John Halifax, Gentleman Part 6

"Yes. Come up here; never mind the cart."

But that was not John's way. He led the refractory horse, settled him comfortably under a tree, and gave him in charge to a small boy. Then he bounded back across the road, and was up the steps to my side in a single leap.

"I had no notion of seeing you. They said you were in bed yesterday."

(Then he HAD been inquiring for me!) "Ought you to be standing at the door this cold day?"

"It's quite warm," I said, looking up at the suns.h.i.+ne, and s.h.i.+vering.

"Please go in."

"If you'll come too."

He nodded, then put his arm round mine, and helped me in, as if he had been a big elder brother, and I a little ailing child. Well nursed and carefully guarded as I had always been, it was the first time in my life I ever knew the meaning of that rare thing, tenderness. A quality different from kindliness, affectionateness, or benevolence; a quality which can exist only in strong, deep, and undemonstrative natures, and therefore in its perfection is oftenest found in men. John Halifax had it more than any one, woman or man, that I ever knew.

"I'm glad you're better," he said, and said no more. But one look of his expressed as much as half-a-dozen sympathetic sentences of other people.

"And how have you been, John? How do you like the tan-yard? Tell me frankly."

He pulled a wry face, though comical withal, and said, cheerily, "Everybody must like what brings them their daily bread. It's a grand thing for me not to have been hungry for nearly thirty days."

"Poor John!" I put my hand on his wrist--his strong, brawny wrist.

Perhaps the contrast involuntarily struck us both with the truth--good for both to learn--that Heaven's ways are not so unequal as we sometimes fancy they seem.

"I have so often wanted to see you, John. Couldn't you come in now?"

He shook his head, and pointed to the cart. That minute, through the open hall-door, I perceived Jael sauntering leisurely home from market.

Now, if I was a coward, it was not for myself this time. The avalanche of ill-words I knew must fall--but it should not fall on him, if I could help it.

"Jump up on your cart, John. Let me see how well you can drive.

There--good-bye, for the present. Are you going to the tan-yard?"

"Yes--for the rest of the day." And he made a face as if he did not quite revel in that delightful prospect. No wonder!

"I'll come and see you there this afternoon."

"No?"--with a look of delighted surprise. "But you must not--you ought not."

"But I WILL!" And I laughed to hear myself actually using that phrase.

What would Jael have said?

What--as she arrived just in time to receive a half-malicious, half-ceremonious bow from John, as he drove off--what that excellent woman did say I have not the slightest recollection. I only remember that it did not frighten and grieve me as such attacks used to do; that, in her own vernacular, it all "went in at one ear, and out at t'other;" that I persisted in looking out until the last glimmer of the bright curls had disappeared down the suns.h.i.+ny road--then shut the front door, and crept in, content.

Between that time and dinner I sat quiet enough even to please Jael. I was thinking over the beautiful old Bible story, which latterly had so vividly impressed itself on my mind; thinking of Jonathan, as he walked "by the stone Ezel," with the shepherd-lad, who was to be king of Israel. I wondered whether he would have loved him, and seen the same future perfection in him, had Jonathan, the king's son, met the poor David keeping his sheep among the folds of Bethlehem.

When my father came home he found me waiting in my place at table. He only said, "Thee art better then, my son?" But I knew how glad he was to see me. He gave token of this by being remarkably conversible over our meal--though, as usual, his conversation had a sternly moral tone, adapted to the improvement of what he persisted in considering my "infant" mind. It had reference to an anecdote Dr. Jessop had just been telling him--about a little girl, one of our doctor's patients, who in some pa.s.sionate struggle had hurt herself very much with a knife.

"Let this be a warning to thee, my son, not to give way to violent pa.s.sions." (My good father, thought I, there is little fear.) "For, this child--I remember her father well, for he lived at Kingswell here; he was violent too, and much given to evil ways before he went abroad--Phineas, this child, this miserable child, will bear the mark of the wound all her life."

"Poor thing!" said I, absently.

"No need to pity her; her spirit is not half broken yet. Thomas Jessop said to me, 'That little Ursula--'"

"Is her name Ursula?" And I called to mind the little girl who had tried to give some bread to the hungry John Halifax, and whose cry of pain we heard as the door shut upon her. Poor little lady! how sorry I was. I knew John would be so infinitely sorry too--and all to no purpose--that I determined not to tell him anything about it. The next time I saw Dr. Jessop I asked him after the child, and learned she had been taken away somewhere, I forgot where; and then the whole affair slipped from my memory.

