Chapter Seven.
Father and Son.
The road from the vicarage to the village and station beyond passed within a hundred yards or so of the pond; but from the latter being situated in a hollow and the meadows surrounding it inclosed within a hedge of thick brushwood, it could only be seen by those passing to and fro from one point—where the path began to rise above the valley as it curved round the spur of the down.
It was Saturday also, when, as Teddy well knew, his father would be engaged on the compilation of his Sunday sermon, and so not likely to be going about the parish, as was his custom of an afternoon, visiting the sick, comforting the afflicted, and warning those evil-doers who preferred idleness and ale at the “Lamb” to honest toil and uprightness of living; consequently the young scapegrace was almost confident of non-interruption from any of his home folk, who, besides being too busy indoors to think of him, were ignorant of his whereabouts. It was also Jupp’s heaviest day at the station, so he couldn’t come after him he thought; and he was enjoying himself to his heart’s content, when as the Fates frequently rule it, the unexpected happened.
Miss Conny, now a tall slim girl of thirteen, but more sedate and womanly even than she had been at ten, if that were possible, was occupied in the parlour “mending the children’s clothes,” as she expressed it in her matronly way, when she suddenly missed a large reel of darning cotton. Wondering what had become of it, for, being neat and orderly in her habits, her things seldom strayed from their proper places, she began hunting about for the absent article in different directions and turning over the piles of stockings before her.
“Have you seen it?” she asked Liz, who was sitting beside her, also engaged in needlework, but of a lighter description, the young lady devoting her energies to the manufacture of a doll’s mantilla.
“No,” said Liz abstractedly, her mouth at the time being full of pins for their more handy use when wanted, a bad habit she had acquired from a seamstress occasionally employed at the vicarage.
“Dear me, I wonder if I left the reel upstairs,” said Conny, much concerned at the loss; and she was just about prosecuting the search thither when Cissy threw a little light on the subject, explaining at once the cause of the cotton’s disappearance.
“Don’t you recollect, Con,” she observed, “you lent it to Teddy the other day? I don’t s’pose he ever returned it to you, for I’m sure I saw it this morning with his things in the nursery.”
“No more he did,” replied Conny. “Please go and tell him to bring it back. I know where you’ll find him. Mary is helping Molly making a pie, and he’s certain to be in the kitchen dabbling in the paste.”
“All right!” said Cissy; and presently her little musical voice could be heard calling through the house, “Teddy! Teddy!” as she ran along the passage towards the back.
Bye and bye, however, she returned to the parlour unsuccessful.
“I can’t see him anywhere,” she said. “He’s not with Mary, or in the garden, or anywhere!”
“Oh, that boy!” exclaimed Conny. “He’s up to some mischief again, and must have gone down to the village or somewhere against papa’s orders. Do you know where he is, Liz?”
“No,” replied the young sempstress, taking the pins out of her mouth furtively, seeing that Conny was looking at her. “He ran out of the house before we had finished dinner, and took Puck with him.”
“Then he has gone off on one of his wild pranks,” said her elder sister, rising up and putting all the stockings into her work-basket. “I will go and speak to papa.”
The vicar had just finished the “thirdly, brethren,” of his sermon; and he was just cogitating how to bring in his “lastly,” and that favourite “word more in conclusion” with which he generally wound up the weekly discourse he gave his congregation, when Conny tapped at the study door timidly awaiting permission to enter.
“What’s the matter?” called out Mr Vernon rather testily, not liking to be disturbed in his peroration.
“I want to speak to you, papa,” said Conny, still from without.
“Then come in,” he answered in a sort of resigned tone of voice, it appearing to him as one of the necessary ills of life to be interrupted, and he as a minister bound to put up with it; but this feeling of annoyance passed off in a moment, and he spoke gently and kindly enough when Conny came into the room.
“What is it, my dear?” he asked, smiling at his little housekeeper, as he called her, noticing her anxious air; “any trouble about to-morrow’s dinner, or something equally serious?”
“No, papa,” she replied, taking his quizzing in earnest. “The dinner is ordered, and nothing the matter with it that I know of. I want to speak to you about Teddy.”
“There’s nothing wrong with him, I hope?” said he, jumping up from his chair and wafting some of the sheets of his sermon from the table with his flying coat-tails in his excitement and haste. “Nothing wrong, I hope?”
Although a quiet easy-going man generally, the vicar was wrapt up in all his children, trying to be father and mother in one to them and making up as much as in him lay for the loss of that maternal love and guidance of which they were deprived at an age when they wanted it most; but of Teddy he was especially fond, his wife having died soon after giving him birth, and, truth to say, he spoiled him almost as much as that grandmother whose visitations were such a vexed question with Mary, causing her great additional trouble with her charge after the old lady left.
