly, as he
leaped forward to save him as quick as I did myself. But we were both
too late. We could only drag at the reins, and stop the horses in time
to prevent the wheels passing over him—that were all.
We had him out in a minute, and Miss Rose was out of the carriage,
kneeling on the pavement by him, and the driver was down off his box.
“Great God!” says Roscoe, “I never meant to do him such a harm. He’s
dead!” And he shuddered all over, with fear, perhaps, as much as
anything else.
But he weren’t dead, and he hadn’t even fainted, though he were stunned
at first. I had lifted him in my arms, and he lay against me, panting
a bit, and stone-white, all but for a stain of blood on one temple. It
weren’t his head as was so badly hurt, it were his side, where one of
the horses had lashed out and struck him. And as sure as I’m a living
man, in a few minutes he opens his eyes and lays hold of his sister’s
hand.
“Rose,” he says, “will you—go home—with me—now?”
She knelt over him, wringing her hands, and sobbing as if her heart
would break. She would not let her lover come near her. When he tried
to speak, she shrank away, shuddering.
It’s my belief as what she had seen in his face during the last ten
minutes would have broke her faith in him, even if the young master had
met no hurt. And now she were that terrified that she were as helpless
as a child.
“Is he much hurt?” she kept saying. “Rabbett, oh, Rabbett! let me take
him home to mamma. Put him into the carriage.” And then she turned upon
Roscoe, fierce and wild. “Go away,” she cried out. “You have killed
him! Go away, and never let me see you again!”
There were a dreadful house when we took him home. Mrs. Dalgetty
went out of one faint into another, as she always did when she were
frightened. The servants ran backward and forward, doing nothing, the
children crowded round us, crying, and the captain looked on at all we
did like a man in a dream.
He were hurt and bruised and broken that bad—poor little fellow!—that
when the doctor came, and were beginning to go to work on him he looks
up at me with his bright, troubled eye, and says to me:
“Rabbett, please take hold of my hand.”
I were that near breaking down and sobbing out loud that I were ashamed
of myself. It were a comfort to me, in many a day after, to think I had
took hold of his hand, and that he had asked me to do it.
And when the hard job was over, the doctor put his hands into his coat
pockets, and stands looking at him for a minute or so, and then he
turns to me and beckons me out of the room.
“Sir,” I ventured to say, “Master Lionel—will he——” But I could not
finish, somehow. I meant to say, “Will he get over it?”
“No,” says he. “I am very sorry to say it; but he will not.”
Will you believe me as the words struck me like a slung-shot. Not
having no family of my own, and never having clung to nothing on earth
as I had clung to that there generous, neglected little fellow, just
at that minute I felt as if I’d got a blow as was too hard to stand up
against. I couldn’t face it straight. When I had been lonely in my way,
he had been lonely in his, and we had been a help and a comfort to each
other in ways as outsiders never understood.
“Sir,” I puts it to him, quite hoarse when I gets my voice back,
“when——” And I couldn’t finish that question neither.
“Well,” he answers me back, “I am afraid before morning.”
I went back to the room and stayed there all night.
It seemed a strange sort of thing that at the very last him and me was
together alone, as we always had seemed to be. He had coaxed Miss Rose
to go to bed; he would not rest until she went; and when she bent down
to kiss him, he says to her, in a whisper, quite bright and cheerful:
“Don’t cry, Rose. It’s all right.”
And then the captain gets tired, and begins to doze, and Mrs. Dalgetty
falls asleep on the sofa; and so Master Lionel and me was left
together; me watching him, and listening to the clock ticking; him
lying quiet, with his eyes shut.
But toward daybreak he gets a bit restless, and stirs, and the next
thing I sees him looking at me, quite wide awake.
“Rabbett,” says he, in a bit of a hurry, “open the window.”
And when I goes and does it, and comes back, he puts out his hand.
“Rabbett,” he says, “I’m very fond of you;” and something wistful comes
into his eyes, and I sees a faint gray shadow creeping up over his
face. “I was always fond of you, and I always shall be fond of you,”
says he. “Don’t let my hand go, Rabbett.”
And the next minute the gray shadow has changed his brave, handsome,
childish face all at once and altogether. He gives me a innocent,
bright look—just one, as if he were wondering why I shook so—and shuts
his eyes. He would never open them again on me, as was so fond and
proud of him in my poor way. When they opened again he would see
something brighter than the morning sky, as was just growing red and
golden before the east window.
* * * * *
Of course they fretted over him for a while, finding out most likely
as he’d made himself dearer than they’d thought before he were gone.
They could not have helped missing him if they had been more careless
than they were. Sometimes I fancied the captain was checked a bit and
sad, and blamed himself in secret, but his days of being open and
soft-hearted was over, and it were hard to tell. I know it was a long
time before he forgave Miss Rosie, though for her sake the matter was
hushed up, and no one but themselves knew exactly how the accident
happened. Miss Rose could never bear the sound of Basil Roscoe’s name
again, and she married a good man a few years after, and made him a
good wife. So the poor little fellow as gave his life for her did
not lose it for nothing, though, if you were to ask me which of the
two—but, there, it’s not for me to take on myself to argue out! But he
were only a boy to them—only a child. They didn’t know him as I did,
and so after a while their grief died out, and in a year or so he was
half forgotten.
[Illustration: “AND I SHALL ALWAYS BE FOND OF YOU, RABBETT”]
But it weren’t so easy for me. His handsome little face and his
pleasant ways is as clear to me to-day as they ever was. When I sit
lonely over my fire of a winter’s night—and I am a lonely man,
things being as they are and the years going on—I think of him for
hours in a way of my own, and make a sort of dream of him. I think of
him as he lay in his cradle and we made friends when he wasn’t but a
week old. I think of him as he was, with his little soldier ways about
the quarters, carrying himself as military as if he’d been twenty;
a-helping me in one way and another, and finding out he might be
confidential, though I wasn’t nothing but a private and him a officer’s
son. I think about him as he looked when he came to me in his innercent
trouble that night and told me about his sister’s lover. And then I see
him lying there, with the light from the east window falling on him,
and I hear him saying:
“I am very fond of you, Rabbett. I always was fond of you, and I always
shall be fond of you. Don’t let my hand go, Rabbett.”
Ay—and that ain’t all. I make a picture of what might have been. I sees
him grown into a young man—a handsome, smart young officer—and make a
picture of some beautiful young girl, and tells myself what a pretty
love story they would have had betwixt them, and what a lover, and
what a young husband he would have been! Why, there’s been nights when
I’ve even seen little children like him, and thought they would have
been fond of me, as he was. It’s made me forget where I was, and when
I’d be roused up by something or other I’ve found myself choke up with
something as might almost have been my heart in my throat, to think as
it were only a sort of dream after all. And the captain’s youngest lies
out under the stars in the churchyard, the wind a-blowing over the snow
as lies on a grave as is only the grave of a child.
LITTLE BETTY’S KITTEN TELLS
HER STORY
LITTLE BETTY’S KITTEN TELLS HER STORY
I am Betty’s kitten—at least, I was Betty’s kitten once. That was
more than a year ago. I am not a kitten now, I am a little cat, and I
have grown serious, and think a great deal as I sit on the hearthrug,
looking at the fire and blinking my eyes. I have so much to think about
that I even stop to ponder things over when I am lapping my milk or
washing my face. I am very careful about lapping my milk. I never upset
the saucer. Betty told me I must not. She used to talk to me about it
when she gave me my dinner. She said that only untidy kittens were
careless. She liked to see me wash my face too, so I am particular
about that. It is always Betty I am thinking about when I sit on the
rug and blink at the fire. Sometimes I feel so puzzled and so anxious
that if her mamma or papa are sitting near I look up at them and say:
“Mee-_aiow_? _Mee_-aiow?”
But they do not seem to understand me as Betty did. Perhaps that is
because they are grown-up people and she was a little girl. But one
day her mamma said:
“It sounds almost as if she were asking a question.” I was asking a
question. I was asking about Betty. I wanted to know when she was
coming back.
I know where she came from, but I do not know where she is gone, or why
she went. She usually told me things, but she did not tell me that. I
never knew her to go away before. I wish she had taken me with her. I
would have kept my face and paws very clean, and never have upset my
milk.
I said I knew where she came from. She came from behind the white
rose-bush before it began to bloom, and when it had nothing but glossy
green leaves and tight little buds on it.
I saw her! My eyes had only been open about two weeks, and I was lying
close to my mother in our bed under the porch that was round the house.
It was a nice porch, with vines climbing over it, and I had been born
under it. We were very comfortable there, but my mother was afraid of
people. She was afraid lest they might come and look at us. She said
I was so pretty that they would admire and take me away. That had
happened to two or three of my brothers and sisters before their eyes
had opened, and it had made my mother nervous. She said the same thing
had happened before when she had had families quite as promising, and
many of her lady friends had told her that it continually happened to
themselves. They said that people coming and looking at you when you
had kittens was a sort of epidemic. It always ended in your losing
children.
She talked to me a great deal about it. She said she felt rather
less nervous after my eyes were opened, because people did not seem
to want you so much after your eyes were opened. There were fewer
disappearances in families after the first nine days. But she told me
she preferred that I should not be intimate with people who looked
under the porch, and she was very glad when I could use my legs and
get farther under the house when any one bent down and said, “Pussy!
Pussy!” She said I must not get silly and flattered and intimate even
when they said, “Pretty pussy! poo’ ’ittle kitty puss!” She said it
might end in trouble.
So I was very cautious indeed when I first saw Betty. I did not intend
to be caught, but I was not so much afraid as I should have been if she
had not been so very little and so pretty.
Not very long before she went away she said to me one day, when we were
in the swing together:
“Kitty, I am nearly five o’clock!”
So when she came from behind the white rose-bush perhaps she was four
o’clock.
I shall never forget that morning, it was such a beautiful morning. It
was in the early spring, and all the world seemed to be beginning to
break into buds and blossoms. There were pink and white flowers on the
trees, and there was such a delicious smell when one sniffed a little.
Birds were chirping and singing, and every now and then darting across
the garden. Flowers were coming out of the ground, too; they were
blooming in the garden beds and among the grass, and it seemed quite
natural to see a new kind of flower bloom out on the rose-bush, which
had no flowers on it then, because the season was too early. I was such
a young kitten that I thought the little face peeping round the green
bush was a flower. But it was Betty, and she was peeping at me! She had
such a pink bud of a mouth, and such pink, soft cheeks, and such large
eyes, just like the velvet of a pansy blossom. She had a tiny pink
frock and a tiny white apron with frills, and a pretty white muslin
hat like a frilled daisy, and the soft wind made the curly, soft hair
falling over her shoulder as she bent forward sway as the vines sway.
“Mother,” I whispered, “what kind of a flower is that? I never saw one
before.”
She looked, and began to be quite nervous.
“Ah, dear! ah, dear!” she said, “it is not a flower at all. It is a
person, and she is looking at you.”
“Ah, mother,” I said, “how can it be a person when it is not half as
high as the rose-bush? And it is such pretty colors. Do look again.”
“It is a child person,” she said, “and I have heard they are sometimes
the worst of all—though I don’t believe they take so many away at a
time.” The little face peeped farther round the green of the rose-bush,
and looked prettier and prettier. The pink frock and white frills began
to show themselves a little more.
“Get behind me,” said my mother; and I began to shrink back.
Ah! how often I have wondered since then why I did not know in a minute
that it was Betty—just Betty! It seemed so strange that I did not know
it without being told. She came nearer and nearer, and her cheeks
seemed to grow pinker and pinker, and her eyes bigger and bigger.
Suddenly she gave a little jump, and began to clap her hands and laugh.
“Ah,” she said, “it is a little kitty. It is a surely little kitty.”
“Oh, my goodness!” said my mother. “Fts-fts-ftss! Fttss-ffttssss!”
I could not help feeling as if it was rather rude of her, but she was
_so_ frightened.
But Betty did not seem to mind it at all. Down she went on her little
knees on the grass, bending her head down to peep under the porch,
until her cheek touched the green blades, and her heap of curls lay on
the buttercups and daisies.
“Oh, you _dee_ little kitty,” she said. “Pretty pussy, pussy, puss!
Kitty—kitty! _Poo_ ’ittle kitty. I won’t hurt you!”
She made a movement as if she were going to put out her dimpled hand to
stroke me, but a side window opened, and I heard a voice call to her.
“Betty—Betty!” it said, “you mustn’t put your hand under there. The
pussy is frightened, and it makes her cross, and she might scratch you.
Don’t try to stroke her, dearie.”
She turned her bright little face over her shoulder.
“I won’t hurt her, mamma,” she said. “I surely, surely won’t hurt her.
She has such a pretty kitty; come and look at it, mamma!”
