Chapter One.
Down the Line.
“Bob!”
The noise of the train, however, drowned Nellie’s voice; besides which Master Bob was further prevented from hearing this appeal to him by reason of his head and shoulders being at that precise instant projected out of the window of the railway-carriage, in utter defiance of the Company’s bye-laws to the contrary and of his sister’s solicitous entreaties to the same effect—poor Nellie, fearing, in her feminine anxiety, that the door would fly open unexpectedly, from the pressure of Bob’s person, and precipitate her brother as suddenly out on the line.
“Bob!” she therefore repeated on finding her first summons disregarded, speaking in a louder key and giving a tug to his jacket the better to attract his attention—“I say, Bob!”
“Hullo! What’s the row?” shouted back the delinquent, hearing her at last, and wriggling himself in from the window like a snail withdrawing itself into its shell, turning round the while his face, slightly flushed with the exertion, to hers—“Anything wrong, eh?”
Little Miss Nellie had not expected her timid and tentative conversational advances to be taken up in this downright fashion. Really she was only anxious for some one to sympathise with her and talk about the various objects of interest which came across her notice as they went along; so, Bob’s abrupt address, coupled with his gruff tone of voice, fell on her enthusiasm like a wet blanket!
“Nothing’s the matter,” she replied timidly. “I only wanted to say how nice it is travelling like this.”
“You don’t mean to say you only called me in to tell me that?” said Bob, almost angrily. “I do think girls are the greatest geese in the world!”
With this dogmatic assertion, Master Bob shoved himself head and shoulders out of the window again, utterly ignoring poor Nellie’s existence, much to her chagrin and dismay.
He was very rude, it must be confessed; but, some allowance should be made for him, all things considered.
In the first place, he was a boy just fresh from the rougher associations of school life; and, secondly, his inquiring mind was intently occupied in endeavouring to solve a series of mathematical problems that set all Euclid’s laws at defiance, as the train whizzed on its way with a ‘piff-paff! pant-pant!’ of the great Juggernaut engine, the carriages rattling and jolting as they were dragged along at the tail of the mighty steam demon, swaying to and fro with a rhythmical movement of the wheels, in measured cadence of spondees and dactyls, as if singing to themselves the song of “the Iron Road.”
Strange to say, this was a song of which, Bob noticed, the involuntary musicians never completed the second bar.
They re-commenced all over again from the beginning, when they reached some particularly crucial point, where the ‘click’ or the ‘clack’ of the ever-echoing ‘click-clacking’ chorus proved too much for their overworked axles!
Bob, though, was not thinking of this music of the rail, or paying any attention to it, albeit it was distinct and plain to him; as, indeed, it is to all with ears attuned in harmony with this mystery of motion, and who choose to listen to it, just as there are ‘sermons in stones,’ for those who care to read them!
No, all his energies were bent on finding out how it was that the straight hedgerows and square fields became round, while curving outlines grow straight in a moment, as if ruled with a measure, at the instant of their speeding by them; and, it occurred to him, or probably would have done so if he had given himself time for reflection, that the question of squaring the circle, which has perplexed the philosophers of all ages, was not so very difficult of solution after all—looking at the matter out of the window of a railway-carriage, that is!
Yes, so it really appeared; for, everything seemed ‘at sixes and sevens,’ the landscape having its middle distances and foreground irretrievably mixed up and its perspective gone mad, the country through which they passed resembling in this respect the land of topsy-turvey-dom!
Bob’s surprise, and wonder and delight, at all he saw became presently too great for him to remain silent any longer or to keep his thoughts to himself; so, affably forgetting his previous ‘snub’ to his sister when she had wished to express her feelings, he jerked in his head as suddenly as he had popped it out the moment before.
“I say, Nell, isn’t it jolly?” he exclaimed in eager accents. “Just look out with me and see how funny everything seems!”
“Why, that was what I wanted to speak of a little while ago, only you wouldn’t listen to me,” replied Nellie, more good-humouredly than Bob would have answered under the circumstances. “It is nice, though, I must say!”
“‘Nice’ indeed!” replied he indignantly. “It is just like a girl to say that. I call it ‘jolly,’ nothing more nor less. There’s no other word to express what a fellow feels; and I do wonder, Nell, at your putting it so tamely!”
The girl laughed out merrily at this; and her smiling face, wreathed in dimples, expressed as much animation as her brother could have wished.
