A Traveller in Little Things Part 2

And now the old father and mother had got their son back, and they told him the story of the thirty years during which they had lamented his loss, and of how at last they had succeeded in recovering him:--what had he to tell them in return? It was a disappointing story. For, to begin with, he had no recollection of his child life at home--no faintest memory of mother or father or of the day when the sudden violent change came and he was forcibly taken away. His earliest recollection was of being taken about by someone--a man who owned him, who was always at the cattle-estates where he worked, and how this man treated him kindly until he was big enough to be set to work shepherding sheep and driving cattle, and doing anything a boy could do at any place they lived in, and that his owner and master then began to be exacting and tyrannical, and treated him so badly that he eventually ran away and never saw the man again. And from that time onward he lived much the same kind of life as when with his master, constantly going about from place to place, from province to province, and finally he had for some unexplained reason been taken into the army.

That was all--the story of his thirty years of wild horseback life told in a few dry sentences! Could more have been expected! The mother had expected more and would not cease to expect it. He was her lost one found again, the child of her body who in his long absence had gotten a second nature; but it was nothing but a colour, a garment, which would wear thinner and thinner, and by-and-by reveal the old deeper ineradicable nature beneath. So she imagined, and would take him out to walk to be with him, to have him all to herself, to caress him, and they would walk, she with an arm round his neck or waist; and when she released him or whenever he could make his escape from the house, he would go off to the quarters of the hired cattlemen and converse with them. They were his people, and he was one of them in soul in spite of his blue eyes, and like one of them he could la.s.so or break a horse and throw a bull and put a brand on him, and kill a cow and skin it, or roast it in its hide if it was wanted so; and he could do a hundred other things, though he couldn't read a book, and I daresay he found it a very misery to sit on a chair in the company of those who read in books and spoke a language that was strange to him--the tongue he had himself spoken as a child!

VII

A THIRD STORY OF TWO BROTHERS

Stories of two brothers are common enough the world over--probably more so than stories of young men who have fallen in love with their grandmothers, and the main feature in most of them, as in the story I have just told, is in the close resemblance of the two brothers, for on that everything hinges. It is precisely the same in the one I am about to relate, one I came upon a few years ago--just how many I wish not to say, nor just where it happened except that it was in the west country; and for the real names of people and places I have subst.i.tuted fict.i.tious ones. For this too, like the last, is a true story. The reader on finis.h.i.+ng it will perhaps blush to think it true, but apart from the moral aspect of the case it is, psychologically, a singularly interesting one.

One summer day I travelled by a public conveyance to Pollhampton, a small rustic market town several miles distant from the nearest railroad. My destination was not the town itself, but a lonely heath- grown hill five miles further on, where I wished to find something that grew and blossomed on it, and my first object on arrival was to secure a riding horse or horse and trap to carry me there. I was told at once that it was useless to look for such a thing, as it was market day and everybody was fully occupied. That it was market day I already knew very well, as the two or three main streets and wide market-place in the middle of the town were full of sheep and cows and pigs and people running about and much noise of shoutings and barking dogs. However, the strange object of the strange-looking stranger in coming to the town, interested some of the wild native boys, and they rushed about to tell it, and in less than five minutes a nice neat-looking middle-aged man stood at my elbow and said he had a good horse and trap and for seven-and-sixpence would drive me to the hill, help me there to find what I wanted, and bring me back in time to catch the conveyance.

Accordingly in a few minutes we were speeding out of the town drawn by a fast-trotting horse. Fast trotters appeared to be common in these parts, and as we went along the road from time to time a small cloud of dust would become visible far ahead of us, and in two or three minutes a farmer's trap would appear and rush past on its way to market, to vanish behind us in two or three minutes more and be succeeded by another and then others. By-and-by one came past driven by two young women, one holding the reins, the other playing with the whip. They were tall, dark, with black hair, and colourless faces, aged about thirty, I imagined. As they flew by I remarked, "I would lay a sovereign to a s.h.i.+lling that they are twins." "You'd lose your money-- there's two or three years between them," said my driver. "Do you know them--you didn't nod to them nor they to you?" I said. "I know them,"

