John Halifax, Gentleman Read online

  “Do you?” The lad’s half-amazed, half-grateful smile went right to my heart.

  “Have you been up and down the country much?”

  “A great deal—these last three years; doing a hand’s turn as best I could, in hop-picking, apple-gathering, harvesting; only this summer I had typhus fever, and could not work.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I lay in a barn till I got well—I’m quite well now; you need not be afraid.”

  “No, indeed; I had never thought of that.”

  We soon became quite sociable together. He guided me carefully out of the town into the Abbey walk, flecked with sunshine through overhanging trees. Once he stopped to pick up for me the large brown fan of a horse-chestnut leaf.

  “It’s pretty, isn’t it?—only it shows that autumn is come.”

  “And how shall you live in the winter, when there is no out-of-door work to be had?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The lad’s countenance fell, and that hungry, weary look, which had vanished while we talked, returned more painfully than ever. I reproached myself for having, under the influence of his merry talk, temporarily forgotten it.

  “Ah!” I cried eagerly, when we left the shade of the Abbey trees, and crossed the street; “here we are, at home!”

  “Are you?” The homeless lad just glanced at it—the flight 9of spotless stone-steps, guarded by ponderous railings, which led to my father’s respectable and handsome door. “Good day, then—which means good-bye.”

  I started. The word pained me. On my sad, lonely life—brief indeed, though ill health seemed to have doubled and trebled my sixteen years into a mournful maturity—this lad’s face had come like a flash of sunshine; a reflection of the merry boyhood, the youth and strength that never were, never could be, mine. To let it go from me was like going back into the dark.

  “Not good-bye just yet!” said I, trying painfully to disengage myself from my little carriage and mount the steps. John Halifax came to my aid.

  “Suppose you let me carry you. I could—and—and it would be great fun, you know.”

  He tried to turn it into a jest, so as not to hurt me; but the tremble in his voice was as tender as any woman’s—tenderer than any woman’s I ever was used to hear. I put my arms round his neck; he lifted me safely and carefully, and set me at my own door. Then with another good-bye he again turned to go.

  My heart cried after him with an irrepressible cry. What I said I do not remember, but it caused him to return.

  “Is there anything more I can do for you, sir?”

  “Don’t call me ‘sir’; I am only a boy like yourself. I want you; don’t go yet. Ah! here comes my father!”

  John Halifax stood aside, and touched his cap with a respectful deference, as the old man passed.

  “So here thee be—hast thou taken care of my son? Did he give thee thy groat, my lad?”

  We had neither of us once thought of the money.

  When I acknowledged this my father laughed, called John an honest lad, and began searching in his pocket for some larger coin. I ventured to draw his ear down and whispered something—but I got no answer; meanwhile, John Halifax for the third time was going away.

  10“Stop, lad—I forget thy name—here is thy groat, and a shilling added, for being kind to my son.”

  “Thank you, but I don’t want payment for kindness.”

  He kept the groat, and put back the shilling into my father’s hand.

  “Eh!” said the old man, much astonished, “thee’rt an odd lad; but I can’t stay talking with thee. Come in to dinner, Phineas. I say,” turning back to John Halifax with a sudden thought, “art thee hungry?”

  “Very hungry.” Nature gave way at last, and great tears came into the poor lad’s eyes. “Nearly starving.”

  “Bless me! then get in, and have thy dinner. But first—” and my inexorable father held him by the shoulder; “thee art a decent lad, come of decent parents?”

  “Yes,” almost indignantly.

  “Thee works for thy living?”

  “I do, whenever I can get it.”

  “Thee hast never been in gaol?”

  “No!” thundered out the lad, with a furious look. “I don’t want your dinner, sir; I would have stayed, because your son asked me, and he was civil to me, and I liked him. Now I think I had better go. Good day, sir.”

  There is a verse in a very old Book—even in its human histories the most pathetic of all books—which runs thus:

  “And it came to pass when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit unto the soul of David; and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.”