“Nothing wrong, papa dear, that I know of,” replied Conny in her formal deliberative sort of way; “but, I’m afraid he has gone off with those village boys again, for he’s nowhere about the place.”
“Dear me!” ejaculated the vicar, shoving up his spectacles over his forehead and poking his hair into an erect position like a cockatoo’s crest, as he always did when fidgety. “Can’t you send somebody after him?”
“Mary is busy, and Teddy doesn’t mind Joe, so there’s no use in sending him.”
“Dear me!” ejaculated her father again. “I’m afraid he’s getting very headstrong—Teddy, I mean, not poor Joe! I must really get him under better control; but, I—I don’t like to be harsh with him, Conny, you know, little woman,” added the vicar dropping his voice. “He’s a brave, truthful little fellow with all his flow of animal spirits, and his eyes remind me always of your poor mother when I speak sternly to him and he looks at me in that straightforward way of his.”
“Shall I go after him, papa?” interposed Conny at this juncture, seeing that a wave of memory had carried back her father into the past, making him already forget the point at issue.
“What? Oh, dear me, no!” said the vicar, recalled to the present. “I’ll go myself.”
“But your sermon, papa?”
“It’s just finished, and I can complete what has to be added when I come back. No—yes, I’ll go; besides, now, I recollect, I have to call at Job Trotter’s to try and get him to come to church to-morrow. Yes, I’ll go myself.”
So saying, the vicar put on the hat Conny handed to him, for she had to look after him very carefully in this respect, as he would sometimes, when in a thinking fit, go out without any covering on his head at all!
Then, taking his stick, which the thoughtful Conny likewise got out of the rack in the hall, he went out of the front door and over the lawn, through the little gate beyond. He then turned into the lane that led across the downs to the village, Miss Conny having suggested this as the wisest direction in which to look for Teddy, from the remembrance of something the young scapegrace had casually dropped in conversation when at dinner.
As he walked along the curving lane, the air was sweet with the scent of dry clover and the numerous wild flowers that twined amongst the blackberry bushes of the hedgerows. Insects also buzzed about, creating a humming music of their own, while flocks of starlings startled by his approach flew over the field next him to the one further on, exhibiting their speckled plumage as they fluttered overhead, and the whistle of the blackbird and coo of the ring-dove could be heard in the distance.
But the vicar was thinking of none of these things.
Conny’s words about Teddy not minding Joe the gardener, or anybody else indeed, had awakened his mind to the consciousness that he had not given proper consideration to the boy’s mental training.
Teddy’s education certainly was not neglected, for he repeated his lessons regularly to his father and displayed the most promising signs of advancement; but, lessons ended, he was left entirely to the servants. The vicar reflected, that this ought not to be permitted with a child at an age when impressions of right and wrong are so easily made, never to be effaced in after life, once the budding character is formed.
He would correct this error, the vicar determined; in future he would see after him more personally!
Just as he arrived at this sound conclusion the vicar reached the bend of the lane where it sloped round by the spur of the down, a bustling bumblebee making him notice this by brushing against his nose as he buzzed through the air in that self-satisfied important way that all bumblebees affect in their outdoor life; and, looking over the
hedge that sank down at this point, he saw a group of boys gathered round the edge of the pond.
He did not recognise Teddy amongst them; but, fancying the urchins might be able to tell him something of his movements, he made towards them, climbing through a gap in the fence and walking down the sloping side of the hill to the meadow below.
The boys, catching sight of him, immediately began to huddle together like a flock of sheep startled by the appearance of some strange dog; and he could hear them calling out some words of warning, in which his familiar title “t’parson” could be plainly distinguished.
“The young imps must be doing something wrong, and are afraid of being found out,” thought the vicar. “Never mind, though, I sha’n’t be hard on them, remembering my own young truant!”
As he got nearer, he heard the yelp of a dog as if in pain or alarm.
“They’re surely not drowning some poor animal,” said the vicar aloud, uttering the new thought that flashed across his mind. “If so, I shall most certainly be severe with them; for cruelty is detestable in man or boy!”
Hurrying on, he soon obtained a clear view of the pond, and he could now see that not only were a lot of boys clustered together round the edge of the water, but towards the centre something was floating like a raft with apparently another boy on it, who was holding a struggling white object in his arms, from which evidently the yelps proceeded—his ears soon confirming the supposition.
“Hullo! what are you doing there?” shouted the vicar, quickening his pace. “Don’t hurt the poor dog!”
To his intense astonishment the boy on the floating substance turned his face towards him, answering his hail promptly with an explanation.
“It’s Puck, padie, and I ain’t hurting him.”
