A Dog of Flanders, The Nürnberg Stove, and Other Stories

by Ouida

THE LITTLE EARL

The little Earl was a very little one indeed, as far as years and stature were, but he was a very big one if you consider his possessions and his importance. He was only a month old when his father died, and only six months old when his mother, too, left him for the cold damp vault, with its marbles and its rows of velvet coffins,—a vault that was very grand, but so chilly and so desolate that when they took the little Earl there on holy-days to lay his flowers down upon the dead he could never sleep for nights afterwards, remembering its darkness and solemnity.

The little Earl was called Hubert Hugh Lupus Alured Beaudesert, and was the Earl of Avillion and Lantrissaint; but by his own friends and his grandmother and his old nurse he was called only Bertie.

He was eight years old in the summer-time, when there befell him the adventure I am going now to relate to you, and he was, for his age, quite a baby; he was slender and slight, and he had a sweet little face like a flower, with very big eyes, and a quantity of fair hair cut after the fashion of the Reynolds and Gainsborough children. He had always been kept as if he were a china doll that would break at a touch. His grandmother and his uncle had been left the sole charge of him; and as they were both invalids, and the latter a priest, and both dwelt in great retirement at the castle of Avillion, the little Earl’s little life had not been a boy’s life.

He had always been tranquil, for every one loved him, and he had all things that he wished for; yet he was treated more as if he were a rare flower or a most fragile piece of porcelain, than a little bright boy of real flesh and blood; and, without knowing it, he was often tired of all his cotton-wool. He was such a tiny fellow, you see, to be the head of his race, and the last of it too; for there were no others of this great race from which he had sprung, and his uncle, as a priest, could never marry. Thus so much depended on this small short life that the fuss made over him, and the care taken of him, had ended in making him so incapable of taking any care of himself that if he had ever got out alone in a street he would have been run over to a certainty, and as he grew older he grew sad and feverish, and chafed because he was never allowed to do the things that all boys by instinct love to do. By nature the little Earl was very brave, but he was made timid by incessant cautions; and as he was, too, by nature very thoughtful, the seclusion from other children in which he was brought up made him too serious for his age.

Avillion was deep-bosomed in woods, throned high above a lake and moors and mountains, and setting its vast stone buttresses firmly down into the greenest, smoothest turf in all the green west country of England a grand and glorious place, famous in history, full of majesty and magnificence, and sung to, forever, by the deep music of the Atlantic waves. Once upon a time the Arthurian Court that Mr. Tennyson has told you of so often had held its solemn jousts and its blameless revels there; at least, so said the story of Avillion, as told in ballads of the country-side,—more trustworthy historians than most people think.

All those ballads the little Earl knew by heart, and he loved them more than anything, for Deborah, his nurse, had crooned them over his cradle before ever he could understand even the words of them; so that Arthur and Launcelot, and Sir Gawain and Sir Galahad, and all the knightly lives that were once at Tintagel, were more real to him than the living figures about him, and these fancies served him as his playmates,—for he had few others, except his dog Ralph and his pony Royal. His relatives were ailing, melancholy, attached to silence and solitude, and though they would have melted gold and pearls for Bertie’s drinking if he could have drunk them, never bethought themselves that noise and romps and laughter and fun and a little spice of peril are all things without which a child’s life is as dead and spiritless as a squirrel’s in a cage. And Bertie did not know it either. He studied under his tutor, Father Philip, a noble and learned old man, and he was caressed and cosseted by his nurse Deborah, and he wore beautiful little dresses, most usually of velvet, and he had wonderful toys that were sent from Paris, automatons that danced and fenced and played the guitar and animals that did just what live animals do and Punches and puppets that played and mimicked by clock-work, and little yachts that sailed by clock-work and whole armies of soldiers, and marvellous games costly and splendid; but he had nobody to play at all these things with, and it was dull work playing with them by himself. Deborah played with them in the best way she knew, but she was not a child, being sixty-six years old, and was of a slow imagination and of rheumatic movements.

“Run and play,” Father Philip would often say to him, taking him perforce from his books; but the little Earl would answer, sadly, “I have nobody to play with!”

That want of his attracted no attention from all those people who loved the ground his little feet trod on; he was surrounded with every splendor and indulgence, he had half the toys of the Palais Royal in his nursery, and he had a bed to sleep in of ivory inlaid with silver, that had once belonged to the little King of Rome; millions of money were being stored up for him, and lands wide enough to make a principality called him lord: it never occurred to anybody that the little Earl of Avillion was not the most fortunate child that lived under the sun.

“Why do people all call me ‘my lord’?” he asked one day, suddenly becoming observant of this fact.

“Because you are my lord,” said Deborah,—which did not content him.

He asked Father Philip.

“My dear little boy, it is your title: think not of it save as an obligation to bear your rank well and without stain.”

At last the little Earl grew so pale and thin and so delicate in health that the physician who was always watching over him said to his grandmother that the boy wanted change of air, and advised the southern coast for him, and cessation of almost all study; which order grieved Father Philip sorely, for Bertie could read his Livy well, and was beginning to spell through his Xenophon, and it cut the learned gentleman to the heart that his pupil should give up all this and go back on the royal road to learning. For both he and his uncle were resolved that the little Earl should be very learned, and the boy was eager enough to learn, only he liked still better knowing how the flowers grew, and why the birds could fly while he could not, and how the wood-bee made his neat house in the tree-trunk, and the beaver built his dam across the river,—inquiries which everybody about him was inclined to discourage. Natural science was not looked on with favor in the nursery and school-room of Avillion. It was considered to lead people astray.

So the little Earl was moved southward, with his grandmother, and his nurse, and his physician, and Ralph and Royal,—for he would not go without them,—and several servants as well. They were to go to Shanklin in the Isle of Wight, and they made the journey by sea in the beautiful sailing-yacht which was waiting for Bertie’s manhood, after having been the idol of his father’s. On board, the little Earl was well amused; but he worried every one about him by questions as to the fishes.

“Lord, child! they are but nasty clammy things, only nice when they are cooked,” said his nurse; and his grandmamma said to him, “Dear, they were made to live in the sea, just as the birds are made to fly in the air.” And this did not satisfy the little man at all; but he could get no more information, for the doctor, who could have told him a good deal, was under the thumb of his stately mistress, and Lady Avillion had said very sternly that the boy was not to be encouraged in his nonsense: what he must be taught were the duties of his position and all he owed to the country,—the poor little Earl!

He was a very small, slender, pale-cheeked lord indeed, with his golden hair hanging over his puzzled forehead, that used to ache sometimes with carrying Xenophon and Livy, and underneath the hair two great wondering blue eyes, of a blue so dark that they were like wet violets. His hands were tiny and thin, and his legs, clad in their red-silk stockings and black-velvet breeches, were like two sticks: people who saw him go by whispered about him and said all the poor little fellow’s rank and riches would not keep him long in the land of the living. Once the little Earl heard that said, and understood what it meant, and thought to himself, “I shouldn’t mind dying if I could take Ralph: perhaps there would be somebody to play with there.”

It was May, and there were not many folks at Shanklin: still, there were two or three children he might have played with, but his grandmamma thought them vulgar children, not fit playmates for him; and so the poor little Earl, with the burden of his greatness, had to walk soberly and sadly past them, with his little tired red-stockinged legs, while the little girls said to each other, in a whisper, “There’s a little lord!” and the boys hallooed out, “He’s the swell that owns the schooner.” Bertie would sigh, as he heard: what was the use of owning the schooner, when you had no one to play with on it, and never could do what you liked?

You have never seen Shanklin, for you have never been in England; and if you do go now, you will never see it as it was when Bertie walked there, when it was the prettiest and most primitive little place in England; now, they tell me, it has been made into a watering-place, with a pier and an esplanade.

Shanklin used to be a little green mossy village covered up in honeysuckle and hawthorn; low long houses, green too with ivy and creepers, hid themselves away in sweet-smelling old-fashioned gardens; yellow roads ran between high banks and hedges out to the green down or downward to the ripple of the sea; and the cool brown sands, glistening and firm, twice a day felt the kiss of the tide. The cliffs were brown too, for the most part; some were white; the gray sea stretched in front; and the glory of the place was its leafy chine and ravine that severed the rocks and was full of foliage and of the sound of birds. It used to be all so quiet there; now and then there passed in the offing a brig or a yacht or a man-of-war; now and then farmers’ carts came in from the downs by Appuldurcombe or the farms beyond the Undercliff; there were some fishing-cabins by the beach, and one old inn with a long grassy garden, where the coaches used to stop that ran through the quiet country from Ryde to Ventnor. It was so green, so still, so friendly, so fresh when I think of it I hear the swish of its lazy waves and I smell the smell of its eglantine hedges, and I see the big brown eyes of my gallant dog as he came breathless up from the sea.

Alas! you will never see it so. The hedges are down, they tell me, and the grand dog is dead, and the hateful engine tears through the fields, and the sands are beaten to make an esplanade, and the beach is noisy and hideous with the bray of bands and the laughter of fools.

What will the world be like when you are twenty? Very frightful, I fear. This is progress, they say?

But what of the little Earl? you ask.

Well, the little Earl knew Shanklin as I knew it,—when the blackbirds and thrushes sang in the quiet chine, and the sense of an infinite peace dwelt on its simple shores. His grandmamma had taken for the summer the house that stands in its woods at the head of the chine and looks straight down that rift of greenery to the gray sea. I know not what that house is now; then it was charming, chalet-like, yet spacious.