he returned, "as well as I know my own face when I look at myself in a gla.s.s." On which I remarked that it was very wonderful. "'Tis only a part of the wonder, and not the biggest part," he said. "You've seen what they are like and how like they are, but if you pa.s.sed a day with them in the house you'd be able to tell one from the other; but if you lived a year in the same house with their two brothers you'd never be able to tell one from the other and be sure you were right. The strangest thing is that the brothers who, like their sisters, have two or three years between them, are not a bit like their sisters; they are blue-eyed and seem a different race."

That, I said, made it more wonderful still. A curiously symmetrical family. Rather awkward for their neighbours, and people who had business relations with them.

"Yes--perhaps," he said, "but it served them very well on one occasion to be so much alike."

I began to smell a dramatic rat and begged him to tell me all about it.

He said he didn't mind telling me. Their name was Prage--Antony and Martin Prage, of Red Pit Farm, which they inherited from their father and worked together. They were very united. One day one of them, when riding six miles from home, met a girl coming along the road, and stopped his horse to talk to her. She was a poor girl that worked at a dairy farm near by, and lived with her mother, a poor old widow-woman, in a cottage in the village. She was pretty, and the young man took a liking to her and he persuaded her to come again to meet him on another day at that spot; and there were many more meetings, and they were fond of each other; but after she told him that something had happened to her he never came again. When she made enquiries she found he had given her a false name and address, and so she lost sight of him. Then her child was born, and she lived with her mother. And you must know what her life was--she and her old mother and her baby and nothing to keep them. And though she was a shy ignorant girl she made up her mind to look for him until she found him to make him pay for the child. She said he had come on his horse so often to see her that he could not be too far away, and every morning she would go off in search of him, and she spent weeks and months tramping about the country, visiting all the villages for many miles round looking for him. And one day in a small village six miles from her home she caught sight of him galloping by on his horse, and seeing a woman standing outside a cottage she ran to her and asked who that young man was who had just ridden by. The woman told her she thought it was Mr. Antony Prage of Red Pit Farm, about two miles from the village. Then the girl came home and was advised what to do. She had to do it all herself as there was no money to buy a lawyer, so she had him brought to court and told her own story, and the judge was very gentle with her and drew out all the particulars. But Mr.

Prage had got a lawyer, and when the girl had finished her story he got up and put just one question to her. First he called on Antony Prage to stand up in court, then he said to her, "Do you swear that the man standing before you is the father of your child?"

And just when he put that question Antony's brother Martin, who had been sitting at the back of the court, got up, and coming forward stood at his brother's side. The girl stared at the two, standing together, too astonished to speak for some time. She looked from one to the other and at last said, "I swear it is one of them." That, the lawyer said, wasn't good enough. If she could not swear that Antony Prage, the man she had brought into court, was the guilty person, then the case fell to the ground.

My informant finished his story and I asked "Was that then the end--was nothing more done about it?" "No, nothing." "Did not the judge say it was a mean dirty trick arranged between the brothers and the lawyer?"

"No, he didn't--he non-suited her and that was all." "And did not Antony Prage, or both of them, go into the witness box and swear that they were innocent of the charge?" "No, they never opened their mouths in court. When the judge told the young woman that she had failed to establish her case, they walked out smiling, and their friends came round them and they went off together." "And these brothers, I suppose, still live among you at their farm and are regarded as good respectable young men, and go to chapel on Sundays, and by-and-by will probably marry nice respectable Methodist girls, and the girls' friends will congratulate them on making such good matches."

"Oh, no doubt; one has been married some time and his wife has got a baby; the other one will be married before long."

"And what do you think about it all?"

"I've told you what happened because the facts came out in court and are known to everyone. What I think about it is what I think, and I've no call to tell that."

