‘Have you ever carried a case to the House of Lords?’
‘We shouldn’t like to trouble you, sir, thank you, all the same.’
CHAPTER IX.
NURSE.
Victoria is my nurse. There is no doubt of it: I am in her charge. She governs all my goings out, and my comings in, and is told off, I think, to see that I do not drown myself, or fall off the rocks. For a few days I see next to nothing of the others. They are gone out to work long before I get up, and I catch mere glimpses of them in our walks afield. They come up in the evening, to look at me through the windows, but Victoria heads them off, with a promise to produce me on Sunday. I am supposed to be convalescent in the meanwhile. I am quite content, and I sham.
The housewives, of course, see me, as I walk through the village. They have all kissed me, nobody objecting, I least of all. I am the best of friends with the children, and these always call me ‘Lord.’ Victoria calls me by my Christian name.
She wakes me in the morning, feeds me as aforesaid, then takes me for an airing, perhaps to St. Paul’s Point, a thousand feet high, which affords a fine bird’s-eye view of infinitude. When the ascent becomes unusually steep, she grasps me by the arm, and pushes me up. It is useless to try to shake her off; I need her as much in that country as Gulliver needed Glumdalclitch elsewhere. The goats can hardly follow us sometimes. Her education has been neglected in the matter of nerves; she stands on perpendicular summits, and coils her hair; she drops on ledges of rock less than a yard wide, to rescue a stray kid, and walks to and fro on them with a certitude that precludes courage. Never have I felt so small. There is nothing to keep up the fiction of knightly service, not a fan to hold, a carriage door to open, a wrap to arrange. So I make no more pretence of homage to the sex than any other infant in charge. Fractiousness, on the contrary, is rather my cast of mind; if anything, I am a troublesome child.
In all things she is a model nurse, and especially in this, that she teaches me to tell the truth. I had no idea of what truthfulness might mean, till I came here. Victoria never says the thing that is not, and she sometimes misses the most tempting effects of humour, in consequence. Her yea is yea, her nay, nay. So, it seems, the primitive founder from Wapping understood his charge under the Writ. Whatever is she states as it is, and this mere habit often gives her talk the charm of classic prose. The Ancient, as we have seen, in his love-knot cases, supplies the want of a detective police by public confession. I praised her once for this virtue; she said I had strange ideas.
It kills coquetry, though. ‘I don’t think you care for me one bit, Victoria,’ I said one day. ‘Why should I care for you?’ I, of course, expected on her part, as the next move in the game. All the best treatises lay this down as the appropriate answer. But Victoria simply played the native gambit. ‘I am sure I do: I like you very much. How stupid of me never to think of telling you! So does father too.’ I threw a stone at a goat, by way of changing the subject, and Victoria redoubled her attentions all the way home. I could only throw more stones at the goats. Shooting, alas! was out of the question: all the live things were stock, and they had no stock to spare.
She tells me stories, like the best of nurses, stories of that unregenerate early time, when evil was killing itself out of the island, and the Devil stinging himself to death with the fork of his own tail. There is a story of an awful night, which I often ask for. All the native men had risen on all the English, and left but one of them alive, the future law-giver, and him half dead. Then, when darkness fell, the native women stole on the sleeping murderers, and finished them. This was the last massacre; the Devil was dead in Pitcairn. The scene is always with me, as the background of the picture of to-day. Here the sweet benignant maids and wives, the sunshine and the peace; there the dusky furies they sprang from, stealing forth in the night to the deed of blood. Love redeemed, if it did not justify; and ah, how these Southern women possess that finest of the arts! At Tahiti—it is another of Victoria’s stories—when the avenging war ship came out to fetch the mutineers home to be hanged, one of them was torn from the side of Peggy, his native wife, who held an infant at her breast. He lay heavily ironed on deck, when Peggy climbed the side, infant and all, from a canoe—as it was thought, only to say a discreet good-bye. But Peggy behaved without discretion, throwing herself on the poor manacled wretch, hugging his very fetters, to get a little nearer the father of her baby, and sobbing the most heart-breaking things to him in the patois of her isle. He turned, and begged she might be led away, as though he were already tasting something sharper than death. Led away she was, and sent back in her canoe, and she made such haste to die of a broken heart that she was at peace long before he went down in his irons in the storm that nearly destroyed the whole ship’s company, captives and all, on the homeward voyage.
Once, it might have been a ghost story. I am walking with Victoria at night, through a deep gorge, to show her the scene of my disaster in the landing. A high ridge bounds the valley; and chancing to raise her eyes to it, the girl suddenly utters a cry of terror, and clings all trembling to me. ‘Tell me what it is—I cannot look at it.’ Then, as suddenly, she flings herself away from me, cowering, and will not be touched; and, with hands clasped, utters more cries of mystery, in which I am not concerned. ‘Oh!—if!—speak to me, only! come to me! I have not forgotten, I have not done wrong.’ There is certainly something stirring up there, in the green moonlight, but Victoria will in nowise let me obey her order to find out what it is, but draws me back into the shadow of the gorge, and insists on our hurrying home. Amiable and harmless ghost, the girl is mute about thee, and I am fain to be content with thy biography from the Ancient’s lips. The Ridge is haunted by the phantom of a murdered chief, another of the victims of that old wild time. The news of our adventure spreads through the settlement, and no one peeps in at the windows that night.