“Ffttssss-ss!” said my mother. “More coming! Grown-ups this time!”
“I don’t believe they will hurt us,” I said. “The little one is such a
pretty one.”
“You know nothing about it,” said my mother.
But they did not hurt us. They were as gentle as if they had been
kittens themselves. The mother came and bent down by Betty’s side and
looked at us, too, but they did nothing which even frightened us. And
they talked in quite soft voices.
“You see, she is a wild little pussy,” the mother said. “She must have
been left behind by the people who lived here before we came, and she
has been living all by herself and eating just what she could steal—or,
perhaps, catching birds. Poor little cat! And now she is frightened
because, evidently, some of her kittens have been stolen from her, and
she wants to protect this one.”
“But if I don’t frighten her,” said Betty, “if I keep coming to see her
and don’t hurt her, and if I bring her some milk and some bits of meat,
won’t she get used to me and let her kitten come out and play with me
after a while?”
“Perhaps she will,” said the mother. “Poor pussy, puss, pussy, pretty
pussy!”
She said it in such a coaxing voice that I quite liked her, and when
Betty began to coax, too, she was so sweet and so like a kitten herself
that I could scarcely help going a trifle nearer to her, and I found
myself saying “Mee-ow” quite softly in answer.
And from that time we saw her every day ever so many times. She seemed
never tired of trying to make friends with us. The first thing in the
bright mornings we used to hear her pretty child voice and see her
pretty child face. She used to bring saucers of delightful milk to us
two or three times a day. And she always was so careful not to frighten
us. She would just call us, “Pretty, pretty pussy! Pretty kitty puss!”
in a voice as soft as silk, and then she would put the saucer of milk
near us and go away behind the rose-bush and let us drink in comfort
and peace.
We thought at first that she went back to the house when she set the
saucer down, but after a few days, when we were beginning to be rather
less afraid, we found out that she just hid behind the rose-bush and
peeped at us through the branches. I saw her pink cheeks and big, soft,
pansy eyes one day, and I told my mother.
“Well, she is a well-behaved child person,” mother said. “I sometimes
begin to think she does not mean any harm.”
I was sure of it. Before I had lapped three saucers of milk I had begun
to love her a little.
A few days later she just put the saucer down near us and stepped
softly away, but stood right by the rose-bush, without hiding behind
it. And she said, “Pretty pussy, pussy!” so sweetly, without moving
towards us, that even my mother began to have confidence in her.
About that time I began to think it would be nice to creep out from
under the house and get to know her a little better. It looked so
pleasant and sunshiny out on the grass, and she looked so sunshiny
herself. I did like her voice so, and I did like a ball I used to see
her playing with, and when she bent down to look under the porch, and
her curls showing, I used to feel as if I should like to jump out and
catch at them with my claws. There never was anything as pretty as
Betty, or anything which looked as if it might be so nice to play with.
“I wish you would like me and come out and play, kitty,” she used to
say to me sometimes. “I do so like kitties! I never hurt kitties! I’ll
give you a ball of string.”
There was a fence not far from the house, and it had a sort of ledge on
top, and it was a good deal higher than Betty’s head, because she was
so very little. She was quite a little thing, only four o’clock.
So one morning I crept out from under my porch and jumped on to the top
of that fence, and I was there when she came again to peep, and say,
“Pretty pussy.” When she caught sight of me she began to laugh and clap
her little hands, and jump up and down.
“Oh, there’s the kitty,” she said. “There’s my kitty. It has come out
its own self. Kitty, kitty, pretty, pretty kitty!”
She ran to me, and stood beneath me, looking up with her eyes shining
and her pink cheeks full of dimples. She could not reach me, but she
was so happy because I had come out that she could scarcely stand
still. She coaxed, and called me pretty names, and stood on her
tiptoes, stretching her short arm and dimpled hand to try to see if I
would let her touch me.
“I won’t pull you down, pussy,” she said, “I only want to stroke you.
Oh, you pretty kitty!”
And I looked down at her, and said, “Meeiou,” gently, just to tell her
that I wasn’t very much afraid now, and that when I was a little more
used to being outside instead of under the house, perhaps I would play
with her.
“Mee-iaou!” I said, and I even put out one paw as if I was going to
give her a pat, and she danced up and down for joy.
My dear little Betty! I wish I could see her again. I cannot understand
why she should go away when I loved her so much, and when everybody
loved her so much.
Oh, how happy we were when I came down from the fence. I did it in
three days. She brought some milk and coaxed me, and then she put it on
the grass close to the fence and moved away a few steps, and looked at
me with such a pretty, imploring look in her pansy eyes that suddenly
I made a little leap down and stood on the grass, and began to lap
the milk and even to purr! That was the beginning. From that time
we played together always. And oh, what a delightful playmate Betty
was! And such a conversationalist! She was not a child who thought you
must not talk to a kitten because it could not talk back. She had so
many things to tell me and show me. And she showed me everything, and
explained it all, too. She had a playhouse in a box in a nice grassy,
shady place, and she told me all about it, and showed me her teacups
and her dolls, and we had tea-parties, with bits of real cake and tiny
cups with flowers on them.
“They don’t hold much milk, kitty,” she said, “but it’s a dolls’
tea-party, so you must pretend, and I’ll give you a big saucerful
afterwards.”
I pretended as hard as ever I could, and it was a beautiful party,
though I did not like the Sunday doll, because she looked proud, and
as if she thought kittens were too young. The everyday doll was much
nicer, though her hair was a little tufty and she was cracked.
How Betty did enjoy herself that lovely sunny afternoon we had the
first tea-party in the playhouse! How she laughed and talked, and ran
backwards and forwards to her mamma for the cups of milk and bits of
cake. I ran after her every time, and she was as happy as a little bird.
“See how the kitty likes me now, mamma,” she said. “Just watch, it runs
every time I run. It isn’t afraid of me the leastest bit. Isn’t it a
pretty kitty?”
I never left her when I could help it. She was such fun. She was a
child who danced about and played a great deal, and I was a kitten who
liked to jump. We ran about and played with balls, and we used to sit
together in the swing. I did not like the swing very much at first, but
I was so fond of Betty that I learned to enjoy it, because she held
me on her knee and talked. She had such a soft, cosey lap and such
soft arms that it was delightful to be carried about by her. She was
very fond of carrying me about, and she liked me to lay my head on her
shoulder so that she could touch me with her cheek. My pretty little
Betty, she loved me so!
She used to show me the flowers in the garden and tell me which ones
were going to bloom, and what color they would be. We were very much
interested in all the flowers, but we cared most about the white
rose-bush. It was so big and we were so little that we could sit under
it together, and we were always trying to count the little, hard, green
buds, though there were so many that we never counted half of them.
Betty could only count up to ten, and all we could do was to keep
counting ten over and over.
[Illustration: “I DID NOT LIKE THE SWING AT FIRST”]
“These little buds will grow so big soon,” she used to say, “that they
will burst, and then there will be roses, and more roses, and we
will make a little house under here and have a tea-party.”
We were always going to look at that rose-bush, and sometimes, when we
were playing and jumping, Betty would think she saw a bud beginning to
come out, and we would both run.
I don’t know how many days we were so happy together, playing ball, and
jumping in the grass, and watching the white rose-bush to see how the
buds were growing. Perhaps it was a long time, but I was only a kitten,
and I was too frisky to know about time. But I grew faster than the
rose-buds did. Betty said so. But oh, how happy we were! If it could
only have lasted, perhaps I might never have grown sober, and sat by
the fire thinking so much.
One afternoon we had the most beautiful play we had ever had. We ran
after the ball, we swung together, Betty knelt down on the grass and
shook her curly hair so that I could catch at it with my paws, we had a
tea-party on the box, and when it was over we went to the rose-bush and
found a bud beginning to be a rose. It was a splendid afternoon!
After we had found the bud beginning to be a rose we sat down together
under the rose-bush. Betty sat on the thick green grass, and I lay
comfortably on her soft lap and purred.
“We have jumped so much that I am a little tired, and I feel hot,” she
said; “are you tired, kitty? Isn’t it nice under the rose-bush, and
won’t it be a beautiful place for a tea-party when all the white roses
are out? Perhaps there will be some out to-morrow. We’ll come in the
morning and see!”
Perhaps she was more tired than she knew. I don’t think she meant to go
to sleep, but presently her head began to droop and her eyes to close,
and in a little while she sank down softly and was quite gone.
I left her lap and crept up close to the breast of her little white
frock, and curled up in her arm and lay and purred, and looked at her
while she slept. I did so like to look at her. She was so pretty and
pink and plump, and she had such a lot of soft curls. They were crushed
under her warm cheek and scattered on the grass. I played with them a
little while she lay there, but I did it very quietly, so that I should
not disturb her.
She was lying under the white rose-bush still asleep, and I was curled
up against her breast, watching her, when her mamma came out with her
papa, and they found us.
“Oh, how pretty!” the mamma said. “What a lovely little picture!
Betty and her kitten asleep under the white rose-bush, and just one
rose watching over them. I wonder if Betty saw it before she dropped
off. She has been looking at the buds every day to see if they were
beginning to be roses.”
“She looks like a rose herself,” said her papa, “but it is a pink rose.
How rosy she is!”
He picked her up in his arms and carried her into the house. She did
not waken, and as I was not allowed to sleep with her I could not
follow, so I stayed behind under the rose-bush myself a little longer
before I went to bed. When I looked at the buds I saw that there were
several with streaks of white showing through the green, and there were
three that I was sure would be roses in the morning, and I knew how
happy Betty would be and how she would laugh and dance when she saw
them.
I often hear people saying to each other that they should like to
understand the strange way I have of suddenly saying “Meeiaou!
Mee-iaou!” as if I was crying. It seems strange to me that they don’t
know what it means. I always find myself saying it when I remember that
lovely afternoon when we played so happily, and Betty fell asleep under
the rose-bush, and I thought how pleased she would be when she came out
in the morning.
I can’t help it. Everything was so different from what I had thought it
would be. Betty never came out in the morning. Oh, dear! oh, dear! she
never came out again!
I got up early enough myself, and it was a beautiful, beautiful
morning. There was dew on the grass and on the flowers, and the sun
made it sparkle so that it was lovely to look at. I did so want Betty
to see it! I ran to the white rose-bush, and, sure enough, there were
four or five roses—such white roses, and with such sparkling drops of
dew on them!
I ran back to the house and called to Betty, as I always did. I wanted
her to come.
But she did not come! She was not even at breakfast, eating her bread
and milk. I looked for her everywhere except in her bedroom. Her
bedroom door was closed, and I could not get in.
And though I called and called, nobody seemed to take any notice of
me. Somehow, something seemed to be the matter. The house was even
quieter than usual, but I felt as if every one was busy and in trouble.
I kept asking and asking where Betty was, but nobody would answer me.
Once I went to her closed bedroom door and called her there, and told
her about the white roses, and asked her why she did not come out. But
before I had really finished telling her, my feelings were quite hurt
by her papa. He came, and spoke to me in a way that was not kind.
“Go away, kitty,” he said, “don’t make such a noise; you will disturb
Betty.”
I went away waving my tail. I went out into the garden and sat under
the rose-bush. As if I could disturb Betty! As if Betty did not always
want me! She wanted me to sleep with her in her little bed, but her
mamma would not let me.
But—ah, how could I believe it!—she did not come out the next day, or
the next, or even the next. It seemed as if I should go wild. People
can ask questions, but a little cat is nothing to anybody unless to
some one like Betty. She always understood my questions and answered
them.
In the house they would not answer me. They were always busy and
troubled. It did not seem like the same house. Nothing seemed the same.
The garden was a different place. In the playhouse the Sunday doll and
the everyday doll sat and stared at the tea-things we had used that
happy afternoon at the party. The Sunday doll sat bolt upright and
looked prouder than ever, as if she felt she was being neglected; but
the everyday doll lopped over, as if she had grieved her strength away
because Betty did not come.
I had made up my mind at the first tea-party that I would never speak
to the Sunday doll, but one day I was so lonely and helpless that I
could not help it.
“Oh, dear!” I meeiaoued, “oh, dear! do you know anything about Betty?
Do you? do you?”
And that heartless thing only sat up and stared at me, and never
answered, though the tears were streaming down my nose.
What could a poor little cat do? I looked and looked everywhere, but
I could not find her. I went round the house and round the house, and
called in every room. But they only drove me out, and said I made too
much noise, and never understood a word I said.
And the white rose-bush—it seemed as if it would break my heart. “There
will be more roses, and more roses,” Betty had said, and every morning
it was coming true. I used to go and sit under it, and I had to count
ten over and over, there were so many. It was such a great rose-bush
that it looked at last like a cloud of snow-white bloom. And Betty had
never seen it!
