THE boy was very tired when he arrived in London, and not capable of the hot interest he expected to feel in the great muddy capital, which was one muddle of mean houses, noisy roads, carts and carriages, and crowding people, to his tired perceptions. The day after, he and his grandfather went to Windsor through the mild soft country, half veiled in the “mists and mellow fruitfulness” that distinguish autumn, and warm with the all-pervading and diffused sunshine of the season. How different was the calm slow river, lingering between its placid banks, seeking no coy concealment under cliff or tree, but facing the daylight with gentle indifference, from the wild shy Esk, which played at hide-and-seek with the sunshine, like a flying nymph among the woods! The old lord seemed half inspired by this return to scenes which he remembered so well, though he had not been himself brought up at Eton. “I brought your father here, as I’m bringing you,” he said, as they rolled along round the curves of the railway, looking out upon the distant castle and the river. “You will see plenty of boats on the river in another day, my boy; and if your grandma and I come here next summer, I daresay we shall see you strutting along in all your finery, with flowers in your hat, and a blue shirt.” Innocent old lord! he thought his little rustic, just out of the nest, might reach the celestial heights of Eton in a few months, and perhaps—for what limits are there to the presumption of ignorance?—find a place in the Eight in his first summer. But, indeed, I don’t really think Lord Eskside’s ignorance went so far as this. He said it, not knowing what else to say, to please the boy. They went down together to the great dame’s house, full already of small boys settling into their familiar quarters, upon whom Val looked with all the wondering envy and respect natural to a freshman. He had himself assumed the tall hat for the first time in his life, and the sight of so many tall hats moving about everywhere confused yet excited him. His tutor, who was not his “dame,” lived in a tiny house attached to a big pupil-room, and had no accommodation for boys or for much else, except the blue-and-white china in which his soul delighted. Mr Gerald Grinder, like his brother Mr Cyril Grinder, who had been Val’s tutor at Eskside, had one of the finest minds of his time; but the chief way in which this made itself evident to the outer world was in his furniture, and the fittings-up of his little house, every “detail” in which he flattered himself was a study. It was a very commonplace little house, but the thought that had been expended on its decoration might have built pyramids—if anything so rude and senseless as building pyramids could have occurred to the refined intelligence of a man of Mr Gerald Grinder’s day. Val gazed at all the velvet brackets, and all the antique cabinets (which had been “picked up” in holiday travels all over the world, and were each the subject of a tale), and all the china, with a sense of failing breath and space too small for him; while his grandfather engaged Mr Grinder in conversation, and pointed out the boy’s peculiarities, as if these characteristics could be of any particular interest to any one out of Val’s own family—and the young tutor listened with a smile. “I don’t doubt we shall soon know each other,” he said suavely, and shook hands with Val, and dismissed him: to receive just such a description of another boy next moment from another anxious parent. “Whether is it Ross or Smith now, that is the self-willed one, and which is the boy that catches cold?” the young tutor asked himself, when the audience was over. He concluded, finally, that the latter case must be Smith’s, since he was brought by his mother—a generalisation which perhaps was justifiable. Poor Mr Grinder! he knew all the marks of his china as well as these tiresome people knew, so to speak, the manufacturer’s marks on their boys; but how much more interesting was one than the other! He took a walk up to Windsor to an old furniture shop, where bargains of precious ware were now and then to be had, with a delicious sense of relief when it was too late to expect more pupils—and fell upon a bit of real Nankin there which refreshed his very soul.
Meanwhile the old lord and his boy strayed about the narrow streets. They went to the bookseller’s and bought pictures for Val’s room—which, I need not say, were chiefly Landseers, though, granting the subject, Val was not particular as to the artist; and then they walked to the castle, the grandfather making a conscientious but painful attempt to remember who built the Round Tower, and who was responsible for St George’s Chapel. As to these points, however, Val was not at all exacting, and had no thirst for information. He liked to walk on the terrace better, where the great sunny misty plain before him made his young heart expand with a delightful sense of space and distance, but did not care for the splendid alleys of the Long Walk, which were too formal to please his ill-regulated fancy. And then they went to the river, along the green bank of the Brocas, which touched Lord Eskside’s heart with many recollections. “I have walked with your father here fifty times, I should think,” said the old lord. “He was not much of a boating man himself, but he was fond of the river. Your father had always what is called a fine mind, Val.”