"Oh, very well!" I said, vexed at his noncommittal att.i.tude. Then I looked at him, but his face revealed nothing; he was just the man with a quiet manner and low voice who had put himself at my service and engaged to drive me five miles out to a hill, help me to find what I wanted and bring me back in time to catch the conveyance to my town, all for the surprisingly moderate sum of seven-and-sixpence. But he had told me the story of the two brothers; and besides, in spite of our faces being masks, if one make them so, mind converses with mind in some way the psychologists have not yet found out, and I knew that in his heart of hearts he regarded those two respectable members of the Pollhampton community much as I did.

VIII

THE TWO WHITE HOUSES: A MEMORY

There's no connection--not the slightest--between this two and the other twos; it was nevertheless the telling of the stories of the brothers which brought back to me this ancient memory of two houses.

Nor were the two houses connected in any way, except that they were both white, situated on the same road, on the same side of it; also both stood a little way back from the road in grounds beautifully shaded with old trees. It was the great southern road which leads from the city of Buenos Ayres, the Argentine capital, to the vast level cattle-country of the pampas, where I was born and bred. Naturally it was a tremendously exciting adventure to a child's mind to come from these immense open plains, where one lived in rude surroundings with the semi-barbarous gauchos for only neighbours, to a great civilised town full of people and of things strange and beautiful to see. And to touch and taste.

Thus it happened that when I, a child, with my brothers and sisters, were taken to visit the town we would become more and more excited as we approached it at the end of a long journey, which usually took us two days, at all we saw--ox-carts and carriages and men on horseback on the wide hot dusty road, and the houses and groves and gardens on either side.... It was thus that we became acquainted with the two white houses, and were attracted to them because in their whiteness and green shade they looked beautiful to us and cool and restful, and we wished we could live in them.

They were well outside of the town, the nearest being about two miles from its old south wall and fortifications, the other one a little over two miles further out. The last being the farthest out was the first one we came to on our journeys to the city; it was a somewhat singular- looking building with a verandah supported by pillars painted green, and it had a high turret. And near it was a large dovecot with a cloud of pigeons usually flying about it, and we came to calling it Dovecot House. The second house was plainer in form but was not without a peculiar distinction in its large wrought-iron front gate with white pillars on each side, and in front of each pillar a large cannon planted postwise in the earth.

This we called Cannon House, but who lived in these two houses none could tell us.

When I was old enough to ride as well as any grown-up, and my occasional visits to town were made on horseback, I once had three young men for my companions, the oldest about twenty-eight, the two not more than nineteen and twenty-one respectively. I was eagerly looking out for the first white house, and when we were coming to it I cried out, "Now we are coming to Dovecot House, let's go slow and look at it."

Without a word they all pulled up, and for some minutes we sat silently gazing at the house. Then the eldest of the three said that if he was a rich man he would buy the house and pa.s.s the rest of his life very happily in it and in the shade of its old trees.

In what, the others asked, would his happiness consist, since a rational being must have something besides a mere shelter from the storm and a tree to shade him from the sun to be happy?

He answered that after securing the house he would range the whole country in search of the most beautiful woman in it, and that when he had found and made her his wife he would spend his days and years in adoring her for her beauty and charm.

His two young companions laughed scornfully. Then one of them--the younger--said that he too if wealthy would buy the house, as he had not seen another so well suited for the life he would like to live. A life spent with books! He would send to Europe for all the books he desired to read and would fill the house with them; and he would spend his days in the house or in the shade of the trees, reading every day from morning to night undisturbed by traffic and politics and revolutions in the land, and by happenings all the world over.

He too was well laughed at; then the last of the three said he didn't care for either of their ideals. He liked wine best, and if he had great wealth he would buy the house and send to Europe--O not for books nor for a beautiful wife! but for wine--wines of all the choicest kinds in bottle and casks--and fill the cellars with it. And his choice wines would bring choice spirits to help him drink them; and then in the shade of the old trees they would have their table and sit over their wine--the merriest, wittiest, wisest, most eloquent gathering in all the land.

The others in their turn laughed at him, despising his ideal, and then we set off once more.