“Ah, Betty! Betty!” I used to cry when I had counted so many tens that
I was tired. “Oh! do come and see how beautiful it is, and let us have
our tea-party. Oh, white rose-bush, where is she?” They drove me out
of the house so many times that I had no courage; but one morning the
white rose-bush was so splendid that I made one desperate effort. I
went to the bedroom door and rubbed against it, and called with all my
strength:
[Illustration: “I LEFT HER LAP AND CURLED UP IN HER ARM”]
“Betty, if you are there!—Betty, if you love me at all, oh, speak to
me and tell me what I have done! The white rose-bush has tens and tens
and tens of flowers upon it. It is like snow. Don’t you care about
it? Oh, do come out and see! Betty, Betty! I am so lonely for you, and
I love you so!”
And the door actually opened, and her mamma stood there looking at me,
with great tears rolling down her cheeks. She bent down and took me in
her arms and stroked me.
“Perhaps she will know it,” she said in a low, strange voice to some
one in the room. She turned and carried me into the bedroom, and I saw
that it was Betty’s papa she had spoken to.
The next instant I sprang out of her arms on to the bed. Betty was
there—my Betty!
It seemed as if I felt myself lose my senses. My Betty! I kissed her
and kissed her and kissed her! I rubbed her little hands, her cheeks,
her curls. I kissed her and purred and cried.
“Betty,” said her mamma, “Betty, darling, don’t you know your own
little kitty?”
Why did not she? Why did she not? Her cheeks were hot and red, her
curls were spread out over the pillow, her pansy eyes did not seem to
see me, and her little head moved drearily to and fro.
Her mamma took me in her arms again, and, as she carried me out of the
room, her tears fell on me.
“She does not know you, kitty,” she said. “Poor kitty, you will have to
go away.”
* * * * *
I cannot understand it. I sit by the fire and think and think, but I
cannot understand. She went away after that, and I never saw her again.
I have never felt like a kitten since that time.
I went and sat under the white rose-bush all day, and slept there all
night.
The next day there were more roses than ever, and I made up my mind
that I would try to be patient and stay there and watch them until
Betty came to see. But two or three days after, in the fresh part of
the morning, when everything was loveliest, her mamma came out, walking
slowly, straight towards the bush. She stood still a few moments and
looked at it, and her tears fell so fast that they were like dew on
the white roses as she bent over. She began to gather the prettiest
buds and blossoms one by one. Her tears were falling all the time, so
that I wondered how she could see what she was doing, but she gathered
until her arms and her dress were full—she gathered every one! And when
the bush was stripped of all but its green leaves, I gave a little
heartbroken cry—because they were Betty’s roses, and she had so loved
them when they were only hard little buds—and she looked down and saw
me, and oh! her tears fell then, not like dew, but like rain.
“Betty,” she said, “kitty, Betty has gone—where—where there are
roses—always.”
And she went slowly back to the house, with all my Betty’s white roses
heaped up in her arms. She never told me where my Betty had gone—no
one did. And no more roses came out on the bush. I sat under it and
watched, because I hoped it would bloom again.
I sat there for hours and hours, and at last, while I was waiting, I
saw something strange. People had been going in and out of the house
all morning. They kept coming, and bringing flowers, and when they went
away most of them had tears in their eyes. And in the afternoon there
were more than there had been in the morning. I had got so tired that
I forgot, and fell asleep. I don’t know how long I slept, but I was
awakened by hearing many footsteps going slowly down the garden walk
towards the gate.
They all seemed to be people who were going away. And first there
walked before them two men who were carrying a beautiful white and
silver box of some kind on their shoulders. They moved very slowly,
and their heads were bent as they walked. But the white and silver box
was beautiful. It shone in the sun, and—oh, how my heart beat!—all my
Betty’s snow-white roses were heaped upon and wreathed around it. And
I sat under the stripped rose-bush breaking my heart. She had gone
away—my little Betty—and I did not know where; and all I could think
was that this was the very last I should ever see of her; because I
thought there must be something which had belonged to her in the white
and silver box under the roses, and because she was gone they were
carrying that away, too.
Oh, my Betty, my Betty! and I am only a little cat, who sits by the
fire and thinks, while nobody seems to care or understand how lonely
and puzzled I am, and how I long for some kind person to explain. And
I could not bear it, but that we loved each other so much that it
comforts me to think of it. And I loved her so much, that when I say to
myself over and over again what her mamma said to me, it almost makes
me happy again—almost, not quite, because I’m so lonely. But if it is
true, even a little cat who loved her would be happy for her sake.
Betty has gone—where there are always roses. Betty has gone—where there
are always roses.
HOW FAUNTLEROY OCCURRED
_AND A VERY REAL LITTLE BOY BECAME AN IDEAL ONE_
HOW FAUNTLEROY OCCURRED
_AND A VERY REAL LITTLE BOY BECAME AN IDEAL ONE_
CHAPTER I
HIS ENTRANCE INTO THE WORLD
It has always been rather interesting to me to remember that he first
presented himself in an impenetrable disguise. It was a disguise
sufficiently artful to have disarmed the most wary. I, who am not at
all a far-sighted person, was completely taken in by him. I saw nothing
to warrant in the slightest degree any suspicion that he had descended
to earth with practical intentions; that he furtively cherished plans
of making himself into the small hero of a book, the picturesque
subject of illustrations, the inspiration of a fashion in costume, the
very _jeune premier_ in a play over which people in two continents
would laugh and cry.
Perhaps, in periods before he introduced himself to his family that
morning of April 5, 1876, in a certain house in Paris, he may have
known all this, and laid out his little plans with adroitness and
deliberation; but when I first examined him carefully, as he lay on
my arm, looking extremely harmless and extremely fast asleep in his
extremely long nightgown, he did not bear at all the aspect of a crafty
and designing person; he only looked warm and comfortable, and quite
resigned to his situation.
He had been clever enough to disguise himself as a baby—a quite new
baby, in violet powder and a bald head and a florid complexion. He
had even put on small, indefinite features and entirely dispensed
with teeth, besides professing inability to speak, a fastidious
simplicity of taste in the matter of which limited him to the most
innocuous milk diet. But beneath this disguise there he lurked, the
small individual who, seven years later—apparently quite artlessly and
unconsciously—presented his smiling, ingenuous little face to the big
world, and was smiled back upon by it—Little Lord Fauntleroy. He was a
quite unromantic little person. Only a prejudiced maternal parent could
have picked him out from among seventy-five other babies of the same
age; but somehow we always felt that he had a tiny character of his
own, and somehow it was always an amusing little character, and one’s
natural tendency was to view him in rather a jocular light.
In the first place, he had always been thought of as a little girl.
It was the old story of “Your sister, Betsey Trotwood;” and when he
presented himself, with an unflinching firmness, in the unexpected
character of a little boy, serious remonstrance was addressed to him.
“This habit you have contracted of being a little boy,” his mamma said
to him, “is most inconvenient. Your name was to be Vivien. ‘Vivien’
is Early English, and picturesque and full of color; Vivian, which is
a boy’s name, I don’t think so much of. It sounds like a dandy, and
reminds me of Vivian Grey; but, after the way you have behaved, it is
about all I can do for you, because I am too tired of thinking of names
to be equal to inventing anything else.”
If it had not been for his disguise, and his determination not to be
betrayed into the weakness of speech, it is quite possible he might
have responded:
“If you will trust the matter to me, I will manage to reconcile you to
the name, and make you feel there is some consolation for the fact that
I preferred to be myself, instead of Vivien. Just give me time.”
We were, of course, obliged to give him time, and he wasted none
of it. One of the favorite jokes was that he was endeavoring to
ingratiate himself with us, and by a strict attention to business to
merit future patronage. We felt it very clever of him to elect to do
this quietly; to occupy the position he had chosen for himself with
such unobtrusiveness that no one could possibly object to him. This
might really have been the deepest craft. To have proved one’s self
an individual to whom no one can object on any pretext, is really an
enormous step in the direction of gaining a foothold. It is quite
possible that he realized that the step he had taken had been somewhat
premature; that to introduce himself to a family absorbed in study and
foreign travel, and an elder brother aged eighteen months, had not
been entirely discreet, and that a general decorum of manner would
be required to obliterate the impression that he had been somewhat
inconsiderate.
His elder brother had decided to become a stately beauty, and after
some indeterminate months had set up as premonitory symptoms large
brown eyes, a deepening golden tinge of hair, and a distinguished and
gracefully exclusive demeanor. His opinion of the new-comer was that
he was an interloper. I think his private impression was that he was
vulgar, also that he was fatuous and unnecessary. He used to stand
by his nurse’s knee when she held the intruder, and regard her with
haughty reflection from under his eyelids. She had hitherto been his
sole property, and her defection seemed to him to denote inferior taste
and instability of character. On one occasion, after standing by her
in disapproving silence for some time, while he alternately looked at
her and then at the white bundle on her knee, he waved his hand toward
the grate, remarking, with more dignity of demeanor than clearness of
enunciation:
“F’ow him in ’er fire!”
We were sure that the new member of the family appreciated the
difficulty of his position. We wondered if he had understood when he
had heard us refer to him as the “Little Calamity.” After a few days’
acquaintance with him we were afraid he had, and felt a delicacy in
using the term, which we had at first thought rather a good joke.
Dear Little Calamity, how often we have spoken of that misnomer since!
From his first hour his actions seemed regulated by the peaceful
resolve never to be in the way, and never to make any one uncomfortable.
The unvarying serenity with which he devoted himself to absorbing as
much nourishment as his small system would hold, and then sleeping
sweetly for hours and most artistically assimilating it, was quite
touching.
“Look at him,” his mamma would say. “He is trying to insinuate himself.
He intends to prove that he is really an addition, and that no family
should be without him. But no family can have him,” she burst forth in
a very short time, “no family but ours. Nobody is rich enough to buy
him. He has made his own price, and it is five hundred thousand million
dollars!” When he had selected her as a parent he had probably observed
that she was a susceptible person—peculiarly susceptible to the special
variety of charms he had to offer. He had analyzed her weakness and his
strength, and had known she was a fitting victim for his seductive arts.
The unflinchingness with which he applied himself to the fine art of
infant fascination was really worth reflecting upon. At thirty there
are numerous methods by which a person may prove that he is worthy
of affection and admiration; at three months his charms and virtues
are limited to a good digestion, a tendency to somnolence, and an
unobtrusive temper. The new arrival did not obtrude upon us any
ostentatiously novel attractions. He merely applied himself to giving
his family the most superior specimens of the meritorious qualities his
tender age was entitled to. He never complained of feeling unwell, he
was generally asleep, and when he was awake he would lie upon his back
without revolt for a much longer period than is submitted to usually
by persons of his months. And when he did so he invariably wore the air
of being engaged in sweet-tempered though profound reflection.
[Illustration: FAUNTLEROY’S WELCOME INTO THE WORLD: “F’OW HIM IN ’ER
FIRE!”]
He had not seemed to regret being born in Paris, but he seemed
agreeably impressed by America when he was taken there at the age of
six weeks. Feeling himself restored to a land of republican freedom, he
began to feel at liberty to unfold his hitherto concealed resources.
He began by giving less time to sleep and more to agreeable, though
inarticulate, conversation. He began to sit up and look around him
with soft, shadowy, and peculiarly thoughtful eyes. The expression—the
dear little dreamy, reflective expression—of his eyes was his most
valuable possession. It was a capital. It attracted the attention of
his immediate relatives and ensnared them into discussing his character
and wondering what he was thinking of. His eyes were brown, and having
heard their color remarked on in a complimentary manner, he, with great
artistic presence of mind, stealthily applied himself to developing
upon his hitherto bald head golden hair with a curl in it.
It was his mamma who first discovered this. She was lying upon a grassy
slope, playing with him, and holding him up in the sunlight at arm’s
length; she saw in the brightness a sort of faint little nimbus of gold
crowning him.
“Oh, the Lammie day!” she cried out. (“Lammie day” is not in the
dictionary; it was a mere maternal inspiration.) “See what he is doing
now! He is putting out a lovely little golden fuzz all over his head,
and there is a tiny curl at the ends—like little duck-tails! He has
asked somebody or something, perhaps a fairy, what kind of hair I
like with brown eyes, and he is doing it on purpose.” It seemed not
improbable that, on inquiring into her character before selecting her,
he had grounded himself thoroughly in the matter of her tastes, and had
found that an insistent desire for a certain beauty in the extremely
young was one of her weaknesses also.
From his earliest hours he considered her. He had not anticipated
walking alone at nine months old, but in their intimate moments he
discovered she had really set her heart upon his doing so.
“Your brother walked alone beautifully when he was nine months old,”
she would remark, “and if you wait until you are ten months old I shall
feel that you have dishonored your family and brought my reddish hair
with sorrow to the grave.”
