The Massarenes

by Ouida

“You are such a low boy, Jack,” said Boo with disdain. “Mammy always says so.”

Jack’s brows clouded at his mother’s name. Was he a low boy? he wondered. He did not think so, but then his tutor had told him that no one has any knowledge of themselves. He liked real things, he liked people who told the truth; he hated being called “your Grace”; he loved dogs and horses; he detested fine ladies and all their perfumes and pranks and pastimes; perhaps he was a very low boy indeed.

Jack, after the colonel had shown him that telegram, bought up all the newspapers he could (when he was not watched), and read them with difficulty where the words were long, and understood that his friend had been behaving like a knight of old. How his heart ached, and how his blood thrilled! One thing too added greatly to his pain; the news was more than four months old. Intelligence traveled slowly from the land of the Loomalis, and people did so also. He could not tell at all how his friend was on these especial days when he, himself seated on his own bed to be undisturbed, devoured the chronicles from Capetown in one London journal after another. Jack had heard enough about wounds from shot and sabre to know that they were often mortal, and that recovery, if it ensued, was terribly tedious and slow, and often too uncertain.

In his ignorance and unhappiness he took a bold step. He wrote to Harry’s father, whom he did not know. He composed a letter “all out of his own head.”

“The Duke of Otterbourne presents his compliments to Lord Inversay and wishes very much if you would tell him where Harry is, and if it is true that he is hurt amongst black men. I am so very very anxious, and I want you please to tell me, and no one knows that the Duke of Otterbourne is writing to you, so please don’t say, and excuse these blots; please answer soon, and I am your very affectionate Jack.”

When he had read it over it seemed to him not altogether right; he was afraid it was ungrammatical, but he could not tell where the mistakes were, and he put it in an envelope and addressed it to the Marquis of Inversay, looking out the address in the big red book so dear to Mrs. Massarene, and sealing it with a seal lent him by his friend Hannah, bearing the device of two doves and a rose.

The little note would have gone to the heart of Harry’s father, and would have certainly been answered, but, as Jack’s unlucky star would have it, his mother espied his letter lying on the hall table with her own, and seeing the address in the big childish caligraphy, took it, opened it, and consigned it in atoms to the waste-paper basket.

She was agitated and irritated in an extreme degree by its perusal. What would old Inversay think if he got such a note? He would actually think that Jack knew! She was beyond measure annoyed and alarmed to see this impudent little fellow daring to act and to write all by himself.

In her own way she was herself worried about Harry, although she concealed her worry successfully; it pained her to think of his wounds and his danger; her anxiety did not prevent her from going to theatres and operas, and pastoral plays and dinner-parties, and State concerts and all the rest of it; but still the thought of him hurt her, and no doubt he would come home and be made a pet of by everybody, and be sent for to Windsor, and it would all be rather worrying, and malapropos, and perhaps some woman would get hold of him—women are always mad about heroes—and then that woman would make him talk of herself.

She said nothing about his letter to Jack, who, after watching with eagerness for the post in vain for a week, sadly decided that Lord Inversay must have been offended with a stranger for writing to him. He did not say anything about his disappointment to anyone, for Jack had already learned that our sorrows only bore other people. But he got all the newspapers he could and searched through them every day. Once he saw that Lord Brancepeth had been brought down from the interior, and had been carried on board a homeward bound steamer at Capetown, and although very weak and shattered, it was considered possible the voyage might save him, and that he might rally on reaching his native air.