Me and Nobbles Part 1

'Me and n.o.bbles'

by Amy Le Feuvre.

PROLOGUE.

[_To be skipped by children if they like._]

It was a very silent old house.

Outside, the front windows stared gravely down upon the tidy drive with its rhododendron shrubberies, the well-kept lawn with the triangular beds, and the belt of gloomy fir trees edging the high brick wall that ran along the public road. The windows were always draped and curtained, and opened one foot at the top with monotonous regularity.

No one was ever seen leaning out of them, or even pus.h.i.+ng back the curtains to widen their view. There was a broad flight of steps, and a ponderous door which, when opened, disclosed a long hall, at the end of which was a gaily flowered conservatory. Instinct made people tread gently upon the thick Turkey rugs that were laid upon the polished floor; there was a stillness in the house that seemed to chill one. If you peeped into the big dining-room, the portraits upon the wall eyed you with disapproval; the table, which was always laid with snowy-white cloth and s.h.i.+ning silver, seemed severely austere and formal; the high back chairs and the ma.s.sive sideboards bade you respect their age.

The drawing-room was quite as awe-inspiring, for the blinds were nearly always down, and it had a musty unused scent telling you that its grandeur was not for daily use. The library was gloomier still. Its windows were of stained gla.s.s; books of the dingiest hue surrounded you; they lined the walls; and the furniture and carpet matched them in tone. Ghostly busts on pedestals, scientific machines, and a huge geographical and astronomical globe added to its gloom. The sun had a way of only hastily s.h.i.+ning in when he could not help himself, and he left it till the last moment just before he went to bed. He was not fond of that room, and there was no one in the house that was.

Then there was the morning room, and this was where old Mrs. Egerton spent most of her day. She was a tall severe old lady with no sense of humour and a very strong will. She spent an hour after breakfast with her cook, for housekeeping was her hobby; then she sat at her table writing letters and doing her accounts till luncheon, after which she always went for a drive. In the evening after dinner she read the paper or some solid book, knitted, and retired early to bed. Her daughter, Miss Anna Egerton, was very like her, only she was seldom seen indoors. She was full of good works, and was never idle, for she had more business than she could possibly get through, and her days were so crowded that meals seemed quite an effort. The man of the house, Mrs. Egerton's son, was also always out, and when at home spent his leisure moments in his smoking-room. London claimed most of his time, for he was in a government office, and went to and fro by train, thinking nothing of the hours spent twice a day in a railway carriage.

'A very dull house indeed,' a lady visitor thought at the end of her first day there; and yet, in spite of its quietness, there were just a few indications of another element that puzzled her.

Once she heard a patter of childish feet along the corridor past her door, but that was very early in the morning before she was properly awake, so she thought she must be dreaming. Then, in a secluded path in the shrubberies, she came across a child's glove and a toy watering-can, and as she was going downstairs to dinner, and was pa.s.sing a broad staircase window, she noticed upon its broad ledge a little bunch of daisies. She looked at them and took them up in her hand. She fancied, as she noted the droop of their stalks, that she could see the impress still upon them of a hot, childish grasp, and as she mused, she distinctly heard a childish chuckle of laughter not far away.

'Is your house haunted?' she asked Miss Egerton at dinner.

'Indeed it is not. Why do you ask?'

'There is no child in the house is there?'

'Yes,' replied Miss Egerton, 'there is Vera's child.'

The visitor could not suppress her astonishment, and Mrs. Egerton, noting it, said with extra severity: 'I like children to be kept in their proper place. He has a good nurse, who looks after him entirely.

And I am thankful to say that the nurseries are at the top of the house, so we are not being continually reminded of his presence.'

'He must be a very quiet child.'

There was no response. When Miss Egerton was alone with her friend she gave her a little more information.

'When Vera went abroad with her husband her child was only a few months old, and very delicate, so she was advised to leave him behind. She sent him here at once, without first asking mother's permission to do so, and mother did not like it. We do not care for children; but he is no trouble. Mother visits the nurseries every morning and sees to his comfort and health. When poor Vera died she determined to keep him for good and all. His father never writes to us, or shows the slightest interest in his child. We don't know in which quarter of the globe he is. Of course a child in a house is rather a nuisance, but in another year or two mother means to send him to a boarding-school.

'A child in the house.'

The words rang through the visitor's heart and brain. She began to listen for the faint tokens of the little one's presence. She meditated a raid upon the nursery, and a sally forth from it with the child into the old garden below, where she and he would enjoy laughter and play together. But a telegram called her suddenly away, and the quiet of the house and garden remained undisturbed.

The footsteps still pattered at intervals; the hushed little voice and gurgles of innocent laughter still echoed from distant corners. For the child in the house was not a ghost, and his life is the one of which I am about to tell you.

Chapter I.

'MASTER MORTIMER.'

He was known by the name of 'the Child' by his relations, but his nurse called him Master Bobby. He would say if he were asked himself:

'My name is Robert Stuart Allonby.' And he would raise a pair of wonderful brown eyes as he spoke, in anxious doubt as to whether his name would be liked.

Bobby showed a good deal of anxiety about different things. His favourite sentence was always, 'I wonder, Nurse ----' and very often, noting the impatient frown on his nurse's face, he would stop there, and turn away to his favourite corner in the window-seat, which he shared with 'n.o.bbles,' the comfort of his life.