Here the little Earl was set free of his studies and kept out in the air when it was fine, and when it rained was sent, not to his books, but to his toys. Yet it did not seem to him any great change; for when he rode, James was with him; and when he walked, Deborah was with him; and when he bathed, William was with him; and when he was only in the garden, there was grandmamma.

He was never alone. Oh, how he longed to be alone sometimes! And he never had any playfellows: how he would watch those two or three vulgar little boys building sand-castles and sailing their boats! He would have given all his big schooner and its crew to be one of those little boys.

He had a cruise now and then off the island, and the skipper came up bare-headed and hoped my lord enjoyed the sail; but he did not enjoy it: William and Deborah were always after him, telling him to mind this, and take care of that, till he wished his pretty snow-white sailor dress with the gold buttons were only rags and tatters! For the poor little Earl was an adventurous and curious little lad at heart, and had a spirit of his own, though he was so meek; and he was tired of being treated like a baby.

His eighth birthday came round in June, and wonderful and magnificent were the presents he had sent him; but he only felt a little more tired than he had done before; the bonbons he was not allowed to eat, the splendidly-bound books seemed nonsense to a little classic who read Livy; the toys he did not care for, and the gold dressing-case his grandmamma gave him was no pleasure: he had one in silver, and his very hair he was never permitted to brush himself.

“As I may not eat the bonbons, might I send them all to the children on the sands?” he asked wistfully of his grandmother.

“Impossible, my love,” she answered. “We do not know who they are.”

“May I give them to the poor children then?” said the little lad.

“That would hardly be wise, dear. It would give them a taste for luxuries.”

Bertie sighed: life on this his eighth birthday seemed very empty.

“Why are people strangers to each other? Why does not everybody speak to every one else?” he said at last, desperately. “St. Paul says we are all brothers, and St. Francis——”

“My dear child, do not talk nonsense,” said Lady Avillion. “We shall have you a Radical when you are of age!”

“What is that?” said Bertie.

“The people who slew your dear Charles the First were Radicals,” said his grandmother, cleverly.

He was discouraged and silent. He went sorrowfully and leaned against one of the windows and looked down the green vista of the chine. It was raining, and they would not let him go out of doors. He thought to himself, “What use is it calling me ‘my lord,’ and telling me I own so much, and bowing down before me, if I may never do once, just once, as I like? I know I am a little boy; but then, if I am an Earl, if I am good enough to be that, I ought to be able to do once as I like. Else, if not, what is the use? And why does the skipper say always to me, ‘Your lordship is owner here’?”

And then a fancy came into his little head. Was he like the Princes in the Tower? Was he a prisoner, after all? His little mind was full of the pageant of history, and he made his mind up now that he was a princely captive watched and warded.

“Tell me, dear Deb,” he said, catching his nurse by the sleeve as she turned from his bed that night, “tell me, is it not true that I am in prison, though you are all kind to me; that somebody else wants my throne?”

Nurse Deborah thought he was “off his head,” and ran to the physician for a cooling draught, and sat up in fright all the night, not even reassured by his sound tranquil sleep.

Bertie asked her nothing more.

He was more sure than ever that a captive he was, kept in kindly and honorable durance, like James of Scotland in the Green Tower.

Whilst he was lying awake, a grand and startling idea dawned on him: What if he were to go out and see the world for himself? This notion has fascinated many a child before him. Did not St. Teresa of Spain, when she was a little thing, toddle out with a tiny brother over the brown sierras? So absolutely now did this enterprise dazzle and conquer the little Earl that before night was half-way over he had persuaded himself that a prisoner he was, and that his stolen kingdom he would go and find, just as the knights in his favorite tales sallied forth to seek the Holy Grail. The passion for adventure, for escape, for finding out the truth, grew so strong on him that at the first flush of daybreak he slid out of bed and resolved that go alone he would. He longed to take Ralph, but he feared it would not be right: who knew what perils or pains awaited him?—and to make the dog sharer in them seemed selfish. So he threw a glove of his own for Ralph to guard, bade him be still, and set about his own flight.

He made a sad bungle of dressing himself, for he had never clothed himself in his life; but at last he got the things on somehow, and most of them hind-part-before. But he did it all without awaking Deborah, and, taking his sailor-hat, he managed to drop out of the window on to the sward below without any one being aware.

It was quite early day; the sky was red, the shadows and the mists were still there, the birds were piping good-morrow to each other.

“How lovely it is!” he thought. “Oh, why doesn’t everybody get up at sunrise?”

He knew, however, that if he wanted to see the world by himself he must not tarry there and think about the dawn. So off he set, as fast as his not very strong legs could carry him, and he got down to the shore.

The fog was on the sea and screened it from his sight, and there was no one on the beach except a boy getting nets ready in an old boat. To the boy ran Bertie, and held to him two half-crowns. “Will you row me to Bonchurch for that?” he asked.

The boy grinned. “For sure, little master; and I’d like to row a dozen at the price.”

Into the boat jumped the little Earl, with all the feverish agility given to prisoners, who are escaping, by their freed instincts. It was a very old, dirty boat, and soiled his pretty white clothes terribly, but he had no eyes for that, he so enjoyed that delicious sense of being all alone and doing just as he liked. The boy was a big boy and strong, and rowed with a will; and the old tub went jumping and bobbing and splashing through the rather heavy swell. The gig of his yacht was a smart, long boat, beautifully clean, and with rowers all dressed in red caps and white jerseys; but the little Earl had never enjoyed rowing in that half so much. There had been always somebody to look after him and say, “Don’t lean over the side,” or, “Mind the water does not splash you,” or, “Take care!” Oh, that tiresome “Take care!” It makes a boy want to jump head-foremost into the sea, or fling himself head-downwards from the nearest apple-tree! I know you have felt so yourself twenty times a week, though I do not tell you that you were right.

Nothing is prettier than the Undercliff as you look up at it from the sea,—a tangle of myrtle and laurel and beech and birch coming down to the very shore, all as Nature made it. Bertie, as the boat wabbled along like a fat old duck, looked up at it and was enchanted, and then he looked at the white wall of mist on the waters, and was enchanted too. It was like Wonderland. His dreams were broken by the fisher-lad’s voice:

“I’ll have to put you ashore at the creek, little master, and get back, or daddy’ll give me a hiding.”

“Who is ‘daddy’?”

“Father,” said the boy. “He’ll lick me, for the tub’s his’n.”

Bertie was perplexed. He had heard of bears being licked into shape by their fathers and mothers, but this boy, though rough and rather shapeless, looked too old for such treatment.

“You were a wicked boy to use the boat, then,” he said, with great severity.

The lad only grinned.

“Little master, you tipped me a crown.”

“I did not mean to tempt you to do wrong,” said Bertie very seriously still; and then he colored, for was he very sure that he was not doing wrong himself?

The old boat was grinding on the shingle then, and the rower of it was putting him ashore at a little creek that was wooded and pretty, and up which the sea ran at high tide; there was a little cottage at the head of it. I have heard that this wood-glen used to be in the old time a very famous place for smugglers, and it is still solitary and romantic, or at least was so still when the little Earl was set down there. “Where am I?” he asked the boy. But the wicked boy only grinned, and began to wabble back through the water as fast as his long slashing strokes could carry him. The little Earl felt rather foolish and rather helpless.

He was not far on his way towards seeing the world, and he began to wish for some breakfast. There was smoke going out of a chimney of the cottage, and the door of it stood open, but he was afraid the people there might stop him if he asked for anything, and, besides, the path up to it through the glen looked rocky and thorny and impassable, so he kept along by the beach, finding it heavy walking, for there were more stones than sands, and the beach was strewn with rocks, large and small, and stiff prickly furze. But he had the sea beside him and the world before him, and he walked on bravely, and in a little while he came into Bonchurch. It was very early yet, and Bonchurch was asleep, and most of its snug thatched houses, hidden away in their gardens and fuchsia hedges, were shut up snugly; the tall trees of its one street made a deep shadow in it, and the broad placid water of its great pool was green with their reflection: it was a sweet, quiet place, leafy as any haunt for fairies, yet on the very edge of the sea.

At a baker’s shop, a woman was lifting down the shutters. The little Earl took his hat off very prettily and said to her,—

“If you please, will you be kind enough to sell me some bread-and-milk?”

The woman stared, then laughed.

“Lord bless your pretty face! I only sell bread, but I’ll give you some milk in, for sake of your pinched cheeks. Come along inside, little gentleman.”

He went inside; it seemed a very funny place to him, so small and so dark, and so dusty with flour; but the smell of baking was sweet, and he was hungry.

She bustled about a little, and set before him a bowl of bread-and-milk, with a wooden spoon to eat it with. The little Earl put his hand in his pocket to pay for it; lo! he had not a farthing!

He turned very red, and then very white, and thought to himself that the money must have tumbled into the sea with his watch, which was missing too.

It did not occur to him that the wicked boy had taken both; yet such was the sad fact.

He rose, very sorrowful and confused and ashamed.

“Madam, I beg your pardon,” he said, in his little ceremonious way: “I thought I had money, but I have lost it. Thank you very much, but I cannot take the food.”

The woman was good-natured and shrewd.

“Lord! sup it up, my dear little gentleman,” she said to him. “You are welcome to it,—right welcome, you are; and your pa and your ma can pay for it.”