Both the face and the voice were Teddy’s!
The vicar was completely astounded.
“Teddy!” he exclaimed, “can I believe my eyes?—is it really you?”
“Yes, it’s me, padie,” replied the young scapegrace, trying to balance himself upright on the unsteady platform as he faced his father, but not succeeding in doing so very gracefully.
“Why, how on earth—or rather water, that would be the most correct expression,” said the vicar correcting himself, being a student of Paley and a keen logician as to phraseology; “how did you get there?”
“I made a raft,” explained Teddy in short broken sentences, which were interrupted at intervals through the necessary exertion he had to make every now and then to keep from tumbling into the water and hold Puck. “I made a raft like—like Robinson Crusoe, and—and—I’ve brought Puck—uck with me, ’cause I didn’t have a parrot or a cat. I—I—I wanted to get to the island; b–b–but I can’t go any further as the raft is stuck, and—and I’ve lost my stick to push it with. Oh—I was nearly over there!”
“It would be a wholesome lesson to you if you got a good ducking!” said the vicar sternly, albeit the reminiscences of Robinson Crusoe and the fact of Teddy endeavouring to imitate that ideal hero of boyhood struck him in a comical light and he turned away to hide a smile. “Come to the bank at once, sir!”
Easy enough as it was for the vicar to give this order, it was a very different thing for Teddy, in spite of every desire on his part, to obey it; for, the moment he put down Puck on the leafy flooring of the raft, the dog began to howl, making him take it up again in his arms. To add to his troubles, also, he had dropped his sculling pole during a lurch of his floating platform, so he had nothing now wherewith to propel it either towards the island or back to the shore, the raft wickedly oscillating midway in the water between the two, like Mahomet’s coffin ’twixt heaven and earth!
Urged on, however, by his father’s command, Teddy tried as gallantly as any shipwrecked mariner to reach land again; but, what with Puck hampering his efforts, and his brisk movements on the frail structure, this all at once separated into its original elements through the clothes-line becoming untied, leaving Teddy struggling amidst the debris of broken rails and branches—Puck ungratefully abandoning his master in his extremity and making instinctively for the shore.
The vicar plunged in frantically to the rescue, wading out in the mud until he was nearly out of his depth, and then swimming up to Teddy, who, clutching a portion of his dismembered raft, had managed to keep afloat; although, he was glad enough when his father’s arm was round him and he found himself presently deposited on the bank in safety, where they were now alone, all the village boys having rushed off en masse, yelling out the alarm at the pitch of their voices the moment Teddy fell in and the vicar went after him.
Both were in a terrible pickle though, with their garments soaking wet, of course; while the vicar especially was bedraggled with mud from head to foot, looking the most unclerical object that could be well imagined. However, he took the whole matter good-humouredly enough, not scolding Teddy in the least.
“The best thing we can do, my son,” he said when he had somewhat recovered his breath, not having gone through such violent exercise for many a long day.—“The best thing we can do is to hurry off home as fast we can, so as to arrive there before they hear anything of the accident from other sources, or the girls will be terribly alarmed about us.”
Teddy, without speaking, tacitly assented to this plan by jumping up immediately and clutching hold of the shivering Puck, whose asthma, by the way, was not improved by this second involuntary ducking; and the two were hastening towards the vicarage when they heard a horse trotting behind them, Doctor Jolly riding up alongside before they had proceeded very far along the lane, after clambering out of the field where the pond was situated.
“Bless me!” cried the doctor; “why, here are you both safe and sound, when those village urchins said you and Master Teddy were drownded!”
“Ah! I thought these boys were up to something of the sort when they all scampered off in a batch without lending us a helping hand!” replied the vicar laughing. “I was just telling Teddy this, thinking the report would reach home before us.”
“Aye, all happen, Vernon? ’Pon my word, you’re in a fine mess!”
The vicar thereupon narrated all that had occurred, much to the doctor’s amusement.
“Well,” he exclaimed at the end of the story, “that boy of yours is cut out for something, you may depend. He won’t be drowned at any rate!”
“No,” said the vicar reflectively; “this is the second merciful escape he has had from the water.”
“Yes, and once from fire, too,” put in the other, alluding to the gunpowder episode. “He’s a regular young desperado!”
“I hope not, Jolly,” hastily interposed the vicar. “I don’t like your joking about his escapades in that way. I hope he will be good—eh, my boy?” and he stroked Teddy’s head as he walked along by his side, father and son being alike hatless, their headgear remaining floating on the pond, along with the remains of the raft, to frighten the frogs and fishes.
Teddy uttered no reply; but his little heart was full, and he made many inward resolves, which, alas! his eight-year-old nature was not strong enough to keep.