CHAPTER II.
WHEN HE WAS A CHILD (CONTINUED).
IT was not very long after this, but how long his memory could not clearly make out, when Johnnie was sent to the country to his grandfather and grandmother, who lived in a village some twenty miles away. He did not recollect being told about it, or at all prepared for his journey, but only that one morning the old people came in, driving in an old-fashioned little light cart, called a shandry in the neighbourhood, and took him away. They were old people who were ‘retired,’ living in the village in a nice little house of their own, without any particular occupation. The old lady kept poultry, and the old gentleman read the newspapers, and they were very comfortable and happy, with fresh country complexions, and kind country ways. Grandmamma wore a little brown front with little curls under her cap, which had been the fashion in her day. But her husband looked much handsomer in his own white hair. They were neither of them very like Johnnie’s mother, who was tall and quiet and very serious, while the old people were full of cheerfulness and jokes. But there were no jokes on the day when they came to carry off Johnnie. They came in, and kissed their daughter with scarcely a word, and then the old gentleman sat down in a chair by the fire, with a great many curves about his eyes, and wrinkles in his forehead—which had never been seen there before—while his wife dropped down upon the sofa and began to cry, saying,
‘Oh that we should have lived to see this day!’ rocking herself backwards and forwards in dreadful distress.
‘Don’t cry, grandmamma,’ said Johnnie, stealing to her side, and stroking with his hands to console her the skirts of her thick silk gown. Susie went to the other side, and put her arm round the old lady, and said the same thing.
‘Don’t cry, grandmamma!’ but Susie knew all about the trouble, whatever it was. She was not like her little brother, only unhappy and perplexed to see the grown-up people cry.
‘Run away, dear, and play,’ his mother said; and the poor little boy obeyed, very forlorn and miserable to be always sent away. But he only went to the back parlour, where his box of bricks was standing on the floor, and where he began to build a house, oh, so seriously, as if it were a matter of life and death. The folding-doors were half open, and he still could see grandmamma crying and the wrinkles on grandpapa’s face, and hear the murmur of the talk, very serious, and broken now and then with a sob. They were in great trouble—that Johnnie could easily make out: and by this time he was as sure, as if some one had told him all about it, that their trouble had something to do with his father—his merry laughing father, who spoilt him so—who was never now to be seen even in the middle of the night through half shut eyes. The conversation that went on was not much. Grandpapa for his part only sat and stared before him, and occasionally shook his head, and drew his brows together, as if it was somebody’s fault; while grandmamma cried and sometimes exclaimed,
‘Oh, how could he do it? Had he no thought of you or the children, or how dreadfully you would feel it?’
‘If he did not think of himself, mother, how should he think of me,’ said Johnnie’s mother, with a sort of stern smile. ‘He knew better than anyone what the penalty was.’
‘He was a fool, always a fool,’ said grandpapa, hastily.
‘Oh,’ said grandmamma, ‘when he was young, he was very dear! There never was anyone nicer than he was—instead of thinking harm of his mother-in-law, as so many foolish fellows do——’
‘Hush, mother! don’t speak so that the child can understand. I don’t want him to know.’
‘How can you keep it from him? It isn’t possible. Why, everybody knows, even the people at the turnpike. They looked at your father and me so pitifully as we came through.’
‘That for their pity!’ said grandpapa, with an angry snap of his fingers, and the colour mounted up to the very edge of his white hair. Johnnie, peeping timidly out between the legs of the table, thought his mother, too, was very angry with grandmamma. She was standing in the middle of the room, looking very tall and grand, enough to strike terror into any little shrinking breast, whether it belonged to a child of seven or to a man of seventy.
She said: ‘Mother! Pity is what I cannot bear. Let them crush us if they like. Let them think us as bad as—but pity, never! That I cannot bear.’
‘Oh, my dear,’ said grandmamma, ‘try to be softened and not hardened by this great trouble.’
These were things that Johnnie heard partially. Sometimes a few words would get lost as the corner of the table-cover fell down between him and the other parlour, like a curtain in a theatre, which was what happened from time to time: and there would be long pauses in which nothing at all was said, but only a little sob from grandmamma, or the tchick, tchick of inarticulate comment which the old man made, or the mother or Susie moving across the room. There is nothing more terrible than those long pauses in which those who have come to console the sufferers can find nothing to say, when words are impossible, and the silence of the little company, which cannot be broken save on one subject, becomes more intolerable than if no consolation had been attempted at all.
Then they had a sort of dreary dinner, to prepare for which Johnnie and his bricks had to be removed into a corner. They all sat down round the table, grandpapa still giving a tchick, tchick from time to time and grandmamma stopping in the midst of a mouthful to dry her eyes. Johnnie himself was hungry, but it was difficult to eat when everybody looked so miserable, and when he asked for a little more they all looked at him as if he had said something wrong.