“No, no,” murmured Bertie, getting very red; and, fearing lest his longing for the meal should overcome his honor, he stumbled out of the baking-house door and ran up the tree-shadowed road faster than ever he had run in his life.

To be sure, he had plenty of money of his own; they all said so; but he never knew well where it was, or what it meant; and, besides, he intended never to go back to his grandmother and Deborah and Ralph and Royal any more, till he had found out the truth and seen his kingdom.

So he ran on through Bonchurch and out of it, leaving its pleasant green shade with a little sigh, half of impatience, half of hunger. He did not go on by the sea, for he knew by hearsay that this way would take him to Ventnor, and he was afraid people in a town would know him and stop him; so he set forth inland, where the deep lanes delve through the grassy downs, and here, sitting on a stile, the little Earl saw the ploughboy eating something white and round and big that he himself had never seen before.

“It must be something very delicious to make him enjoy it so much,” thought the little Earl, and then curiosity entered so into him, and he longed so much to taste this wonderful unknown thing, that he went up to the boy and said to him,—

“Will you be so kind as to let me know what you are eating?”

The ploughboy grinned from ear to ear.

“For certain, little zurr,” he said, with a burr and a drawl in his speech, and he gave the thing to Bertie, which was neither more nor less than a peeled turnip.

The little Earl looked at it doubtfully, for he did not much fancy what the other had handled with his big brown hands and bitten with his big yellow teeth. But then, to enjoy anything as much as that other had enjoyed it, and to taste something quite unknown!—this counterbalanced his disgust and over-ruled his delicacy. One side of the great white thing was unbitten; he took an eager tremulous little bite out of that.

“But, oh!” he cried in dismay as he tasted, “it has no taste at all, and what there is is nasty!”

“Turnips is main good,” said the boy.

“Oh, no!” said the little Earl, with intense horror; and he threw the turnip down amongst the grass, and went away sorely puzzled.

“Little master,” roared Hodge after him, “I’ll bet as you aren’t hungry.”

That was it, of course.

The little Earl was not really hungry,—never had been really hungry in all his life. But this explanation of natural philosophy did not occur to him, not even when the boy hallooed it after him. He only said to himself, “How can that boy eat that filthy thing? and he really did look as if he liked it so!”

Presently, after trotting a mile or so, he passed a little shop set all by itself at the end of a lane,—surely the tiniest, loneliest shop in Great Britain. But a cheery-looking old woman kept it, and he saw it had bread in it, as well as many other stuffs, and tin canisters that were to him incomprehensible.

“If you please,” he said, rather timidly, offering the gold anchor off the ribbon of his hat, “I have lost my money, and could you be so kind as to give me any breakfast for this?”

The old woman smelt the anchor, bit it, twinkled her eyes, and then drew a long face. “It ain’t worth tuppence, master,” she said; “but ye’re mighty small to be out by yourself, and puny like: I don’t say as how I won’t feed yer.”

“Thanks,” said Bertie, who did not know at all what his anchor was worth.

“Come in out o’ dust,” said the old woman, smartly, and then she bustled about and set him down in her little den to milk, bread, and some cold bacon.

That he had no appetite was the despair of his people and physician at home, and cod-liver oil, steel, quinine, and all manner of nastiness had been administered to provoke hunger in him, with no effect: by this time, however, he had almost as much hunger as the boy who had munched the turnip.

Nothing had ever tasted to him half so good in his life.

The old woman eyed him curiously. “You’s a runaway,” she thought; “but I’ll not raise the cry after ye, or they’ll come spying about this bit o’ gold.”

She said to herself that the child would come to no harm, and when a while had gone by she would step over to Ryde or Newport and get a guinea on the brooch.

Her little general shop was not a very prosperous business, though useful to the field-folk; and sanding her sugar, and putting clay in her mustard, and adding melted fat to her butter, had not strengthened her moral principles.

As Bertie was eating, there came a very thin, scantily-clad, miserable-looking woman, who held out a halfpenny. “A sup o’ milk for Susy, missus,” she said, in a very pitiful faint voice.

“How be Sue?” asked the mistress of the shop. The woman shook her head with tears running down her hollow cheeks.

“My boy he’s gone in spinney,” she murmured, “to try and catch summat, if he can: will you change it, missus, if he git a good bird?”

The old woman winked, frowned, and glanced at Bertie.

“Birds aren’t good eatin’ on fust of July,” she observed, as she handed the milk. The woman paid the halfpenny and hurried away with the milk.

“I think that woman is very poor,” said Bertie, questioningly and solemnly.

The old dame chuckled.

“No doubts o’ that, master.”

“Then you are cruel to take her money: you should have given her the milk.”

“Ho, ho, little sir! be you a parson in a gownd? I’m mappen poor as she, and she hiv desarved all she gits, for her man he were a poacher, and he died in jail last Jannivery.”

“A poacher!” said Bertie, with the natural instinctive horror of a landed gentleman. “And her son was going to snare a bird!” he cried, with light breaking in on him; “and you would give them things in exchange for the bird! Oh, what a very cruel, what a very wicked woman you are!”

For an answer she shied at him a round wooden trencher, which missed its aim and struck a basket of eggs and smashed them, and one of the panes of her shop-window as well.

Bertie got up and walked slowly out of the door, keeping his eyes upon her.

“When I see a magistrate, I shall tell him about you,” he said, solemnly: “you tempt poor people: that is very dreadful.”

The enraged woman, in her outraged feelings, threw a pail of dirty water after him, some of which splashed him and completed the disfigurement of his white suit. He looked up and down to see for the poor woman with the milk, that he might console her poverty and open her eyes to her sins; but she was not within sight; and Bertie reflected that if he stopped to correct other people’s errors he should never see the world and find his kingdom.

He had eaten a hearty meal, and his spirits rose and his heart was full of hope and valor; and if he had only had Ralph with him, he would have been quite happy.

So he went away valorously across a broad rolling down, and about half a mile farther on he came to a little shed. In the shed were a fire, and a man, and a pig; in the fire was an iron, and the pig was tied by a rope to a ring. Bertie saw the man take the red-hot iron and go up to the pig: Bertie’s face grew blanched with horror.

“Stop, stop! what are you doing to the pig?” he screamed, as he ran in to the man, who looked up and stared.

“I be branding the pig. Get out, or I’ll brand you!” he cried. Bertie held his ground; his eyes were flashing.

“You wicked, wicked man! Do you not know that poor pig was made by God?”

“Dunno,” said the wretch, with a grin. “She’ll be eat by men, come Candlemas! I be marking of her, ’cos I’ll turn her out on the downs with t’other. Git out, youngster! you’ve no call here.”

Bertie planted himself firmly on his feet, and doubled his little fists.

“I will not see you do such a cruelty to a poor dumb thing,” he said, while he grew white as death, “I will not.”

The man scowled and yet grinned.

“Will you beat me, little Hop-o’-my-thumb?”

Bertie put himself before the poor black pig, who was squealing from mere fright and the scorch of the fire.

“You shall not get the pig without killing me first. You are a cruel man.”

The man grew angry.

“Tell you what, youngster: I’ve a mind to try the jumping-irons on you for your impudence. You look like a drowned white kitten. Clear off, if you don’t want to taste something right red hot.”

Bertie’s whole body grew sick, but he did not move and he did not quail.

“I would rather you did it to me than to this poor thing,” he answered.

“I’m blowed!” said the man, relaxing his wrath from sheer amazement. “Well, you’re a good plucked one, you are.”

“I do not know what you mean,” said Bertie, a little haughtily; “but you shall not hurt the pig.”

“Darn me!” yelled the man; “I’ll burn you, sure as you live, if you don’t kneel on your bare bones and beg my pardon.”

“I will not do that.”

“You won’t beg my pardon for cheeking me?”

“No: you are a wicked man.”

Bertie’s eyes closed; he grew faint; he fully believed that in another instant he would feel the hissing fire of the brand. But he did not yield.

The man’s hand dropped to his side.

“You are a plucked one,” he said, once more. “Lord, child, it was a joke. You’re such a rare game un, to humor you, there, I’ll let the crittur go without marking her. But you’re a rare little fool, if you’re not an angel down from on high.”

Bertie’s eyes filled with tears. He held his hand out royally to be kissed, as he was used to do at Avillion.

The big, black-looking man crushed it in his own brown paw.

“My! you’re a game un!” he muttered, with wonder and awe.

“And you will never, never, never burn pigs any more?” said Bertie, searching his face with his own serious large eyes.

“I’ll ne’er brand this un,” said the man, with a shamefaced laugh. “Lord, little sir, you’re the first is ever got as much as that out of me!”

“But you never must do it,” said Bertie, solemnly. “It is wicked of you, and God is angry; and it is very mean for you, such a big man and so strong, to hurt a defenceless dumb thing. You must never do it.”

“What is your name, little master?” said the big man, humbly.

“They call me Avillion.”

“William? Then I’ll say William all the days of my life at my prayers o’ Sundays,” said the man, with some emotion, and murmured to himself, “Such a game un I never seed.”

“Thanks very much,” said Bertie, gently, and then he lifted his hat politely, and went out of the shed before the man could recover from his astonishment. When the little Earl looked back, he saw the giant pouring water on the fire, and the pig was loose.

“I was afraid,” thought Bertie. “But he should have burnt me all up every bit: I never would have given in.”

