The Ship of Stars Part 14

A man by the pulpit-stairs shuffled his feet. A sigh pa.s.sed through the Chapel as he rose and relaxed the tension. It was Jacky Pascoe.

He stepped up to the Squire, and, laying a hand on his shoulder, said, gently, persuasively, yet so clearly that Honoria could hear every word:

"Try, brother. Keep on trying. O, I've knowed cases--You can never tell how near salvation is. One minute the heart's like a stone, and the next maybe 'tis melted and singing like fat in a pan.

'Tis working! 'tis working!"

The congregation broke out with cries: "Amen!" "Glory, glory!"

The Squire's lips moved and he muttered something. But stony despair sat in his eyes.

"Ay, glory, glory! You've been a doubter, and you doubt no longer.

Soon you'll be a shouter. Man, you'll dance like as David danced before the Ark! You'll feel it in your toes! Come along, friends, while he's resting a minute! Sing all together--oh, the blessed peace of it!--

"'I long to be there, His glory to share--'"

He pitched the note, and the congregation took up the second line with a rolling, gathering volume of song. It broke on the night like the footfall of a regiment at charge. Honoria scrambled off Taffy's back, and the two slipped away to the high road.

"Shall you tell your father?"

"I--I don't know."

She stooped and found a loose stone. "He shan't find salvation to-night," she said heroically.

As the stone crashed through the window the two children pelted off.

They ran on the soft turf by the wayside, and only halted to listen when they reached Tredinnis's great gates. The sound of feet running far up the road set them off again, but now in opposite ways.

Honoria sped down the avenue, and Taffy headed for the Parsonage, across the towans. Ordinarily this road at night would have been full of terrors for him; but now the fear at his heels kept him going, while his heart thumped on his ribs. He was just beginning to feel secure, when he blundered against a dark figure which seemed to rise straight out of the night.

"Hullo!"

Blessed voice! The wayfarer was his own father.

"Taffy! I thought you were home an hour ago. Where on earth have you been?"

"With Honoria." He was about to say more, but checked himself.

"I left her at the top of the avenue," he explained.

CHAPTER XII.

TAFFY'S CHILDHOOD COMES TO AN END.

The summer pa.s.sed. There was a talk in the early part of it that the Bishop would be coming, next spring, to consecrate the restored church and hold a confirmation service. Taffy and Honoria were to be confirmed, and early in August Mr. Raymond began to set apart an hour each day for preparing them. In a week or two the boy's head was full of religion. He spent much of his time in the church, watching the carpenter at work upon the new seats; his mind ran on the story of Samuel, and he wished his mother had followed Hannah's example and dedicated him to G.o.d; he had a suspicion that G.o.d would be angry with her for not doing so.

He did not observe that, as the autumn crept on, a shadow gathered on Humility's face. One Sunday the old Squire did not come to church; and again on the next Wednesday, at the harvest festival, Honoria sat alone in the Tredinnis pew. The shadow was on his mother's face as he chatted about this on their way home to the Parsonage; but the boy did not perceive it. He loved his parents, but their lives lay outside his own, and their sayings and doings pa.s.sed him like a vain show. He walked in the separate world of childhood, and it seemed an enormous world yet, though a few weeks were to bring him abruptly to the end of it.

But just before he came to the precipice he was given a glimpse of the real world--and of a world beyond that, far more splendid and romantic than any region of his dreams.

The children had no lessons during Christmas, or for three weeks after. On the last morning before the holidays George brought a letter for Mr. Raymond, who read it, considered for a while, and laid it among his papers.

"It's an invitation," George announced in a whisper. "I wonder if he'll let you come."

"Where?" whispered Taffy.

"Up to Plymouth--to the Pantomime."

"What's that?"

"Oh--clowns, and girls dressed up like boys, and policemen on slides, and that sort of thing."

