by E A Dineley
The three older Conway boys were on the bridge, leaning over the balustrade, clinging to Phil by his boots and ankles. Phil was hanging upside down with his head a few feet from the water. His hands were tied behind his back with a pocket handkerchief. He made little movement, just the feeblest jerks of his body.
Robert was white. It was a game that had run away with them. He thought of letting his brothers hold on while he waded into the water and caught up Phil from below, but Stephen and Frankie were only nine and eight years old, they might not be strong enough to hold Phil on their own, and between the three of them, they were unable to pull him up, to undo what they had done. He could call to the twins but what use were they, playing on the bankside as if nothing were happening? Robert was on the verge of panicking as he weighed up what they might do and the consequences of failure. The river was not particularly deep, but the current was swift and none of them could swim. He did not hear Allington’s footsteps until they were nearly upon him and then, when strong arms hoisted Phil back over the balustrade Robert was at first weak with relief and then, with terrible mortification, he saw it was Captain Allington who had rescued them.
Allington busied himself with Phil, who was limp and pale. When his eyes opened he started to weep pathetically, covering his face with his hands. Allington shook him. He said, ‘You are all right.’
Phil muttered, ‘But I drowned. The water drowned me.’
‘No, it didn’t drown you, silly,’ Frankie said. ‘You are not even wet.’
Allington looked at the Conway boys. His cold eye fell on Robert and he said, ‘Well?’
Robert said nothing. He was sunk, reduced, and fought within his mind for some desperate means of redeeming himself. He considered, yet more mortifying, lying, or putting a different light on their game that had not really been a game, but there was the telltale handkerchief that Captain Allington had unknotted from Phil’s skinny wrists.
At last Robert said, ‘He was too heavy, though he doesn’t look heavy at all.’
Allington propped himself against the parapet of the bridge. He did nothing further for Phil apart from allowing him to bury his face in the folds of his coat.
Stephen said cheerfully, artlessly, ‘He was our prisoner.’
‘And how did that come about?’
‘It was just as you told us. There was the Castle of Badejos, there was the river. Robert knows its name. We laid the ladder over it and we all crossed it that way, even Jacky and James, though they are too little. Robert called to them but they wouldn’t stop. They never listen. We nearly forgot the ladder but Robert went back for it. We needed it for the escalade. We pulled it up. It’s ever so heavy and it got stuck in the brambles but we got it there.’
‘And Phil was the French?’ Allington said.
‘Oh yes, we always make him to be the French. The ladder was long enough. Robert got through the window but we went round by the door. Robert said we were to take the enemy from behind. So, you see, we made Phil our prisoner. We tied him up.’
‘And then you didn’t know what to do with him?’
‘Phil is afraid of the river. We didn’t mean to drown him.’
‘I dare say not, merely to torment him.’ Allington turned his attention to Robert. ‘You, I suppose, were the captain in charge of this company?’
Robert said quietly, ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Your conduct,’ Allington said, ‘is unbefitting an officer or a gentleman. If you were a grown man and I your senior, I would have your sword removed and I would place you in arrest, pending a court martial. As it is, you are a boy, but not too young to understand that the torment of a younger child should be as foreign to you as to an officer allowing the torture of a prisoner in his care. Take the ladder and put it back where you found it. Don’t come back.’
Allington took Phil by the shoulder and started to walk towards the house.
Phil, trotting along beside Captain Allington, could not refrain from clinging to his coat with one hand, the terror of the river still with him. At the same time he was ashamed of himself, ashamed of having been so frightened.
He paused by the sundial. He gave Allington’s hand a tug and whispered, ‘I mustn’t upset my mother, nor tell tales.’
‘And how is that to be managed?’ Allington asked him.
‘When I can’t tell truly, I don’t tell at all.’
They went indoors.
Mrs Arthur, having seen the britchka and spoken to Pride, had composed herself to meet Captain Allington, but the sight of Phil’s white face distracted her. She half-stood up and then sat down again, saying, ‘Phil, whatever has happened?’