And something seemed to say in his ear, “The loveliest thing in all the world is courage that goes hand in hand with mercy; and these two together can work miracles, like magicians.”

By this time Bertie, except for a certain inalienable grace and refinement that were in his little face and figure, had few marks of a young gentleman. His snowy serge was smirched and stained with blackberries; his red stockings, from the sea-water and the field-mud, had none of their original color; his hat had been bent and crumpled by his fall, and his hair was rough. Nobody passing him could have dreamt that this sorry wanderer was a little earl. Nevertheless, when he had been dressed in his little court suit and had been taken to see the queen once at Balmoral, he had never been a quarter so proud nor a tenth part so happy. He longed to meet Cromwell, and Richard the Third, and Gessler, and Nero. He began to feel like all the knights he had ever read of, and those were many.

“LITTLE GIRL, WHY DO YOU CRY?” HE SAID

Presently he saw a little maiden weeping. She was an ugly little maiden, with a shock head of red hair, and a wide mouth, and a brickdust skin; but she was crying. In his present heroic mood, he could not pass her by unconsoled.

“Little girl, why do you cry?” he said, stopping in the narrow green lane.

She looked at him out of a sharp little eye, and her face puckered up afresh.

“I’se going to schule, little master!”

“To school, do you mean? And why does that make you cry? Can you read?”

“Naw,” said the maiden, and sobbed loudly.

“Then why are you not glad to go and learn?” said Bertie, in his superior wisdom.

“There’s naebody to do nowt at home,” said the red-haired one, with a howl. “Mother’s abed sick, and Tam’s hurt his leg, and who’ll mind baby? He’ll tumble the kittle o’er hisself, I know he will, and he’ll be scalt to death, ’ll baby!”

“Dear, dear!” said Bertie, sympathetically. “But why do you go to school then?”

“’Cos I isn’t thirteen,” sobbed the shock-haired nymph: “I’se only ten. And daddy was had up las’ week and pit in prison ’cos he kept me at home. And if I ain’t at home, who’ll mind baby, and who’ll bile the taters, and who’ll——? Oh, how I wish I was thirteen!”

Bertie did not understand. He had never heard of the School Board.

“What does your father do?” he asked.

“Works i’ brick-field. All on us work i’ brick-field. I can take baby to brick-field; he sit in the clay beautiful, but they awn’t let me take him to schule, and he’ll be scalt, I know he’ll be scalt. He’ll allers get a-nigh the kittle if he can.”

“But it is very shocking not to know how to read,” said the little Earl, very gravely. “You should have learned that as soon as you could speak. I did.”

“Maybe yours aren’t brick-field folk,” said the little girl, stung by her agony to sarcasm. “I’ve allers had a baby to mind, ever since I toddled; first ’twas Tam, and then ’twas Dick, and now ’tis this un. I dunno want to read; awn’t make bricks a-readin’.”

“Oh, but you will learn such beautiful things,” said Bertie. “I do think, you know, that you ought to go to school.”

“So the gemman said as pit dad in th’ lock-up,” said the recalcitrant one, doggedly. “Butiful things aren’t o’ much count, sir, when one’s belly’s empty. I oodn’t go to the blackguds now, if ’tweren’t as poor dad says as how I must, ’cos they lock him up.”

“It seems very hard to lock him up,” said Bertie, with increasing sympathy; “and I think you ought to obey him and go. I will see if I can find the baby. Where do you live?”

She pointed vaguely over the copses and pastures: “Go on a mile, and you’ll see Jim Bracken’s cottage; but, Lord love you! you’ll ne’er manage baby.”

“I will try,” said Bertie, sweetly. His fancy as well as his charity was stirred; for he had never, that he knew of, seen a baby. “But indeed you should go to school.”

“I’m a-going,” said the groaning and blowsy heroine with a last sob, and then she set off running as quickly as a pair of her father’s boots, ten times too large, allowed her, her slate and her books making a loud clatter as she struggled on her way.

He was by this time very tired, for he was not used to such long walks; but curiosity and compassion put fresh spirit into his heart, and his small legs pegged valorously over the rough ground, the red stockings and the silver buckles becoming by this time much begrimed with mud.

He knocked at one cottage door, and saw only a very cross old woman, who flourished a broom at him.

“No, it bean’t Jim Bracken’s. Get you gone!—you look like a runaway.”

Now, a runaway he was; and, as truth when we are guilty is always even as a two-edged sword, Bertie colored up to the roots of his hair, and bolted off as fast as he could to the only other cottage visible, beyond a few acres of mangel-wurzel and all the lucern family, which the little Earl fancied were shamrocks. For he was far on in Euclid, could speak German well, and could spell through Tacitus fairly, but about the flowers of the field and the grasses no one had ever thought it worth while to tell him anything at all. Indeed, to tell you the truth, I do not think his tutors knew anything about them themselves.

This other cottage was so low, so covered up in its broken thatch, which in turn was covered with lichen, and was so tumble-down and sorrowful-looking, that Bertie thought it was a ruined cow-shed. However, it stood where the school-girl had pointed: so he took his courage in both hands, as we say in French, and advanced to it. The rickety door stood open, and he saw a low miserable bed with a miserable woman lying on it; a shock-headed boy sprawled on the floor, another crouched before a fire of brambles and sods, and between the legs of this last boy was a strange, uncouth, shapeless object, which, but for the fact that it was crying loudly, never would have appeared to his astonished eyes as the baby for whom was prophesied a tragic and early end by the kettle. The boy who had this object in charge stared with two little round eyes.

“Mamsey, there’s a young gemman,” he said, in an awed voice.

Bertie took off his hat, and went into the room with his prettiest grace.

“If you please, are you very ill?” he said, in his little soft voice, to the woman in bed. “I met—I met—a little girl who was so anxious about the baby, and I said I would come and see if I could be of any use——”

The woman raised herself on one elbow, and looked at him with eager, haggard eyes.

“Lord, little sir, there’s naught to be done for us;—leastways, unless you had a shillin’ or two——”

“I have no money,” murmured Bertie, feeling very unlike a little earl in that moment. The woman gave a weary angry sigh and sank back indifferent.

“Can I do nothing?” said Bertie, wistfully.

“By golly!” said the boy on the floor, “unless you’ve got a few coppers, little master——”

“Coppers?” repeated the little Earl.

“Pence,” said the boy, shortly; then the baby began to howl, and the boy shook it.

“Do please not make it scream so,” said Bertie. “That is what you call the baby, is it not?”

“Iss,” said the boy Dick, sullenly. “This here’s baby, cuss him! and what bisness be he of yourn?”

For interference without coppers to follow was a barren intruder that he was disposed to resent.

“I thought I could amuse him,” said Bertie, timidly. “I told your sister I would.”

Dick roared into loud guffaws.

“Baby’d kick you into middle o’ next week, you poor little puny spindle-shanks!” said this rude boy; and Bertie felt that he was very rude, though he had no idea what was meant by spindle-shanks.

The other boy, who was lying on his stomach,—a sadly empty little stomach,—here reversed his position and stared up at Bertie.

“I think you’re a kind little gemman,” he said, “and Dick’s cross ’cos he’s broke his legs, and we’ve had no vittles since yesternoon, and only a sup o’ tea Peg made afore she went, and mother’s main bad, that she be.”

And tears rolled down this gentler little lad’s dirty cheeks.

“Oh, dear, what shall I do?” said Bertie, with a sigh: if he had only had the money and the watch that had fallen into the sea! He looked round him and felt very sick; it was all so dirty, so dirty!—and he had never seen dirt before; and the place smelt very close and sour, and the children’s clothes were mere rags, and the woman was all skin and bone, on her wretched straw bed; and the unhappy baby was screaming loudly enough to be heard right across the sea to the French coast.

“Baby, poor baby, don’t cry so!” said Bertie, very softly, and he dangled the ends of his red sash before its tearful eyes, and shook them up and down: the attention of the baby was arrested, it ceased to howl, and put out its hands, and began to laugh instead! Bertie was very proud of his success, and even the sullen Dick muttered, “Well, I never!”

The little Earl undid his scarf and let the baby pull it towards itself. Dick’s eyes twinkled greedily.

“Master, that’d sell for summat!”

“Oh, you must not sell it,” said the little Earl, eagerly. “It is to amuse the poor baby. And what pretty big eyes he has! how he laughs!”

“Your shoes ’ud sell,” muttered Dick.

“Dick! don’t, Dick! that’s begging,” muttered Tam. Bertie stared in surprise. To sell his shoes seemed as odd as to be asked to sell his hair or his hands. The woman opened her fading, glazing eyes.

“They’re honest boys, little sir: you’ll pardon of ’em; they’ve eat nothing since yesternoon, and then ’twas only a carrot or two, and boys is main hungry.”

“And have you nothing?” said Bertie, aghast at the misery in this unknown world.

“How’d we have anything?” said the sick woman, grimly. “They’ve locked up my man, and Peg’s sent to school while we starve; and nobody earns nothin’, for Dick’s broke his leg, and I’ve naught in my breasts for baby——”

“But would not somebody you work for—or the priest—?” began Bertie.

“Passon don’t do nowt for us,—my man’s a Methody; and at brick-field they don’t mind us; if we be there, well an’ good,—we work and get paid; and if we isn’t there, well—some un else is. That’s all.” Then she sank back, gasping.

Bertie stood woe-begone and perplexed.