“Do forgive me, Bob,” she cried. “You are quite right. It is ‘jolly,’ the fields flying by, the trees all jumping up when you least expect them, the hills coming close, and—everything! I have noticed them all; for, I’ve been looking out, too, Master Observer, and have eyes like you, old chappie!”
“Ah, but you haven’t seen all that I have,” said Bob, mollified by Nellie’s sympathetic accord. “Look at those little woolly lambs, there, frisking about, with their sedate old mothers standing by, watching the train with wondering eyes—”
“Yes, I see, I see,” said she, interrupting him. “What great big eyes they have, to be sure! I declare, too, I can hear them ‘baa’ above all the noise of the railway!”
Just at that moment, the engine gave a shriek of its steam-whistle, which startled the sheep and lambkins, sending them scuttling over to the other end of the field, in company with a number of skittish heifers and young colts, which kicked up their heels in such a funny way that Bob and Nellie both burst out laughing together in concert, in one burst as it were.
“Hullo, Nellie, look!” presently exclaimed Bob, who was the first to recover himself. “All the horses have not run away. There is one old fellow there, close to the line, who hasn’t budged an inch.”
“Perhaps he’s the veteran of the field?” said Miss Nellie, rather poetically. “He’s an old war-horse, maybe, who has heard too many clanging trumpet-calls and guns fired to be upset by the mere noise of an engine, which is only a bugbear to the ignorant.”
“Bosh!” cried Bob, who did not believe much in sentiment, ‘flummery’ he termed it. “Much more likely he’s an old cart-horse, and is as well accustomed to the row of the railroad as he is to the plough, and that’s the reason he took no notice of us as we dashed by. See, he’s only a little dot in the distance now.”
They were running along at such a rate that every object which in turn presented itself, first ahead of the train, then alongside and then behind, became speedily but ‘a dot in the distance,’ to use Bob’s words over again; the snugly secluded seats of the county gentry, the scattered villages and sparse red-roofed farmhouses, with their outposts of hayricks and herds of cattle and other stock, that one moment appeared and the next disappeared from view behind masses of foliage, all dancing a wild Sir Roger de Coverley sort of country dance, ‘down the valleys and over the hills,’ until poor Nellie’s eyes became quite dazed in watching them.
“Come over to the other window, Bob,” she cried at length, turning round and getting up from her seat, suiting the action to the words, or at least trying to do so. “Let us cross over, Bob.”
But, here a difficulty arose.
An old gentleman, who was the only other occupant of the carriage besides themselves, had dropped asleep over the newspaper which he had been reading, letting this slide down on his knees while he stretched out his legs right across the compartment, thus preventing Nellie from carrying out her intention.
“I can’t get by,” she whispered to Bob, who had also turned round from his window, and now giggled, grasping the situation. “I can’t get by!”
“What, what?” ejaculated the old gentleman, suddenly waking up and clutching hold of his paper, as if afraid that some one was going to take it from him. “What, what did you say?”
Strangely enough, although Bob and his sister had been talking quite loudly before, nothing that they had said had roused their fellow-passenger until now, when, probably, Nellie’s hushed voice led to this very undesirable result—just in the same way as a miller is said to sleep soundly amid all the clatter of the grinding wheels of his mill, his repose being only disturbed when the motion of the machinery stops. Poor Nellie hardly knew what to say now on the old gentleman, all at once, sitting bolt upright and addressing her so unexpectedly.
“I was only speaking to my brother,” she managed to stammer out, after a little hesitating pause; “I am sorry to have awakened you, sir.”
“Awakened me, eh?” snorted the old gentleman in a snappish tone. “Pooh, pooh, nonsense, girl! I wasn’t a bit asleep. Heard every word you said. What was it you said, eh—what, what?”
Bob and Nellie exchanged a smile at this; for, the old gentleman had not merely nodded previously to their having determined to change windows, but his gold-rimmed spectacles had almost tumbled from his nose, the latter organ also having given audible vent to certain stentorian sounds uncommonly like snoring!
The old gentleman, however, did not appear conscious of all this evidence against his fancied wakefulness; and he blinked out so queerly from a pair of little black beady eyes, half-hidden under a fringe of bushy white eyebrows, which made them look all the blacker from contrast, as he glared over his spectacles at the brother and sister, that Bob’s giggle expanded into a fit of irrepressible merriment, although he endeavoured vainly to conceal his want of manners by burying his face in his pocket-handkerchief.
Bob some time afterwards told Nellie in confidence that, just then, the old gentleman so comically resembled ‘Blinkie,’ a dissipated old tame jackdaw they had at home, in the way he cocked his head on one side, with his ruffled hair and all, that he couldn’t have helped laughing, if he had died for it!
