Books: My Young Alcides

C >> Charlotte M. Yonge >> My Young Alcides

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Hippolyta's fortune was in a complicated state, which made her
settlements long in being made out; and as Eustace did not wish to
turn me out till the wedding, I had time to wait to ascertain what
Harold would like me to do. I hoped that Dora was so inconvenient an
appendage that I should be allowed to keep her, but I found that
Hippolyta had designs on her--saying, truly enough, that she could
neither write nor spell and knew not a word of any language. "Poor
Lucy Alison, what could be expected of her!" So Dora was to go to
the married cousins in London, who, by thus taking her in, would be
enabled to have a superior governess for their own tribe. Poor Dora!
how fiercely she showed her love for me all those weeks of reprieve,
and how hard I laboured to impress upon her that her intended system
of defiance to the whole Horsman family was not, by any means, such a
proof of affection as either Harry or I should relish.

More letters from our travellers from New Zealand turned our
attention from our own troubles. They had reached Dunedin, and there
found Harold's letter, to announce his coming, waiting at the post-
office. The Smith family had left the place, and Mr. Smith only came
or sent from time to time when Harold's regular letters, containing
remittances, were due. By inquiry, they were traced to the
goldfields; and thither Harold and Dermot repaired, through curious
experiences and recognitions of old army and London friends of
Dermot's, now diggers or mounted police. Save for one of these
gentlemen, much better educated than Harold, but now far rougher
looking, they would never have found the house where "Parson Smith"
(a title that most supposed to be entirely unfounded) made a greater
profit by selling the necessaries of life to the diggers, than did
his son by gold-digging and washing.

Poor Alice, the stately farmhouse beauty of thirty years ago, was a
stooping, haggard, broken-down wreck--not a slattern, but an
overworked drudge, with a face fitter for seventy than for fifty
years old, and a ghastly look of long-continued sickness.

Her husband was out, and she sat, propped up in a chair behind the
board that served for a counter, still attending to the shop; and
thus it was that her son beheld her when he stooped under the low
doorway, with the one word, "Mother."

Dermot had waited outside, but Harold called him in the next moment.
"He will mind the shop, mother. I'll carry you to your bed. You are
not fit to be here a moment."

And Dermot found himself selling tobacco, tin cups, and knives to
very rough-looking customers, some of whom spoke in as refined a
voice as he could do, and only asked what green chum the parson could
have picked up instead of the sickly missus.

Alice Smith was indeed far gone in illness, the effect of exposure,
drudgery, and hard usage. Perhaps her husband might have had mercy
on her, but they were both cowed by the pitiless brute of a step-son,
whose only view was to goad her into driving their profitable
traffic to her last gasp. But there was no outbreak between them and
Harold. The father's nature was to cringe and fawn, and the son
estimated those thews and muscles too well to gratify his hatred by
open provocation, and was only surly and dogged, keeping himself
almost entirely out of the way. Alice wanted nothing but to look at
her son--"her beautiful boy," "her Harry come back to her at last;"
and kind and tender to her and loving, as he had never been since his
baby days; but he would have moved heaven and earth to obtain
comforts and attendance for her. Dermot rode a fabulous distance,
and brought back a doctor for a fabulous fee, and loaded his horse
with pillows and medicaments; but the doctor could only declare that
she had a fatal disease of long standing and must die, though care
and comfort might a little while prolong her life. It was welcome
news to poor Alice, provided she might only die while her boy was
still with her, shutting out all that had so long made her life one
ground-down course of hopeless wretchedness.