“Did you say my shoes would sell?” he murmured, very miserably, his mind going back to the history of St. Martin and the cloak.

Dick brightened up at once.

“Master, I’ll get three shillin’ on ’em, maybe more, down in village yonder.”

“You mus’n’t take the little gemman’s things,” murmured the mother, feebly; but faintness was stealing on her, and darkness closing over her sight.

“Three shillings!” said Bertie, who knew very little of the value of shillings; “that seems very little! I think they cost sovereigns. Could you get a loaf of bread with three shillings?”

“Gu-r-r-r!” grinned Dick, and Bertie understood that the guttural sound meant assent and rapture.

“But I cannot walk without shoes.”

“Walk! yah! ye’ll walk better. We niver have no shoes,” said Dick.

“Don’t you, really?”

“Golly! no! Ye’ll walk ten times finer; ye won’t trip, nor stumble, nor nothin’, and ye’ll run as fast again.”

“Oh, no, I shall not,” murmured Bertie, and he was going to say that he would be ashamed to be seen without shoes, only he remembered that, as these boys had none, that would not be kind. A desperate misery came over him at the thought of being shoeless, but then he reasoned with himself, “To give was no charity if it cost you nothing: did not the saints strip themselves to the uttermost shred for the poor?”

He stooped and took off his shoes with the silver buckles on them, and placed them hastily on the floor.

“Take them, if they will get you bread,” he said, with the color mounting in his face.

Dick seized them with a yell of joy. “Tarnation that I can’t go mysel’. Here, Tam, run quick and sell ’em to old Nan; and get bread, and meat, and potatoes, and milk for baby, and Lord knows what; p’raps a gill of gin for mammy.”

“I don’t think we ought to rob little master, Dick,” murmured little Tam. His brother hurled a crutch at him, and Tam snatched up the pretty shoes and fled.

“My blazes, sir,” said Dick, with rather a shamefaced look, “if you’d a beast like a lot of fire gnawing at your belly all night long, yer wouldn’t stick at nowt to get bread.”

Bertie only imperfectly comprehended. The baby, tired of the sash, began to cry again; and Dick, grown good-natured, danced it up and down.

“How old are you?” said Bertie.

“Nigh on eight,” said Dick.

“Dear me!” sighed the little Earl; this rough, masterful, coarse-tongued boy seemed like a grown man to him.

“You won’t split on us?” said Dick, sturdily.

“What is that?” asked Bertie.

“Not tell anybody you give us the shoes: there’d be a piece of work.”

“As if one told when one did any kindness!” murmured Bertie, with a disgust he could not quite conceal. “I mean, when one does one’s duty.”

“But what’ll you gammon ’em with at home?—they’ll want to know what you’ve done with your shoes.”

“I am not going home,” said the little Earl, and there was a something in the way he spoke that silenced Dick’s tongue,—which he would have called his clapper.

“What in the world be the little swell arter?” thought Dick.

Bertie meanwhile, with some awe and anxiety, was watching the livid face of the sick woman: he had never seen illness or death, but it seemed to him that she was very ill indeed.

“Are you not anxious about your mother?” he asked of the rough boy.

“Yes,” said Dick, sulkily, with the water coming in his eyes. “Dad’s in the lock-up: that’s wuss still, young sir.”

“Not worse than death,” said Bertie, solemnly. “He will come back.”

“Oh, she’ll come round with a drop of gin and a sup of broth,” said Dick, confidently. “’Tis all hunger and frettin’, hers is.”

“I am glad I gave my shoes,” thought Bertie. Then there was a long silence, broken only by the hissing of the green brambles on the fire and the yelps of the baby.

“Maybe, sir,” said Dick, after a little, “you’d put the saucepan on? I can’t move with this here leg. If you’d pit some water out o’ kittle in him, he’ll be ready for cookin’ when the vittles come.”

“I will do that,” said Bertie, cheerfully, and he set the saucepan on by lifting it with both hands: it was very black, and its crock came off on his knickerbockers. Then, by Dick’s directions, he found a pair of old wooden bellows, and blew on the sticks and sods; but this he managed so ill that Dick wriggled himself along the floor closer to the fire and did it himself.

“You’re a gaby!” he said to his benefactor.

“What is that?” said Bertie.

But Dick felt that it was more prudent not to explain.

In half an hour Tam burst into the room, breathless and joyous, his scruples having disappeared under the basket he bore.

“She gived me five shillin’!” he shouted; “and I’s sure they’s wuth a deal more, ’cos her eyes twinkled and winked, and she shoved me a peg-top in!”

“Gie us o’t!” shrieked Dick, in an agony at being bound to the floor with all these good things before his sight.

Little Tam, who was very loyal, laid them all out on the ground before his elder: two quartern loaves, two pounds of beef, onions, potatoes, a bit of bacon, and a jug of milk.

Dick poured some milk into an old tin mug, and handed it roughly to Bertie.

“Feed the baby, will yer, whiles Tam and me cooks?”

The little Earl took the can, and advanced to the formidable bundle of rags, who was screaming like a very hoarse raven.

“I think you should attend to your mother first,” he said, gently, as the baby made a grab at the little tin pot, the look of which it seemed to know, and shook half the milk over itself.

“Poor mammy!” said Tam, who was gnawing a bit of bread; and, with his bread in one hand, he got up and put a little gin and water quite hot between his mother’s lips. She swallowed it without opening her eyes or seeming to be conscious, and Tam climbed down from the bed again with a clear conscience.

“We’ll gie her some broth,” he said, manfully, while he and Dick, munching bread and raw bacon, tumbled the beef in a lump into the saucepan, drowned in water with some whole onions, in the common fashion of cottage-cooking. The baby, meanwhile, was placidly swallowing the milk that the little Earl held for it very carefully, and, when that was done, accepted a crust that he offered it to suck.

The two boys were crouching before the crackling fire, munching voraciously, and watching the boiling of the old black pot. They had quite forgotten their benefactor.

“My! What’ll Peg say when she’s to home?” chuckled Tam.

“She’ll say that she’d ha’ cooked better,” growled Dick. “Golly! ain’t the fat good?”

Bertie stood aloof, pleased, and yet sorrowful because they did not notice him.

Even the baby had so completely centred its mind in the crust that it had abandoned all memory of the red scarf.

Bertie looked on a little while, but no one seemed to remember him. The boys’ eyes were glowing on the saucepan, and their cheeks were filled out with food as the cherubs in his chapel at home were puffed out with air as they blew celestial trumpets.

He went to the door slowly, looked back, and then retreated into the sunshine.

“It would be mean to put them in mind of me,” he thought, as he withdrew.

Suddenly a sharp pain shot through him: a stone had cut his unshod foot.

“Oh, dear me! how ever shall I walk without any shoes or boots!” he thought, miserably; and he was very nearly bursting out crying.

On the edge of these fields was a wood,—a low, dark, rolling wood,—which looked to the little Earl, who missed his own forests, inviting and cool and sweet. By this time it was getting towards noon, and the sun was hot, and he felt thirsty and very tired. He was sad, too: he was glad to have satisfied those poor hungry children, but their indifference to him when they were satisfied was chilling and melancholy.

“But then we ought not to do a kindness that we may be thanked,” he said to himself. “It is a proper punishment to me, because I wished to be thanked, which was mean.”

So he settled, as he usually did, that it was all his own fault.

Happily for him, the ground was soft with summer dust, and so he managed to get along the little path that ran from the cottage through the lucern-fields, and from there the path became grass, which was still less trying to his little red stockings.

Yet he was anxious and troubled; he felt heavily weighted for his battle with the world without any shoes on, and he felt he must look ridiculous. For the first time, St. Martin did not seem to him so very much of a hero, because St. Martin’s gift was only a cloak. Besides, without his sash, the band of his knickerbockers could be seen; and he was afraid this was indecent.

Nevertheless, he went on bravely, if lamely. Believe me, nothing sets the world more straight than thinking that what is awry in it is one’s self.

The wood, which was a well-known spinney famous for pheasants, was reached before very long, though with painful effort. It was chiefly composed of old hawthorn-trees and blackthorn, with here and there a larch or holly. The undergrowth was thick, and the sunbeams were playing at bo-peep with the shadows. Far away over the fields and thorns was a glimmer of blue water, and close around were all manner of ferns, of foxgloves, of grasses, of boughs. The tired little Earl sank downward under one of the old thorns with feet that bled. A wasp had stung him, too, through his stocking, and the stung place was smarting furiously. “But how much more Christ and the saints suffered!” thought Bertie, seriously and piously, without the smallest touch of vanity.

Lying on the moss under all that greenery, he felt refreshed and soothed, although the foot the wasp had stung throbbed a good deal.

There were all sorts of pretty things to see: the pheasants, who were lords of the manor till October came round, did not mind him in the least, and swept smoothly by with their long tails like court mantles sweeping the grass. Blackbirds, those cheeriest of all birds, pecked at worms and grubs quite near him. Chaffinches were looking for hairs under the brambles to make their second summer nest with. Any hairs serve their purpose,—cows’, horses’, or dogs’; and if they get a tuft of hare-skin or rabbit-fur they are furnished for the year. A pair of little white-throats were busy in a low bush, gathering the catch-weed that grew thickly there, and a goldfinch was flying away with a lock of sheep’s wool in his beak. There were other charming creatures, too: a mole was hurrying to his underground castle, a nuthatch was at work on a rotten tree-trunk, and a gray, odd-looking bird was impaling a dead field-mouse on one of the thorn-branches. Bertie did not know that this gentleman was but the gray shrike, once used in hawking; indeed, he did not know the names or habits of any of the birds; and he lay still hidden in the ferns, and watched them with delight and mute amazement. There were thousands of such pretty creatures in his own woods and brakes at home, but then he was never alone: he was always either walking with Father Philip or riding with William, and in neither case was he allowed to stop and loiter and lie in the grass, and the sonorous voice of the priest scattered these timid dwellers in the greenwood as surely as did the tread of the pony’s hoofs and the barking of Ralph.

