“‘Comethup,’” said David again, half to himself. “Yes, that’s the name.”
“Oh, I see; family name, I presume?” said the other.
“Yes,” replied David Willis, “a family name. Good-night.” And he went inside, and sat down in the darkness to think about it.
CHAPTER II.
AND MAKES DISCOVERIES.
David Willis stuck to his determination, so suddenly made on that night of the captain’s visit, and the child was duly baptized under the name of Comethup Willis. Simple David Willis chuckled to himself a little over his ingenuity; he grew to like the quaintness of the name, and it was a constant reminder—if such were necessary—of the tragedy which belonged to the boy’s birth. He always spoke the name rapidly when addressing the child or when referring to it to any one else, slurring the cumbrous name that he might hide the secret of it; only to himself did he ever speak it slowly with the added words, “as a flower.” It was a never-ceasing source of joy to him to think how cleverly the name had been conceived; he dwelt upon it lovingly, with the pride of the inventor; and it became on his tongue a caress whenever it was uttered.
Apart from the mere name, the child filled his life and his thoughts to a greater extent than he had ever even dared to hope. He grew rapidly, and shook off the childish ailments which came with his years with greater ease than most children; he had about him, even as a little fellow, the grave, shy tenderness of his mother. Captain Garraway-Kyle murmured once, as he held him at arms’-length and looked critically at him, that he had his mother’s eyes.
It was a strange life for the child, alone with a dreamy man in that old house under the shadow of the church; if he could have written down his impressions of life and those about him at that time, they would have made curious reading. He remembered when it was possible for him, by a great effort, to get both hands up to the door knob, and to twist it round and stagger backward, pulling the door with him; understood fully what a steep and treacherous affair the stone step was which led down to the garden; and what a proud and wonderful day it was when he summoned courage to step straight down upon it, instead of manipulating the descent with one small bare knee on the stone and the foot of the other leg feeling for the earth below. He knew his mother’s garden by heart, and all the wondrous corners of it, where strange things hid which no one saw but himself. He learned early that the roses which grew there, and nodded in a friendly fashion to him as he passed, only grew there for a small boyish nose to be poked up at them to get their scent, and were not to be pulled except on rare occasions, when his father went round the garden with a basket, and gathered the choicest, and tied them into a rude kind of wreath. Comethup knew then that a great expedition was on foot; that they would go out of the gate at the farthest end of the garden, and that he would stumble—holding fast by his father’s hand—through a place where the grass was very soft and very green, and where some of it was raised in long hillocks higher than the rest; a place where large flat stones with curious marks upon them, and little babies’ heads with wings cut on some, cropped up out of the earth. On one of these hillocks the little homely wreath would be laid, and his father would kneel and seem to whisper something behind his hand. He knew that his mother slept there, and that she would never wake up again, and never walk with him, as his father walked, in the garden of the roses. Child though he was, he always felt a little sadness as he stumbled back over the hillocks to the garden gate, because the mother he had never seen lay, an inscrutable mystery, out of his sight under the grass.
There was one never-to-be-forgotten day when he first learned of something outside his own small world. It was Sunday, and the heavy old bells were swinging, and his father had gone out through the sunlight with books under his arm to the church. It struck suddenly upon the child that this day was different from all the rest; that the little maid-servant had a cleaner face and a whiter apron, and that his own tiny suit was one which was laid by in a tall old press all the rest of the week. Most of our impressions, whatever age we may be, come to us through the sense of smell, and Comethup’s impression of the day came to him through the scent of the clothes. They bore the same scent as the big best bedroom upstairs—a room in which no one ever slept and into which he had peeped one day when the door was open; just such a scent as that which hung about it had been wafted out to his nostrils then. He began to see that there must be something “best” about this day also, as there was about everything connected with it.