Phil went to his mother but did not quite accept her embrace. He glanced anxiously towards Allington before saying, ‘Nothing much. You know I don’t like the river and the river gave me a fright.’
‘But you aren’t wet. You can’t have fallen in.’
‘No. Just a fright. I was silly, I expect.’
He looked at Allington again, who said, ‘Yes, he had a shock. He was nearly in the river.’
‘But I’m all right now.’
‘He needs a cup of tea,’ Allington said.
Phil said, ‘I shall go down to the kitchen and sit in the chair by the stove. Cook will give me a cup of tea. Then I shall be better.’ He would go away from his mother, and Captain Allington would answer the questions.
Mrs Arthur let him go, a little reluctant, a little suspicious. ‘What did happen by the river?’ she asked.
‘I don’t think I should tell you what Phil isn’t prepared to tell you himself. That would be dishonourable.’
‘Oh, gentlemen and their honour,’ Mrs Arthur replied, exasperated, and then, looking at him carefully, she said, ‘You are better?’
‘Yes, I am better.’
‘We would like to have known how you were.’
‘The agent would have told you if I had died.’
Mrs Arthur, nonplussed, hesitated before replying. She then said, ‘Are you truly better?’
Though he looked well, she felt something not right.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I am better than I’ve been for years.’
‘Cornwall suits you. Perhaps you wish to live there.’
‘No. I wish to live here. This suits me perfectly well.’
‘And my affairs, are they completed? You must be ready to have Castle Orchard to yourself.’
‘At the end of the month everything we need to know, every last bit of the puzzle, will be in place. I haven’t troubled you with it.’
‘And is it so much of a puzzle?’
‘It’s not a puzzle to me, but it is to everybody else.’
‘It has been so kind of you to take so much trouble. I shall be very relieved.’
‘So you must be. You have been in a state of limbo. You will be free to leave Castle Orchard.’
Mrs Arthur looked at him, uncertain how to reply. How could she possibly want to leave Castle Orchard? In the end she said nothing, turning her back on him and going to the window. She was wearing, he noticed, the faded blue smock over the gown she had worn when he had seen her under the apple trees with Emmy, the day he had come to Castle Orchard the previous autumn. He had been filled with poetry and all things he could express only in his head. He joined her at the window but he was silent. Mrs Arthur still wished to make some sort of reply, but the suddenness of his appearance, Phil and the river, nothing being as it had been, deprived her of words.
Captain Allington then said, ‘I’m watching the wagtails on the lawn, bobbing up and down, their tails too long for their bodies. They remind me of young officers struggling to manage their swords.’
He might, she supposed, have been going to say something further, but the door opened and Emmy ran in. She held out her arms and Allington scooped her up and kissed her. She said, ‘Well, you are bad and naughty. You wrote no letter. Say me a poem.’
Allington said:
‘So we’ll go no more a-roving
; So late into the night;
Though the heart still be as loving
And the moon still be as bright.’
Emmy was not satisfied. ‘How is that? It’s half a poem.’
‘Half a poem is enough for today. I have a lot to do.’
He put the child down and left the room.
Mrs Arthur waited in the dining room with Phil, who she thought very pale. She said, thinking he had been too nervous to speak in front of Captain Allington, ‘What did give you such a fright?’
He replied, ‘Only the river, but I didn’t get wet.’
Annie put jonquils, spring flowers, on the table, to celebrate Captain Allington’s return.
‘You all like him,’ Mrs Arthur said, something she would never have said to the other servants.
‘We know where we are,’ Annie replied. ‘He’s fair, but I never would leave you and the dear children.’
Mrs Arthur knew when Annie said fair she meant more than that, but Annie would not know how to put it into words. It was the power of a good officer who could make his wishes theirs.
Annie said, ‘Cook is cross. She wanted to do something special to send down to the lodge but he gave us no warning. I don’t know where gentlemen think food comes from, that’s what Cook says.’