This being the case, he applied himself to making determined, if slow,
little pilgrimages upon the carpet on his hands and knees. His reward
was that the first time he essayed this he was saluted with cries of
adulation and joy, notwithstanding the fact that his attempt was
rather wabbly in character, and its effect was marred by his losing his
balance and rolling over in a somewhat ignominious manner.
“He is creeping!” his mamma said. “He has begun to creep! He is going
to walk as soon as Lionel did!” and everything available in the form
of an audience was gathered together in the room, to exult with
acclamations over the enrapturing spectacle of a small thing dragging
its brief white frock and soft plump body, accompanied and illumined by
a hopeful smile, over a nursery carpet.
“He is so original!” his unprejudiced parent exclaimed, with fine
discrimination. “He’s creeping, of course, and babies have crept
before, but he gives it a kind of air, as if he had invented it, and
yet was quite modest.”
Her discrimination with regard to his elder brother had been quite as
fine. There were even persons who regarded her as being prejudiced by
undue affection. It has never been actually proved that the aspirant
for pedestrian honors had privately procured a calendar and secreted
it for daily reference as to the passage of time, but if this were not
the case, it was really by a rather singular coincidence that the day
before his ninth month was completed he arrested his creeping over the
carpet, and, dragging himself up by a chair to a standing position,
covered himself with glory by staggering, flushed, uncertain, but
triumphant, at least six steps across the floor unaided and alone.
He was snatched up and kissed until he was breathless. He was ruffled
and tumbled with delightful little shakes and ecstatic little hugs.
He bore it all with the modest composure of a conqueror, who did not
deign trivial airs and graces. His cheeks were warm and pink; he made
no remark whatever, but there was in his eyes a soft, coy little smile
which only a person of his Machiavellian depth of character could have
accomplished. By that time, by adroit machinations and an unbounded
knowledge of human weakness, he had assured his position in the
respectable family of which he had chosen to become a member. It would
have been impossible to oust him, or to work upon the feelings of his
relatives in any such manner as would have induced them to listen for
a moment to any animadversions upon his conduct. His eyelashes, his
indefinite features, his totter, his smile, were considered to become
matters of the most thrilling national importance. On the magnificent
occasion when he first decided to follow his mamma up-stairs, and
consequently applied himself to the rather prolonged and serious
athletic task of creeping up step by step on his dusty little hands and
soft knees, and electrifying her by confronting her, when she turned
and saw him, with a sweetly smiling and ardent little upturned face—on
that occasion it seemed really that it could only be by the most
remarkable oversight that there were not columns of editorials on the
subject in the London _Times_.
“They wrote about the passing of bills in Parliament,” his parent
remarked, “and about wars and royal marriages; why don’t they touch on
things of really vital importance?” It was at this period of existence
that his papa was frequently distracted in moments of deep absorption
in scientific subjects, by being implored to leave his essay upon
astigmatism and revert his attention upon his offspring.
“Don’t waste him!” he was besought. “He could not possibly keep up this
degree of fascination always. He might grow out of it, and then just
think how you would feel when you reflected that you had read medical
books when you might have been watching him pretending to be looking at
pictures. He ought to be economized every moment!”
But the most charming feature of his character was that his knowledge
of the possession of glittering accomplishments, which were
innumerable, never betrayed him into forgetting that his attitude
toward the entire world was one of the most perfect good-fellowship.
When he was spoken to, he smiled; when he was kissed, even by
unprepossessingly familiar persons, he always comported himself with
graceful self-control and dignity. The trying fact, which I am sure was
more apparent to no one than to himself, that there were individuals
whose idea of entertaining him was to make blatant idiots of
themselves, was never resented by him openly. When they uttered strange
sounds, and poked his soft cheeks, or tumbled him about in an unseemly
manner, it was his habit to gaze at them with deep but not disdainful
curiosity and interest, as if he were trying to be just toward them and
explain to himself their point of view.
“It really must be rather fatiguing to him not to be able to express
himself,” was his mamma’s opinion. “He has evidently so many opinions
in reserve.”
He was so softly plump, he was so sweet-tempered, he was so pretty! One
forgot all about his Early English sister Vivien. It was as if she had
never been contemplated for a moment. The word “calamity” was artfully
avoided in conversation. One felt unworthy, and rather blushed if one
caught sight of it in literature. When he invented a special little
habit of cuddling up to his mamma in a warm, small heap, and in his
sleep making for her a heavenly downy necklace of both his arms, with
his diminutive palms locked together to hold her prisoner through the
night, she began to feel it quite possible that his enslaving effect
upon her might be such as to enfeeble an intellect even of the most
robust. But she knew him by this time well enough to realize that it
would be useless to rebel, and that she might as well succumb.
She succumbed more and more as the days went by. But she also observed
that everybody else succumbed. While making the most of his mental
charms and graces he gave a great deal of attention to his physical
attractions. It was believed that he concentrated his attention upon
his hair. He encouraged it to develop from the golden fuzz into a
golden silk, from the tiny duck-tails to shining rings, from rings to a
waving aureole, from the aureole to an entrancing mop of yellow, which
tumbled over his forehead and gave his up-looking eyes a prettiness of
expression.
And how like him it was to make a point of never objecting to have this
wayward, though lovely, growth brushed! What a _supplice_ he might
have made of the ceremony for his family if he had resented it and
rebelled! But, on the contrary, it was believed that he seized upon the
opportunity offered by it to gild the refined gold of his amiability
of disposition, as it were. Speaking as a person with some knowledge
of the habits of the extremely young, I should say that there may be
numbers of maternal parents who will scarcely believe that one of the
most enchanting hours of the day was a certain time in the morning,
when he leaned against his mamma’s knee and gave himself up to engaging
conversation while his tangles were being taken out. He made not the
slightest objection to being curled and brushed and burnished up and
made magnificent. His soft, plump body rested confidingly against the
supporting knee, and while the function proceeded he devoted himself to
agreeable remark and analytical observation.
There was an expression of countenance it was his habit to wear at
such times which was really a matter of the finest art. It combined
philosophic patience, genial leniency, and a sweet determination to
make the very best of a thing, which was really beautiful to behold.
It was at these times that a series of nursery romances, known as “The
Hair-Curling Series,” was invented and related. They were notable
chiefly for good, strong, dramatic coloring, and their point was the
illustration of the useful moral that little boys with a great deal of
beautiful curly hair are naturally rewarded—if they are always good
when it is brushed—by delightful adventures, such as being played with
by fairies and made friends with by interesting wild animals, whose
ravenous propensities are softened to the most affectionate mildness
by the sight of such high-mindedness in tender youth. There was one
story, known as “The Good Wolf,” which lasted for months, and was a
never-ending source of delight, as it rejoiced in features which could
be varied to adapt themselves to any circumstance or change of taste in
playthings. It was the laudable habit of the good wolf to give presents
to little boys who were deserving, besides taking them delightful rides
in a little sleigh, and one could vary the gifts and excursions to an
unlimited extent. Another, known as “The Mournful Story of Benny,” was
a fearful warning, but ended happily, and as it was not of a personal
nature was not disapproved of, and was listened to with respectful and
sympathizing interest, though “The Good Wolf” was preferred.
A delightfully intelligent little expression and an occasional dear
little gurgling laugh when the best points were made, convinced me that
the point of view of the listener was an appreciation of the humor
between the lines quite as clear, in a four-year-old way, as that of
the relater of the incidents. He revelled in the good wolf and was
concerned by the misfortunes of Benny, who had brought tragedy upon
himself by being so lost to all sense of virtue as to cut off his
curls, but he knew they were highly colored figures, and part of a
subtile and delightful joke.
But long before this he had learned to talk, and it was then that we
were introduced to the treasures of his mind.
What was the queer little charm which made every one like him so much,
which made every one smile when he looked at them, which made every one
listen when he spoke, which made arms quite involuntarily close around
his small body when he came within reach?
The person who made the closest study of his character devoted five or
six years to it before she was quite sure what this charm consisted
in. Then she decided that it was formed of a combination of fortunate
characteristics which might have lost all their value of fascination
but for their being illumined by the warmth and brightness of a purely
kind little heart, full of friendliness to the whole world.
He was pretty, but many little boys were pretty; he was quaint and
amusing, but so are many scores. The difference between this one tiny
individuality and others was that he seemed to have been born without
sense of the existence of any barrier between his own innocent heart
and any other.
I think it had never occurred to him that any one could possibly
be unfriendly or unloving to him. He was a perfectly human little
thing, not a young cherub, but a rational baby, who made his frocks
exceedingly dirty, and rejoiced sweetly in the making of mud pies. But,
somehow, his radiant smile of belief in one’s sympathy, even with his
mud pies, minimized the trouble of contending with the earthly features
of him.
His opinion evidently was that the world was made of people who
loved him and smiled if they saw him, of things one could play with
and stories one could listen to, and of friends and relations who
were always ready to join in the play and tell the stories. He went
peacefully to the curl-brushing ordeal, perhaps because of this
confiding sureness that any hand that dealt with him would touch him
tenderly. He never doubted it.
One morning, before he was three years old, he trotted into the
dining-room with a beautifully preoccupied expression, evidently on
business thoughts intent. The breakfast was over, but his mamma was
still sitting at the table, reading.
She heard the tiny pattering of feet coming down the hall before he
entered. She had thought him with his nurse, but he appeared to be
returning from some unusual expedition to the front door, which, as it
was a warm, early summer morning, stood open.
She was always curious about his mental processes, and so, when he
trotted to the table with his absorbed air, and stood upon his tiptoes,
making serious efforts to gain possession of a long loaf of French
bread, she regarded him with interest—he was so little, and the roll of
bread was so long, and his intentions to do something practical with it
were so evident. Somehow, one of his allurements was that he was always
funny, and he was so purely because his small point of view was always
so innocently serious.
“What does mamma’s baby want?” she asked. He looked at her with an
air of sweet good faith, and secured the bread, tucking it in all its
dignity of proportion under the very shortest possible arm.
“Lady,” he said, “lady, f’ont door—want b’ead,” and he trotted off,
with a simple security in the sense of doing the right and only
admissible thing, which it was reposeful to behold.
His mamma left her book hurriedly and trotted after him. Such a quaint
baby figure he was, with the long French roll under his arm! And he
headed straight for the front door.
Standing upon the top step was an exceedingly dilapidated and
disreputable little negro girl with an exceedingly dirty and broken
basket on her arm. This basket was intended to contain such scraps of
food as she might beg for. She was grinning a little, and at the same
time looking a little anxious, as the baby came toddling to her, the
sun on his short curls, the loaf under his short arm.
[Illustration: HIS INITIAL ACT OF CHARITY: “LADY,” HE SAID, “LADY,
F’ONT DOOR—WANT B’EAD”]
He dropped the loaf into her basket with sweet friendliness.
“B’ead, lady,” he said. And as she scurried away he turned to smile at
his approaching mamma with the confidence of a two-year-old angel.
“Lady, b’ead,” he remarked succinctly, and the situation was explained.
The dirty little colored girl was a human thing in petticoats,
consequently she was a lady. His tender mind saw no other conclusion
to be arrived at. She had expressed a desire for bread. On his mamma’s
breakfast table there was a beautiful long loaf. Of course it must be
given to her. The question of demand and supply was so easily settled;
so he trotted after the bread. The mere circumstances of short legs and
short arms did not deter a spirit like his.
And it was this simple and unquestioning point of view which made him
adorable.
CHAPTER II
IN WHITE FROCK AND SASH
In the drawing-room, in full war-paint of white frock and big sash, he
was the spirit of innocent and friendly hospitality, in the nursery
he was a brilliant entertainment, below stairs he was the admiration
and delight of the domestics. The sweet temper which prompted him to
endeavor to sustain agreeable conversation with the guest who admired
him led him, also, to enter into friendly converse with the casual
market-man at the back door, and to entertain with lively anecdote and
sparkling repartee the extremely stout colored cook in the kitchen.
He endeavored to assist her in the performance of her more arduous
culinary duties, and by his sympathy and interest sustained her in
many trying moments. When he was visiting her department chuckles and
giggles might be heard issuing from the kitchen when the door was
opened. Those who heard them always knew that they were excited by the
moral or social observations or affectionate advice and solace of the
young but distinguished guest.
“Me an’ Carrie made that pudding,” he would kindly explain, at dinner.
“It’s a very good pudding. Carrie’s such a nice cook. She lets me help
her.”
And his dimples would express such felicity, and his eyes beam from
under his tumbling love-locks with such pleasure, at his confidence
in the inevitable rapture of his parents at the announcement of his
active usefulness, that no one possessed sufficient strength of mind to
correct the grammatical structure of his remarks.
There is a picture—not one of Mr. Birch’s—which I think will always
remain with me. It is ten years since I saw it, but I see it still.