‘Poor child, he had always a good appetite, bless him,’ grandmamma said, laying down her knife and fork with a little sob. ‘What a good thing it is that nothing matters very much at his age.’
Johnnie did not say that it mattered very much indeed—he had no words to use; but his little heart throbbed up into his throat, and he could not eat a morsel of his second help. Oh, if anyone had known how forlorn that little heart was, groping among the mysteries with which he was surrounded, which he could not understand! All he could do was to gaze at the grown-up people who were so hard upon him, who did not understand him any more than he understood them. Grandpapa, though he went on with his tchick, tchick at intervals, made a tolerable meal, and thought he could taste a bit of cheese after all the rest had done.
‘Meat has no savour to people in trouble,’ he said, ‘but sometimes you can taste a bit of cheese when you can take nothing else.’
All the same, however, he made a very good meal.
Some time after this it was suddenly intimated to Johnnie that he was going ‘back’ with the old people.
‘Grandpapa and grandmamma are going to take you with them,’ Susie said, seeking him out in the back parlour where he had relinquished the bricks and taken to Robinson Crusoe, and began again to wonder whether, in spite of the placid policeman, the savages, after all, might not have something to do with the disappearance of papa.
‘Oh, what a lucky boy you are, Jack! You are going to drive back between them in the shandry, and stay there for a change—for mamma thinks you are not looking very well. Oh, you lucky little boy!’
Though Susie said this as if she envied him, Johnnie could see that in her mind she thought it was a good thing that he should be going away. And his poor little heart, which was so silent, gave a great throb and cry, ‘Why do you want to send me away?’
‘It is because mamma thinks you are so pale—and that a change will do you good,’ said Susie. She said it as if it were a lesson she had learnt, repeating the same words. ‘You are to make haste and get on your things, and not keep them waiting. You can take your book with you if you like,’ she said. And then Betty came in with the little blue pilot cloth topcoat which was so thick and warm, and the comforter, and a fur cap which papa had bought for Johnnie in old days when he used to take the little boy out for drives. The sight of this was too much for the child. He rushed out to the front hall where mamma was standing watching her mother mount into the shandry, and caught hold of her by the skirts of her dress.
‘I want papa; I want papa!’ said Johnnie, flinging himself upon his mother. The cry was so piercing that it went out into the street where old Mrs. Sandford was arranging her wraps round her, and making a warm seat between herself and her husband for the child.
‘Tchick tchick!’ said the old gentleman, standing on the pavement before the open door. Mamma caught Johnnie in her arms and gave him a hug which was almost fierce, to solace him as well as to take good-bye of him, and then she lifted him up beside his grandmother and tucked him in.
‘Mind you are a good boy, and don’t trouble granny,’ she said, but took no notice of his crying or of the trouble on his little face. Looking back as they drove away he could see her standing, very pale in her black dress, and Susie by her, who was waving her hand, and calling out good-bye. Betty stood behind them, crying, but neither his mother nor his sister seemed to be sorry to see him go away. He looked back at them with a dreadful choking in his throat, and for years after saw it all like a picture—the two figures in the doorway and Betty crying behind. Susie smiled and waved her hand, but his mother neither wept nor smiled. She was all black and white, like a woman cut out of marble, as though nothing could move her more. And that was the last that Johnnie saw of them for years.
The house to which he went at first was not the place in which he grew up: for the grandparents, it seemed, were on the eve of a removal. Everything was new in the new house to which they took him, and which was a very neat little red brick house, with green shutters, like a house in a story book. It stood in the village street, with a little garden full of lilac and rose bushes in front, and a large garden with everything in it, from lilies to cabbages, behind. Nothing could exceed the comfort, or the neatness, or the quiet of this little place. There was only one servant, as at home; but probably she was a better servant than Betty: and there was a gardener besides, who did a great many odd jobs in the house, and now and then took Johnnie out with him upon wonderful expeditions to the moor which lay just outside the last houses of the village. It was the most wonderful moor that ever was seen, sometimes golden with gorse, sometimes purple with heather, with wild little black pools in it, which looked as if they went down into the very heart of the earth, and here and there a little ragged tree, which the wind had blown into corners and elbows, and which stood and struggled for bare life with every storm that raged. The wind blew on the moor so fresh and keen that Johnnie’s cheeks got to be two roses, and his little body strengthened and lengthened, and he grew into a strong and likely lad without any fancies or delicacies, or anything at all out of the way about him. The grandparents were more kind than words could say; that is they were not kind, but only loved the child with all their hearts, which is the one thing in the world that is better than kindness. He did nothing but play for a year or two, and then he had lessons from the curate, and learned a great deal, and was trained up in all the duties which can be required from a boy. There could not have been a happier child. He was the king of the little house, and of the two old people’s hearts, and of Sarah the maid, and Benjamin the gardener, and of the donkey and cart. And in the village itself he was quite a considerable person, ranking next after the rector’s boys and above the doctor’s son, who was delicate and spoilt.