When they had had dinner and Annie was clearing the plates, Captain Allington returned.
He said, ‘Excuse me, I’m disturbing your evening but I wanted to say something to Phil.’
Mrs Arthur said, with an uncertain smile, ‘You need not apologise for entering your own house.’
‘I suppose I need not,’ he replied, but with an unaccustomed vagueness. He turned to Phil and said, ‘Every day you will hit the punching bag in the stable. When you can hit it hard, Dan will teach you to box.’
‘But I don’t want to hit anybody,’ Phil said, startled.
‘I dare say not, but nevertheless, you must learn it. My stepbrothers will go fifty miles to a prize fight, but it’s not of the least interest to me. For a boy, as an accomplishment, it’s invaluable.’
‘If you want me to do it, then I will.’
Allington glanced at Mrs Arthur. He said, ‘Of course, if your mother doesn’t wish it, we will think no more about it.’
Mrs Arthur thought her opinion on the matter entirely immaterial and that she was consulted only out of politeness. Captain Allington seemed, at that minute, to calmly assume the role of a father.
Phil was tired and went to bed early. He slipped away, trying to see himself in the role of a Jackson or a Belcher, prize fighters, but it seemed unlikely.
Mrs Arthur said to Allington, ‘I hope you will take tea.’ She went into the drawing room. There was a gown of Emmy’s she was lengthening. ‘I wanted to thank you for sending the pony for Phil.’ She thought how he had reappeared, like the genie from the lamp. Whatever had occurred to so frighten Phil had done away with explanations and formal greetings, but he had altered.
Annie brought the tea in earlier than usual. She said, ‘Cook and me didn’t think you ought to be late, seeing as you’ve been travelling, sir. That Pride thought you’d be cross, but ’tis only for your good, Cook and me says.’
Allington said, ‘Thank you, Annie.’ He turned to Mrs Arthur. ‘Phil may as well have Joe. My nephews have outgrown him. I brought him back from Waterloo, or somebody did. Major Wilder brought his baggage pony back from the Peninsula for his niece, so I suppose I grasped that idea. Joe is old now.’
Mrs Arthur made the tea and Allington took the cup from her, relapsing into silence. He sat down by the window. There was still daylight left and he seemed absorbed by the garden.
Mrs Arthur, wondering if they were ever to speak again, said, ‘Tell me what you are thinking.’
‘I was thinking of the sundial. What times will it tell by moonlight? I should be able to calculate that.’
‘Perhaps it goes backwards.’
‘That would suit me very well, forward in the day and backwards at night, like Penelope unpicking her tapestry, time suspended, the hourglass turned and turned so the sand never ran out.’
‘Are Emmy and Phil never to grow up and am I to be altering this hem for ever and ever?’
‘Yes, but you should not need to alter the hem if Emmy is never to grow. Well, time won’t stand still and we shall continue to wind the clocks.’
‘If time had stood still, you might still be in Cornwall. It’s the place of your childhood, so perhaps home.’
‘Yes, that is so, but it is also the place of illness, of being too feeble to do more than lie and look out of the window at a distant strip of the sea. If I’m to be so ill again I should prefer to die. I’m too much reminded of Brussels. I lay day after day, in a house there, a respectable merchant’s house. My room was white, the bed was white and the hangings were white. There were no pictures. The window looked on to the street but I could only see the windows of the opposite house, which appeared to be unoccupied. They never altered. How well I remember that room, every fold in the hangings of the bed, the single chair, the table, the washstand, the medicines. My hostess was dutiful. She grudged me nothing, but I never saw her smile. There was a young girl in the house, some sort of cousin, about fourteen years old. No, older, I suppose. She had a long, flaxen plait and used to skip in and out, running errands. I fell madly in love with her. She was a cheerful child, light-hearted, and in her exuberance inclined to knock over the few things in the room. They were always saying “Hush, remember the poor, wounded soldier.” At least, I believe that is what they were saying. I was too ill to grasp the language.’