“When I am a man I will pass all my life out of doors, and I will get friends with all these pretty things, and ask them what they are doing,” he thought; and he was so entranced in this new world hidden away under the low hawthorn boughs of this spinney that he quite forgot he had lost his shoes and did not know where he would sleep when night came. He had quite forgotten his own existence, indeed; and this is just the happiness that comes to us always, when we learn to love the winged and four-footed brethren that Nature has placed so near us, and whom, alas! we so shamefully neglect when we do not do even worse and persecute them. Bertie was quite oblivious that he was a runaway, who had started with a very fine idea or finding out who it was that kept him in prison, and giving him battle wherever he might be: he was much more interested in longing to know what the great gray shrike was, and why it hung up the mouse on the thorn and flew away. If you do not know any more than he did, I may tell you that the shrikes are like your father, and like their game when it has been many days in the larder. It is one of the few ignoble tastes in which birds resemble mankind.

The shrike flew away to look for some more mice, or frogs, or little snakes, or cockroaches, or beetles, for he is a very useful fellow indeed in the woods, though the keepers are usually silly and wicked enough to try and kill him. His home and his young ones were above in the thicket, and he had stuck all round their nests insects of all kinds: still, he was a provident bird, and was of opinion that every one should work while it is day.

When the shrike flew away after a bumble-bee, the little Earl fell asleep: what with fatigue, and excitement, and the heat of the sun, a sound, dreamless slumber fell upon him there among the birds and the sweet smell of the May buds; and the goldfinch sang to him, while he slept, such a pretty song that he heard it though he was so fast asleep. The goldfinch, though, did not sing for him one bit in the world; he sang for his wife, who was sitting among her callow brood hidden away from sight under the leaves, and with no greater anxiety on her mind than fear of a possible weasel or rat gnawing at her nest from the bottom.

When the little Earl awoke, the sun was not full and golden all about him as it had been; there were long shadows slanting through the spinney, and there was a great globe descending behind the downs of the western horizon. It was probably about six in the evening. Bertie could not tell, for, unluckily for him, he had always had a watch to rely upon, and had never been taught to tell the hour from the “shepherd’s hour-glass” in the field-flowers, or calculate the time of day from the length of the shadows. Even now, though night was so nigh, the thought of where he should find a bed did not occur to him, for he was absorbed in a little boy who stood before him,—a very miserable little black-haired, brown-cheeked boy, who was staring hard at him.

“Now, he, I am sure, is as poor as Dick and Tam,” thought the little Earl, “and I have nothing left to give him.”

The little boy was endeavoring to hide behind his back a bright bundle of ruffled feathers, and in his other hand he held a complicated arrangement of twine and twigs with a pendent noose.

That Bertie did know the look of, for he had seen his own keepers destroy such things in his own woods, and had heard them swear when they did so. So his land-owner’s instincts awoke in him, though the land was not his.

“Oh, little boy,” he said, rubbing his eyes and springing to his feet, “what a wicked, wicked little boy you are! You have been snaring a pheasant!”

The small boy, who was about his age, looked frightened and penitent: he saw his accuser was a little gentleman.

“Please, sir, don’t tell on me,” he said, with a whimper. “I’ll gie ye the bird if ye won’t tell on me.”

“I do not want the bird,” said Bertie, with magisterial gravity. “You are a wicked little boy to offer it to me. It is not your own, and you have killed it. You are a thief!”

“Please, sir,” whimpered the little poacher, “dad allus tooked ’em like this.”

“Then he is a thief too,” said Bertie.

“He was a good un to me,” said the small boy, and then fairly burst out sobbing. “He was a good un to me, and he’s dead a year come Lady-day, and mother she’s main bad, and little Susie’s got the croup, and there’s nowt to eat to home; and I hear Susie cryin’, cryin’, cryin’, and so I gae to cupboard where dad’s old tackle be kep, and I gits out this here, and says I to myself, maybe I’ll git one of them birds i’ spinney, ’cos they make rare broth, and we had a many on ’em when dad was alive, and Towser.”

“Who was Towser?”

“He was our lurcher; keeper shot him; he’d bring of ’em in his mouth like a Chrisen; and gin ye’ll tell on me, they’ll clap me in prison like they did dad, and it’s birch rods they’d give yer, and mother’s nowt but me.”

“I do not know who owns this property,” said Bertie, in his little sedate way, “so I could not tell the owner, and I should not wish to do it if I could; but still it is a very wicked thing to snare birds at all, and when they are game-birds it is robbery.”

“I know as how they makes it so,” demurred the poacher’s son. “But dad said as how——”

“No one makes it so,” said Bertie, with a little righteous anger; “it is so: the birds are not yours, and so, if you take them, you are a thief.”

The boy put his thumb in his mouth and dangled his dead pheasant.

A discussion on the game-laws was beyond his powers, nor was even Bertie conscious of the mighty subject he was opening, though the instincts of the land-owner were naturally in him, and it seemed to him so shocking to find a boy with such views as this as to meum and tuum, that he almost fancied the sun would fall from the sky. The sun, however, glowed on, low down in the wood beyond a belt of firs, and the green downs, and the gray sea; and the little sinner stood before him, fascinated by his appearance and frightened at his words.

“Do you know who owns this coppice?” asked Bertie; and the boy answered him, reluctantly,—

“Yes: Sir Henry.”

“Then, what you must do,” said Bertie, “is to go directly with that bird to Sir Henry, and beg his pardon, and ask him to forgive you. Go at once. That is what you must do.”

The boy opened eyes and mouth in amaze.

“That I won’t never do,” he said, doggedly: “I’d be took up to the lodge afore I’d open my mouth.”

“Not if I go with you,” said Bertie.

“Be you one of the fam’ly, sir?”

“No,” said Bertie, and then was silent in some confusion, for he bethought him that, without any shoes on, he might also be arrested at the lodge gates.

“I thought as not, ’cos you’re barefoot,” said the brown-cheeked boy, with a little contempt supplying the place of courage. “Dunno who you be, sir, but seems to I as you’ve no call to preach to me: you be a-trespassin’ too.”

Bertie colored.

“I am not doing any harm,” he said, with dignity; “you are: you have been stealing. If you are not really a wicked boy, you will take the pheasant straight to that gentleman, and beg him to forgive you, and I dare say he will give you work.”

“There’s no work for my dad’s son,” said the little poacher, half sadly, half sullenly: “the keepers are all agen us: ’tis as much as mother and me and Susie can do to git a bit o’ bread.”

“What work can you do?”

“I can make the gins,” said the little sinner, touching the trap with pride. “Mostwhiles, I never comes out o’ daylight; but all the forenoon Susie was going off her head, want o’ summat t’ eat.”

“I’m sorry for Susie and you,” said the little Earl, with sympathy. “But indeed, indeed, nothing can excuse a theft, or make God——”

“The keepers!” yelled the boy, with a scream like a hare’s, and he dashed head-foremost into the bushes, casting on to Bertie’s lap the gin and the dead bird. Bertie was so surprised that he sat perfectly mute and still: the little boy had disappeared as fast as a rabbit bolts at sight of a ferret. Two grim big men with dogs and guns burst through the hawthorn, and one of them seized the little Earl with no gentle hand.

“You little blackguard! you’ll smart for this,” yelled the big man. “Treadmill and birch rod, or I’m a Dutchman.”

Bertie was so surprised, still, that he was silent. Then, with his little air of innocent majesty, he said, simply, “You are mistaken: I did not kill the bird.”

Now, if Bertie had had his usual nicety of apparel, or if the keeper had not been in a fuming fury, the latter would have easily seen that he had accused and apprehended a little gentleman. But no one in a violent rage ever has much sense or sight left to aid him, and Big George, as this keeper was called, did not notice that his dogs were smelling in a friendly way at his prisoner, but only saw that he had to do with a pale-faced lad without shoes, and very untidy and dusty-looking, who had snares and a snared pheasant at his feet.

Before Bertie had even seen him take a bit of cord out of his pocket, he had tied the little Earl’s hands behind him, picked up the pheasant and the trap, and given some directions to his companion. The real culprit was already a quarter of a mile off, burrowing safely in the earth of an old fox killed in February,—a hiding-place with which he was very familiar.

Bertie, meanwhile, was quite silent. He was thinking to himself, “If I tell them another boy did it, they will go and look for him, and catch him, and put him in prison; and then his mother and Susie will be so miserable,—more miserable than ever. I think I ought to keep quiet. Jesus never said anything when they buffeted him.”

“Ah, you little gallows-bird, you’ll get it this time!” said the keeper, knotting the string tighter about his wrists, and speaking as if he had had the little Earl very often in such custody.

“You are a very rude man,” said Bertie, with the angry color in his cheeks; but Big George heeded him not, being engaged in swearing at one of his dogs,—a young one, who was trotting after a rabbit.

