MISS LETITIA’S house, her “great big house,” as Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir had expansively described it to Boy, was situated on the sunniest side of Hans Place. It was tastefully built, and all the window-ledges had floral boxes delightfully arranged with flowers growing in pots and hanging baskets, over which on warm bright days spacious crimson-and-white awnings stretched forth their protective shade, giving the house-front quite a gay and foreign effect. The door was white, and a highly-polished brass knocker glinted in the sunshine with an almost knowing wink, as much as to say—“Use me—And you shall see—Hospitalitee!” When Miss Letty’s brougham drove up, however, this same knowing knocker was not called into requisition, for the butler had heard the approaching wheels, and had seen the approaching trotting roans through a little spy-window of his own in the hall, so that before Miss Letty had stepped from the vehicle and had “jumped” her small visitor out also, the door was opened and the butler himself stood, a sedate figure of civil welcome on the threshold. Without betraying himself by so much as a profane smile, this dignitary of the household accepted the Cow and the brown paper parcel which constituted all Boy’s belongings. He took them, so to speak, to his manly bosom, and then, waving away the carriage, coachman, footman and horses with a slight yet stately gesture, he shut the house door and followed his “lady” and the “young gentleman” through the hall into a room which beamed with light, warmth and elegance,—Miss Letty’s morning-room or boudoir—where, with undisturbed serenity he set the Cow on the table between a cabinet portrait of Mr. Balfour and a small bronze statuette of Mercury. The Cow looked rather out of place there, but it did not matter.
“Will you take tea, Madam?” he asked, in a voice rendered mellifluous by the constant and careful practice of domestic gentleness.
“No, thank you, Plimpton,” replied Miss Letty cheerfully; “we have had tea. Just ring the bell for Margaret, will you?”
Plimpton bowed, and withdrew, not forgetting to deposit the brown paper parcel on a chair as he made his exit. Boy stood speechless, gazing round him in a state of utter bewilderment, and only holding to any sense of reality in things by keeping close to “Kiss-Letty,” and for the further relief of his mind glancing occasionally at the familiar “Dunny,” who presented the appearance of grazing luxuriously on an embroidered velvet table-cloth. Instinctively aware of the little fellow’s sudden shyness and touch of fear, Miss Letty did not allow him to remain long oppressed by his vague trouble. Kneeling down beside him, she took off his hat, pulled him out of his tiny overcoat, and kissed his little fat cheeks heartily.
“Now you are at home with Kiss-Letty,” she said, smiling straight into his big innocent blue eyes,—“aren’t you?”
Boy’s breath came and went quickly—his heart beat hard. He lifted one dumpy hand and dubiously inserted a forefinger through the loops of Miss Letty’s ever-convenient neck-chain. Then he smiled with responsive sweetness into the kind face so close to his own.
“’Ess,” he murmured very softly, “Boy wiz Kiss-Letty! But me feels awfoo’ funny!”
Miss Letitia laughed and kissed him again.
“Feels awfoo’ funny, do you?” she echoed. “Oh, but I feel just the same, Boy! It’s awfoo’ funny for me to have you here all to myself, don’t you think so?”
Boy’s smile broadened—he began to chuckle,—there was the glimmering perception of a joke somewhere in his brain. Just at that moment a comfortable-looking woman in a neat black dress, with a smart white apron, entered, and to her Miss Letty turned.
“This is the dear little fellow I told you about, Margaret,” she said, “the only son of the D’Arcy-Muirs. Master Boy he is called. Boy, will you say ‘how do you do’ to Margaret?”
Boy looked up. He was easier in his mind now and felt much more at home.
“How do, Margit?” he said cheerfully. “Me tum to stay wiz Kiss-Letty.”
“Bless the wee laddie!” exclaimed Margaret in the broad soft accent of Inverness, of which lovely town she was a proud native; and down she flopped on her knees, already the willing worshipper of one small child’s winsomeness. “And a grand time ye’ll have of it, I’m thinking, if ye’re as good as ye’re bonnie! Come away wi’ me now and I’ll wash ye’r bit handies and put on anither suit,” for her quick eye had perceived the brown paper parcel while her quick mind had guessed its contents. “And what time will he be for bed, mem?”
“What time do you go to bed, Boy?” asked Miss Letty, caressing his curls.
“Eight klock!” responded Boy promptly; “Gerty puts me in barf and zen in bed.”
Both Miss Leslie and her maid laughed.
“Well, it will be just the same to-night,” said ‘Kiss-Letty’ gaily; “only it will be Margaret instead of Gerty. But it’s a long way off eight o’clock,—you go with Margaret now, and she will bring you back to me in the drawing-room, and there you shall see some pictures.”
