“After a speech like that I think you had better not,” said Grant, quietly, but there was a significance in his voice that did not appear on the surface.
Nothing daunted, Riles called on his two English neighbours who were giving instruction in agriculture at so much per head. They signed his recommendation without question. A clergyman who had never been in Riles’ home, who had never met Mrs. Riles, who knew nothing of their style of living, put his name to the paper, as he did so speaking some cheap platitudes about the privilege of giving a Christian home to “one of these little ones.”
And so it came about that Wilfred Vickery, already introduced to the reader as “London,” became the bond-servant of Hiram Riles and his wife, Eliza Riles.
For a week or so the little orphan boy found everything so strange and unreal that he went around as one in a trance. Pure English was difficult enough for him, but the slangy colloquialism of the Riles’ home was almost unintelligible. Half the time he did not know what they said to him, but stared in a vacant, meaningless way which they ascribed to downright stupidity. When he spoke they mocked his language, although using an equally corrupted tongue themselves. For a few weeks, while under the direct care of responsible officers of the Home, the little fellow had experienced a kindness and a personal interest which had begun to unfold before him a life of which he had never dreamed. He had been taught to sing a few hymns, he had been taught to utter a simple prayer, he had been taught that there is a great Father to whom every child is dearer than to even the kindest earthly father. He had never known what an earthly father was, but in the new, great land to which they were going he should soon know—he should find that for every little child in all God’s world some heart beats with the joy of a father’s love, some bosom swells with the wealth of a mother’s devotion. He had been taught these things, and some glimpse of that great real world which lies just beyond the realm of the intellect had come to his poor dwarfed soul and fired his spirit with the unutterable yearning that no man has ever answered in terms of time and sense. He had learned that life is not merely a battle to fill the belly, that the earth is not only for fighting and swearing in, that Love is a real thing, more powerful than hate. The slumbering germ of his spiritual life, deafened by a decade of London’s roar, had been wakened by a brief contact with kindness, and in the birth of imagination the world had taken on a new interest and a new possibility. All these hidden emotions, touched to sudden life, were clamouring for expression, for utterance, when he had come—to this.
The boy’s disillusionment was terrible and complete. They thought him stupid, but he found the guise of stupidity serve his purpose well, and he was more cunning than they. He stole to fill his stomach; he lied to cover his theft. He shirked his labour whenever he could; he destroyed property whenever he dared. When they cuffed him he cursed them; when they swore at him he swore back, and he had the advantage of vocabulary. When they made him milk cows he would pour the milk on the ground and say the cow kicked it; when he was old enough to drive a team he would let it run away whenever opportunity offered. He was to have been sent to school, but he went only on those rare occasions when nothing could be found for him to do on the farm, but he was compelled to write periodical letters to the Home saying how happy he was and how kind Mr. and Mrs. Riles were to him. He was held up as an object of contempt before neighbours and strangers; he was the butt of their coarse humour and the victim of their bullying authority.
The kind officers of the Home had taught him a little prayer, and told him never to forget the good people who were to be his foster-parents in the new land. And every night as he crawled to his musty mattress and blankets in the mouse-chamber already described he would kneel by the broken chair and repeat:
“Jesus, tender shepherd, hear me,
Bless Thy little lamb to-night,
Through the darkness be Thou near me.
Keep me safe till morning’s light.
God bless Mr. and Mrs. Riles and make me a good boy, for Jesus’ sake, Amen.”
He had repeated this prayer nightly for months. One night he had difficulty getting the calves into their pen; they would run every direction except the way he would have them go. He still had his cows to milk, his pigs to feed, his wood and water to carry in, but the calves refused to be housed. When he had them almost in they broke away, and raced into the darkness of the pasture field, jumping and frisking in appreciation of the joke. He ran after them as fast as his tired little legs would take him, sobbing and swearing as he ran, but without success. They could not be found in the darkness, and as he came back, defeated and utterly played out, he met Riles, who had just returned from town and was none the better for his potations. Without a word the ruffian knocked the boy down with a swinging blow on the face, and kicked him almost into insensibility. As he crawled to bed that night, stiff, bruised and battered, he knelt before his broken chair and repeated his nightly prayer. When he came to the words “God bless Mr. and Mrs. Riles” he stopped. The significance of the words dawned upon him in a way he had never quite understood. He was only a little boy, against whom environment and ancestry seemed to have conspired, but he was no hypocrite. He was praying for a man he hated, and the words stuck in his teeth. For a long time he remained there on his knees, looking at the misty light in the half-blackened lantern, and thinking, thinking. He was fighting one of those great fights which come earlier in boyhood than we sometimes think, and which decide in large measure the whole course of after life.
Finally his jaws closed with a snap. “Damn Mr. Riles,” he said, and climbed into bed.