It is the quaint one of a good-looking, stout, colored woman climbing
slowly up a back staircase with a sturdy little fellow on her back, his
legs astride her spacious waist, his arms clasped round her neck, his
lovely mop of yellow hair tumbling over her shoulder, upon which his
cheek affectionately and comfortably rests.
It does not come within the province of cooks to toil up-stairs with
little boys on their backs, especially when the little boys have stout
little legs of their own, and are old enough to wear Jersey suits and
warlike scarfs of red, but in this case the carrying up-stairs was an
agreeable ceremony, partly jocular and wholly affectionate, engaged
in by two confidants, and the bearer enjoyed it as much as did her
luxurious burden.
“We’re friends, you know,” he used to say. “Carrie’s my friend, and
Dan’s my friend. Carrie’s such a kind cook, and Dan’s such a nice
waiter.”
That was the whole situation in a nutshell. They were his friends, and
they formed together a mutual admiration society.
His conversation with them we knew was enriched by gems of valuable and
entertaining information. Among his charms was his desire to acquire
information, and the amiable readiness with which he imparted it to
his acquaintances. We gathered that while assisting in the making of
pudding he was lavish in the bestowal of useful knowledge. Intimate
association and converse with him had revealed to his mamma that
there was no historical, geographical, or scientific fact which might
not be impressed upon him in story form, and fill him with rapture.
Monsoons and typhoons, and the crossing of the Great Desert on camels,
he found absorbing; the adventures of Romulus and Remus, and their
good wolf, and the founding of Rome, held him spellbound. He found the
vestal virgins and their task of keeping up the sacred fires in the
temple sufficiently interesting to be made into a species of dramatic
entertainment during his third year. It was his habit to creep out of
his crib very early in the morning, and entertain himself agreeably in
the nursery until other people got up. One morning his mamma, lying in
her room, which opened into the nursery, heard a suspicious sound of
unlawful poking at the fire.
“Vivvie,” she said, “is that you?”
The poking ceased, but there was no reply. Silence reigned for a few
moments, and then the sound was heard again.
“Vivian,” said his anxious parent, “you are not allowed to touch the
fire.”
Small, soft feet came pattering hurriedly into the room; round the
footboard of the bed a ruffled head and seriously expostulatory little
countenance appeared.
“Don’t you know,” he said, with an air of lenient remonstrance, “don’t
you _know_ I’s a westal wirgin?”
It would be impossible to explain him without relating anecdotes. Is
there not an illustration of the politeness of his demeanor and the
grace of his infant manners in the reply renowned in his history,
made at the age of four, when his mamma was endeavoring to explain
some interesting point in connection with the structure of his small,
plump body? It was his habit to ask so many searching questions that
it was necessary for his immediate relatives to endeavor to render
their minds compact masses of valuable facts. But on this occasion
his inquiries had led him into such unknown depths as were beyond
him for the moment—only for the moment, of course. He listened to the
statement made, his usual engaging expression of delighted interest
gradually becoming tinged with polite doubtfulness. When the effort at
explanation was at an end he laid his hand upon his mamma’s knee with
apologetic but firm gentleness.
“Well, you see,” he said, “of course you know I _believe_ you, dearest”
(the most considerate stress was laid upon the “believe”), “but,
_ascuse_ me,” with infinite delicacy, “_ascuse_ me, I do _not_ think it
is true.”
The tender premonitory assurance that his confidence was unimpaired,
even though he was staggered by the statement made, was so
affectionately characteristic of him, and the apologetic grace of the
“ascuse me, dearest,” was all his own.
There might be little boys who were oblivious of, and indifferent
to, the attractions of simoons, who saw no charm in the interior
arrangements of camels, and were indifferent to the strata of the
earth, but in his enterprising mind such subjects wakened the liveliest
interest, and a little habit he had, of suddenly startling his family
by revealing to them the wealth of his store of knowledge, by making
casual remarks, was at once instructive and enlivening.
“A camel has ever so many stomachs,” he might sweetly announce, while
sitting in his high chair and devoting himself to his breakfast, the
statement appearing to evolve itself from dreamy reflection. “It fills
them with water. Then it goes across the desert and carries things.
Then it isn’t thirsty.”
He was extremely pleased with the camel, and was most exhaustive in his
explanations of him. It was not unlikely that Carrie and Dan might have
passed a strict examination on the subject of incidents connected with
the crossing of the Great Desert. He also found his bones interesting,
and was most searching in his inquiries as to the circulation of his
blood. But he had been charmed with his bones from his first extremely
early acquaintance with them, as witness an incident of his third year,
which is among the most cherished by his family of their recollections
of him.
He sat upon his mamma’s knee before the nursery fire, a small, round,
delightful thing, asking questions. He had opened up the subject of
his bones by discovering that his short, plump arm seemed built upon
something solid, which he felt at once necessary to investigate.
“It is a little bone,” his mamma said, “and there is one in your other
arm, and one in each of your legs. Do you know,” giving him a caressing
little shake, “if I could see under all the fat on your little body I
should find a tiny, weenty skeleton?”
He looked up enraptured. His dimples had a power of expressing delight
never equalled by any other baby’s dimples. His eyes and his very curls
themselves seemed somehow to have something to do with it.
“If you did,” he said, “if you did, _would you give it to me to play
with_?”
He was a very fortunate small person in the fact that nature had been
extremely good to him in the matter of combining his mental sweetness
and quaintness with the great charm of physical picturesqueness. All
his little attitudes and movements were picturesque. When he stood
before one to listen he fell unconsciously into some quaint attitude;
when he talked he became ingenuously dramatic; when he sat down to
converse he mentally made a droll or delightful and graceful little
picture of himself. His childish body was as expressive as his glowing
little face. Any memory of him is always accompanied by a distinct
recollection of the expression of his face, and some queer or pretty
position which seemed to be part of his mental attitude. When he wore
frocks his habit of standing with his hands clasped behind his back in
the region of a big sash, and his trick of sitting down with a hand
upon each of the plump knees a brevity of skirt disclosed, were things
to be remembered; when he was inserted into Jersey suits and velvet
doublet and knickerbockers, his manly little fashion of standing hands
upon hips, and sitting in delicious, all unconsciously æsthetic, poses
were positively features of his character. What no dancing-master could
have taught him, his graceful childish body fell into with entire
naturalness, merely because he was a picturesque small person in both
body and mind.
Could one ever forget him as he appeared one day at the seaside, when
coming up from the beach with his brief trousers rolled up to his
stalwart little thighs? He stood upon the piazza, spade and bucket in
hand, looking with deep, sympathetic interest at a male visitor who
was on the point of leaving the house. This visitor was a man who had
recently lost his wife suddenly. He was a near relative of a guest in
the house, and the young friend of all the world had possibly heard
his bereavement discussed. But at six years old it is not the custom
of small boys to concern themselves about such events. It seems that
this one did, however, though the caller was not one of his intimates.
He stood apart for a few moments, looking at him with a tenderly
reflective countenance. His mamma, seeing his absorption, privately
wondered what he was thinking of. But presently he transferred both
spade and bucket to one hand, and came forward, holding out the other.
I do not think anything could have been quainter and more sweet than
the kind little face which uplifted itself to the parting guest.
“Mr. Wenham,” he said, “I’m _very_ sorry for you, Mr. Wenham, about
your wife being dead. I’m very sorry for you. I know how you must miss
her.”
Even the sympathy of six years old does not go for nothing. There was a
slight moisture in Mr. Wenham’s eyes as he shook the small, sandy hand,
and his voice was not quite steady as he answered, “Thank you, Vivvie,
thank you.”
It was when he was spending the summer at this place that he made the
acquaintance of the young lady whose pony he regarded as a model of
equine strength and beauty. It was the tiniest possible pony, whose
duty it was to draw a small phaeton containing a small girl and her
governess. But I was told it was a fine sight to behold the blooming
little gentleman caller standing before this stately equipage, his
hands on his hips, his head upon one side, regarding the steed with
quite the experienced air of an aged jockey.
“That’s a fine horse,” he said. “You see, it’s got plenty of muscle.
What I like is a horse with plenty of muscle.”
[Illustration: “I’M VERY SORRY FOR YOU, MR. WENHAM, ABOUT YOUR WIFE
BEING DEAD”]
And when we drove away from the cottage at the end of the summer, I
myself perhaps a shade saddened, as one often is by the thought that
the days of sunshine and roses are over, he put his small hand in mine
and looked up at me wistfully.
“We liked that little house, didn’t we, dearest?” he said. “We will
always like it, won’t we?”
“Do you know my friend Mrs. Wilkins?” he inquired one day, when he was
still small enough to wear white frocks, and not old enough to extend
his explorations further than the part of the quiet street opposite the
house he lived in.
“And who is your friend Mrs. Wilkins?” his mamma inquired.
“She is a very nice lady that saw me through her window when I was
playing on the pavement, and we talked to each other, and she asked
me to come into her house. She’s such a kind lady, and she paints
beautiful cups and saucers. She’s my friend. And her cook is a nice
lady too. She lives in the basemen’ and she talks to me through the
window. She likes little boys. I have two friends in that house.”
“My friend Mrs. Wilkins” became one of his cherished intimates. His
visits to her were frequent and prolonged.
“I’ve just been to see my friend Mrs. Wilkins,” he would say; or, “My
friend Mrs. Wilkins’s husband is very kind to me. We go to his store,
and he gives me oranges.”
It is not improbable that he also painted china during his calls upon
his friend Mrs. Wilkins. It is certain that, if he did not otherwise
assist, his attitude was that of an enthusiastic admirer of the art.
That his conversation with the lady embraced many subjects, we have
evidence in an anecdote frequently related with great glee by those to
whom the incident was reported. I myself was not present during the
ingenuous summing up of the charm of social life, but I have always
mentally seen him taking his part in the scene in one of his celebrated
conversational attitudes, in which he usually sat holding his plump
knee in a manner which somehow seemed to express deep, speculative
thought.
“Are you in society, Mrs. Wilkins?” he inquired, ingenuously.
“What _is_ being in society, Vivvie?” Mrs. Wilkins replied, probably
with the intention of drawing forth his views.
“It’s—well—there are a great many carriages, you know, and a great many
ladies come to see you. And they say, ‘How _are_ you, Mrs. Burnett?
So glad to find you at home.’ Gabble, gabble, gabble, gabble. ‘_Good_
morning!’ And they go away. That’s it.”
I am not quite sure that I repeat the exact phrasing, but the idea is
intact, and the point which inspired the hearers with such keen joy was
that he had absolutely no intention of making an unfriendly criticism.
He was merely painting an impressionist’s picture. On his own part he
was fond of society. It delighted him to be allowed to come into the
drawing-room on the days when his mamma was “at home.” This function
impressed him as an agreeable festivity. As he listened to the “gabble,
gabble, gabble,” he beamed with friendly interest. He admired the
ladies, and regarded them as beautiful and amiable. It was his pleasure
to follow the departing ones into the hall and render them gallant
assistance with their wraps.
“I like ladies, dearest,” he would say. “They are so pretty.”
At what age he became strongly imbued with the stanchest Republican
principles, it would be difficult to say. He was an unflinching
Republican.
“My dearest Mamma,” he wrote me in one of the splendid epistolary
efforts of his earliest years, “I am sorry that I have not had time
to write to you before. I have been so occupied with the presidential
election. The boys in my school knock me down and jump on me because
they want me to go Democrat. But I am still a strong Republican. I
send you a great many hugs and kisses.
“Your obedient and humble son and servant,
“VIVIAN.”
He was given to inventing picturesque terminations to his letters, and
he seemed particularly pleased with the idea of being my humble or
obedient son and servant. The picture the letter brought to my mind of
a flushed and tumbled but stanch little Republican engaged in a sort of
kindergarten political tussle with equally flushed and tumbled little
Democrats wore an extremely American aspect. Figuratively speaking,
he plunged into the thick of the electioneering fray. He engaged in
political argument upon all available occasions. Fortunately for his
peace of mind, Carrie and Dan favored the Republican party. Dan took
him to see Republican torchlight processions, and held him upon his
shoulders while he waved his small hat, his hair flying about his
glowing face while he shouted himself hoarse. No unworthy party cry
of “’Rah for Hancock!” went unanswered by the clarion response. At
the sound of such a cry in the street the nursery windows flew open
with a bang, and two ecstatic Republicans (himself and brother) almost
precipitated themselves into space, shouting “’Rah for Garfield!”
Without such precautions he felt his party would be lost. I think he
was six when he discovered that he was a supporter of the movement
in favor of female suffrage. It was rather a surprise to us when this
revealed itself, but his reasons were of such a serious and definite
nature that they were arguments not to be refuted.