They had not thought to put the question to me, because I was only a boy while they were grown men; but I had listened with such intense interest to that colloquy that when I recall the scene now I can see the very expressions of their sun-burnt faces and listen to the very sound of their speech and laughter. For they were all intimately known to me and I knew they were telling openly just what their several notions of a happy life were, caring nothing for the laughter of the others. I was mightily pleased that they, too, had felt the attractions of my Dovecot House as a place where a man, whatsoever his individual taste, might find a happy abiding-place.

Time rolled on, as the slow-going old storybooks written before we were born used to say, and I still preserved the old habit of pulling up my horse on coming abreast of each one of the two houses on every journey to and from town. Then one afternoon when walking my horse past the Cannon House I saw an old man dressed in black with snow-white hair and side-whiskers in the old, old style, and an ashen grey face, standing motionless by the side of one of the guns and gazing out at the distance. His eyes were blue--the dim weary blue of a tired old man's eyes, and he appeared not to see me as I walked slowly by him within a few yards, but to be gazing at something beyond, very far away. I took him to be a resident, perhaps the owner of the house, and this was the first time I had seen any person there. So strongly did the sight of that old man impress me that I could not get his image out of my mind, and I spoke to those I knew in the city, and before long I met with one who was able to satisfy my curiosity about him. The old man I had seen, he told me, was Admiral Brown, an Englishman who many years before had taken service with the Dictator Rosas at the time when Rosas was at war with the neighbouring Republic of Uruguay, and had laid siege to the city of Montevideo. Garibaldi, who was spending the years of his exile from Italy in South America, fighting as usual wherever there was any fighting to be had, flew to the help of Uruguay, and having acquired great fame as a sea-fighter was placed in command of the naval forces, such as they were, of the little Republic. But Brown was a better fighter, and he soon captured and destroyed his enemies' s.h.i.+ps, Garibaldi himself escaping shortly afterwards to come back to the old world to renew the old fight against Austria.

When old Admiral Brown retired he built this house, or had it given to him by Rosas who, I was told, had a great affection for him, and he then had the two cannons he had taken from one of the captured s.h.i.+ps planted at his front gate.

Shortly after that one glimpse I had had of the old Admiral, he died.

And I think that when I saw him standing at his gate gazing past me at the distance, he was looking out for an expected messenger--a figure in black moving swiftly towards him with a drawn sword in his hand.

Oddly enough it was but a short time after seeing the old man at his gate that I had my first sight of an inmate of Dovecot House. While slowly riding by it I saw a lady come out from the front door--young, good-looking, very pale and dressed in the deepest mourning. She had a bowl in her hand, and going a little distance from the house she called the pigeons and down they flew in a crowd to her feet to be fed.

A few months later when pa.s.sing I saw this same lady once more, and on this occasion she was coming to the gate as I rode by, and I saw her closely, for she turned and looked at me, not unseeingly like the old man, and her face was perfectly colourless and her large dark eyes the most sorrowful I had ever seen.

That was my last sight of her, nor did I see any human creature about the house after that for about two years. Then one hot summer day I caught sight of three persons who looked like servants or caretakers, sitting in the shade some distance from the house and drinking mate, the tea of the country.

Here, thought I, is an opportunity not to be lost--one long waited for!

Leaving my horse at the gate I went to them, and addressing a large woman, the most important-looking person of the three, as politely as I could, I said I was not, as they perhaps imagined, a long absent friend or relation returned from the wars, but a perfect stranger, a traveller on the great south road; that I was hot and thirsty, and the sight of them refres.h.i.+ng themselves in that pleasant shade had tempted me to intrude myself upon them.