  And this day, I, a poorer and more helpless Jonathan, had found my David.

  I caught him by the hand, and would not let him go.

  “There, get in, lads—make no more ado,” said Abel Fletcher, sharply, as he disappeared.

  So, still holding my David fast, I brought him into my father’s house.

  11CHAPTER II

  Dinner was over; my father and I took ours in the large parlour, where the stiff, high-backed chairs eyed one another in opposite rows across the wide oaken floor, shiny and hard as marble, and slippery as glass. Except the table, the sideboard and the cuckoo clock, there was no other furniture.

  I dared not bring the poor wandering lad into this, my father’s especial domain; but as soon as he was away in the tan-yard I sent for John.

  Jael brought him in; Jael, the only womankind we ever had about us, and who, save to me when I happened to be very ill, certainly gave no indication of her sex in its softness and tenderness. There had evidently been wrath in the kitchen.

  “Phineas, the lad ha’ got his dinner, and you mustn’t keep ’un long. I bean’t going to let you knock yourself up with looking after a beggar-boy.”

  A beggar-boy! The idea seemed so ludicrous, that I could not help smiling at it as I regarded him. He had washed his face and combed out his fair curls; though his clothes were threadbare, all but ragged, they were not unclean; and there was a rosy, healthy freshness in his tanned skin, which showed he loved and delighted in what poor folk generally abominate—water. And now the sickness of 12hunger had gone from his face, the lad, if not actually what our scriptural Saxon terms “well-favoured,” was certainly “well-liking.” A beggar-boy, indeed! I hoped he had not heard Jael’s remark. But he had.

  “Madam,” said he, with a bow of perfect good-humour, and even some sly drollery, “you mistake: I never begged in my life: I’m a person of independent property, which consists of my head and my two hands, out of which I hope to realise a large capital some day.”

  I laughed. Jael retired, abundantly mystified, and rather cross. John Halifax came to my easy chair, and in an altered tone asked me how I felt, and if he could do anything for me before he went away.

  “You’ll not go away; not till my father comes home, at least?” For I had been revolving many plans, which had one sole aim and object, to keep near me this lad, whose companionship and help seemed to me, brotherless, sisterless, and friendless as I was, the very thing that would give me an interest in life, or, at least, make it drag on less wearily. To say that what I projected was done out of charity or pity would not be true; it was simple selfishness, if that be selfishness which makes one leap towards, and cling to, a possible strength and good, which I conclude to be the secret of all those sudden likings that spring more from instinct than reason. I do not attempt to account for mine: I know not why “the soul of Jonathan clave to the soul of David.” I only know that it was so, and that the first day I beheld the lad John Halifax, I, Phineas Fletcher, “loved him as my own soul.”

  Thus, my entreaty, “You’ll not go away?” was so earnest, that it apparently touched the friendless boy to the core.

  “Thank you,” he said, in an unsteady voice, as leaning against the fire-place he drew his hand backwards and forwards across his face: “you are very kind; I’ll stay an hour or so,
if you wish it.”

  “Then come and sit down here, and let us have a talk.”

  13What this talk was, I cannot now recall, save that it ranged over many and wide themes, such as boys delight in—chiefly of life and adventure. He knew nothing of my only world—books.

  “Can you read?” he asked me at last, suddenly.

  “I should rather think so.” And I could not help smiling, being somewhat proud of my erudition.

  “And write?”

  “Oh, yes; certainly.”

  He thought a minute, and then said, in a low tone, “I can’t write, and I don’t know when I shall be able to learn; I wish you would put down something in a book for me.”

  “That I will.”

  He took out of his pocket a little case of leather, with an under one of black silk; within this, again, was a book. He would not let it go out of his hands, but held it so that I could see the leaves. It was a Greek Testament.

  “Look here.”

  He pointed to the fly-leaf, and I read:

  “Guy Halifax, his Book.

  “Guy Halifax, gentleman, married Muriel Joyce, spinster, May 17, in the year of our Lord 1779.

  “John Halifax, their son, born June 18, 1780.”