Smith's most profitable form of employment was carrying dinners out
to the men at work; and for an hour or two at noon the little store
was entirely free from customers. The day after the doctor's visit,
Dermot came in at this time to speak to Harold, and as soon as Alice
knew of his presence (there was a mere partition of slab between her
bed and the shop), she eagerly and nervously bade him stay and keep
watch that no one should come near to see or hear. Then, when
certain that she was alone with her son, she produced from hiding-
places about her person what appeared to be three balls of worsted--
her eyes gleaming, and her whole person starting at every sound. She
laid her skeleton fingers over them with a start of terror, as
Harold, puzzled at first, would have unwound one; but made him weigh
them, parted the covering with her nail, and showed for one instant a
yellow gleam. Each held a nugget of unusual size! Her urgency and
her terror were excessive till they were out of sight in his pockets,
though he protested that this was but to satisfy her for the moment;
he could not keep them. She laid her head so close to his that she
could whisper, and told him they were not meant for him. They were
payment for the L200 of which her husband had defrauded the elder
Eustace, and which had been a heavy weight ever since on her high-
spirited pride. By one of the strange chances that often befell in
the early days of the goldfields, she, going to draw water at a
little stream soon after her first arrival, had seen these lying
close together in the bed of the shallow rivulet--three lumps of gold
formed by a freak of nature into the likeness of the golden pippins
her father used to be so proud of, and the gathering of which had
been the crisis of the courtship of the two handsome lads from
Arghouse.

With the secretiveness that tyranny had taught her, Alice hid her
treasure; and with the inborn honest pride which had, under Smith's
dominion, cost her so much suffering, she swore to herself that they
should go to Eustace to wipe out the fraud against his father. She
had sought opportunities ever since, and believed that she should
have to send for some man in authority when she was dying, and no one
could gainsay her, and commit them to him, little guessing that it
was in her own son's hands that she should place them.

As little did she reckon on what Harold chose to do. He said that
for him to conceal them, and take them away without her husband's
knowledge, would be mere robbery; but that he would show them to
Smith, and sign a receipt for them, "for Eustace Alison," in payment
of the sum of L200 due from James Smith to his father. Mr. Tracy and
his friend, the policeman, should be witnesses, and the nuggets
themselves should be placed in charge of the police, when their
weight and value would be ascertained, and any overplus returned to
Smith. The poor woman trembled exceedingly--Dermot heard the
rustling as he stood outside; and he also heard Harold's voice
soothing her, and assuring her that she should not be left to the
revenge of young Dick Smith. No, she feared not that; she was past
the dread of Dick for herself, but not for Harold. He laughed, and
said that they durst not touch him.

For his mother's relief, and for Dermot's safety, he, however, waited
to say anything till the assistance of the gentleman of the police
force had been secured, so that there might be no delay to allow Dick
Smith to gather his fellows for revenge or recovery of the gold.

And with these precautions all went well. Harold, in the grave,
authoritative way that had grown on him, reminded Mr. Smith of a
heavy debt due to his uncle; and when the wretched man began half to
deny and half to entreat in the same breath, Harold said that he had
received from his mother a deposit in payment thereof, and that he
had prepared a receipt, which he requested Mr. Smith to see him sign
in presence of the two witnesses now waiting.

Smith's resentment and disappointment at the sight of the treasure
his wife had hidden from him were unspeakable. He was not an
outwardly passionate man, and he was in mortal fear, not only of the
giant who seemed to fill up all his little room, but also of anything
that could compromise him with the police. So he suppressed his
passion, aware that resistance would bring out stories that could not
bear the light. Harold signed, and the golden apples were carried
away to the office, where Mr. Smith was invited to come the next day
and see them weighed.

That night Harold kept watch over his mother; and Dermot, who was
thought to be at his friend's shanty, kept watch near the door: but
Dick Smith, hating Harold's presence, had gone on an excursion
lasting some days, and before his father went in quest of him in the
morning, Harold had a proposal ready--namely, to continue to pay
Smith what he already allowed his mother, with an addition, provided
he were allowed to take her with him to Dunedin, and, if possible,
home.

Smith haggled, lamented, and pretended to hesitate, but accepted the
terms at last, and then showed considerable haste in setting the
party off on their journey before his son should come home, fearing,
perhaps, some deadly deed if Dick should discover what a prey the
poor woman had concealed from him, while she was within his reach;
and as the worth of the apples was estimated at about twenty pounds
beyond the debt, Harold paid this to him at once, and they left him
in the meek, plausible, tearful stage of intoxication, piteously
taking leave of his wife as if she were the very darling of his
heart, and making fine speeches about his resolution to consign her
to her son for the sake of her health. So contemptible had the poor
creature become, that Harold found it easier to pity than to hate
him.