She received me with smiles and a torrent of welcoming words, and the expected invitation to sit down and drink mate with them. She was a very large woman, very fat and very dark, of that reddish or mahogany colour which, taken with the black eyes and coa.r.s.e black hair, is commonly seen in persons of mixed blood--Iberian with aboriginal. I took her age to be about fifty years. And she was as voluble as she was fat and dark, and poured out such a stream of talk on or rather over me like warm greasy water, and so forcing me to keep my eyes on her, that it was almost impossible to give any attention to the other two. One was her husband, Spanish and dark too, but with a different sort of darkness; a skeleton of a man with a bony ghastly face, in old frayed workman's clothes and dust-covered boots; his hands very grimy. And the third person was their daughter, as they called her, a girl of fifteen with a clear white and pink skin, regular features, beautiful grey eyes and light brown hair. A perfect type of a nice looking English girl such as one finds in any village, in almost any cottage, in the Midlands or anywhere else in this island.

These two were silent, but at length, in one of the fat woman's brief pauses, the girl spoke, in a Spanish in which one could detect no trace of a foreign accent, in a low and pleasing voice, only to say something about the garden. She was strangely earnest and appeared anxious to impress on them that it was necessary to have certain beds of vegetables they cultivated watered that very day lest they should be lost owing to the heat and dryness. The man grunted and the woman said yes, yes, yes, a dozen times. Then the girl left us, going back to her garden, and the fat woman went on talking to me. I tried once or twice to get her to tell me about her daughter, as she called her, but she would not respond--she would at once go off into other subjects. Then I tried something else and told her of my sight of a handsome young lady in mourning I had once seen there feeding the pigeons. And now she responded readily enough and told me the whole story of the lady.

She belonged to a good and very wealthy family of the city and was an only child, and lost both parents when very young. She was a very pretty girl of a joyous nature and a great favourite in society. At the age of sixteen she became engaged to a young man who was also of a good and wealthy family. After becoming engaged to her he went to the war in Paraguay, and after an absence of two years, during which he had distinguished himself in the field and won his captaincy, he returned to marry her. She was at her own house waiting in joyful excitement to receive him when his carriage arrived, and she flew to the door to welcome him. He, seeing her, jumped out and came running to her with his arms out to embrace her, but when still three or four yards distant suddenly stopped short and throwing up his arms fell to the earth a dead man. The shock of his death at this moment of supreme bliss for both of them was more than she could bear; it brought on a fever of the brain and it was feared that if she ever recovered it would be with a shattered mind. But it was not so: she got well and her reason was not lost, but she was changed into a different being from the happy girl of other days--fond of society, of dress, of pleasures; full of life and laughter. "Now she is sadness itself and will continue to wear mourning for the rest of her life, and prefers always to be alone. This old house, built by her grandfather when there were few houses in this suburb, she once liked to visit, but since her loss she has been but once in it. That was when you saw her, when she came to spend a few months in solitude. She would not even allow me to come and sit and talk to her! Think of that! She thinks nothing of her possessions and allows us to live here rent free, to grow vegetables and raise poultry for the market. That is what we do for a living; my husband and our little daughter attend to these things out of doors, and I look after the house."

When she got to the end of this long relation I rose and thanked her for her hospitality and made my escape. But the mystery of the white, gentle-voiced, grey-eyed girl haunted me, and from that time I made it my custom to call at Dovecot House on every journey to town, always to be received with open arms, so to speak, by the great fat woman. But she always baffled me. The girl was usually to be seen, always the same, quiet, unsmiling, silent, or else speaking in Spanish in that gentle un-Spanish voice of some practical matter about the garden, the poultry, and so on. I was not in love with her, but extremely curious to know who she really was and how she came to be a "daughter," or in the hands of these unlikely people. For it was really one of the strangest things I had ever come across up to that early period of my life. Since then I have met with even more curious things; but being then of an age when strange things have a great fascination I was bent on getting to the bottom of the mystery. However, it was in vain; doubtless the fat woman suspected my motives in calling on her and sipping mate and listening to her talk, for whenever I mentioned her daughter in a tentative way, hoping it would lead to talk on that subject, she quickly and skilfully changed it for some other subject.

And at last seeing that I was wasting my time, I dropped calling, but to this day I am rather sorry I allowed myself to be defeated.

And now once more I must return for the s.p.a.ce of two or three pages to the _brother_ white house before saying good-bye to both.