Taffy sat bewildered. He vaguely remembered Plymouth as a ma.s.s of roofs seen from the train, as it drew up for a minute or two on a high bridge. Someone in the railway carriage had talked of an engine called _Brutus_, which (it appeared) had lately run away and crashed into the cloak-room at the end of the platform. He still thought of railway engines as big, blundering animals, with wills of their own, and of Plymouth as a town rendered insecure by their vagaries; but the idea that its roofs covered girls dressed up like boys and policemen on slides was new to him, and pleasant on the whole, though daunting.

"Will you give my thanks to Sir Harry," said Mr. Raymond, after lessons, "and tell him that Taffy may go."

So on New Year's Day Taffy found himself in Plymouth. It was an experience which he could never fit into his life except as a gaudy interlude; for when he awoke and looked back upon it, he was no longer the boy who had climbed up beside Sir Harry and behind Sir Harry's restless pair of bays. The whirl began with that drive to the station; began again in the train; began again as they stepped out on the pavement at Plymouth, just as a company of scarlet-coated soldiers came down the roadway with a din of brazen music.

The crowd, the shops, the vast hotel, completely dazed him, and he seriously accepted the waiter, in his black suit and big white s.h.i.+rt-front, as a contribution to the fun of the entertainment.

"We must dine early," Sir Harry announced at lunch; "the Pantomime begins at seven."

"Isn't--isn't this the Pantomime?" Taffy stammered.

George giggled. Sir Harry set down his gla.s.s of claret, stared at the boy, and broke into musical laughter. Taffy perceived he had made some ridiculous mistake and blushed furiously.

"G.o.d bless the child--the Pantomime's at the theatre!"

"Oh!" Taffy recalled the canvas booth and wheezy cornet of his early days with a chill of disappointment.

But with George at his side it was impossible to be anything but happy. After lunch they sallied out, and it would have been hard to choose the gayest of the three. Sir Harry's radiant good-temper seemed to gild the streets. He took the boys up to the Hoe and pointed out the war-s.h.i.+ps; he whisked them into the Camera Obscura; thence to the Citadel, where they watched a squad of recruits at drill; thence to the Barbican, where the trawling-fleet lay packed like herring, and the shops were full of rope and oilskin suits and marine instruments, and dirty children rolled about the roadway between the legs of seabooted fishermen; and so up to the town again, where he lingered in the most obliging manner while the boys stared into the fis.h.i.+ng-tackle shops and toy shops. On the way he led them up a narrow pa.s.sage and into a curious room, where fifteen or twenty men were drinking, and talking at the top of their voices. The most of them seemed to know Sir Harry well and greeted him with an odd mixture of respect and familiarity. Their talk was full of mysterious names and expressions, and Taffy thought at first they must be Freemasons. "The Moor point-to-point was a walk-over for the Milkman; Lapidary was scratched, which left it a soft thing, unless Sir Harry fancied a fox-catcher like Nursery Governess, in which case Billy behind the bar would do as much business as he liked at six-to-one." After a while Taffy discovered they were talking about horses, and wondered why they should meet to discuss horses in a dingy room up a back yard. "Youngster of yours is growin', Surrarry," said a red-faced man. "Who's his stable companion?" Taffy was introduced, and to his embarra.s.sment Sir Harry began to relate his ridiculous mistake at lunch. The men roared with laughter.

He made another, quite as ridiculous, at the pastry-cook's where Sir Harry ordered tea. "What'll you take with it? Call for what you like, only don't poison yourselves." Taffy referring his gaze from the buns and confections on the counter to the card in his hands, which was inscribed with words in unknown tongues, made a bold plunge and announced that he would take a "_marasheno_."

This tickled Sir Harry mightily. He ordered the waitress with a wink to "bring the young gentleman a _marasheno_"; and Taffy, who had expected something in the shape of a macaroon, was confronted with a tiny gla.s.s of a pale liquor, which, when tasted, in the most surprising manner put suns.h.i.+ne into his stomach and brought tears into his eyes. But under Sir Harry's quizzical gaze he swallowed it down bravely, and sat gasping and blinking.