“Well?” said the old gentleman inquiringly, after a bit, tired apparently of waiting for an answer to his original question as to what Nellie had said as he woke up, gazing still fixedly at her, his beady black eyes twinkling and his bushy eyebrows bristling up like the whiskers of a cat when it is angry. “What did he say, eh?”
“He—he was only speaking to me, sir,” stammered poor Nellie, now trembling with fright. “He was only speaking to me, that’s all.”
“What, what?” jerked out her unappeased questioner. “Who is ‘he’?”
“My brother—Bob, sir,” said she, still trembling and nervous; “my brother here, sir.”
“Bob what?”
“Strong, sir,” replied Nellie, a little less timidly, now that she saw the old gentleman was not going to eat her up quite—“Robert Dugald Strong, sir.”
“Humph!” he grunted out in reply to this. “He may be Strong by name and he looks strong by nature; but, really, he seems unusually weak in mind—he’s a lunatic, I should think!”
But, there was a quaint, good-humoured expression on his face that somewhat belied his abrupt manner and harsh, peremptory voice, which sounded like that of a bullying old barrister, cross-examining a hesitating witness in court; so Nellie, therefore, gathered increased confidence as she caught his glance, to proceed with her explanation anent Master Bob.
“You’re mistaken, sir,—he isn’t silly,” she said. “He only wanted me to cross over to the other side of the carriage; and I told him I couldn’t pass by you, sir. That was all, sir.”
“Oh, indeed! Then I’m sure I beg your pardon,” said the old gentleman very politely, drawing in his legs, so as to leave the road clear. “I don’t see, though, what the young rascal has got to laugh at in that way, like a regular young yahoo.”
“Please, sir, pray excuse him,” pleaded Nellie on behalf of Bob. “It is only a way he has got. He cannot help laughing for the life of him when the fit is on. He really does not mean to be rude, sir, I assure you.”
“Doesn’t he?” repeated the old gentleman, smiling in a knowing fashion as if he knew all about it. “Then, he’s very unlike all the boys I have come across in my time; and they’ve been a goodish few, missy! But, there, get along with you both, and look out of the window to your heart’s content. Take care, though, that neither you nor that young jackanapes don’t manage to tumble out on the line, for I can’t pick you up from here!”
Bob and Nellie took advantage at once of the permission granted them; but, soon, becoming tired of the monotonous sameness of the ever-whirling landscape, turned back within the railway-carriage, and, sitting down like ordinary and regular travellers accustomed by this time to all the sights and scenes of the road, the pair were presently engaged in earnest and confidential conversation with the now extremely affable, old gentleman.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, breaking the ice on seeing the pair at last quiet. “So, your name is Strong, eh?”
“Yes, sir,” answered Bob, acting as spokesman. “Father is a barrister, and he cannot get away from London yet for his holiday like us; and, of course, sir, my mother couldn’t leave him alone, you know—”
“No, of course not,” agreed the old gentleman, “of course not.”
“So, then,” continued Bob, “they sent us on first; and we’re going to the seaside, where we’ve never been before! Isn’t it jolly?”
“Very jolly,” responded the old gentleman smiling. “I wish I were as young as you are to enjoy it all over again, in spite of my having seen enough of the sea in my time.”
“Are you a sailor, sir?” asked Nellie, chiming in. “I mean a sailor officer, sir, you know?”
“Yes, an old one, put on the shelf after fighting the battles of my country for many a long year!” said the old gentleman, with a deep sigh that almost made the carriage shake. He then extracted a silver snuff-box from his waistcoat-pocket; and taking a pinch, which seemed to relieve his feelings, added, as if to change the subject, “But, my young friends, you haven’t told me where you are going.”
“Why, to Portsmouth, to be sure, sir,” said Bob promptly. “I thought you knew it; and—”
“And we are to stop at aunt Polly’s till papa and mamma come down,” again interposed Miss Nellie, who had lost all her timidity and wanted to have her share in the talk. “Dear aunt Polly, how glad I shall be to see her again!”
“Oh, indeed! But, who is aunt Polly?”
Really, he was a most inquisitive old gentleman!
The children, however, did not seem to notice this; and went on to tell how their aunt Polly was the dearest aunt they believed any one ever had, and the nicest.
They informed the old gentleman, likewise, that this loved aunt of theirs came up to town every year regularly at Christmas-time to pay them a visit; although they, on their part, had never been able to go down to see her until now, something or other having always happened to prevent their proceeding to the sea.
