Wayfaring Men. Lyall Edna
the grim houses, the bustle and confusion, and the sordid misery seemed absolutely hateful; it was not until they happened to pass a theatre, and he caught sight of the name of a well known actor that his face brightened and his tongue was unloosed.
“Oh!” he exclaimed, “does Washington act there? Is that his own theatre?”
“Yes, to be sure,” said Sir Matthew; “you shall go some night and see him.”
“Oh, thank you!” said Ralph rapturously; “how awfully good of you. Father took me once to hear him at Southampton, he was playing in ‘The Bells’ one Saturday afternoon. It was splendid; there was the dream you know, you saw it all before you. He dreamt of the court of justice, and all the time it was his own conscience that was killing him, and his remorse for having murdered the traveller in the sleigh. I thought I should have choked at the end when he believed they were hanging him; he just says, you know, in a sort of gasp, ‘Take the rope off my neck!’ and then he falls back dead, and the play ends. It felt so jolly to get out of the dark theatre into the street, and to find the sun shining, and everything as jolly as usual, and to know that all that dreadful misery wasn’t really true.”
“Not true?” said Sir Matthew reflectively. “H’m!” He looked with a sort of envy at the boy’s clear innocent eyes, then he turned away; whether he were absorbed in his own thoughts or in the observation of the dingy crowd, it would have been hard to say.
They paused at a house in Bow Street where he had to make some inquiry, and Ralph fell into a happy dream about his latest hero the great actor, returning with a pang to the uncomfortable present when the hansom at length drew up at a house in Queen Anne’s Gate.
Feeling very small and desolate he followed his guardian up the broad steps and into the imposing entrance hall.
“Wipe your shoes,” said Sir Matthew, in his brisk authoritative tone.
Ralph obediently complied, and saw somewhat to his amusement that the same command was printed in large black letters on the mat.
“When I have a house of my own,” he reflected, “there shall be a doormat with SALVE on it. Then the chaps will know I’m awfully glad to see them, and that I’m not thinking first of my carpets.”
Sir Matthew, meantime, had been talking to a greyheaded butler; Ralph only caught the closing remark: “And let someone show Master Denmead up to the school-room.”
The butler looked at the small lonely boy in his black suit. “Fraulein and Miss Evereld are out, sir,” he replied unwilling to send this sad-faced little lad into the utter solitude of the upper regions.
“Oh, very well, then you had better come with me, Ralph,” said Sir Matthew, and he led the way upstairs. The boy glanced nervously round as they entered. This was not one of the homelike, comfortable, used drawing-rooms such as he had grown to love at Westbrook Hall, but a great saloon upholstered in the best style of a well-known firm, and as lacking in soul and individuality as a Parisian doll.
There were several people present. Lady Mactavish a peevish-looking woman with small suspicious blue eyes and a nervous manner, shook hands with him and looked him over in a dissatisfied way as though mentally reflecting what in the world she was to do with him.
“Janet,” she called turning to her elder daughter, “this is poor Mr. Denmead’s son.”
Janet, a somewhat sharp-featured clever-looking girl of four-and-twenty, came up and shook hands with him, but her cold light eyes beneath the fringe of red hair, looked to him unfriendly. She just passed him on to her younger sister who was enjoying a comfortable little flirtation at the other side of the room with a middle-aged officer.
“This is Ralph Denmead, Minnie,” she said, returning to her former place, and resuming the interrupted conversation with a lady caller.
Minnie, who was also redhaired, had a more friendly expression, she smiled at him as she shook hands.
“Fraulein has taken Evereld to her French class, but they will soon be home, and then they will look after you,” she said, motioning him to a chair at some little distance from herself and the Major. It was a modern imitation of an antique chair, very hard in the seat, very high from the ground, and with rich carving all over the back which made any sort of comfort impossible. As he sat on it with his legs uncomfortably dangling, he saw the lady who was talking to Janet put up her long-handled eye-glass, and inspect him critically as if he had been some strange animal at the Zoological Gardens. However small schoolboys were not interesting, she soon put down the eye-glass and turned to Miss Mactavish with a question which arrested Ralph’s attention.
“By the bye, have you read ‘The Marriage of Melissa’? It is the book of the season, you must get it my dear at once, everyone is talking of it, and it is an open secret that Sir Algernon Wyte and Mrs. Hereward Lyne wrote it, though of course it appeared anonymously.”
“What is it? A society novel?”
“Yes, and such a plot! There’s a tremendous run upon it they say, and wherever you go you hear people discussing it.”
Then followed a graphic account of the chief characters, and the most difficult situations; it was a plot which made the boy’s ears tingle. He wriggled round in his chair and tried to become interested in the vapid talk of Major Gillot and Minnie, it was doubtless very interesting to them, but to him it seemed the most insane interchange of bantering compliments and teasing replies that he had ever heard. Was this love making? he wondered. If so, they did it much better in books. It was not in this fashion that Frank Osbaldistone wooed Di Vernon, or that John Kidd made love to Lorna Doone.
He looked wearily across to the hearthrug where Sir Matthew was shouting unintelligible jargon about the money market into the ear of a deaf old Scotsman; then in desperation tried to listen to Lady Mactavish’s grumbling voice as she related her difficulties to a soothing and sympathetic friend.
“You are always burdening yourself with other people’s affairs,” said the purring voice of the adept in flattery.
“Well,” said Lady Mactavish, “you see my husband is one of those men who inspire confidence. They all turn to him naturally. And I do assure you he has a perfect passion for adopting children. There’s this boy to-day. To-morrow it will be some other sad case. A little while ago it was Evereld Ewart, poor Sir Richard Ewart’s little girl. You must see her by and bye. Yes, we have taken her in and her nurse and her German governess. It’s been a very great anxiety to me, a great responsibility, though I make no complaint of the child. Still one likes to have one’s house to oneself.”
“And dear Sir Matthew,” remarked the friend, “is fast turning it into an orphan asylum. But there it’s just like him! so noble-minded! So ready to give and glad to distribute!”
There came a little interlude with the tea. Ralph handed about cups and hot scones which looked very tempting he thought. But there was no cup for him; evidently boys of his age were not supposed to feed in the drawing-room. He returned to the mock antique chair with its bony back and thought wistfully of the drawing-room at Westbrook Hall, and wondered whether Mab was at this very moment finishing that particularly good Buzzard cake to which she had so lavishly helped him yesterday. At lunch he had been too miserable to eat, but now he was ravenous, and to be at once hungry and lonely and unhappy was a sensation he had never before experienced. How was he to bear this detestable new life? How was he to take root in this uncongenial soil?
His dismal reverie was interrupted by Lady Mactavish’s voice: “Just ring the bell, Ralph. By this time she must surely be in.” Then as the butler appeared, the welcome news came that Miss Evereld was at that moment on the stairs. Orders were given that she should come in at once.
Ralph looked eagerly towards the open door, and watched the entrance of a little girl who was apparently about a year or two younger than himself. She was dressed in a short black frock trimmed with crape, but nothing else about her was mournful, her nut-brown hair seemed full of golden sunbeams, her rosy face was dimpled and smiling; she seemed neither shy nor forward,