“What is a fine mind?” said the boy, who did not know very much about his father, or care a great deal, if the truth must be told.
“It’s rather hard to define,” said the old lord, “when you don’t possess the article; and you must not learn to generalise too much, my boy; it’s a dangerous custom. It is, so far as I’ve been able to remark, an intellect which pays more attention to the small things than the great in this life; it cares for what it calls the details, and lets the bigger matters shift for themselves.”
“Was my father—very good at anything?” asked Val, whom this definition interested but moderately. He had some difficulty in shaping this question; for indeed, having just heard that his father was not a boating man, his curiosity was partially satisfied before expressed.
“Your father has very good abilities,” said Lord Eskside—“very good abilities. I wish he would put them to more use. I’ve been told he was an elegant scholar, Val.”
“What is an elegant scholar, grandpa?”
The old lord laughed. “Not me nor you,” he said; “and I doubt if either you or me are the stuff to make one of; but your father was. I’ll show you an old school-list at home with his name in it. I’ve heard his Latin verses were something very fine indeed; Val, Latin verses are grand things. Poetry in English is a thriftless sort of occupation; but a dead language makes all the difference. If you ever can make Latin verses like your father, you’ll be a great man, Val.”
Val never knew whether his grandfather was laughing at him when he adopted this tone. “Is my father a great man?” he asked, with a serious face. “I should like to know a little more about him. I have only seen him once. Once is not much for a fellow to have seen his father; and I was so small then, and never thought of anything.”
“Most of us are just as well without thinking,” said Lord Eskside, with a suppressed sigh, “except about your work, my boy. You may be sure you will want all your thoughts for your work.”
“That is just how you always turn me off,” said Val. “I ask you about my father, grandpa, and you tell me about my work. I will do my work,” said the boy, with a dogged air, which he sometimes put on; “but why does my father never come home?—why doesn’t he care for me? All these fellows there are with their fathers. I like you a great deal better—but why doesn’t he come?”
“Because he likes his own way,” said the old lord, “better than he likes you or me—better than he likes his own country or our homely life. Observe, my boy, this is nothing for you to judge, or make your remarks upon,” he added, bending his brows at Val, who was not used to be looked on frowningly. “Your father is no boy like you, but a man, and able to judge for himself. His profession takes him abroad. He will be an ambassador one of these days, I suppose, and represent his sovereign—which is more honour than often falls to the lot of a poor Scots lord.”
Val did not make any reply, and the pair continued their walk along the river-side. His father a representative of his sovereign; his mother——. For the last time before he was engulfed by the practical schoolboy life which was more congenial to his years, Val felt the whirl of wonder, the strange chaos of his double life which was made up of such different elements, and lay as it were between two worlds. His panic was gone, having worn itself out, and no real interest in his unknown mother kept her image before him; but he felt the jar in him of these two existences, so strangely, widely separated. His head felt giddy, as if the world were turning round with him. But every moment the river was becoming more gay and bright, and the moving panorama before him after a while overcame his individual reflections. The “fellows” newly arrived were already crowding down to the river—little new boys standing about with their hands in their pockets looking wistfully on; but the old habitués of the Thames asserted their superiority, and got afloat in swarms—some in the strange outriggers which Val had heard of, but had never seen before. Lord Eskside was as eager about the sight as if it had been he who was the new boy. “Look how light they are, Val!” he cried—“how cleverly they manage them! If those long oars get out of balance the thing upsets. Look at that small creature there no bigger than yourself——”
“Bigger! he’s not up to my elbow,” cried Val, indignant.
“Well, smaller than yourself: but you could not do that, you lout, to save your life.”
Val’s face grew crimson. “Come back next week, grandpa,” he said, “and see if I can’t; or come along, I’ll try now; it would only be a ducking—and what do I care for a ducking? I’ll try this very day.”