Boy smiled at the prospect,—he was ready for anything now. He put his hand trustfully in that of Margaret, merely observing in a casual sort of way—
“Dunny tum wiz me.”
Margaret looked round enquiringly.
“He means his Cow,” explained Miss Letty, taking that animal from its velvet pasture-land and handing it to her maid, who received it quite respectfully. “Just remember, Margaret, will you, that he likes the Cow on his bed! It sleeps with him always.”
Mistress and maid exchanged a laughing glance, and then Boy trotted off. Miss Letty watched him slowly stumping up her handsome staircase, holding on to Margaret’s hand and chattering all the way, and a sudden haze of tears blinded her sight. What she had missed in her life!—what she had missed! She thought of it with no selfish regret, but only a little aching pain, and even now she stilled that pain with a prayer—a prayer that though God had not seen fit to bless her with the love of husband or children she might still be of use in the world,—of use perchance if only to shield and benefit this one little human life of Boy’s which had attracted so much of her interest and affection. And with this thought, dismissing her tears, she went up to her own room, changed her walking dress for a graceful tea-gown of black Chantilly lace which clothed her slender figure with becoming ease and dignity, and went into her drawing-room, where, near the French window which opened into a beautiful conservatory, stood a bluff, big gentleman with a white moustache, chirruping tenderly to a plump bullfinch, which made no secret of the infinite surprise it felt at such strange attempts to imitate melodious warbling. Miss Leslie uttered a low exclamation of pleasure.
“Why, Dick,” she said, “this is delightful! I thought you had gone abroad?”
“So I was going,” responded Dick—otherwise Major Desmond, advancing to take Miss Letty’s outstretched hand and raise it gallantly to his lips,—“but just as I was about to start, I read in the newspapers of a fellow—a man who was once in my regiment—who had got insulted by a dirty ragamuffin of a chap in the Custom-house on the French frontier,—and I said to myself—‘What!—am I going out of England to be treated as if I were a thief, and have my portmanteau searched by a Frenchy? No!—as an English officer I won’t submit to it! I will stay at home!’ It was a sudden resolution. You know I’m a fellow to make sudden resolutions, am’t I, Letty? Well, give you my word, I never looked upon Custom-house regulations in the same light as I do now! Come to think of it, you know, directly we leave our own shores we’re treated like thieves and rascals by all the foreigners,—and why should we expose ourselves to it? Eh? I say why?”
Miss Leslie laughed.
“Well, I’m sure I don’t know why,” she answered. “Only I rather wonder you never thought of all this before. You have always gone abroad some time in the year, you know.”
The Major pulled his white moustache thoughtfully.
“Yes, I have,” he admitted. “And why the devil—I beg your pardon!—I have done it I can’t imagine. England’s good enough for anybody. There’s too much gadding about everywhere nowadays. And the world seems to me to shrink in consequence. Shrink! by Jove!—it’s no bigger than a billiard ball!”
Miss Letty smiled, and said “Sweet!” to her bullfinch, which straightway warbled with delightful inaccuracy the quaint air of “The Whistling Coon.”
“Bravo! Bravo!” exclaimed Major Desmond, after listening attentively to the little bird’s performance. “Now why the chap couldn’t do that for me I can’t understand. I have been chirruping to him till my tongue aches—and couldn’t get a note out of him. Only a wink. You just say ‘sweet’ and off he starts. Well, and what have you been doing with yourself, Letty? You look very fit.”
“Oh, I’m always ‘fit’ as you call it,” said Miss Leslie placidly. “I live the same quiet life month after month, you know, and I suppose it’s scarcely possible for anything to go very wrong with me. I have passed through my storm and stress. The days go by now all in the same even, monotonous way.”
Major Desmond took two or three turns up and down the room.
“Well, if you find it even and monotonous to be doing good all your time,” he observed, “I can only say that I wish a few more people would indulge in monotony! But don’t you mean to have a change?”
“Oh, I have provided a little distraction for myself,” said Miss Letty, smiling demurely; “I have got a young man to stay with me for a few days.”
“Young man!” exclaimed the Major. “Well, upon my word——” here he stopped short, for at that moment Boy, attired in his best suit of white flannel, his face shining with recent ablutions, and his golden hair brushed into a shining aureole of curls round his brow, trotted into the room with a cheerful confidence and assertiveness quite wonderful to see.
“Ullo, Major!” he exclaimed: “Zoo tum to see Boy?”
Major Desmond rose to the occasion at once.
“Of course!” he said, and lifting Boy in his arms he set him on his broad shoulder. “Of course I have come to see you! Impossible to keep away knowing you to be here!”
