Tommy Wideawake Part 10

Tommy grinned.

"I must go," he said. "I'm jolly glad you and Mrs. Berrill are pals,"

and he disappeared in the direction of the poet.

"Which I 'ope 'e won't turn out no worse than 'is dear father. G.o.d bless 'im," said Mrs. Berrill, as they discussed the tattered jacket.

And so the days tripped by, sunny and showery--true April days. Up in the downs was a new shrill bleating of lambs, and down in the valley rose the young wheat, green and strong and hopeful.

The water-meadows grew each day more velvety and luscious, as the young gra.s.s thickened, and between the stems, in the copse, came a s.h.i.+mmer of blue and gold, of blue-bell and primrose.

The stream sang buoyantly down to the mill, and Tommy wandered over the country-side, happy in it all--and indeed almost part of it.

Moreover, Madge and her governess would often come upon him, all unexpectedly, too, in some byway of their daily travel, and he would show them flowers and bird's-nests, and explain for their benefit the position of each farmhand and labourer in the commonwealth of Camslove, and thus the days went by so happily that they seemed to have vanished almost as they came, and on a morning Tommy woke up to the fact that the holidays had ended. A grim showery day it was, too--a day of driving wind and cold rain--and Tommy loitered dismally from arbour to house, and house to arbour.

The poet was busy on a new work, and Mrs. Chundle, too intent on marking and packing his clothes to be good company.

Madge would be indoors, as it was raining, and it was too cold and uninviting for a bathe.

He spent the afternoon trudging about the muddy lanes with the doctor, but the evening found him desolate.

Ah, these sad days that form our characters, as men tell us--characters that, at times, we feel we could willingly dispense with, so that the days might be always sunny, and the horizons clear.

Even the longest of dreary days ends at last, however, and Tommy fell sorrowfully asleep in the summer house, a rain-drop rolling dismally down his freckled nose, and his mind held captive by troubled visions of school.

A day or two after Tommy's departure, the poet stooped, in a side path of his garden, to pick up a stray sheet of paper.

On it he saw two words in his own handwriting.

"Mollie--folly--"

He sighed.

"I remember," he said.

Then he looked again, for in a round, sprawling hand was written yet another word--"jolly."

The poet wiped his gla.s.ses and folded up the paper.

Then he coughed.

"I had not thought of that," he observed, meditatively.

VI

IN WHICH FOUR MEN MEET A TRAIN

A hot August noon blazed over Becklington common, as I lay thinking and thinking, staring up into the blue sky, and for all the richness of the day, sad enough in heart.

In the valley below me the stream still splashed happily down to the mill, and away on the far hills the white flocks were grazing peacefully as ever.

And above my head poised and quivering sang a lark.

The Spring had rounded into maturity, and Summer, lavish and wonderful and queenly, rested on her throne.

Why should there be war anywhere in the world? I asked.

And yet along a far frontier it flickered even now, sinister and relentless. A little war and, to me, a silent one--yet there it rose and fell and smouldered, and grew fierce, and in the grip of it two brave grey eyes had closed forever.

I heard the quiet, well-known voice.

"Tommy is not an ordinary boy," it said.

How we had smiled at the simple honest pride that this soldier had taken in his son.

I turned over and groaned, as I thought of it all--our parting in the old study--our promise--the half-comedy, half-responsibility of the situation.

And we had borne it so lightly, tossed for the boy, taken him more as an obstreperous plaything than a serious charge.

And now--well it matters not upon which of us the mantle of his legal guardian had fallen, nor upon whom lay the administration of his affairs--for we all had silently renewed our vows to one who was dead, and felt that there was something sacred in this mission, which lay upon the shoulders of each one of us.

Poor Tommy--none of us knew how the blow had taken him, for to none of us had he written since the news reached England, save indeed when, in a brief line to me, he had announced his return next week.

We had all written to him, as our separate natures and feelings had dictated, but no reply had reached us--and how should we know that of all the letters he had received, only one was deemed worthy of preservation--and that written in a round childish hand?

"Dear Tommy--I am so sorry. Your loving Madge."

A damp sorry little note it was, but it remained in Tommy's pocket long after our more stately compositions had been torn up and forgotten.

To us, leading our quiet commonplace peaceful life in this little midland village, the shock had come with double force.

Perhaps we had been apt to dwell so little on the eternal verities of chance and change and life and death as to have become almost oblivious of their existence, at any rate in our own sphere.

Those of the villagers who, year by year, in twos and threes, were gathered to their fathers, were old and wrinkled and ready for death, resting quietly under the good red earth, well content with sleep.

And these we had missed, but scarcely mourned, feeling that, in the fitness of things, it was well that they should cease from toil.

But here was our friend, straight and strong and vigorous, cut down by some robber bullet in an Indian pa.s.s--and to us all, I fancy, the shock came with something of terror, and something of awakening in its tragedy. Outwardly we had shown little enough.

The poet, when the first stun of the blow had pa.s.sed, had written his grief in the best lines I had ever seen from his pen.

The vicar had preached a quiet scholarly sermon in our friend's memory.

And now all reference to the dead had ceased among us, for the time.

To-morrow, Tommy was to come back from school, and all of us, I fancy, dreaded the first meeting.