  There was one more entry, in a feeble, illiterate female hand: “Guy Halifax, died Jannary 4, 1781.”

  “What shall I write, John?” said I, after a minute or so of silence.

  “I’ll tell you presently. Can I get you a pen?”

  He leaned on my shoulder with his left hand, but his right never once let go of the precious book.

  “Write—‘Muriel Halifax, died January 1, 1791.’”

  “Nothing more?”

  “Nothing more.”

  He looked at the writing for a minute or two, dried it carefully by the fire, replaced the book in its two cases, and put it 14into his pocket. He said no other word but “Thank you,” and I asked him no questions.

  This was all I ever heard of the boy’s parentage: nor do I believe he knew more himself. He was indebted to no forefathers for a family history: the chronicle commenced with himself, and was altogether his own making. No romantic antecedents ever turned up: his lineage remained uninvestigated, and his pedigree began and ended with his own honest name—John Halifax.

  Jael kept coming in and out of the parlour on divers excuses, eyeing very suspiciously John Halifax and me; especially when she heard me laughing—a rare and notable fact—for mirth was not the fashion in our house, nor the tendency of my own nature. Now this young lad, hardly as the world had knocked him about even already, had an overflowing spirit of quiet drollery and healthy humour, which was to me an inexpressible relief. It gave me something I did not possess— something entirely new. I could not look at the dancing brown eyes, at the quaint dimples of lurking fun that played hide-and-seek under the firm-set mouth, without feeling my heart cheered and delighted, like one brought out of a murky chamber into the open day.

  But all this was highly objectionable to Jael.

  “Phineas!”—and she planted herself before me at the end of the table—“it’s a fine, sunshiny day: thee ought to be out.”

  “I have been out, thank you, Jael.” And John and I went on talking.

  “Phineas!”—a second and more determined attack—“too much laughing bean’t good for thee; and it’s time this lad were going about his own business.”

  “Hush!—nonsense, Jael.”

  “No—she’s right,” said John Halifax, rising, while that look of premature gravity, learned doubtless out of hard experience, chased all the boyish fun from his face. “I’ve had a merry day—thank you kindly for it! and now I’ll be gone.”

  15Gone! It was not to be thought of—at least, not till my father came home. For now, more determinedly than ever, the plan which I had just ventured to hint at to my father fixed itself on my mind. Surely he would not refuse me—me, his sickly boy, whose life had in it so little pleasure.

  “Why do you want to go? You have no work?”

  “No; I wish I had. But I’ll get some.”

  “How?”

  “Just by trying everything that comes to hand. That’s the only way. I never wanted bread, nor begged it, yet—though I’ve often been rather hungry. And as for clothes”—he looked down on his own, light and threadbare, here and there almost burst into holes by the stout muscles of the big growing boy—looked rather disconsolately. “I’m afraid SHE would be sorry—that’s all! She always kept me so tidy.”

  By the way he spoke, “SHE” must have meant his mother. There the orphan lad had an advantage over me; alas! I did not remember mine.

  “Come,” I said, for now I had quite made up my mind to take no denial, and fear no rebuff from my father; “cheer up. Who knows what may turn up?”

  “Oh yes, something always does; I’m not afraid!” He tossed back his curls, and looked smiling out through the window at the blue sky; that steady, brave, honest smile, which will meet Fate in every turn, and fairly coax the jade into good humour.

  “John, do you know you’re uncommonly like a childish hero of mine—Dick Whittington? Did you ever hear of him?”

  “No.”

  “Come into the garden then”—for I caught another ominous vision of Jael in the doorway, and I did not want to vex my good old nurse; besides, unlike John, I was anything but brave. “You’ll hear the Abbey bells chime presently—not unlike Bow bells, I used to fancy sometimes; and we’ll lie on the grass, and I’ll tell you the whole true and particular story of Sir Richard Whittington.”

  16I lifted myself, and began looking for my crutches. John found and put them into my hand, with a grave, pitiful look.