Boy chuckled.
“Me tum to stay wiz Kiss-Letty,” he announced.
“So I perceive,” replied the Major—and turning to Miss Leslie he said, “This is the young man, eh, Letty? Well, however did you manage to get hold of him?”
“I will tell you all about it at dinner,” she answered in a low tone. “You will stay and dine?”
“With pleasure—in fact I hoped you would ask me,” responded the Major frankly; “I’m sick of club food.”
Boy from his lifted position on the Major’s shoulder had been quietly surveying everything in the room. He now pointed to a copy of Burne-Jones’s “Golden Stair.”
“Pitty ladies,” he remarked.
“Yes,” agreed Major Desmond, “very pitty! All so good and sweet and lovely, aren’t they, Boy? Each one sweeter, gooder, lovelier as they come,—and all so full of pleasant thoughts that they have almost grown alike. One ideal of goodness taking many forms!”
He spoke to himself now and not to Boy—and his eyes rested musingly on Miss Letty. She was just setting a large vase of roses on the grand piano. She looked from his distance a very gentle, fragile lady—dainty and elegant too—almost young.
“Kiss-Letty wiz ze roses,” observed Boy.
“Just so!” agreed the Major, “and that is where she always is, Boy! Roses mean everything that is good and sweet and wholesome, and I should not wonder if ‘Kiss-Letty’ was not something of a rose itself in her way!”
“Oh, Dick!” expostulated Miss Letty, “how can you talk such nonsense to the child! What flattery to an old woman like me!”
“Boy doesn’t know whether I’m talking nonsense or the utmost wisdom,” responded the Major undauntedly. “And as I have often told you, you will never be old to me, Letty. You are the best friend I ever had, and if friends are not the roses of life, I should like to know what flowers they do represent! And what I have said before, I say again, that I’m ready to marry you to-morrow if you’ll have me.”
“Oh, dear me!” sighed Miss Leslie, with a little tremulous laugh. “Just think! Saying such a thing before Boy!”
“Boy! I guarantee he doesn’t understand a word I have been talking about. Eh, Boy? Do you know what I have been saying to ‘Kiss-Letty’?”
Boy looked down at him with a profound air of cherubic wisdom.
“Wants marry Kiss-Letty ’morrow if ’ave me,” he said solemnly.
And then Major Desmond had one of his alarming laughs,—a laugh which threatened to dislodge Boy altogether from his position and throw him headlong on the floor. Miss Letty laughed too, but more gently, and on her pale cheeks there was a rosy tinge suggestive of a blush.
“Well, well!” said the Major, recovering from his hilarity at last,—“Boy is not such a fool as he looks, evidently! There, Letty, I won’t tease you any more. But you are very obstinate, you know,—yes, you are! What does Longfellow say?—
‘Trust no future, howe’er pleasant,
Let the dead past bury its dead:
Act, act, in the living present,
Heart within and God o’erhead.’
That’s wholesome stuff, Letty. I like Longfellow because he is always straight. Some poets go giggetting about in all sorts of dark corners and pop out suddenly upon you with a fire-cracker of a verse which you can’t understand a bit, because all the meaning fizzles out while you are looking at it,—but Longfellow!—‘Let the dead past bury its dead.’ That’s sense, Letty. And ‘Act, act in the living present.’ Why, that’s sense too. And why don’t you do it?”
“I think I try to do it,” answered Miss Letty quietly; “I like to be useful wherever I go. But for me there is no dead past, as you know,—it lives always with me and makes the best and sweetest part of the present.”
“There, I suppose I’ve been putting my foot in it again!” muttered Major Desmond, somewhat disconsolately. “You know I never meant to suggest that you did not do all the good you could and more than is necessary in your life, but what I see in Longfellow’s line is that you should ‘act, act in the living present’ for yourself, Letty. For yourself—make yourself happy, as well as others—make me happy! Now, wouldn’t that be a praiseworthy deed?”
“Not at all,” replied Miss Letty, smiling, “for you deserve to be much happier than I could ever make you. You know there are many charming young women you could marry.”
“No, I don’t know anything of the sort,” said the Major decisively. “The young women of the present day are all hussies—brazen-faced hussies, in my opinion. Girls don’t blush any more nowadays; men blush for them. No—you’re not going to get rid of me in that way, Letty. At my age I’m not going to be such a vain old ass as to go smirking after girls who would only laugh at me behind my back. I don’t believe in philandering, but I believe in love—yes, love at all ages and in all seasons—but it must be the real thing and no sham about it.” Here he stopped, for Boy was wriggling on his shoulder and showing unmistakable signs of wishing to go free; so he gently set him down. “There you are, little chap!—and there you go—straight for the roses and ‘Kiss-Letty’! Lucky rascal!” This as Boy trotted up to Miss Leslie and stretched his short arms caressingly round her soft lace skirts.