Besides, Harold had little thought then to spare from the eager
filial and maternal affection that had been in abeyance all the years
since poor Alice's unhappy marriage. For a little while the mother
and son were all in all to each other. The much-enduring woman, used
to neglected physical suffering, bore the journey apparently well,
when watched over and guarded with a tender kindness recalling that
of the husband of her youth; and Harold wrote to me from Dunedin full
of hope and gladness, aware that his mother could never be well
again, but trusting that we might yet give her such peace and rest as
she had never yet tasted.

Again came bitter vexation in Eustace's way of receiving the
intelligence. "I hope he does not mean to bring her here. It would
be so extremely inconvenient--not a widow even! It would just
confirm all the scandals _I_ have surmounted."

"I thought she had been almost as much a mother to you as your own?"

"Oh, that was when I was at school, and they were paid for it.
Besides, what a deceitful fellow Smith was, and how he defrauded me."

"And how she has restored it!"

"I hope Harold will not go and get those nuggets changed into specie.
They would make splendid ornaments--so distingue with such a story
attached to them."

I could only again tell myself that my first impression had been
right, and that he must be underwitted to be so absolutely impervious
to gratitude. How Harold must have bolstered him up to make him so
tolerable as he had been.

He need not have feared. Alice's improvement was but a last flash of
the expiring flame. She grew worse the very day after Harold wrote
to me, and did not live three weeks after he brought her into the
town, though surrounded by such cares as she had never known before.
She died, they said, more from being worn out than from the disease.
She had done nothing her whole lifetime but toil for others; and if
unselfishness and silent slavery can be religion in a woman, poor
Alice had it. But!

Harold once asked her the saddest question that perhaps a son could
ask: "Mother, why did you never teach me to say my prayers?"

She stared at him with her great, sunken, uncomplaining eyes, and
said, "I hadn't time;" and as he gave some involuntary groan, she
said, "You see we never got religion, not Dorothy and me, while we
were girls; and when our troubles came, I'm sure we'd no time for
such things as that. When your father lay a-dying, he did say,
'Alice, take care the boy gets to know his God better than we have
done;' but you were a great big boy by that time, and I thought I
would take care you was taught by marrying a parson and a
schoolmaster; but there, I ought to have remembered there was none so
hard on us as the parsons!"

Nor would she see a clergyman. She had had enough of that sort, she
said, with the only petulance she ever showed to Harold when he
pressed it. She did not object to his reading to her some of those
passages in the Bible and Prayer-Book which had become most dear to
him, but she seemed rather to view it as one of the wonderful
performances of her boy--a part of his having become "as good an
English gentleman as ever his poor father was, and able to hold up
his head with any of them." She was too ill to be argued with; she
said "she trusted in God," whatever she meant by that; and so she
died, holding Harold's hand as long as her fingers could clasp, and
gazing at him as long as her eyes could see.

He wrote to me all out of his overflowing heart, as he could never
have spoken by word of mouth, on his voyage between New Zealand and
Australia; and on his arrival there, finding our letters just before
the mail went out, he added the characteristic line to the one he had
written to Eustace, "All right, old chap, I wish you joy;" and to me
he wrote, that since I asked what he wished, he thought I had better
take a house by the year in, or near, Mycening, and see how things
would turn out. He hoped I should keep Dora. We need not write
again, for he should leave Sydney before our letters could arrive.

I found a little house called Mount Eaton, on the Neme Heath side of
Mycening, with a green field between it and the town, and the heath
stretching out beyond, where Harold might rush out and shake his mane
instead of feeling cribbed and confined. It wanted a great deal of
painting and papering, which I set in hand at once, but of course it
was a more lingering business than I expected. All the furniture and
books that had belonged to my own mother had been left to me, and it
had been settled by the valuation, when I knew little about it, what
these were; and all that remained was to face Eustace's disgust at
finding how many of "the best things" it comprised. Hippolyta showed
to advantage there. I believe she was rather glad to get rid of
them, and to have the opportunity of getting newer and more
fashionable ones; but, at any rate, she did it with a good grace, and
made me welcome not only to my own property, but to remain at
Arghouse till my new abode should be habitable, which I hoped would
be a day or two after the wedding.