  “You don’t need those sort of things,” I said, making pretence to laugh, for I had not grown used to them, and felt often ashamed.

  “I hope you will not need them always.”

  “Perhaps not—Dr. Jessop isn’t sure. But it doesn’t matter much; most likely I shan’t live long.” For this was, God forgive me, always the last and greatest comfort I had.

  John looked at me—surprised, troubled, compassionate—but he did not say a word. I hobbled past him; he following through the long passage to the garden door. There I paused—tired out. John Halifax took gentle hold of my shoulder.

  “I think, if you did not mind, I’m sure I could carry you. I carried a meal-sack once, weighing eight stone.”

  I burst out laughing, which maybe was what he wanted, and forthwith consented to assume the place of the meal-sack. He took me on his back—what a strong fellow he was!—and fairly trotted with me down the garden walk. We were both very merry; and though I was his senior I seemed with him, out of my great weakness and infirmity, to feel almost like a child.

  “Please to take me to that clematis arbour; it looks over the Avon. Now, how do you like our garden?”

  “It’s a nice place.”

  He did not go into ecstasies, as I had half expected; but gazed about him observantly, while a quiet, intense satisfaction grew and diffused itself over his whole countenance.

  “It’s a VERY nice place.”

  Certainly it was. A large square, chiefly grass, level as a bowling-green, with borders round. Beyond, divided by a low hedge, was the kitchen and fruit garden—my father’s pride, as this old-fashioned pleasaunce was mine. When, years ago, I was too weak to walk, I knew, by crawling, every inch of 17the soft, green, mossy, daisy-patterned carpet, bounded by its broad gravel walk; and above that, apparently shut in as with an impassable barrier from the outer world, by a three-sided fence, the high wall, the yew-hedge, and the river.

  John Halifax’s comprehensive gaze seemed to take in all.

  “Have you lived here long?” he asked me.

  “Ever since I was born.”

  “Ah!—well, it’s a nice place,” he repeated, somewhat sadly. “This grass plot is very even—thirty yards square, I should guess. I’d get up and pace it; only I’m rather tired.”

  “Are you? Yet you
would carry—”

  “Oh—that’s nothing. I’ve often walked farther than to-day. But still it’s a good step across the country since morning.”

  “How far have you come?”

  “From the foot of those hills—I forget what they call them—over there. I have seen bigger ones—but they’re steep enough—bleak and cold, too, especially when one is lying out among the sheep. At a distance they look pleasant. This is a very pretty view.”

  Ay, so I had always thought it; more so than ever now, when I had some one to say to how “very pretty” it was. Let me describe it—this first landscape, the sole picture of my boyish days, and vivid as all such pictures are.

  At the end of the arbour the wall which enclosed us on the riverward side was cut down—my father had done it at my asking—so as to make a seat, something after the fashion of Queen Mary’s seat at Stirling, of which I had read. Thence, one could see a goodly sweep of country. First, close below, flowed the Avon—Shakspeare’s Avon—here a narrow, sluggish stream, but capable, as we at Norton Bury sometimes knew to our cost, of being roused into fierceness and foam. Now it slipped on quietly enough, contenting itself with turning a flour-mill hard by, the lazy whirr of which made a sleepy, incessant monotone which I was fond of hearing.

  18From the opposite bank stretched a wide green level, called the Ham—dotted with pasturing cattle of all sorts. Beyond it was a second river, forming an arch of a circle round the verdant flat. But the stream itself lay so low as to be invisible from where we sat; you could only trace the line of its course by the small white sails that glided in and out, oddly enough, from behind clumps of trees, and across meadow lands.

  They attracted John’s attention. “Those can’t be boats, surely. Is there water there?”

  “To be sure, or you would not see the sails. It is the Severn; though at this distance you can’t perceive it; yet it is deep enough too, as you may see by the boats it carries. You would hardly believe so, to look at it here—but I believe it gets broader and broader, and turns out a noble river by the time it reaches the King’s Roads, and forms the Bristol Channel.”