“I know who this youngster is, Bob,” he said to his companion: “he’s the Radley shaver over from Blackgang.”

Bertie wondered who the Radley shaver was that resembled him.

“He has the looks on him,” said the other, prudently.

“Sir Henry’s dining at Chigwell to-night, and he’ll have started afore we get there,” continued Big George. “Go you on through spinney far as Edge Pool, and I’ll take and lock this here Radley up till morning. Blast his impudence,—a pheasant! think of the likes of it! A pheasant! If ’t had been a rabbit, ’t had been bad enough.”

Then he shook his little captive vigorously.

Bertie did not say anything. He was not in trepidation for himself, but he was in an agony of fear lest the other boy should be found in the spinney.

“March along afore me,” said Big George, with much savageness. “And if you tries to bolt, I’ll blow your brains out and nail you to a barn-door along o’ the owls.”

The little Earl looked at him with eyes of scorn and horror.

“How dare you touch Athene’s bird?”

“How dare I what, you little saucy blackguard?” thundered Big George, and fetched him a great box on the ears which made Bertie stagger.

“You are a very bad man,” he said, breathlessly. “You are a very mean man. You are big, and so you are cruel: that is very mean indeed.”

“You’ve the gift of the gab, little devil of a Radley,” said the keeper, wrathfully; “but you’ll pipe another tune when you feel the birch and pick oakum.”

Bertie set his teeth tight to keep his words in: he walked on mute.

“You’ve stole some little gemman’s togs as well as my pheasant,” said Big George, surveying him. “Why didn’t you steal a pair of boots when you was about it?”

Bertie was still mute.

“I will not say anything to this bad man,” he thought, “or else he will find out that it was not I.”

The sun had set by this time, leaving only a silvery light above the sea and the downs: the pale long twilight of an English day had come upon the earth.

Bertie was very white, and his heart beat fast, and he was growing very hungry; but he managed to stumble on, though very painfully, for his courage would not let him repine before this savage man, who was mixed up in his mind with Bluebeard, and Thor, and Croquemitaine, and Richard III., and Nero, and all the ogres that he had ever met with in his reading, and who seemed to grow larger and larger and larger as the sky and earth grew darker.

Happily for his shoeless feet, the way lay all over grass-lands and mossy paths; but he limped so that the keeper swore at him many times, and the little Earl felt the desperate resignation of the martyr.

At last they came in sight of the keeper’s cottage, standing on the edge of the preserves,—a thatched and gabled little building, with a light glimmering in its lattice window.

At the sound of Big George’s heavy tread, a woman and some children ran out.

“Lord ha’ mercy! George!” cried the wife. “What scarecrow have you been and got?”

“A Radley boy,” growled George,—“one of the cussed Radley boys at last,—and a pheasant snared took in his very hand!”

“You don’t mean it!” cried his wife; and the small children yelled and jumped. “What’ll be done with him, dad?” cried the eldest of them.

“I’ll put him in fowl-house to-night,” said Big George, “and up he’ll go afore Sir Henry fust thing to-morrow. Clear off, young uns, and let me run him in.”

Bertie looked up in Big George’s face.

“I had nothing to do with killing the bird,” he said, in a firm though a faint voice. “You quite mistake. I am Lord Avillion.”

“Stop your pipe, or I’ll choke yer,” swore Big George, enraged by what he termed the “darned cheek” of a Radley boy; and without more ado he laid hold of the little Earl’s collar and lifted him into the fowl-house, the door of which was held open eagerly by his eldest girl.

There was a great flapping of wings, screeching of hens, and piping of chicks at the interruption, where all the inmates were gone to roost, and one cock set up his usual salutation to the dawn.

“That’s better nor you’ll sleep to-morrow night,” said Big George, as he tumbled Bertie on to a truss of straw that lay there, when he went out himself, slammed the door, and both locked and barred it on the outside.

Bertie fell back on the straw, sobbing bitterly: his feet were cut and bleeding, his whole body ached like one great bruise, and he was sick and faint with hunger. “If the world be as difficult as this to live in,” he thought, “how ever do some people manage to live almost to a hundred years in it?” and to his eight-year-old little soul the prospect of a long life seemed so horrible that he sobbed again at the very thought of it. It was quite dark in the fowl-house; the rustling and fluttering of the poultry all around sounded mysterious and unearthly; the strong, unpleasant smell made him faint, and the pain in his feet grew greater every moment. He did not scream or go into convulsions; he was a brave little man, and proud; but he felt as if the long, lonely night there would kill him.

Half an hour, perhaps, had gone by when a woman’s voice at the little square window said, softly, “Here is bread and water for you, poor boy; and I’ve put some milk and cheese, too, only my man mustn’t know it.”

Bertie with great effort raised himself, and took what was pushed through the tiny window; a mug of milk being lowered to him last by a large red fat hand, on which the light of a candle held without was glowing.

“Thanks very much,” said the little Earl, feebly. “But, madam, I did not kill that bird, and indeed I am Lord Avillion.”

The good woman went within to her lord, and said timidly to him, “George, are you sartin sure that there’s a Radley boy? He do look and speak like a little gemman, and he do say as how he is one.”

Big George called her bad names.

“A barefoot gemman!” he said, with a sneer. “You thunderin’ fool! it’s weazened-faced Vic Radley, as have been in our woods a hundred times if wunce, though never could I slap eyes on him quick enough to pin him.”

HE SHARED IT WILLINGLY

The good housewife took up her stocking-mending and said no more. Big George’s arguments were sometimes enforced with the fist, and even with the pewter pot or the poker.

Meanwhile, the little Earl in the hen-house was so hungry that he drank the milk and ate the bread and cheese. Both were harder and rougher things than any he had ever tasted; but he had now that hunger which had made the boy on the stile relish the turnip, and, besides, another incident had occurred to give him relish for the food.

At the moment when he had sat down to drink the milk, there had tumbled out from behind the straw a round black-and-white object, unsteady on its legs, and having a very broad nose and a very woolly coat. The moon had risen by this time, and was shining in through the little square window, and by its beams Bertie could see this thing was a puppy,—a Newfoundland puppy some four months old. He welcomed it with as much rapture as ever Robert Bruce did the spider. It had evidently been awakened from its sleep by the smell of the food. It was a pleasant, companionable, warm and kindly creature; it knocked the bread out of his hand, and thrust its square mouth into his milk, but he shared it willingly, and had a hearty cry over it that did him good.

He did not feel all alone, now that this blundering, toppling, shapeless, amiable baby-dog had found its way to him. He caressed it in his arms and kissed it a great many times, and it responded much more gratefully than the human baby had done in Jim Bracken’s cottage, and finally, despite his bleeding feet and his tired limbs, he fell asleep with his face against the pup’s woolly body.

When he awoke, he could not remember what had happened. He called for Deborah, but no Deborah was there. The moon, now full, was shining still through the queer little dusky place; the figures of the fowls, rolled up in balls of feathers and stuck upon one leg, were all that met his straining eyes. He pulled the puppy closer and closer to him: for the first time in his life he felt really frightened.

“I never touched the pheasant,” he cried, as loud as he could. “I am Lord Avillion! You have no right to keep me here. Let me out! let me out! let me out!”

The fowls woke up, and then cried and cackled and crowed, and the poor pup whined and yelped dolefully, but he got no other answer. Everybody in Big George’s cottage was asleep, except Big George himself, who, with his revolver, his fowling-piece, and a couple of bull-dogs, was gone out again into the woods.

At home, Bertie in his pretty bed, that had belonged to the little Roi de Rome, had always had a soft light burning in a porcelain shade, and his nurse within easy call, and Ralph on the mat by the door. He had never been in the dark before, and he could hear unseen things moving and rustling in the straw, and he felt afraid of the white moonbeams shifting hither and thither and shining on the shape of the big Brahma cock till the great bird looked like a vulture. Once a rat ran swiftly across, and then the fowls shrieked, and Bertie could not help screaming with them; but in a minute or two he felt ashamed of himself, for he thought, “A rat is God’s creature as much as I am; and, as I have not done anything wrong, I do not think they will be allowed to hurt me.”

Nevertheless, the night was very terrible. Without the presence of the puppy, no doubt, the little Earl would have frightened himself into convulsions and delirium; but the pup was so comforting to him, so natural, so positively a thing real and in no wise of the outer world, that Bertie kept down, though with many a sob, the panics of unreasoning terror which assailed him as the moon sailed away past the square loop-hole, and a great darkness seemed to wrap him up in it as though some giant were stifling him in a magic cloak.

The pup had not long been taken from its mother, and had been teased all day by the keeper’s children, and was frightened, and whimpered a good deal, and cuddled itself close to the little Earl, who hugged it and kissed it in paroxysms of loneliness and longing for comfort.

With these long, horrible black hours, all sorts of notions and terrors assailed him; all he had ever read of dungeons, of enchanted castles, of entrapped princes, of Prince Arthur and the Duke of Rothsay, of the prisoner of Chillon and the Iron Mask, of every kind of hero, martyr, and wizard-bewitched captive, crowded into his mind with horrifying clearness, thronging on him with a host of fearful images and memories.

But this was only in his weaker moments. When he clasped the puppy and felt its warm wet tongue lick his hair, he gathered up his courage: after all, he thought, Big George was certainly only a keeper,—not an ogre, or an astrologer, or a tyrant of Athens or of Rome.