It may have been that the maraschino induced a haze upon the rest of the afternoon. The gas-lamps were lit when they left the pastry-cook's and entered a haberdasher's where Taffy, without knowing why, was fitted with a pair of white kid gloves. Of dinner at the hotel he remembered nothing except that the candles on the tables had red shades, of which the silverware gave funny reflections; that the same waiter flitted about in the penumbra; and that Sir Harry, who was dressed like the waiter, said, "Wake up, young Marasheno! Do you take your coffee black?" "It's usually pale brown at home," answered Taffy; at which Sir Harry laughed again.

"Black will suit you better to-night," he said, and poured out a small cupful, which Taffy drank and found exceedingly nasty. And a moment later he was wide awake, and the three were following a young woman along a pa.s.sage which seemed to run in a complete circle.

The young woman flung open a door; they entered a little room with a balcony in front; and the first glorious vision broke on the child with a blaze of light, a crash of music, and the murmur of hundreds of voices.

Faces, faces, faces!--faces mounting from the pit below him, up and up to the sky-blue ceiling, where painted G.o.ddesses danced and scattered pink roses around the enormous gasalier. Fauns piping on the great curtain, fiddles sawing in the orchestra beneath, ladies in gay silks and jewels leaning over the gilt balconies opposite--which were real, and which a vision only? He turned helplessly to George and Sir Harry. Yes, _they_ were real. But what of Nannizabuloe, and the sand-hills, and the little parsonage to which that very morning he had turned to wave his handkerchief?

A bell rang, and the curtain rose upon a company of russet-brown elves dancing in a green wood. The play was _Jack the Giant-killer_; but Taffy, who knew the story in the book by heart, found the story on the stage almost meaningless. That mattered nothing; it was the world, the new and unimagined world, stretching deeper and still deeper as the scenes were lifted--a world in which solid walls crumbled, and forests melted, and loveliness broke through the ruins, unfolding like a rose; it was this that seized on the child's heart until he could have wept for its mere beauty. Often he had sought out the trout-pools on the moors behind the towans, and lying at full length had watched the fish moving between the stones and water-plants; and watching through a summer's afternoon had longed to change places with them and glide through their grottoes or anchor among the reed-stalks and let the ripple run over him. As long back as he could remember, all beautiful sights had awakened this ache, this longing--

"O, that I were where I would be!

Then would I be where I am not; For where I am I would not be, And where I would be, I cannot."

It seemed to him that these bright beings on the stage had broken through the barriers, had stepped beyond the flaming ramparts, and were happy. Their horseplay, at which George laughed so immoderately, called to Taffy to come and be happy, too; and when Jack the Giant-killer changed to Jack in the Beanstalk, and when in the Transformation Scene a real beanstalk grew and unfolded its leaves, and each leaf revealed a fairy seated, with the limelight flas.h.i.+ng on star and jewelled wand, the longing became unbearable.

The scene pa.s.sed in a minute. The clown and pantaloon came on, and presently Sir Harry saw Taffy's shoulders shaking, and set it down to laughter at the harlequinade. He could not see the child's face.

But, perhaps, the queerest event of the evening (when Taffy came to review his recollections) was this: He must have fallen into a stupor on leaving the theatre, for when he awoke he found himself on a couch in a gas-lit room, with George beside him, and Sir Harry was shaking him by the collar, and saying, "G.o.d bless the children, I thought they were in bed hours ago!" A man--the same who had talked about racehorses that afternoon--was standing by the table, on which a quant.i.ty of cards lay scattered among the drinking-gla.s.ses; and he laughed at this, and his laugh sounded just like the rustling of paper. "It's all very well--" began Sir Harry, but checked himself and lit a candle, and led the two boys off s.h.i.+vering to bed.