[Illustration: “ARE YOU IN SOCIETY, MRS. WILKINS?”]
When he gave them he was leaning against a window-ledge in a room in a
seaside home, his hands in his red sash, his countenance charming with
animation.
“I believe they ought to be allowed to vote if they like it,” he said,
“’cause what should we do if there were no ladies? Nobody would have
any mothers or any wives.”
“That is true,” his maternal audience encouraged him by saying. “The
situation would be serious.”
“And nobody could grow up,” he proceeded. “When any one’s a baby, you
know, he hasn’t any teeth, and he can’t eat bread and things. And if
there were no ladies to take care of him when he was very first born
he’d die. I think people ought to let them vote if they want to.”
This really seemed so to go to the root of things that the question
appeared disposed of.
One laughed and laughed at him. All his prettiness was quaint, and so
innocent that its unconsciousness made one smile. Only sometimes—quite
often—while one was smiling one was queerly touched and stirred.
What a picture of a beautiful, brave little spirit, aflame with young
fervor, he was the day I went into a room and found him reading for the
first time in his brief life the story of the American Revolution!
He sat in a large chair, one short leg tucked under him, a big book on
his knee, his love-locks tumbling over his ecstasied child face. He
looked up, glowing, when I entered. His cheeks were red, his eyes were
beautiful.
“Dearest,” he said, “dearest, listen. _Here’s_ a brave man, here’s a
brave man! This is what he says, ‘Give me liberty or give me death!’”
It was somehow so movingly incongruous—this “pretty page with dimpled
chin” stirred so valiantly by his “liberty or death.” I kissed his
golden thatch, laughing and patting it, but a little lump was in my
throat.
Where did he learn—faithful and tender heart—to be such a lover as he
was? Surely no woman ever had such a lover before! What taught him
to pay such adorable childish court, and to bring the first-fruits
of every delight to lay upon one shrine? In the small garden where
he played—a toddling thing, accumulating stains of grass and earth
in truly human fashion on his brief white frock—the spring scattered
sparsely a few blue violets. How he applied himself to searching for
them, to gather them with pretty laboriousness until he had collected
a small, warm handful, somewhat dilapidated before it was large enough
to be brought up-stairs in the form of a princely floral gift!
It is nearly fourteen years since they were first laid at my feet—these
darling little grubby handfuls of exhausted violets—but I can hear
yet the sound of the small feet climbing the staircase, stoutly but
carefully, the exultant voice shouting at intervals all the way up from
the first flight: “Sweet dearest! Sweet de-ar-est! I got somefin’ for
you! Please le’ me in.”
So many beautiful names had been tried by turns by himself and brother,
but they found “sweetest” and “sweet dearest” the most satisfactory.
Finally they decided upon “dearest” as combining and implying the
sentiment they were inspired by.
There was in a certain sacred workroom at the top of the house a
receptacle known as the “treasure drawer.” It was always full of
wonderful things, rich gifts brought carefully and with lavish
generosity from the grass in the back yard, from dust heaps, from the
street, from anywhere; bits of glass or pebble, gorgeous advertising
cards, queerly shaped twigs or bits of wood, pictures out of papers,
small, queer toys, possessing some charm which might make them valuable
to an appreciative maternal relative. And just before they were
presented I always heard the small feet on the stairs, the knock on the
door, and the delightful, confiding voice outside: “Please, may I come
in? I’ve brought a treasure for you, dearest.”
We always spoke of them as “treasures.” They seemed so beautiful and
valuable to the donor, that love brought them at once as a gift to
love, and the recipient saw them with his eyes.
The very first bud which appeared on the oldfashioned rose-bushes at
the back of the house was watched for and discovered when it was a
tiny, hard, green thing.
“There’s a bud,” he would say, “and I’m watching till it is a rose, so
that I can give it to you.”
There is nothing so loving as a child who is loved. What valuable
assistance he rendered in the matter of toilet! How charmed he was with
any pretty new thing! How delighted to be allowed to put on slippers
or take them off, to stand by the dressing-table and hand pins, and
give the benefit of his admiring advice. And how adorable it was to
come home late from a party and find the pincushion adorned with a
love-letter, scrawled boldly in lead pencil and secured by a long pin.
In conjunction with his brother—who was the troubadour of love from his
infancy, and who has a story of his own—he invented the most delightful
surprises for those late returns. Sometimes pieces of candy wrapped in
paper awaited the arrival, sometimes _billets doux_, sometimes singular
rhymes courageously entitled “A Valentine.” The following was the fine
flower of all:
“MY MAMA
“O my swetest little mama,
Sweteness that can ne’er be told
Dwells all decked in glory behind thy bosom folds.
In love and tender sweteness
Thy heart has no compare
And as through the path of sorrow
Thy heart goes wangering on
Thow always lend a helping hand
To all who are alone.
“ESEX ESSEX.”
“What does ‘Essex’ mean, darling?” I asked.
“I don’t know what it means,” he said, sweetly, “and I didn’t spell it
right at first. But, you know, when any one writes poetry they nearly
always put another name at the end, and I thought Essex would do.” He
was so desirous of making it complete!
CHAPTER III
IN BOYHOOD AND NOW
As a travelling companion what a success he was! How he made friends in
the train, at railway stations, on steamers! How, if one lost sight of
him for a moment, he invariably reappeared full of delight, with the
information that he had “found a friend.”
As I was struggling in the usual manner up the crowded gangway of an
ocean steamer on one occasion, his flushed and radiant countenance
appeared over the rail, where he had climbed.
“Dearest, dearest,” he said, “I’ve found a friend. He’s a French
gentleman and can’t speak English.” He had found him on the tug, and
they had apparently sworn eternal amity between the wharf and the
steamer, though how this had been accomplished I was never quite able
to determine, as he had only just begun to attack valiantly a verb
or so of the first conjugation. But with the assistance of “donner,”
“aller,” “aimer,” and a smile like his, nothing was impossible.
His circle of acquaintances during an ocean voyage was choice and
large. And one languid passenger, lying in her steamer chair with
cushions behind her and fur robes over her, was never passed without
the affectionate, inquiring smiles of a protector, and at intervals
through all the day he presented himself to “look after” her.
“Are you all right, dearest?” he would say. “Do you want your feet
tucked in? Did the deck steward bring you your lunch? Are your cushions
comfortable?” And these matters being attended to he would kiss her
gayly and run off to explore engines, or gather valuable information
about walking-beams.
On several occasions he and his brother made some rather long railroad
journeys alone. It was quite safe to send them. If they had not been
able to take care of themselves, half the world would have taken care
of them. Conductors conversed with them, passengers were interested in
them, and they arrived at the end of their travels laden with tribute.
After one such journey, taken together between Washington and Boston,
with what joy they performed their toilets through an entire summer
with the assistance of a large box of wonderful soaps and perfumes,
sent to them by an acquaintance made _en voyage_.
“He was Lionel’s friend,” Vivian explained. “I think he said he was a
drummer. He was so nice to us. My friend that I made was a professor
in a college, I believe, and he gave me this to remember him by.”
“This” was a pretty nugget of gold, and was accompanied by a card on
which the donor had written the most affectionately kind things of the
pleasure he had had in his brief acquaintance with his young travelling
companion, whose _bonne mine_ he should not soon forget.
One could always be quite sure that he would give no trouble during a
journey, that he would always be ready to perform any service, that no
railroad nor ocean boat official could withstand him when he presented
himself with a smiling request.
It is easy to call to mind, at any moment, some memory of him, his face
flushed, his hair damp on his forehead, his eyes courageous, as he
struggled with something too big for him, he had felt it his duty to
take charge of, as he swayed with the crowd down the gangway of some
steamer at Southampton or some _paquebot_ at Calais.
“It is too heavy for you, darling,” one would say. “You look so hot.
Let me carry it.”
“Oh, no,” would be his valiant answer. “I’m all right, dearest. It’s
rather a warm day, but a boy doesn’t mind being warm.”
Even foreign languages did not appall him.
“I’m only a little boy, you know,” he would say, cheerfully. “It
doesn’t matter if it does sound funny, just so that they understand
me. I like to talk to them.”
So he conversed with Annunciata in the kitchen, and Luigi in the
dining-room, as it had been his habit to converse with Carrie and Dan
years before, for by this time his love-locks had been cropped and had
changed to brown, but he still remained the same charming and engaging
little person.
“Boys are sometimes a great trouble,” commented Luigi, in referring to
him and his brother, “but these—they are little _signorini_.”
Fauntleroy had “occurred” nearly four years before the time when he
exhausted all the resources of the Paris Exposition, but it was still
Fauntleroy, though a taller one, in schoolboy suit and Eton collar, and
shorn of his _boucles blondes_, who marched off at nine o’clock every
morning for two weeks, and spent the day exploring the treasures of the
exhibition. Sometimes he was quite alone, sometimes he had appointments
with some “friends” he had made in the passage from New York to
Havre—three interesting men whose connection with the electrical
exhibit inspired him with admiration and delight. My impression is that
they did not speak French, and that it enraptured him to place his
vocabulary at their disposal.
“They are so kind to me, dearest,” he said, just as he had said it at
three years old, when he visited his “friend Mrs. Wilkins.”
“It must be an entertaining spectacle,” I often thought, “to see him
walk into the restaurant quite unattended, order his little _déjeuner à
la fourchette_, dispose of it in dignified solitude at a small table,
and present the _garçon_ with a _pourboire_ as if he were forty. I
should like to be a spectator from afar. No doubt the waiters know him
and make jocular remarks among themselves.”
But it was when he was only seven that Fauntleroy really occurred. He
had been so amusing and interesting that summer, and I had reflected
upon him so much! Every few days I heard some delightful anecdote about
him, or saw him do something incomparably quaint. What led me most into
speculation was the effect he invariably produced upon people, touching
little fascinations he exercised.
“Do you know, I never saw a child like him!” said a clever man of the
world who had spent an hour talking to him.
And, curiously enough, it was exactly the idea expressed by an old
colored aunty years before. “Dat chile,” she said, “he suttanly
ain’t like no other chile. ’Tain’t jest dat he’s smart—though cose
he’s smart, smart as they make ’em. It’s sump’n else. An’ he’s the
frien’liest little human I ever seed—he suttanly is!”
I had been ill that year and the year before it, and of that illness
I have many memories which are beautiful and touching things. One is
of many disturbed and weary nights, when the door of my room opened
quietly and a little figure entered—such an adorable little figure,
in a white nightgown, and with bright hair, tumbled by sleep, falling
about a serious, small face.
“I’ve come to take care of you, dearest,” he would say, with his
indescribable protecting and comforting air. “I’ll sit by you and make
you go to sleep.”
And somehow there seemed to emanate from his childish softness a sort
of soothing which could not have been put into words.
It was his special province to put me to sleep when I was restless. He
assumed it as a sacred duty, and had the utmost confidence in his power
to do it.
“I’ll put you to sleep,” he would say. “I will just sit by you and hold
your hand and make you quiet.”
How long had he sat by me on that one night which I shall always
remember? I do not know. But he had been so quiet, and had sat holding
my hand so long, that I could not find it in my heart to let him
know that the charm had not worked and that I was not really asleep.
I pretended that I was, lying very still, and breathing with soft
regularity.
He stayed quite a long time after I knew he thought I was quiet for the
night, he was so determined to be quite sure that nothing would disturb
me. At last he began with the most cautious softness to take his hand
away. When he had been a baby I had sometimes laid him down to sleep
with just such cautious movement. How gradually and softly the small
fingers released themselves one by one, how slowly, with what infinite
precaution of slowness, the warm, kind little palm was detached from
mine. Then there was a mysterious, careful movement, and I knew he was
leaving his chair. I dared not open my eyes for fear he would see me,
and be heartbroken because I was awake. What was he doing? There were
no footsteps, and yet he was moving a little—a very little, it seemed.
And the movement was so slow, and interrupted by such pauses, that the
length of time it lasted added to my curiousness. What idea had he
been inspired by? Whatsoever he was doing he was putting his entire
soul into, and he should not be crushed by the thought that it was all
in vain. When I could hear that he had reached the door I opened an
eye very cautiously. The opening of the door was as clever and quiet
as the mysterious movement. It was opened only a little, there was
more careful movement, and then it was drawn to. But though I had been
looking directly at the slip of light I had not seen him. Somehow he
had passed through without coming within my line of vision.
I lay mystified. The incomprehensibleness of it gave me something to
think about. His room was near my own, and I knew that he went to it
and got into bed. I knew, also, that he would be asleep as soon as his
curly head touched the pillow.
He had been asleep perhaps an hour when his brother came in. He had
been spending the evening at the house of a friend. He was usually a
tender and thoughtful thing himself, but this night the excitement of
festivity had intoxicated him and made him forgetful. He came up the
staircase and ran into the bedroom with a childish rush.