“Where’s booful pick-shures?” he demanded; “Boy likes pick-shures.”
Miss Leslie then bethought herself that she had promised he should see some ‘booful pick-shures’ when he came into the drawing-room, and turning towards a pile of éditions de luxe in large quarto of famous works such as “Don Quixote,” “Idylls of the King,” and Dante’s “Divina Commedia,” she hesitated.
“Which shall I give him, Dick?” she asked the Major.
“Put ’em all on the floor and let him choose for himself,” was the reply. “I believe in treating children like lambs and birds—let them frisk and fly about in the fields of general information as they like,—choose their own bits of grass as it were. Now here’s a quintessence of brain for you,”—and he lifted four large volumes off the side-table where they generally stood and placed them on the floor—“Come here, Boy! Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Tennyson!—Never heard of ’em, did you? No!—but you will probably have the pleasure of making the acquaintance of all four of ’em in a few years. That’s where the wonderful immortality of genius comes in,—the dead author is spiritually able to shake hands with and talk to each and every generation which follows him. There is a wonderful secret in the power of expressed thought if we could only fathom it. Now, which one are you going for first?”
Boy sat down on the floor and considered. One or two of the big books he opened cautiously and looked in as though expecting to see some strange living object inside,—then he shut them quickly, smiling mysteriously to himself the while. Then in the same doubtful way he peeped into the second volume of Dante entitled “Paradiso”—and lo! a picture of angels ascending and descending—one of Doré’s most wonderful conceptions of forms of light portrayed in a dazzling atmosphere,—and his blue eyes sparkled—he opened the book wider and wider—till the whole page burst upon his view, whereupon he curled down closer still and stared silently. Miss Letty seated herself in a low chair, and took out some dainty embroidery, and while her swift needle went in and out with a bright-coloured silk behind it, which wove a flower as it moved, she watched the little fellow, and Major Desmond sitting opposite to her did the same. The bullfinch began a scrap of his ‘aria’ but broke off to preen his wing,—and there was a silence in the pretty room while Boy’s innocent little face drooped in a rapture over the pictured scene of heavenly glory. Not a word did he utter,—but merely drew a long breath like a sigh, and his eyes darkened with an expression of wistful gravity. Then he turned over a few more pages and came upon that most exquisite “Cross” of Doré’s imagination, where the dying Saviour of the world hangs crucified, but is surrounded at every point by angels. This seemed to fascinate him more than the other, and he remained absorbed for many minutes, enrapt and speechless. Some unaccountable influence held Miss Leslie and her old friend Dick Desmond silent too. The thoughts of both were very busy. The Major had a secret in his soul which, had he declared it, would have well-nigh killed Letitia Leslie,—he knew that the man she had loved, and whose memory she honoured with such faithful devotion, had been nothing but a heartless scamp, who in an unguarded moment had avowed to him, Major Desmond, that he was going to throw over Letty when he got back from India, as he was ‘on’ with a much prettier and wealthier woman; but he had never ‘got back from India’ to carry out his intention—death had seized him in the heyday of his career, and Letty believed he had died loving her, and her only. Who would have undeceived her? Who would have poisoned the faith of that simple trusting heart? Not Dick Desmond certainly; though he had himself loved her for nearly twenty years, and being of a steadfast nature had found it impossible to love any one else. And he was more content to have her as a friend than to have the most charming ‘other woman’ as a wife. And he had jogged on quietly till now—well, now he was fifty, and Letty was forty-five.
“We’re getting on—by Jove, yes!—we’re getting on!” mused Dick. “And just think what that dead rascal out in India has cost us! Our very lives! All sacrificed! Well, never mind!—I would not spoil Letty’s belief in her sweetheart for the world.”
And yet he could not help feeling it to be a trifle ‘hard,’ as he felt the charm of Letty’s quiet presence, and saw Boy bending over Doré’s picture of the “Cross.”
“If—if she would have had me, we might have had a child of our own like that,” he mused dolefully; “and as it is, the poor little chap has got a drunken beast for a father and a slovenly fool for a mother! Well, well—God arranges things in a queer way, and I must say, without irreverence, it doesn’t seem at all a clear or a just way to me. Why the innocent should suffer for the guilty (and they always do) is a mystery.”