“Come back, come back, my boy; they won’t let you try to-day,” cried the old lord, laughing at the boy’s impetuosity. Val had turned back, and was rushing down to the “rafts” where boats were to be had; and it was all that his grandfather could do to restrain him. “You are not, Val Ross, your own master—not to speak of other people’s—here,” he said, holding the boy by the arm, “but a member of a corporation, and you must obey the laws of it. They’ll not give you a boat, or if they do, it will be because they think you don’t belong to Eton; and if you were to go out without fulfilling all the regulations, they’d punish you, Val.”
“Punish me!” cried Val, with nostrils dilating, and a wild fire in his eyes.
“Ay, punish you, though you are such a great man. This will never do,” said Lord Eskside; “do you mean to struggle with me, sir, in the sight of all these lads? Master yourself! and that at once.”
The boy came to himself with a gasp, as if he had been drowning. I don’t think he had ever in his life been spoken to in so severe a voice. He ceased to resist, and the old lord gave up his hold on his arm, and continued in a lower tone—
“You must learn this lesson, my boy, at once. You are nobody here, and you must master yourself. Do it of your own will, and you show the makings of a man. Do it because you are compelled and what are you but a slave? The thing is in your own hands, Val,” said Lord Eskside, softened, and putting off his peremptory tone; “you have almost made an exhibition, before all these strange lads, of yourself—and me.”
Val did not say anything; his breast was swelling high, his heart throbbing with the effort he had made; and he was not pleased that he had been obliged to make the effort, nor did he feel that satisfaction in having done his duty which is said always to attend that somewhat difficult operation. He walked along the river-side panting and drawing his breath hard, as if he really had tried the experiment of a ducking. How he longed to do this thing which he had been assured he must not do! He would have liked to jump into the river and swim out to one of the long slim boats, poised like big dragon-flies on the water, and eject its rower, and take the vacant place; in which case, no doubt, Val would have come to signal grief, as he would have deserved—for he had never been in an outrigger in his life.
Then the pair went and dined at the hotel, where Val recovered his spirits; and then the old lord took the boy to his little room, where they found his things unpacked, and his pictures standing in a little heap against the wall, and his room almost filled up with the bed which had been folded up out of the way when they were there before. It was not like the luxurious large airy room which had been Val’s at home, any more than the house with its long passages, with regiments of doors on either side, was like the old-fashioned arrangements of Rosscraig. And here at last the parting so often rehearsed had to be done in earnest. “Master yourself,” said the old lord, with a voice which was neither so cheery nor so firm as he meant it to be; “and God bless you, Val!” And then he was gone, walking up the dark street with a heavy heart in his old bosom, and his eyebrows working furiously. And Val sat down upon his bed and looked round him wonderingly, and for the first time realised that he was left alone.
However, it is needless to enter upon the details of so very common a scene. Perhaps the boy shed a few tears silently when the maid took away his candle, and he felt that no soft step, subdued lest he should be sleeping, no rustling silken garments, could come into his room that night. In the morning he faced his new existence vigorously, and hung his pictures, and began his work without any weakness of recollection. The old people felt it a great deal more, and a great deal longer; but Val could not have been known from the most accustomed and habitual schoolboy, and, stranger still, scarcely knew himself for anything else, after that night. At the end of the week he felt as if he had lived there all his life—as if he had been there before in some previous kind of existence. I suppose this readiness of a child to adapt itself to new habits, and make them its own, does but increase the strange unreality of life itself to the half-conscious mind—life which changes in a moment, so that one week seems like years, and years, being past, look as if they had never been.
At the end of the week Val wrote home; and in his first letter there was this paragraph, written in his clearest hand:—
“Tell grandpapa I rowed up to Surly Hall, a long way above where we walked, above locks, in an outrigger, this morning. I rowed another fellow and licked him. I passed swimming on Thursday, and outriggers is very easy. You have nothing to do but keep steady, and it flies like a bird.”
“What is an outrigger?” said Lady Eskside, as she gave her husband the letter. The old lord gave an internal shiver, and thanked heaven that she did not remember; and Val did not think it necessary to inform his anxious grand-parents how often he had swamped his little craft on the Friday, before he succeeded in making that triumphal progress to Surly on Saturday morning. “He’s a determined rascal, that boy of yours, my lady,” was all the answer Lord Eskside made.