Exactly what happened I could only guess at. I had reason to suppose
that my young protector and medical attendant was wakened with some
extra sense of flurry taking place. He evidently sat up in bed in
reproachful despair.
“What have I done?” said his brother. “What is the matter?”
I heard tears in the plaintive little voice that answered—actual tears.
“Oh!” he said, “I know you’ve wakened her! I know you have! It was so
hard to get her to sleep. And at last I did, and then I was so afraid
of wakening her that I went down on the floor and crawled out of the
room on my hands and knees. And I think it took an hour.”
“Darling,” I murmured, in the drowsiest possible tone, when he crept
into the room to look at me, “I’ve had a lovely sleep, and I’m going
to sleep again. You made me so quiet.” But with the most serious
difficulty I restrained myself from clutching him in my arms with a
force which would have betrayed to him all my adoring duplicity.
It was things such as these I remembered when he was so deliciously
amusing, and I heard stories of him every day.
Sometimes, when swinging in my hammock on the piazza, I caught sight
of him flying on his small bicycle down the tree-shaded avenue,
a delightful, animated picture, his strong, graceful child body
beautifully defined in his trim, closefitting Jersey suit, his red
scarf and fez brilliant touches of color, his waving, flying hair
brightened to gold as he darted through the sunshine and into the
shade. I used to say to myself: “He is so good to look at! He is so
pretty! That is why every one likes him so.” And then, when I heard him
say some quaint thing which was an actual delight through its droll
ingenuousness, I said: “It is because he is so amusing!”
So I studied him day after day, often trying to imagine the effect
his fearless candor and unsophisticated point of view would have upon
certain persons who did not know his type.
I was convalescing from my long illness, and had plenty of time to
amuse myself with such speculations. He was such a patriotic young
American; he was so engaged in an impending presidential election
at the time; his remarks were so well worth hearing. I began, among
other fancies about him, to imagine his making them with that frankly
glowing face to conservative English people. He had English blood in
his veins, and things more unheard-of had occurred than that, through a
combination of circumstances, he might be surrounded by things very new
to him.
“When a person is a duke,” he had said to me once, “what makes him
one? What has he done?” His opinion evidently was that dukedoms were a
species of reward for superhuman sweetness of character and brilliant
intellectual capacity. I began to imagine the interest that would be
awakened in his mind by the contemplation of ducal personages.
It amused me to analyze the subject of what his point of view would be
likely to be. I knew it would be productive of immense entertainment to
his acquaintances. I was sure that the duke would be subjected to sweet
but searching cross-questioning, and that much lively interest would
be felt in the subject of coronets. He would regard them as a species
of eccentric hat. What questions he would ask, what enthusiasm he would
display, when he was impressed by things beautiful or stately and
interesting! Would he seem “a cheeky little beggar” to less republican
minds than his own? I asked myself this curiously. But no, I was sure
he would not. He would be so simple; he would expect such splendor of
mind and of noble friendliness that the hypothetical duke would like
him as Dan and Carrie did, and he would end by saying “My friend the
Duke of Blankshire,” as affectionately as he had said “My friend the
milkman.”
It was only a thread of fancy for a while, but one day I had an idea.
“I will write a story about him,” I said. “I will put him in a
world quite new to him, and see what he will do. How shall I bring
a small American boy into close relationship with an English
nobleman—irascible, conservative, disagreeable? He must live with him,
talk to him, show him his small, unconscious, republican mind. He will
be more effective if I make him a child who has lived in the simplest
possible way. Eureka! Son of younger son, separated from ill-tempered
noble father because he has married a poor young American beauty.
Young father dead, elder brothers dead, boy comes into title! How it
would amaze him and bewilder him! Yes, there it is, and Vivian shall
be he—just Vivian, with his curls and his eyes, and his friendly, kind
little soul. Little Lord Something-or-other. What a pretty title—Little
Lord ——, Little Lord —— what?”
[Illustration: THE REAL FAUNTLEROY LISTENING TO THE STORY OF THE IDEAL
FAUNTLEROY]
And a day later it was Little Lord Fauntleroy. A story like that is
easily written. In part, it was being lived before my eyes.
“I can wash myself quite well, thank you,” he said, scrubbing
vigorously one day. “I can do it quite well, dearest, if some one will
just ’zamine the corners.”
He had always spoken very clearly, but there were a few words his
pronunciation of which endeared them inexpressibly to me. On the
evening of the day before “Fauntleroy” spent his first morning with
“Lord Dorincourt” he brought into my room a parlor base-ball game to
show me.
It was a lovely thing to see his delight over it, and to note the care
with which he tried to make all technical points clear to an interested
but unintelligent parent. What vigorous little attitudes he threw
himself into when he endeavored to show me how the ball was thrown in
the real game!
“I’m afraid that I am a very stupid little mammy,” I said. “What does
the first base do? And what is the pitcher for? I’m very dull, you
see.”
“Oh, no!” he said. “No, you’re not, dearest. It’s me, you know. I’m
afraid that I’m not a very good ’splainer. And besides, you are a lady,
you know, and ladies don’t play base-ball.”
Almost every day I recorded something he had said or suggested.
And how delightful it was to read the manuscript to him and his
brother! He used to sit in a large arm-chair holding his knee, or with
his hands in his pockets.
“Do you know,” he said to me once, “I like that boy! There’s one thing
about him, he never forgets about dearest.”
When the first appearance of the false claimant occurred, he turned
quite pale; so did his brother.
“Oh, dearest!” they gasped, “why did you do that? Oh, don’t do it!”
“What will he do?” the occupant of the arm-chair asked. “Won’t he,
dearest, be the Earl’s boy any more?”
“‘That other boy,’ said Fauntleroy tremulously to Lord Dorincourt, the
next day, ‘he will have to—to be your boy now—as I was—won’t he?’”
‘No,’ answered the Earl, and he said it so fiercely that Cedric quite
jumped.
“‘Shall I be your boy even if I’m not going to be an earl?’ he said.
‘Shall I be your boy just as I was before?’”
But it was a real little heart that had beaten at the thought.
* * * * *
He has been considered such an ideal little person—Cedric Errol, Lord
Fauntleroy—and he was so real after all. Perhaps it is worth while
explaining that he was only a simple, natural thing—a child, whose
great charm was that he was the innocent friend of the whole world.
I have reason to believe that an impression exists that the passage of
years has produced no effect whatever on the great original, that he
has still waving golden hair, and wears black velvet doublets and broad
collars of lace. This is an error. He is sixteen. He plays foot-ball
and tennis, and battles sternly with Greek. He is anxious not to
“flunk” in geometry, and his hair is exceedingly short and brown. He
has a fine sense of humor, and his relatives consider it rather a good
joke to present him to intimates, as he appears before them, looking
particularly cheerful and robust, in the words first heard by Havisham:
“This is—‘Little Lord Fauntleroy.’”
But there are things which do not change with the darkening of golden
hair and the passage of boyish years.
Charles Scribner’s Sons’
New and Standard Books for Young Readers for 1897-98 ...
MRS. BURNETT’S
FAMOUS JUVENILES
An entirely new edition of Mrs. Burnett’s famous juveniles from new
plates, with all the original illustrations. Bound in a beautiful new
cloth binding designed by R. B. Birch, and sold at very much reduced
prices.
LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY
TWO LITTLE PILGRIMS’ PROGRESS
SARA CREWE and LITTLE SAINT ELIZABETH AND OTHER STORIES (in one vol.)
PICCINO AND OTHER CHILD STORIES
GIOVANNI AND THE OTHER
_Five Volumes, 12mo, each, $1.25_
The original editions can still be supplied at the former prices:
=LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY.= Beautifully illustrated by REGINALD B.
BIRCH. Square 8vo, $2.00.
=TWO LITTLE PILGRIMS’ PROGRESS.= A STORY OF THE CITY BEAUTIFUL. By
Mrs. FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. Illustrated by REGINALD B. BIRCH.
Uniform with “Fauntleroy,” etc. Square 8vo, $1.50.
=SARA CREWE=; OR, WHAT HAPPENED AT MISS MINCHIN’S. Richly and fully
illustrated by REGINALD B. BIRCH. Square 8vo, $1.00.
=LITTLE SAINT ELIZABETH=, AND OTHER STORIES. With 12 full-page
drawings by REGINALD B. BIRCH. Square 8vo, $1.50.
=GIOVANNI AND THE OTHER=: CHILDREN WHO HAVE MADE STORIES. With 9
full-page illustrations by REGINALD B. BIRCH. Square 8vo, $1.50.
=PICCINO=, AND OTHER CHILD STORIES. Fully illustrated by REGINALD B.
BIRCH. Square 8vo, $1.50.
_SCRIBNER’S BOOKS FOR THE YOUNG_
G. A. HENTY’S POPULAR STORIES FOR BOYS
New Volumes for 1897-98. Each, crown 8vo, handsomely Illustrated, $1.50.
Mr. Henty, the most popular writer of Books of Adventure in England,
adds three new volumes to his list this fall—books that will delight
thousands of boys on this side who have become his ardent admirers
=WITH FREDERICK THE GREAT.= A TALE OF THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR. With 12
full-page illustrations. 12mo, $1.50.
This story, more than any other of Mr. Henty’s, follows closely the
historic lines, and no better description of the memorable battles of
Rossbach, Leuthen, Prague, Zorndorf, Hochkirch, and Torgau can be found
anywhere than is given in this volume. Through the historic part there
runs the record of the daring and hazardous adventures of the hero, so
that the charm of romance is given to the whole narrative. It is one of
the most important volumes Mr. Henty has written.
=A MARCH ON LONDON.= A STORY OF WAT TYLER’S RISING. With 8 full-page
illustrations by W. H. MARGETSON. 12mo, $1.50.
This book weaves together, in a most interesting way, the story of Wat
Tyler’s rebellion under King Richard, the civil war in Flanders which
occurred soon after, and the ill-planned attack upon the French led
by the Bishop of Norfolk. The whole story is singularly interesting,
covering as it does a period of history which is but little known and
which is well worth narrating.
=WITH MOORE AT CORUNNA.= A STORY OF THE PENINSULAR WAR. With 12
full-page illustrations by WAL. PAGET. 12mo, $1.50.
A bright Irish lad, Terence O’Connor, is living with his widowed
father, Captain O’Connor of the Mayo Fusiliers, with the regiment,
at the time when the Peninsular War against Napoleon began. Under
the command of Sir John Moore, he shared in the same marching and
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received a commission as colonel in the Portuguese army, and during the
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account of the conduct of the campaigns.
MR. HENTY’S OTHER BOOKS
Each volume with numerous illustrations; handsomely bound. Olivine
edges. 12mo. $1.50.
“Mr. Henty’s books never fail to interest boy readers. Among writers
of stories of adventure he stands in the very first rank.”—_Academy_,
London.
“No country nor epoch of history is there which Mr. Henty does not
know, and what is really remarkable is that he always writes well and
interestingly. Boys like stirring adventures, and Mr. Henty is a master
of this method of composition.”—_New York Times._
=AT AGINCOURT.= A TALE OF THE WHITE HOODS OF PARIS. With 12 full-page
illustrations by WAL. PAGET.
=COCHRANE THE DAUNTLESS.= A TALE OF THE EXPLOITS OF LORD COCHRANE
IN SOUTH AMERICAN WATERS. With 12 full-page illustrations by W. H.
MARGETSON.
=ON THE IRRAWADDY.= A STORY OF THE FIRST BURMESE WAR. With 8 full-page
illustrations by W. H. OVEREND.
=THROUGH RUSSIAN SNOWS.= A STORY OF NAPOLEON’S RETREAT FROM MOSCOW.
With 8 full-page illustrations by W. H. OVEREND.
=A KNIGHT OF THE WHITE CROSS.= A TALE OF THE SIEGE OF RHODES. With 12
full-page illustrations by RALPH PEACOCK.
=THE TIGER OF MYSORE.= A STORY OF THE WAR WITH TIPPOO SAID. With 12
full-page illustrations by W. H. MARGETSON.
=IN THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES.= A STORY OF ADVENTURE IN COLORADO.
=WHEN LONDON BURNED.= A STORY OF RESTORATION TIMES AND THE GREAT FIRE.
=WULF THE SAXON.= A STORY OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST.
=ST. BARTHOLOMEW’S EVE.= A TALE OF THE HUGUENOT WARS.
=THROUGH THE SIKH WAR.= A TALE OF THE CONQUEST OF THE PUNJAUB.
=A JACOBITE EXILE.= BEING THE ADVENTURES OF A YOUNG ENGLISHMAN IN THE
SERVICE OF CHARLES XII. OF SWEDEN.