So he fell off again, after a long and dreadful waking-time, into a fitful slumber, in which his feet ached and his nerves jumped, and the frightful visions assailed him just as much as when he was awake; and how that ghastly night passed by him, he never knew very well.

When he again opened his eyes there was a dim gray light in the fowl-house, and sharp in his ear was ringing the good-morrow of the Brahma chanticleer.

It was daybreak.

A round red face looked in at the square hole, and the voice of the keeper’s wife said, “Little gemman, Big George will be arter ye come eight o’clock, and ’t ’ll go hard wi’ yer. Say now, yer didn’t snare the bird?”

“No,” said Bertie, languidly, lying full length on the straw; he felt shivery and chilly, and very stiff and very miserable in all ways.

“But yer know who did!” persisted the woman. “Now, jist you tell me, and I’ll make it all square with George, and he’ll let you out, and we’ll gie ye porridge, and we’ll take ye home on the donkey.”

The little Earl was silent.

“Now, drat ye for a obstinate! I can’t abide a obstinate,” said the woman, angrily. “Who did snare the bird? jist say that; ’tis all, and mighty little.”

“I will not say that,” said Bertie; and the woman slammed a wooden door that there was to the loop-hole, and told him he was a mule and a pig, and that she was not going to waste any more words about him; she should let the birds out by the bars. What she called the bars, which were two movable lengths of wood at the bottom of one of the walls, did in point of fact soon slip aside, and the fowls all cackled and strutted and fluttered after their different manners, and bustled through the opening towards the daylight and the scattered corn, the Brahma cock having much ado to squeeze his plumage where his wives had passed.

“The puppy’s hungry,” said Bertie, timidly.

“Drat the puppy!” said the woman outside; and no more compassion was wrung out of her. The little Earl felt very languid, light-headed, and strange; he was faint, and a little feverish.

“Oh, dear, pup! what a night!” he murmured, with a burst of sobbing.

Yet it never occurred to him to purchase his liberty by giving up little guilty Dan.

Some more hours rolled on,—slow, empty, desolate,—filled with the whine of the pup for its mother, and the chirping of unseen martins going in and out of the roof above-head.

“I suppose they mean to starve me to death,” thought Bertie, his thoughts clinging to the Duke of Rothsay’s story.

He heard the tread of Big George on the ground outside, and his deep voice cursing and swearing, and the children running to and fro, and the hens cackling. Then the little Earl remembered that he was born of brave men, and must not be unworthy of them; and he rose, though unsteadily, and tried to pull his disordered dress together, and tried, too, not to look afraid.

He recalled Casabianca on the burning ship: Casabianca had not been so very much older than he.

The door was thrust open violently, and that big grim black man looked in. “Come, varmint!” he cried out; “come out and get your merits: birch and bread-and-water and Scripture-readin’ for a good month, I’ll go bail; and ’t ’ud be a year if I wur the beak.”

Then Bertie, on his little shaky shivering limbs, walked quite haughtily towards him and the open air, the puppy waddling after him. “You should not be so very rough and rude,” he said: “I will go with you. But the puppy wants some milk.”

Big George’s only answer was to clutch wildly at Bertie’s clothes and hurl him anyhow, head first, into a little pony-cart that stood ready. “Such tarnation cheek I never seed,” he swore; “but all them Radley imps are as like one to t’ other as so many ribston-pippins,—all the gift o’ the gab and tallow-faces!”

Bertie, lying very sick and dizzy in the bottom of the cart, managed to find breath to call out to the woman on the door-step, “Please do give the puppy something; it has been so hungry all night.”

“That’s no Radley boy,” said the keeper’s wife to her eldest girl as the cart drove away. “Only a little gemman ’ud ha’ thought of the pup. Strikes me, lass, your daddy’s put a rod in pickle for hisself along o’ his tantrums and tivies.”

It was but a mile and a half from the keeper’s cottage to the mansion of the Sir Henry who was owner of these lands; and the pony spun along at a swing trot, and Big George, smoking and rattling along, never deigned to look at his prisoner.

“Another poachin’ boy, Mr. Mason?” said the woman who opened the lodge gates; and Big George answered, heartily,—

“Ay, ay, a Radley imp caught at last. Got the bird on him, and the gin too. What d’ye call that?”

“I call it like your vigilance, Mr. Mason,” said the lodge-keeper. “But, lawks! he do look a mite!”

Big George spun on up the avenue with the air of a man who knew his own important place in the world, and the little cart was soon pulled up at the steps of a stately Italian-like building.

“See Sir Henry to wunce: poachin’ case,” said Big George to the footman lounging about the doorway.

“Of course, Mr. Mason. Sir Henry said as you was to go to him directly.”

“Step this way,” said one of the men; and Big George proceeded to haul Bertie out of the cart as unceremoniously as he had thrown him in; but the little Earl, although his head spun and his shoeless feet ached, managed to get down himself, and staggered across the hall.

“A Radley boy!” said Big George, displaying him with much pride. “All the spring and all the winter I’ve been after that weazen-faced varmint, and now I’ve got him.”

“Sir Henry waits,” said a functionary; and Big George marched into a handsome library, dragging his captive behind him, towards the central writing-table, at which a good-looking elderly gentleman was sitting.

Arrived before his master, the demeanor of Big George underwent a remarkable change; he cringed, and he pulled his lock of hair, and he scraped about with his leg in the humblest manner possible, and proceeded to lay the dead pheasant and the trap and gear upon the table.

“Took him in the ac’, Sir Henry,” he said, with triumph piercing through deference. “I been after him ages; he’s a Radley boy, the little gallows-bird; he’s been snarin’ and dodgin’ and stealin’ all the winter long, and here we’ve got him.”

“He is very small,—quite a child,” said Sir Henry, doubtingly, trying to see the culprit.

“He’s stunted in his growth along o’ wickedness, sir,” said Big George, very positively; “but he’s old in wice; that’s what he is, sir,—old in wice.”

At that moment Bertie managed to get in front of him, and lifted his little faint voice.

“He has made a mistake,” he said, feebly: “I never killed your birds at all, and I am Lord Avillion.”

“Good heavens! you thundering idiot!” shouted Sir Henry, springing to his feet. “This is the little Earl they are looking for all over the island, and all over the country! My dear little fellow, how can I ever——”

His apologies were cut short by Bertie dropping down in a dead faint at his feet, so weak was he from cold, and hunger, and exhaustion, and unwonted exposure.

It was not very long, however, before all the alarmed household, pouring in at the furious ringing of their master’s bell, had revived the little Earl, and brought him to his senses none the worse for the momentary eclipse of them.

“Please do not be angry with your man,” murmured Bertie, as he lay on one of the wide leathern couches. “He meant to do his duty; and please—will you let me buy the puppy?”

Of course Sir Henry would not allow the little Earl to wander any farther afield, and of course a horseman was sent over in hot haste to apprise his people, misled by the boat-lad, who, frightened at his own share in the little gentleman’s escape, had sworn till he was hoarse that he had seen Lord Avillion take a boat for Rye.

So Bertie’s liberty was nipped in the bud, and very sorrowfully and wistfully he strayed out on to the rose-terrace of Sir Henry’s house, awaiting the coming of his friends. The puppy had been fetched, and was tumbling and waddling solemnly beside him; yet he was very sad at heart.

“What are you thinking of, my child?” said Sir Henry, who was a gentle and learned man.

Bertie’s mouth quivered.

“I see,” he said, hesitatingly,—“I see I am nothing. It is the title they give me, and the money I have got, that make the people so good to me. When I am only me, you see how it is.”

And the tears rolled down his face, which he had heard called “wizen” and “puny” and likened to tallow.

“My dear little fellow,” said his grown-up companion, tenderly, “there comes a day when even kings are stripped of all their pomp, and lie naked and stark; it is then that which they have done, not that which they have been, that will find them grace and let them rise again.”

“But I am nothing!” said Bertie, piteously. “You see, when the people do not know who I am, they think me nothing at all.”

“I don’t fancy Peggy and Dan will think so when we tell them everything,” said the host. “We are all of us nothing in ourselves, my child; only, here and there we pluck a bit of lavender,—that is, we do some good thing or say some kind word,—and then we get a sweet savor from it. You will gather a great deal of lavender in your life, or I am mistaken.”

“I will try,” said Bertie, who understood.

So, off the downs that day, and in the pleasant hawthorn woods of the friendly little Isle, he plucked two heads of lavender,—humility and sympathy. Believe me, they are worth as much as was the moly of Ulysses.

---

Transcriber’s Notes:

Obvious punctuation errors repaired.

Page 22, “thei” changed to “their” (even in their dulness)

Page 51, “draw” changed to “drew” (drew out with his teeth)

Page 70, “gir” changed to “girl” (girl whom he afterwards)

Page 119, “drins” changed to “drink” (drink your reward at)

Page 133, “al” changed to “all” (were all bad trades)

Page 136, “ooks” changed to “looks” (and looks; there is)

Page 139, “beautifu” changed to “beautiful” (beautiful in their own)

Page 140, “mac-roni” over two lines changed to “macaroni” (long coils of macaroni)

Page 155, “grea” changed to “great” (great eyes glared and)

Page 157, “on” changed to “one” (that every one in the long)

Page 204, “the” changed to “she” (she was very ill indeed)

Page 229, “come” changed to “comes” (I never comes)