Allington came to a halt.
Mrs Arthur, after a while, said, ‘And did she reciprocate your affections?’
‘I never spoke to her nor she to me. I believe she spoke no French, the only language we might have had in common.’ Allington smiled. ‘I don’t think I can have been at my best, my head shaved and bandaged, my arms bandaged, my chest too, my leg in a splint. There I lay, often delirious, always in pain, waiting to die but never quite doing so, quietly teasing myself with a passion for this girl.’
Mrs Arthur thought of this flaxen-haired girl he had so oddly loved.
‘I expect,’ he continued, ‘she is now a matron with her hair arranged on top of her head, and several blond babies. Time will not have stood still.’
He got up and said abruptly, ‘I wish you good night.’
After he had gone, she laid down her sewing. She thought of him with those Spanish girls, with this Flemish child. Was he trying to tell her how transitory were his affections? From the window she could see him walking down to the lodge in the half-light.
Robert Conway found no consolation in the uniform. The three rows of silver buttons, the velvet facings, mocked him. Captain Allington’s words, ‘unbefitting an officer or a gentleman’, returned to him at every moment of the day. His uncle, now long dead, who had once shrugged his living form into the tight green jacket, would never have forgiven him. Sometimes he tried to shift the blame, to accuse his brothers or Phil, but he knew those terrible words would haunt him for ever. He repeated them to himself again and again.
The rector noticed that his son was in a state of disharmony and, as the rector was not accustomed to observations so close to home, he became uneasy and addressed him on the subject. ‘You are out of sorts, my boy. You are growing too fast. Why are you not out of doors? Do not the woods, the river, the meadows of Castle Orchard beckon you?’
‘I can’t go to Castle Orchard,’ Robert said sulkily.
‘My dear boy, why not? We may not have become much acquainted with Captain Allington, but he has not forbidden more humble folk the benefit of his park.’
‘He has me.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. He has only just returned. You must have misunderstood him, or been engaged in some childish prank. I am sure he meant no permanent ban.’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘Pray, tell me why.’
‘No, I can’t. It was
silly. It was nothing.’ Robert flung this at his father as he made a retreat, hastening outdoors into the rectory shrubbery for fear of being forced to tell the truth. Here he crouched on the ground beneath the laurels and plotted enlisting as a common soldier. A few tears spilled down his cheeks. He would go as a volunteer and get his commission and be killed. Robert, his mind running away with him, saw a hundred ways in which he might redeem himself, death being the most satisfactory.
Mr Conway, giving up any thought of the duties he had intended for the morning, walked to Castle Orchard and sent in his card, begging Annie to plead his cause with Captain Allington in allowing him a few minutes of his time. He saw that his nephews, Jacky and James, had followed him.
‘Run home, little boys,’ he said. ‘Uncle is busy.’
Allington, who had just been seeing the agent, received the rector’s message.
‘He begs just a few minutes, sir,’ Annie said. ‘He is a kind gentleman, Mr Conway is, and means good.’
‘But is he useful, Annie?’
Annie thought about this. She then said, ‘Seeing we must have a rector to remind us of our Christian souls and to say our prayers and love our neighbours, why, then he must be useful, sir.’
‘And we can’t do this for ourselves?’
‘And we must be married and buried and baptised, sir,’ Annie continued, ignoring his questions and thinking her arguments in favour of the rector conclusive. ‘He is a good man even if he doesn’t understand ordinary folk too well.’
Allington had the rector admitted and sat down opposite him in the morning room into which spring sunshine streamed and there was a fine view of the river.
‘What may I do for you?’ he asked.
‘It is my earnest wish to be on cordial terms with you,’ the rector started. ‘Of course the rectory living ought to be yours, but the late Mr Arthur, of whom I can’t bring myself to speak, sold it as quick as he could. Nevertheless, for myself as the rector not to be on good terms with you, the landlord, let alone yourself as my neighbour, would, I feel, be injurious to the parish, and my first consideration must be the parish.’