=CONDEMNED AS A NIHILIST.= A STORY OF ESCAPE FROM SIBERIA.
=BERIC THE BRITON.= A STORY OF THE ROMAN INVASION.
=IN GREEK WATERS.= A STORY OF THE GRECIAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE
[1821-1827].
=THE DASH FOR KHARTOUM.= A TALE OF THE NILE EXPEDITION.
=REDSKIN AND COWBOY.= A TALE OF THE WESTERN PLAINS.
=HELD FAST FOR ENGLAND.= A TALE OF THE SIEGE OF GIBRALTAR.
SOME OF THE NEWEST BOOKS
=WILL SHAKESPEARE’S LITTLE LAD.= By IMOGEN CLARK. With illustrations
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A story, full of warm color and brisk movement, of Stratford life in
Shakespeare’s day, the local atmosphere being reflected with rare
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=CHILD POEMS.= By EUGENE FIELD. With an introduction by KENNETH GRAHAME
and profusely illustrated by CHARLES ROBINSON. Uniform with Robert
Louis Stevenson’s “Child’s Garden of Verses,” also illustrated by
Charles Robinson. 12mo, $1.50.
=THE STEVENSON SONG BOOK.= VERSES FROM “A CHILD’S GARDEN,” by ROBERT
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=AN OLD-FIELD SCHOOL GIRL.= By MARION HARLAND. With 8 full-page
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=LORDS OF THE WORLD.= By ALFRED J. CHURCH. A STORY OF THE FALL OF
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The scene of this story centres in the overthrow and destruction of
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=HEROES OF OUR NAVY.= By MOLLY ELLIOT SEAWELL. Illustrated. 12mo. _In
press._
Never has this entertaining writer been more felicitous than in the
present volume.
=THE LAST CRUISE OF THE MOHAWK.= By W. J. HENDERSON. Illustrated by
HARRY EDWARDS. 12mo, $1.25.
The book is crowded with dramatic incident—mutiny, shipwreck,
Farragut’s great fight in Mobile Bay—and the narrative is as simple as
the events and characters are entertaining.
KIRK MUNROE’S STIRRING TALES
_THE WHITE CONQUEROR SERIES_
WITH CROCKETT AND BOWIE
THE WHITE CONQUERORS
AT WAR WITH PONTIAC
THROUGH SWAMP AND GLADE
Each, illustrated, 12mo, $1.25. The complete set, 4 vols., in a box,
$5.00.
_JUST PUBLISHED_
=WITH CROCKETT AND BOWIE=; OR, FIGHTING FOR THE LONE STAR FLAG. A TALE
OF TEXAS. With 8 full-page illustrations by VICTOR PÉRARD.
The story is of the Texas revolution in 1835, when American Texans
under Sam Houston, Bowie, Crockett, and Travis, fought for relief
from the intolerable tyranny of the Mexican Santa Ana. The hero, Rex
Hardin, son of a Texas ranchman, and graduate of an American military
school, takes a prominent part in the heroic defense of the Alamo,
the terrible scenes at Golead, and the final triumph at San Jacinto.
The historical side of the story has been carefully studied and its
localities rendered familiar by a special trip to Texas undertaken by
the author for that purpose within a year.
_PREVIOUS VOLUMES_
=THROUGH SWAMP AND GLADE.= A TALE OF THE SEMINOLE WAR. With 8 full-page
illustrations by VICTOR PÉRARD. 12mo, $1.25.
In this new story Mr. Munroe opens to view an exceedingly interesting
period of American history—the period of the Seminole War in Florida.
Coacoochee, the hero of the story, is a young Indian of noble birth,
the son of Philip, the chieftain of the Seminoles. He is a boy at
the time of the beginning of the Seminole troubles and grows up to
lead his tribe in the long struggle which resulted in the Indians
being driven from the north of Florida down to the distant southern
wilderness. It is full of strange adventure, of stirring incident and
rapid action, and it is a true and faithful picture of a period of
history little known to young readers.
=AT WAR WITH PONTIAC=; OR, THE TOTEM OF THE BEAR. A TALE OF REDCOAT AND
REDSKIN. With 8 full-page illustrations by J. FINNEMORE. 12mo, $1.25.
A story of old days in America when Detroit was a frontier town and
the shores of Lake Erie were held by hostile Indians under Pontiac.
The hero, Donald Hester, goes in search of his sister Edith, who
has been captured by the Indians. Strange and terrible are his
experiences; for he is wounded, taken prisoner, condemned to be
burned, and contrives to escape. In the end there is peace between
Pontiac and the English, and all things terminate happily for the
hero. One dares not skip a page of this enthralling story.
=THE WHITE CONQUERORS.= A TALE OF TOLTEC AND AZTEC. With 8 full-page
illustrations by W. S. STACEY. 12mo, $1.25.
This story deals with the Conquest of Mexico by Cortes and his
Spaniards, the “White Conquerors,” who, after many deeds of valor,
pushed their way into the great Aztec kingdom and established their
power in the wondrous city where Montezuma reigned in barbaric
splendor.
BOOKS BY WILLIAM HENRY FROST
_JUST PUBLISHED_
=THE KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE.= Illustrated and cover designed by S.
R. BURLEIGH. 12mo, $1.50.
Mr. Frost’s volumes of folk-lore stories have achieved a deserved
popularity, and this last one, dealing with the ever-fascinating theme
of the Round Table and its knights, is equal to either of his earlier
books.
_MR. FROST’S FORMER BOOKS_
=THE COURT OF KING ARTHUR.= STORIES FROM THE LAND OF THE ROUND TABLE.
Illustrated by S. R. BURLEIGH. 12mo, $1.50.
Mr. Frost has had the happy idea of making a journey to the different
places connected with the Arthurian romances by history or legend, and
of relating the ever new Round Table Tales on their sites, to the same
little girl, now somewhat older, to whom he told his charming Wagner
stories.
=THE WAGNER STORY BOOK.= FIRELIGHT TALES OF THE GREAT MUSIC DRAMAS.
Illustrated by SIDNEY R. BURLEIGH. 12mo, $1.50.
“A successful attempt to make the romantic themes of the music drama
intelligible to young readers. The author has full command of his
subject, and the style is easy, graceful, and simple.”—_Boston Beacon._
ROBERT GRANT’S TWO BOOKS FOR BOYS
=JACK HALL=; OR, THE SCHOOL DAYS OF AN AMERICAN BOY. Illustrated by F.
G. ATTWOOD. 12mo, $1.25.
“A better book for boys has never been written. It is pure, clean, and
healthy, and has throughout a vigorous action that holds the reader
breathlessly.”—_Boston Herald._
=JACK IN THE BUSH=; OR, A SUMMER ON A SALMON RIVER. Illustrated by F.
T. MERRILL. 12mo, $1.25.
“A clever book for boys. It is the story of the camp life of a lot of
boys, and is destined to please every boy reader. It is attractively
illustrated.”—_Detroit Free Press._
THE KANTER GIRLS
=By MARY L. B. BRANCH=. Illustrated by HELEN M. ARMSTRONG. Square 12mo,
$1.50.
The adventures of Jane and Prue, two small sisters, among different
peoples of the imaginative world—dryads, snow-children, Kobolds,
etc.—aided by their invisible rings, their magic boat, and their
wonderful birds, are described by the author with great naturalness
and a true gift for story-telling. The numerous illustrations are very
attractive, and in thorough sympathy with the text.
SAMUEL ADAMS DRAKE’S HISTORICAL BOOKS
_JUST ISSUED_
THE BORDER WARS OF NEW ENGLAND
COMMONLY CALLED KING WILLIAM’S AND QUEEN ANNE’S WARS. By SAMUEL ADAMS
DRAKE. With 58 illustrations and maps. 12mo, $1.50.
Mr. Drake has made a consecutive, entertaining narrative of the border
wars which the French and Indians waged against the English settlers
in New England during the reigns of King William and Queen Anne. The
story is full of adventurous interest and is told with that minute
attention to suggestive and instructive details which have been the
distinguishing feature of Mr. Drake’s other books. The illustrations,
many of them from photographs of historic spots and of buildings still
standing, are of exceptional interest.
_FORMER VOLUMES_
=THE MAKING OF THE OHIO VALLEY STATES.= 1660-1837. Illustrated. 12mo,
$1.50.
=THE MAKING OF VIRGINIA AND THE MIDDLE COLONIES.= 1578-1701.
Illustrated. 12mo, $1.50.
=THE MAKING OF NEW ENGLAND.= 1580-1643. With 148 illustrations and with
maps. 12mo, $1.50.
=THE MAKING OF THE GREAT WEST.= 1812-1853. With 145 illustrations and
with maps. 12mo, $1.50.
STORIES OF LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND HISTORY BY HENRIETTA CHRISTIAN
WRIGHT
_A NEW VOLUME JUST ISSUED_
=CHILDREN’S STORIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE.=—1860-1896. 12mo, $1.25.
Miss Wright here continues the attractive presentation of literary
history begun in her “Children’s Stories in English Literature,” taking
up the literary figures that have appeared since the time of the civil
war, and treating their works and personalities in a simple manner,
interesting to young readers.
=CHILDREN’S STORIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE.=—1660-1860. 12mo, $1.25.
=CHILDREN’S STORIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE.= Two volumes: TALIESIN TO
SHAKESPEARE—SHAKESPEARE TO TENNYSON. 12mo, each, $1.25.
=CHILDREN’S STORIES OF THE GREAT SCIENTISTS.= With portraits. 12mo,
$1.25.
=CHILDREN’S STORIES IN AMERICAN HISTORY.= Illustrated. 12mo, $1.25.
=CHILDREN’S STORIES OF AMERICAN PROGRESS.= Illustrated. 12mo, $1.25.
THREE BOOKS OF SPORTS AND GAMES
=THE AMERICAN BOY’S BOOK OF SPORT.= OUT-DOOR GAMES FOR ALL SEASONS. By
DANIEL C. BEARD. With over 300 illustrations by the author. 8vo, $2.50.
This is an entirely new book by Mr. Beard, containing altogether
new matter of great interest to all young lovers of sport. It is a
companion volume to the author’s well-known “American Boy’s Handy
Book,” of which over twenty-five thousand copies have been sold, and
will undoubtedly rival that famous work in popularity as it does in
interest.
=THE AMERICAN BOY’S HANDY BOOK=; OR, WHAT TO DO AND HOW TO DO IT. By
DANIEL C. BEARD. With 360 illustrations by the author. Square 8vo,
$2.00.
“The book has this great advantage over its predecessors, that most of
the games, tricks, and other amusements described in it are new. It
treats of sports adapted to all seasons of the year; it is practical,
and it is well illustrated.”—_New York Tribune._
=THE AMERICAN GIRL’S HANDY BOOK.= By LENA and ADELIA B. BEARD. With
over 500 illustrations by the authors. Square 8vo, $2.00.
“I have put it in my list of good and useful books for young people,
as I have many requests for advice from my little friends and their
anxious mothers. I am most happy to commend your very ingenious and
entertaining book.”—LOUISA M. ALCOTT.
THOMAS NELSON PAGE’S TWO BOOKS
=AMONG THE CAMPS=; OR, YOUNG PEOPLE’S STORIES OF THE WAR. With 8
full-page illustrations. Square 8vo, $1.50.
“They are five in number, each having reference to some incident
of the Civil War. A vein of mingled pathos and humor runs through
them all, and greatly heightens the charm of them. It is the early
experience of the author himself, doubtless, which makes his pictures
of life in a Southern home during the great struggle so vivid and
truthful.”—_The Nation._
=TWO LITTLE CONFEDERATES.= With 8 full-page illustrations by KEMBLE and
REDWOOD. Square 8vo, $1.50.
“Mr. Page was ‘raised’ in Virginia, and he knows the ‘darkey’ of the
South better than any one who writes about them. And he knows ‘white
folks,’ too, and his stories, whether for old or young people, have
the charm of sincerity and beauty and reality.”—_Harper’s Young
People._
EDWARD EGGLESTON’S TWO POPULAR BOOKS
=THE HOOSIER SCHOOL-BOY.= Illustrated. 12mo, $1.00.
“‘The Hoosier School-Boy’ depicts some of the characteristics of
boy-life years ago on the Ohio; characteristics, however, that
were not peculiar to that section. The story presents a vivid and
interesting picture of the difficulties which in those days beset the
path of the youth aspiring for an education.”—_Chicago Inter-Ocean._
=QUEER STORIES FOR BOYS AND GIRLS.= 12mo, $1.00.
“A very bright and attractive little volume for young readers. The
stories are fresh, breezy, and healthy, with a good point to them and
a good, sound American view of life and the road to success. The book
abounds in good feeling and good sense, and is written in a style of
homely art.”—_Independent._
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PICCINO AND OTHER CHILD STORIES ***
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