Bobby was a very small boy, but a big thinker, and he would have liked to be a big talker, but grown-up people were not interested in what he had to say. So he talked in a rapid undertone to 'n.o.bbles,' who always understood, and who smiled perpetually into the earnest little face of his master. 'n.o.bbles' had been given to him a very long time ago by a sailor-brother of Nurse's, who came to tea at certain periods, and who related the most wonderful stories of foreign parts. Jane, the housemaid, always took tea in the nursery upon these occasions, and she and Bobby listened with awed admiration to the handsome traveller.

'n.o.bbles' was only a walking-stick, with a wonderful little ivory head.

It was the head of a goblin, Nurse declared, but Bobby loved it.

n.o.bbles had very round eyes and a smiling mouth, two very big ears, and a little red cap on his head. Bobby took him to bed with him every night; he went out walks with him; he always had him with him in his window corner; and it was n.o.bbles who was treated to all the delicious secrets and plans which only a very lonely little boy could have concocted.

Bobby's nursery was at the top of the house; he reached it by the back stairs, and had to open a wooden gate at the top of them before he could get to it. There were two rooms, one leading out of the other, and both looked out at the back of the house. Bobby spent hours by the window, and he knew every inch of the landscape outside.

First there was a paved yard with a high wall on one side, with a green door in it, through which you pa.s.sed into a walled kitchen garden.

This door was kept locked in fruit time; the gardener, old Tom, kept one key, and Bobby's grandmother the other.

Old Tom was generally working in the kitchen garden, and Bobby watched him from his window with keen interested eyes. Beyond this garden was an orchard which ran down to the high-road. Bobby could not see this road from his window, for a tall row of elms hid it from his view. In the summer, when the windows were open, he could hear the hoot of the motors as they tore along it. But he could see for miles beyond this road. There was a stretch of green fields, two farms, and a range of distant hills, behind which the sun always set. And when he got tired of looking at all this, there was the sky; and the sky to him was a never-ending joy. The clouds chasing each other across its infinite blue, presented the most entrancing pictures to him. Monsters pursuing their prey, ogres changing their shape as they flew, castles dissolving into ocean waves, mermaids, angels, hunters, wolves, chariots and horses. These, and hosts besides, all pa.s.sed before him.

When it was dark in winter-time he would clamber down from his window-seat and content himself with his toys. The nursery was very plainly furnished. It had a square table in the middle of the room; there was one cupboard for Bobby's toys, another for the nursery crockery; a wooden rocking-chair, a low oak bench, and two rush chairs.

The floor was covered with red cocoanut matting. The fire was guarded by a high wire screen, and above the mantelpiece hung a coloured ill.u.s.tration of the battle of Waterloo. Bobby knew every man and horse in it by name. He had his own stories for every one of them, and was found more than once dissolved in tears after looking at it.

'That captain under his horse is so dreadfully hurt, his bones is broken, and he was going home to his little boy!' he would say pitifully, when Nurse would enquire the cause of his grief.

Nurse was a tall thin woman with a severe voice and a soft heart. But though she adored her little charge she never let him know it, and the only time she kissed him was when she tucked him up in his small bed at night. Bobby was quite aware that the grown-up people in the house did not care for him. This did not trouble him; he took it for granted that all grown-up people were the same. With one exception, however.

In the depths of his heart he felt that his unknown father loved him.

One night after saying his prayers, and repeating the Lord's Prayer sentence by sentence after his nurse, he said:

'Who's "Our Father?" Is it mine own, who's far away?'

'Dear, no!' said the nurse, in a shocked tone. ''Tis G.o.d Almighty, up in heaven.'

'Then I shan't call him "Father," 'cause He isn't.'

'For shame, you wicked boy! G.o.d is everybody's Father, He loves you, and gives you everything you want.'

'Does fathers always do that?'

'Of course they do. Fathers always love their children, and work for them, and care for them. And the great G.o.d is called Father because He loves you.'

Bobby thought over this. And he hugged the thought to his heart that he had two fathers, both far away, but both loving him. He knew that G.o.d was the nearest to him; he was told that He watched over him night and day, and could always hear him when he spoke to Him. But his heart went out to his earthly father in an unknown country. And he used to be constantly picturing his return.

On the whole, though he had very big thoughts, and fits of dreaming, Bobby was a happy, merry little soul. Sometimes he strayed along the big pa.s.sage and peeped through the green baize door which led down the front stairs. He had a way of asking Jane what 'the House' was doing, 'the House' being his grandmother, and uncle and aunt, and their visitors. Occasionally he would make breathless little excursions of his own into the rooms which seemed so strange and wonderful to him.

This was generally in the very early morning, or in the afternoon, when everyone was out of doors. Nurse would soon pursue him and bring him back to his proper sphere; but he would have a delightful time whilst the chase lasted, and the very difficulties that beset his investigations made them the more exciting.

One bright spring afternoon he was turned into the kitchen garden to play. Nurse had placed him under the charge of old Tom, for she was busy with her machine, making some holland overalls for him, and she was glad to have the nursery to herself. Bobby was in the seventh heaven of delight. There was nothing he enjoyed so much as a talk with Tom.

'And what's the first thing nice to eat that's coming out of the ground?' he asked, his hands in his pockets and his legs well astride, as he watched Tom sowing some seed in long drills across the square of freshly dug ground.