“Well, better late than never,” said their fellow-traveller, whom Bob and Nellie began to look upon now quite as an old acquaintance—“I’ve no doubt you’ll enjoy yourselves. But, my dears, you haven’t mentioned your aunt’s name—her surname, I mean. Perhaps I might know her, for I’m an old resident of Portsmouth, or rather Southsea, which is just outside the lines and where all the best people live now.”
“Mrs Gilmour, sir,” replied Nellie. “That’s aunt Polly’s name.”
“What, Polly Gilmour, the widow of my old shipmate Ted Gilmour, who commanded the Bucephalus on the West Coast for two commissions and died of fever in the Bight of Benin? Bless my soul, who’d have thought it!”
“Yes, sir, Uncle Gilmour was in the Navy,” put in Bob as if to corroborate the surmise of the old gentleman. “He was Captain Gilmour, sir.”
His questioner, though, appeared for the moment lost in thought, his mind evidently occupied with a flood of old memories connected with his lost friend and their life afloat together.
“Dear, dear, who’d have thought it!” he repeated, as if speaking to himself. Then, presently, recovering his composure with an effort, aided by another pinch of snuff, he said aloud—“And so, you two children are poor Ted Gilmour’s niece and nephew, eh?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Bob and Nellie in one breath, answering the question. “You just ask auntie and see what she says, sir.”
“I’m very glad to hear it,” said the old gentleman, hastily pulling Nellie towards him and giving her a kiss, much to her astonishment, the action was so sudden; while he next proceeded to shake Bob by the hand until his arm ached. “I am very glad, very glad indeed to meet you; and, if it be any satisfaction to know, I may tell you that I go round to your aunt Polly’s every evening to have a game of cribbage, summer and winter alike, except those three weeks when she goes to London to stop with your father, whose name, of course, I recollect now, although I did not think of that when you told it me awhile ago—”
“Then, you’re Captain Dresser?” interrupted Bob at this point, anxious to show that he had heard the old gentleman’s name before and recognised it. “I’m sure you’re Captain Dresser, sir.”
“Yes, I’m Captain Dresser,” replied that individual, smiling all over his face, his queer little beady black eyes twinkling more than ever with excitement, and his bushy eyebrows moving up and down. “Yes, I’m Captain Dresser—Jack Dresser, as your uncle and all my old shipmates in the service used to call me, much at your service, ha, ha, ha!”
Bob and Nellie could not help joining in with the old gentleman’s laugh at his little joke, the Captain’s “Ha, ha, ha!” was so cheery and catching.
It was a regular jolly “Ha, ha, ha!”
The trio, thereupon, got very confidential together, Bob telling how they had got their dog Rover with them, only he was travelling in the guard’s van, being too big to be put in the box under the carriage, as he would have been if he’d been a little dog instead of a fine big black retriever, which he, Bob, was very glad to say he was, and “not a mere lady’s pet like a pug or a toy terrier,” while Nellie, in her turn, intimated her intention of making a collection of shells and seaweed when she got to the shore, which, she said, she longed to reach so as to ‘see the sea,’ that being the dearest wish of her heart.
The Captain, on his part, reciprocated these friendly advances in the heartiest way, expressing the strongest desire to make the acquaintance of Rover, as well as to take his fellow-travellers out in his yacht for a sail whenever the weather was fine enough; that is, if they promised to behave themselves properly, and always ‘did what they were told and obeyed orders,’ Captain Dresser saying, with an expressive wink that made him look more jackdaw-like than ever, that he invariably insisted, even in the presence of their “dear aunt Polly,” on being “captain of his own ship.”
They were in the midst of all these mutual confidences, the Captain chattering away like an old hen clucking round a pair of new-found chicks, and Bob and Nellie full of glee and exuberant anticipations of all the coming fun they were going to have afloat and ashore; when, suddenly, the light of the further window of the railway-carriage, opposite that near to which the trio were grouped in close confab, was obscured by a dark body pressing against it from without, as if some one was trying to gain admittance.
“Hallo!” cried the Captain. “What’s that—who’s there?”
But, before the old gentleman could rise from his seat, or
Bob and Nellie do anything save gape with astonishment, the window-sash was violently forced down; and, without a ‘by your leave’ or any word of warning, a strange uncouth figure, so it seemed to their startled gaze, came squeezing through the opening and fell on the floor of the carriage at their feet in a clumsy sprawl.