The great grievance was, however, that I had put myself and Dora into
mourning, feeling it very sad that this last of the four exiles
should be the only one of whose death I even knew. Eustace thought
the whole connection ought to be forgotten, and that, whatever I
might choose to do, it was intolerable that his sister, the present
Miss Alison of Arghouse, should put on mourning for the wife of a
disgraced fellow, a runaway parson turned sharper!

I am afraid I was not as patient or tolerant as I ought to have been,
and it ended in the time of reprieve being put an end to, and Dora
being carried off by the Horsmans to her new schoolroom in London,
her resistance, and the home-truths she told her brother, only making
him the more inexorable. Poor little girl! I do not like to think
of the day I put her into Hippolyta's hands.

CHAPTER XIII. THE BLOODHOUND.

It was a broiling evening in early June, very beautiful, but so hot
that I dreaded the fatigue and all the adjuncts of the morrow's
wedding, when I was to be a bridesmaid, and should see my poor little
Dora again. I was alone, for Eustace was sleeping at Therford
Vicarage, but I had not time for sentiment over the old home and old
gardens. I was turning out the old Indian cabinets, which were none
of mine, though they had always been called so, and putting into
cotton wool and paper all my treasures there, ready for transport,
when a shadow fell on me from the open window. I looked up, and
there stood Harold!

Oh, how unlike it was from the way in which we had met three years
before as bewildered strangers! I do not think that sister could
ever have met brother with more entire feeling that home, and trust,
and staff, and stay were come back to her, than when I found Harold's
arm round me, his head bending down to me. I was off my own mind!

When our greeting was over, Harold turned and said, "Here he is."

I saw a fine-looking old man, with a certain majesty of air that one
could not define. He was pale, wrinkled, and had deep furrows of
suffering on cheek and brow, but his dark eyes, under a shaggy white
penthouse, were full of keen fire and even ardour. His bald forehead
was very fine, and his mouth--fully visible, for he was closely
shaven--had an ineffable, melancholy sweetness about it, so that the
wonderful power of leading all with whom he came in contact was no
longer a mystery to me; for, fierce patriot and desperate republican
as he might have been, nothing could destroy the inborn noble, and
instinctively I bent to him with respect as I took his hand in
welcome.

After the hasty inquiries, "Where's Dora?" "Where's Eustace?"
"Where's Dermot Tracy?" had been answered, and I had learnt that this
last had gone on to London, where his family were, Harold hurried out
to see about sending for the luggage, and Prometesky, turning to me,
almost took my breath away by saying, "Madam, I revere you. You have
done for the youth so dear to me what I could never have done, and
have transformed him from a noble savage to that far higher being--
the Christian hero."

I did not take this magnificent compliment as if I had been of the
courtly continental blood of him who made it: it made me hot and
sheepish, yet even now I still feel warm at the heart when I remember
it; for I know he really meant it, little as I deserved it, for the
truth was what I faltered out: "It was all in him."

"It was all in him. That is true; but it needed to be evoked, so as
not to be any longer stifled and perverted by the vehemence of his
physical nature. When he left me, after the great catastrophe which
changed him from the mere exaggerated child, gratifying every passion
with violence, I knew it depended on what hands he would fall into,
whether the spiritual or the animal would have the mastery. Madam,
it was into your hands that he fell, and I thank God for it, even
more than for the deliverance that my dear pupil has gained for me."

He had tears in his eyes as he took my hand and kissed it, and very
much overpowered I was. I had somewhat dreaded finding him a free-
thinker, but there was something in both speeches that consoled me,
and he afterwards said to me: "Madam, in our youth intellectual
Catholics are apt to reject what our reason will not accept. We love
not authority. In age we gain sympathy with authority, and
experience has taught us that there can be a Wisdom surpassing our
own. We have proved for ourselves that love cannot live without
faith."

And Harold told me on the evening of their return, with much concern,
that the old man had made up his mind that, so soon as his health
should be sufficiently restored, he would make retreat among the
monks of La Trappe experimentally, and should probably take the vows.
"I don't see that his pardon has done much good," he said, and did
not greatly accept my representation of the marvellous difference it
must make to a Roman Catholic to be no longer isolated from the
offices of religion. He had made up his mind to come into Sydney to
die, but he was too poor to have lived anywhere but under the Boola
Boola rock.

