by Ouida
Old John Stearne, the man who kept the gate, had a knotted stick and no scruples as to using it; but John was aged and slept a good deal in his straw beehive chair inside his porch, and the street boys had a nasty trick of swinging themselves up by the ivy, and from that height shying stones at the almshouse cat and grinning at and mimicing Gerry. He liked neither the stones nor the mimicry, but he would never leave the garden and the birds as long as these arch-enemies were visible, or forsake poor Prim, the cat, whose manners were so excellent that she never hurt anything, only sat blinking at mouse-holes in the creepers hour after hour, with her white-tipped paws folded under her breast.
“I do hope the blessed boy aren’t a coward,” thought Mrs. Lane, seeing him so unresponsive and submissive to the insolence of the bigger boys as they made unkind fun of him from the wall coping. She had brought up two generations of boisterous, self-willed, high-couraged children; and Gerry’s exceeding gentleness seemed to her sometimes unnatural. When he went with her across the street to the great church and sang with the choir in his white surplice, she thought he looked like a little angel with his fair curls, and his violet eyes, and his serious mouth, which so rarely smiled.
“But if he don’t have a spice of the devil in him he’ll fare badly and he’ll grow up poorly,” she thought, which was not a reflection fit for the holy place she was in; but all her dear young gentlemen had had very much of the devil in them, and they were now scattered over the world — stirring and successful men, captains of battleships, and colonel-commandants of regiments, and all of them sturdy and honoured sons of Great Britain.
Gerry did not mind anything the street-boys did if they did not get into his garden, or tease the cat, or take the nests which were made by swallows and robins and sparrows, starlings, tomtits, and titmice, on the roof under the eaves, and in the stones of the garden gateway. Mrs. Lane’s square bit of ground between the high box hedges was his especial domain; but all the rest was in a sense his garden. He was never happier or prouder than when one of the old people called to him to come and dig for them, or asked him to give them some of the seed of an annual or a slip from his geraniums.
Gerry’s garden was known to all the neighbourhood, and every one round was good-natured in letting him have a scrap of any plant they possessed to sow or to strike.
“What’ll you be, Gerry, when you’ve grown a man?” Sarah Lane asked him one day across the small oak tea-table, which was always laid out with a black tea-pot, a little brown Toby jug of milk, two cups of old Wedgwood, bread and honey, and sometimes a cake, and always in the centre a little pot of flowers, according to the season, and a white saucer which was to hold Prim’s portion.
Gerry opened his eyes wide at the question.
“Why, a gardener, granny, of course!” he answered.
“Well, ’twas Adam’s trade,” said the old woman, rather disappointed, for she loved soldiers and sailors. “I’m not saying anything against it; ’tis useful work and healthy, though they get rheumatics in their backs very early.”
Gerry drummed with his little fist on his own backbone above his leather belt.
“Birds aren’t rheumatic,” he remarked, “and they’re always out in the damp and the dew; out o’ nights, too.”
“They’ve got oiled feathers, and they don’t never ondress,” said Mrs. Lane rather crossly. “Wouldn’t ye like to go abroad a bit and see the world, Gerry? They all does it nowadays.”
“No,” said Gerry, shaking his curly head. “I’ll never leave you, nor these cots. What ‘ud my garden do?”
“Ye wouldn’t care to see things, lands and people and the like? There’s wonderful flowers, they tell me, in them places where ’tis hot all the year round.”
Gerry shook his head again.
“I don’t want no better than we’ve got,” he answered, and touched the moss roses which he had put with two York and Lancaster in the centre of the table. Mrs. Lane laughed, and drank her tea.
“Well, if all on ’em had allus been like you, Gerry, they wouldn’t have found out the Amerikeys; but you’ll alter as ye grow up, my ducky.”
“No I won’t,” said Gerry; and his eyes watched a butterfly beating at the lattice window. “She’s allus going about,” he said meditatively, “and she dies in three days, the book says.”
“Ay,” said Mrs. Lane sadly, “them as gad about dies early sometimes.”
She was thinking of one of her darlings, drowned, when a midshipman, forty years before, in a typhoon off the coast of Kurrachee; and the memory moving her strongly she got up and took Gerry’s head in her hands and kissed his curls.
“Stay in your garden, my dearie; stay with your little flowers and me.”
Her hands shook as they stroked his yellow locks, for she thought: Would she live long enough to see Gerry grow up, and would he lay his roses on her breast when her coffin should be lowered into the pit? “I should like to see him a grown man,” she thought, with that wistful desire of age for longer life, which youth never pities because wholly unable to understand it.
Gerry munched his bread and butter, and watched the butterfly, which was now hovering over the moss roses.
“They’re so pretty; what a pity ’tis they do such a lot o’ damage when they’re grubs,” he said pensively.
“Tell me all about ’em, Gerry,” said Mrs. Lane, who was an excellent listener. With her ears trained by the babbling of many childish voices, she knew how to simulate the liveliest interest in what was being related to her, whilst her thoughts were far away with the base treacheries of the butcher, the false balance of the grocer, the sins of the baker in alum and plaster of Paris, and the many similar crosses which darken the path of the thrifty housekeeper.
In the eighth year of Gerry’s short and happy life a great blow fell upon all the dwellers in Dame Eleanor’s Cots. It was nothing less than a terrible proposal made by Mr. Mayor, in the Town Council of Milltown, to purchase and sweep away the almshouses altogether. In greater cities than Milltown, it was averred, such antiquated institutions were being every day done away with, and mutated into such monetary compensations as might (or might not) satisfy those despoiled.