I would not assert, however, that Val found all his difficulties at school to be surmounted so easily as the outrigger. He had to go through the average number of accidents, and perils, and overcome various wild stirrings of nature within him, before he learned, as a true Etonian does, to take pride in the penalties and hardships as well as the pleasures which distinguish his school. Val’s natural pride in his own person as Val Ross had to be met and routed by his artificial and conventional pride as a schoolboy, before, for instance, he could reconcile himself to be some one’s fag, a fate which overtook him instantly. Little Lord Hightowers, the Duke’s son, who was in the same house, took to it naturally, without any stirring of repugnance, and made his master’s toast with conscientious zest, and went his master’s errands, and accepted his share of the dainties he had fetched when that potentate was in a liberal mood, without any struggle whatever with himself. But Val had a struggle, the wild blood in his veins being unused to obedience and finding subjection hard. I am happy to say, however, that his powers were equal to the necessary sacrifice, and that he never made an exhibition of himself as he had been on the eve of doing on the day of his arrival. Time passed on, and Val grew and “mastered himself;” but sometimes did not master himself, and got into disgrace, and scrambled out again, and had no fair-weather voyage, but all a schoolboy’s troubles at their hardest. Hightowers had a very much easier time of it; he was neither proud nor ambitious, but was just as happy at the foot of his division as anywhere else, quite as happy looking on at a game as playing, and took the floggings which overtook him periodically with the most heavenly calm; whereas the mere threat of one wrought Val to the point of desperation. Hightowers was better off than Val by right of his temperament and calmer blood. He took everything much more lightly, and used to discourse to his companion on the vanity of “making a fuss” with ponderous and precocious wisdom. “Why don’t you take it easy, as I do?” said Hightowers; “what’s the good of verses, for instance? A fellow never does verses after he leaves school. If you get complained of, it don’t hurt you; and even a swishing, though it stings, it’s only for a minute—I don’t mind. There’s a house match on to-day between Guerre’s and Whiting’s. Put that rubbish away and come along.”
Val was on the point of going, when a recollection of what he had heard of his father’s eminence in the way of verse-making returned to his mind; whereupon he sat down again doggedly to grind the smooth English into rugged schoolboy Latin. He clenched his teeth at the thought of being inferior to his father—not from love—for how should he love the man who had not spent a kind word on him, or seen him, but once in his life?—but from a violent instinct of opposition which had sprung up in his soul, he could not tell why. He would not be beaten by his father; and this visionary jealousy overcame all Hightowers’ philosophisings, and even the attractions of the match between Whiting’s and Guerre’s.
Thus the boy grew, not perhaps a very amiable boy, though with a side to his character which was as sweet and soft as the other was rugged; and with his grandfather’s lesson well learned and bearing fruit. People who do right by a struggle are not so pleasant as those who do right because it comes natural to them—or even sometimes as those who do wrong in an easy and natural way without any effort; and when Val went home he would carry occasional traces of the conflict, and sometimes showed a chaotic condition of mind which disturbed the peace of his elders almost as much as it disturbed his own; and his career at school was of a mixed character, sometimes almost brilliant, sometimes very doubtful. What wild impulses would rise in him, longings for he knew not what, desires almost uncontrollable to rush away out of the routine in which his life was spent. Sometimes a fierce inclination to go to sea seized upon him; sometimes he would be suddenly tempted by the sight of the soldiers, of whom he saw so many, and for the moment the fancy of enlisting and going off unknown to India, China, or the end of the world, in search of adventures—a veritable knight-errant—moved the boy. But only himself knew how sudden and fierce were these temptations. He did not confide them to any one. He could not tell where they came from, not being learned enough or clever enough to refer them to his mother’s vagrant blood, which stirred and rose in spring-tides and periodical overflowings with the rising of his youth. But his practical schoolboy life had this excellent effect, that it withdrew him from everything visionary, giving him only practical difficulties and temptations to struggle against. He forgot at Eton all about the other strange and jarring element in his existence which had perplexed him in his childhood. And, indeed, the boy had no leisure, even had he been disposed, to brood over his parentage, or ask himself why his father and mother were unlike those paters and maters of whom his companions talked. It was so; and what more could be said? He accepted the fact without further questioning, and thought no more about it. He had enough to do with his schoolboy occupations, and with that high art in which he was being trained by all the influences round him—the art of mastering himself.