It was a very quietly glad evening, as we three sat round the open
window, and asked and answered questions. Harold said he would come
to the wedding with me the next day; he must see old Eu married; and,
besides, he wanted to give up to him the three nuggets, which had
been rather a serious charge. Harold, Prometesky, and Dermot had
each carried one, in case of any disaster, that there might be three
chances; but now they were all three laid in my lap--wonderful
things, one a little larger than the others, but all curiously apple-
like in form, such gifts as a bride has seldom had.

There was the account of the sale of Boola Boola to be rendered up
too; and the place had risen so much in value that it had brought in
far more than Harold had expected when leaving England, so that he
and Eustace were much richer men than he had reckoned on being.

Mrs. Sam Alison had arrived safely, but rather surprised not to find
people walking on their heads, as she had been told everything was
upside down. Her son had so far recovered that he could undertake
such employment in writing as it was possible to procure. The mother
and son were very happy together, but Harold winced as if a sore were
touched when he spoke of their meeting.

I was anxious that he should hear of nothing to vex him that night,
for there was more than enough to annoy him another day, and I talked
on eagerly about the arrangements for the wedding. Hippolyta had
insisted on making it a mingled archery and hunt-wedding. She was to
wear the famous belt. The bridegroom, her brothers, and most of the
gentlemen were to be in their pink; we bridesmaids had scarlet
ribbons, and the favours had miniature fox brushes fastened with
arrows in the centre; even our lockets, with their elaborate cypher
of E's, A's, and H's, depended from the head of a fox.

Prometesky looked amazed, as well he might. "Your ladies are
changed," he said. "It would formerly scarcely have been thought
feminine to show such ardour for the chase."

"Perhaps it is not now," I said.

"Or is it in honour of the lady's name? Hippolyta should have a
Midsummer wedding, and 'love the musick of her hounds,'" continued
the old gentleman, whom I found to have Shakespeare almost by heart,
as one of the chief companions of his solitude.

As soon as Harold heard his boxes arriving, he went to work to
disinter the wedding present he had provided--a pretty bracelet of
New Zealand green jade set in gold. There was a little parcel for
me, too, which he gave me, leading me aside. It was also a locket,
and bore a cypher, but how unlike the other! It was a simple A; and
within was a lock of silver hair. There was no need to tell me whose
it was. "She said she wished she had anything to send you," were
Harold's words, "and I cut off this bit of her hair;" and when I
wondered over her having taken thought of me, he said, "She blessed
you for your kindness to me. If I could only have brought her to
you--"

I secured then, as the completion of his gift, one of his thick curls
of yellow-brown hair. He showed me the chain he had brought for
Dora, and gave me one glance at a clear, pure, crystal cross, from
spar found in New Zealand, near the gold-fields. Would he ever be
able to give it? I answered the question in his eyes by telling him
a certain Etruscan flower-pot had stood in a certain window at Arked
House all the winter, and was gone to London now.

Our home breakfast had to be very early, to give time for the drive
to Therford, but Harold had been already into Mycening, had exchanged
countless hearty greetings, roused up an unfortunate hair-cutter, to
trim his locks, bought a hat, and with considerable difficulty found
a pair of gloves that he could put on--not kid, but thick riding-
gloves; white, at least--and so he hoped that they would pass in the
crowd, and Eustace would not feel himself disgraced. He had not put
on the red coat, but had tried to make himself look as satisfactory
to Eustace as possible in black, and (from a rather comical sense of
duty) he made me look him over to see if he were worthy of the
occasion. He certainly was in splendid looks, his rich, profuse
beard and hair were well arranged, and his fine bronzed face had not
lost its grave expression when at rest, but had acquired a certain
loftiness of countenance, which gave him more than ever the air, I
was going to say, of a demigod; but he had now an expression no
heathen Greek could give; it was more like that of the heads by
Michael Angelo, where Christian yearning is added to classic might
and beauty.

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