"Father," said I, when he ceased talking--and Jael, who always ate her dinner at the same time and table as ourselves, but "below the salt,"

had ceased nodding a respectful running comment on all he said--"Father?"

"Well, my son."

"I should like to go with thee to the tan-yard this afternoon."

Here Jael, who had been busy pulling back the table, replacing the long row of chairs, and re-sanding the broad centre Sahara of the room to its dreary, pristine aridness, stopped, fairly aghast with amazement.

"Abel--Abel Fletcher! the lad's just out of his bed; he is no more fit to--"

"Pshaw, woman!" was the sharp answer. "So, Phineas, thee art really strong enough to go out?"

"If thou wilt take me, father."

He looked pleased, as he always did when I used the Friends' mode of phraseology--for I had not been brought up in the Society; this having been the last request of my mother, rigidly observed by her husband.

The more so, people said, as while she lived they had not been quite happy together. But whatever he was to her, in their brief union, he was a good father to me, and for his sake I have always loved and honoured the Society of Friends.

"Phineas," said he (after having stopped a volley of poor Jael's indignations, beseechings, threats, and prognostications, by a resolute "Get the lad ready to go")--"Phineas, my son, I rejoice to see thy mind turning towards business. I trust, should better health be vouchsafed thee, that some day soon--"

"Not just yet, father," said I, sadly--for I knew what he referred to, and that it would never be. Mentally and physically I alike revolted from my father's trade. I held the tan-yard in abhorrence--to enter it made me ill for days; sometimes for months and months I never went near it. That I should ever be what was my poor father's one desire, his a.s.sistant and successor in his business, was, I knew, a thing totally impossible.

It hurt me a little that my project of going with him to-day should in any way have deceived him; and rather silently and drearily we set out together; progressing through Norton Bury streets in our old way, my father marching along in his grave fas.h.i.+on, I steering my little carriage, and keeping as close as I could beside him. Many a person looked at us as we pa.s.sed; almost everybody knew us, but few, even of our own neighbours, saluted us; we were Nonconformists and Quakers.

I had never been in the town since the day I came through it with John Halifax. The season was much later now, but it was quite warm still in the suns.h.i.+ne, and very pleasant looked the streets, even the close, narrow streets of Norton Bury. I beg its pardon; antiquaries hold it a most "interesting and remarkable" place: and I myself have sometimes admired its quaint, overhanging, ornamented house-fronts--blackened, and wonderfully old. But one rarely notices what has been familiar throughout life; and now I was less struck by the beauty of the picturesque old town than by the muddiness of its pathways, and the mingled noises of murmuring looms, scolding women, and squabbling children, that came up from the alleys which lay between the High Street and the Avon. In those alleys were hundreds of our poor folk living, huddled together in misery, rags, and dirt. Was John Halifax living there too?

My father's tan-yard was in an alley a little further on. Already I perceived the familiar odour; sometimes a not unpleasant barky smell; at other times borne in horrible wafts, as if from a lately forsaken battle-field. I wondered how anybody could endure it--yet some did; and among the workmen, as we entered, I looked round for the lad I knew.

He was sitting in a corner in one of the sheds, helping two or three women to split bark, very busy at work; yet he found time to stop now and then, and administered a wisp of sweet hay to the old blind mare, as she went slowly round and round, turning the bark mill. n.o.body seemed to notice him, and he did not speak to anybody.

As we pa.s.sed John did not even see us. I asked my father, in a whisper, how he liked the boy.

"What boy?--eh, him?--Oh, well enough--there's no harm in him that I know of. Dost thee want him to wheel thee about the yard? Here, I say, lad--bless me! I've forgot thy name."

John Halifax started up at the sharp tone of command; but when he saw me he smiled. My father walked on to some pits where he told me he was trying an important experiment, how a hide might be tanned completely in five months instead of eight. I stayed behind.

"John, I want you."

John shook himself free of the bark-heap, and came rather hesitatingly at first.

"Anything I can do for you, sir?"

"Don't call me 'sir'; if I say 'John,' why don't you say 'Phineas'?"