Letty, meanwhile, was thinking too. Such sweet and holy thoughts!—thoughts of her dead lover,—her ‘brave, true Harry,’ as she was wont to call him in her own mind—a mind which was as white and pure as the ‘Taj-Mahal,’ and which enshrined this same ‘Harry’ in its midst as a heroic figure of stately splendour and godlike honour. No man was ever endowed by woman with more virtues than Letty gave to her dead betrothed, and her faith in him was so perfect that she had become content with her loneliness because she felt that it was only for a little while,—that soon she and her beloved would meet again never to part. Is it impossible to believe that the steadfast faith and love of a good woman may uplift the departed spirit of an unworthy man out of an uttermost Hell by its force and purity? Surely in these days, when we are discovering what marvellous properties there are in simple light, and the passing of sound through space, it would be foolish to deny the probability of noble Thought radiating to unmeasured distances, and affecting for good those who are gone from us, whom we loved on earth,—and whose present state and form of life we are not as yet permitted to behold. Anyway, whatever wonders lie hidden in waiting for us behind Death’s dark curtain, it may be conceded that the unfaithful soul of the man she loved was in no wise injured by Miss Letty’s remembering tenderness and prayers, but rather strengthened and sustained. She was touched just now by Boy’s admiration of the pictured angels,—and to her always thoughtful mind there was something quaint in the spectacle of the little wondering fellow bending over the abstruse Great Poem of Italy which arose to life and being through the poet’s own Great Wrong. Little did the enemies of Dante dream that their names would be committed to lasting execration in a Hell so immortal as the ‘Inferno,’—though it is to be deplored that so supreme a writer should have thought it worth his while to honour, by handing down to posterity, the names of those who were as nobodies compared with himself. However he, like other old-world poets, was not permitted to see his fate beyond his own lifetime. We are wiser in our generation. We know that the more an author’s work is publicly praised the more likely it is to die quickly and immediately,—and those who desire their thoughts to last, and to carry weight with future generations, should pray for the condemnation of their present compeers in order to be in tune with the slow but steady pulse-beat of Fame. One has only to look back through a few centuries to see the list of the Despised who are now become the Glorious—and a study of contemporary critics on the works of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, is a very wholesome lesson to the untried writer of books who is afraid of the little acrimonies of Fleet Street. To lead the world one must first be crucified,—this is the chief lesson of practical Christianity.
“Rather curious,” said Major Desmond at last, nodding towards Boy, and speaking softly as if he were in church, “how he seems to like those fanciful things!”
Miss Letty smiled.
“Boy!”
Boy looked up with a start.
“Do you like the picture-book?”
Boy gave no answer in words. He merely nodded and placed one dumpy hand on the “Cross of Angels,” to keep the place. Suddenly, however, he found voice. He had turned over a few more pages, though still careful not to lose the picture he had selected as his favourite, when he stopped and exclaimed breathlessly,—
“Boy bin there!”
The Major, with remarkable alertness, went down on the floor beside him and looked over his golden head.
“Boy been there! Nonsense! What! In that wonderful garden, with all those flowers and trees and lovely angels flying about! Boy couldn’t get there if he tried!”
Boy looked at him with solemnly reproachful eyes.
“Tell ’oo Boy bin there,” he repeated. “Boy seen f’owers and boo’ful people! Boy knows vezy well about it!”
The Major became interested.
“Oh, all right!—I don’t wish to contradict you, little chappie!” he said with a cheery and confidential air,—“But when were you there last, eh?”
Boy considered—his rosy lips tightened, and his fair brows puckered in a frown of mental puzzlement.
“Me dunno,” he replied at last: “long, long time ‘go—awfoo’ long!” and he gave a deep sigh. “Dunno ’ow long—” here he studied the picture again with an approving air of familiarity. “But Boy ’members it;—pitty p’ace,—pitty flowers,—all bwight,—awfoo’ bwight!—’ess! me ’members it!”
The Major got up from his knees, dusted his trousers, and looked quizzically at Miss Letty.
“Odd little rascal,” he observed, sotto voce. “Doesn’t know a bit what he is jabbering about!”
Miss Letty’s soft blue eyes rested on the child thoughtfully.
“I’m not sure about that, Dick,” she said. “We are rather arrogant, we old worldly-wise people, in our estimate of children;—Boy may remember where he came from, and the imagination of a great artist may have recalled to him a true reality.”
Her voice was very sweet,—her face expressed a faith and hope which made it beautiful; and Dick Desmond, in his quick, impulsive fashion, caught one of her little white hands and raised it to his lips with all the gallant grace of a soldier and a gentleman.
“God bless you, Letty!” he said heartily; “I know very well where you came from!—and I don’t want any picture but yourself to remind me of the fact!”