This change of life worked a great change in every way in the boy. He was removed altogether from his own childish beginnings and all those scenes which had impressed themselves on his mind in the mists of early recollection. He had become the son of his grandfather and grandmother, who were old, and comfortable, and quiet, and never stepped beyond their routine or did differently to-day from what they had done yesterday. The vision of his father had gone altogether from his life, and his mother was as much or even more lost, for her aspect was completely changed to him. She had ceased to be his mother and become Emily, which was the name by which he always heard her called, a person found fault with sometimes, discussed and criticised, about whom there were shakings of the head between the grandparents, complaints that she liked her own will, and would have her own way.
By dint of hearing her spoken of like this for years, and hearing very little of her in any other way, John came to have a sort of impression that she was only an elder sister, whom he too might call Emily, who had been very long away from home, and who had departed from all their traditions. In his mind he came to feel himself a sort of little uncle to Susie, which, of course, being grandmamma’s son, was what he would naturally be. He fell into all the old people’s ways of thinking, feeling sorry in a disapproving way that Emily and her daughter never came to see them, yet feeling this more as a fault in them than as anything that told upon himself. Children and old people are more near to each other than the old and the middle-aged, and Johnnie made a far better child than Emily, who herself was older than her father and mother. He redressed the balance, and by slipping, as it were, a generation, set them right again in their parental place. But the effect upon him was very confusing.
Emily did not write very often, and scarcely at all to the boy. When she did send him a letter to himself at Christmas, or on his birthday, it was without any appreciation of the fact that Johnnie had grown into John, and was no longer a child: and her letters to the old people were bulletins of life rather than familiar letters. She told them what she was doing, and how Susie was getting on, and what sort of weather it was—hot or cold—and that she was quite well in health, or else had little ailments, of which she hoped soon to be well: but there was nothing in these epistles to interest the boy. As a matter of fact he was much disposed in his heart to the conclusion that Emily was not sympathetic, and was fond of having her own way. His way was that of the elder world, and was quite different from hers: and for years he had ceased to wonder why it was that the letters were addressed to Mrs. Sandford, and that he too bore that name.
He was so little when all these changes happened that he was very hazy in his mind about the circumstances, and very far from clear that he had ever been anything but John Sandford. As a matter of fact he never discussed this matter with himself. One does not naturally enter into discussions about one’s self. Even the most strained of circumstances appear to us all quite simple and easy when they concern ourselves. He was quite natural, everything about him was quite natural—he felt no mystery in his own being or surroundings: and—whatever might have been said or felt at the time when he came to his grandfather’s—neither did anyone else. Indeed, in the new place where they had settled, nobody knew anything of Mr. Sandford’s daughter, nor of their previous history at all.
And yet at the bottom of his heart John had forgotten nothing. Those far distant scenes were to him like a dream, like a play he had seen some time (though he had never been at the theatre in his life), like a story that had been told him, but far more vivid than any story. He recollected those wakings in the middle of the night, and the dazzling of the candle in his eyes, and his father’s face—and how he was carried down to the parlour in his night-gown, and the table in all the disorder of supper, with oranges and cakes, and a little wine out of his father’s glass—and of the other face on the other side of the fire which would look on disapproving, and as soon as possible bear him off again into the darkness of bed. The look on that other face was quite what he would have expected from Emily, that grown-up uncomfortable child of whom the grandparents disapproved.
The other scenes of the drama came also fitfully to John’s mind from time to time—the back parlour where he was sent to play with his bricks, and then Robinson Crusoe, and the trouble in his mind lest the savages should have got papa; and then that strange silent spectacle of the lighted court with the judges sitting (as he knew now) and the little sugar-plums sprinkled upon the bread and butter; and then the old people coming to dinner, and grandmamma crying and grandfather with his ‘tchick, tchick,’ and the shandry in which he was carried away, with Betty crying and Susie waving her hand, and mamma neither smiling nor weeping (always so like Emily!) at the open door; and the impression through everything that nothing was to be said before the boy. All this was as distinct in his mind as it ever had been—which perhaps was not saying much: for all was misty with childhood, imperfect in outline, running into such wildernesses of ignorance on either side; but yet so very certain, never forgotten, always at the same point. His mind varied upon matters of every day, and he got to see what happened last year in a different light after passing through the experiences of this year. But nothing changed for him those early scenes, they were beyond the action of experience. They were the same to him at sixteen as they had been when they happened—misty, incomprehensible, yet quite certain and true.
He was the son of his grandparents, as has been said. He was like a boy who had never had either father or mother when he set out upon the active way of his life. And how he came to work in that early drama of the beginning, with all the later incidents, and how he was affected by it for good and evil, has now to be shown in the story of John Sandford, who was his father’s son, though he knew nothing of him, and did not even bear his name.