So the mayor considered; being a man of his time, with nine hundred fellow-creatures making nails for him in hovels, that he might lead his life as a capitalist and a county magnate.
“Utterly out of date!” he said, striking his cane contemptuously on the moss-grown sundial, and surveying with scorn its companions; the stone wall and the iron gateway, and the little creeper-smothered dwellings ranged one after another like the cells in a honeycomb.
To the mayor the sight of that gateway with its pendent masses of ivy and honey-suckle, and its old black iron gates with their double E, formed a standing emblem of retrograde obstinacy and bigoted superstition. A slaughter-house, an engine shed, a brewery, a factory, a foundry, a laboratory, would be, when placed there in their stead, a monument of victorious civilization.
Few of the old folks on the Cots had relatives living; those who had shrank from the thought of being a burden on them. Used to the monastic seclusion of this retreat, they all knew that in the city’s life they would be as blind, and dazed, and stray, as owls pulled out of their holes into the glare of noon.
But more miserable even than all the old folks was the child. From the time his eyes had opened he had seen these walls around him; he had run across this sward; he had played in the shadow of this gateway; he had been lulled to sleep by the evening chimes of St. Michael’s church; he had been roused by the chirping of the sparrows in the creepers and on the tiles; he had been measured for his height against the stone plinth of the sundial; and he had eaten his bread and milk on summer mornings in the shelter of the clipped box edges or under the bushes of sweet-brier and southern-wood. And the garden was his garden now — all his own, trusted to him and blossoming under his hands.
To go away, and leave the place, was an exile as cruel as death. And it would be, not only to leave it, b
ut to leave it to be trampled into nothingness, to be trodden down by men, to be wounded by pickaxes, to be disfigured and destroyed under piles of bricks and of iron.
Prim, scared from her sleep on the turf by the sharp raps of the mayor’s stick on the sundial, scampered away to a safe distance, and then turned round and spat at him with her back arched and her tail on end.
“You should not frighten our cat, Mr. Mayor. She is a very good cat,” said Gerry, who was staring at him, a trowel in one hand, a root in another.
“Who is that unmannerly little boy?” asked the worshipful gentleman; and, on being told, asked by what abuse of the rules of the foundation the child came there?
“You were rude, dear Gerry,” said Sarah Lane. “Children should never reprove grown-up people.”
“He frightened Prim; and Prim can’t speak for herself,” said Gerry. “And I think,” he added, “ that he’s a very bad man, for he trod on the daisies instead of taking the path.”
“He’s no friend, for sure, to the daisies or to us,” said Mrs. Lane, who knew all that the mayor and corporation and county council wished by their united efforts to accomplish. There were many legal difficulties in the path of the destroyers; but in the end she feared these would be overcome, and the destroyers would be successful. Her protector, Dame Eleanor’s descendant, the member for Milltown, told her so; and he did not see his way to oppose so many influential citizens and electors.
Many of these persons thought the principle of almshouses pernicious, and the annual doles to the pensioners therein degrading. Such persons agreed that the houses should be pulled down, the land it stood on sold, and the old people given each a yearly sum with which they could live in hired rooms wherever they pleased. When the last of the present occupants should die, there were to be no more appointments made to Dame Eleanor’s charity; the capital was to lapse to the city, and be used to endow new laboratories in the town hospitals.
The proposal contained much to please many people who were likely to pick the bones of the carcass, especially to please the medical professors of Milltown; but it did not please Dame Eleanor’s pensioners. Headed by John Stearne, they tried to protest vigorously against such a confiscation of rights three centuries old. They even clubbed their shillings and pence together, and paid a lawyer to draw up a statement of the facts, and a protest against the city’s annexation, addressed in the form of a Petition to the Mayor, on whom it made as much impression as the petition of a partridge would make on a head-keeper.
“What has been once given to the people shouldn’t never be took from ’em,” said John Stearne.
That was clear equity; but poor people against rich people play an unequal game, and the occupiers of the almshouses by St. Michael and All Angels had very heavy odds against them from the onset.
Dame Eleanor Ellis had built these almshouses and left them in trust to the borough of Milltown with a sum of money, of which the annual interest was to be spent in keeping the houses in decent repair against age and weather; their architecture was never to be changed nor their statutes.
But in Tudor times Milltown had been a small country borough, of which the only mills were those which turned by wind or water. It was now a city; a great, black, ugly, poisonous wen for the most part, and, as usual, its rapacity had grown with its riches. The town councillors had for many years cast greedy, envious eyes on the land occupied by Dame Eleanor’s Cots. Even the lawyer engaged by the pensioners told them that they were not in accord with the spirit of the age; and the mayor gave them to understand in round-about language that they were a set of antiquated fools, blocking the course of progress.
When his granny and the other inmates talked of the fate which was hanging over them Gerry understood all they were saying, for he was precocious in intelligence and comprehension, though so simple a little lad in many ways, living always with old people and with his flowers.
The old red-brick of the Cots, with the golden nasturtium and the purple and white convolvulus climbing on it, almost broke his heart to look at; it was so bright and so ruddy in the sun, and the thatch above it so alive with birds.
“Could nobody save us?” he asked for the twentieth time of John Stearne. The old gate-keeper shook his white head.
“Not a soul, dearie, not a soul! onless ’twas the Prime Minister hisself.”
“Could he?”
“Lord! yes, dearie; he’s all-omnipotent like —— . But there! What’s the good o’ talking? We might just as well say if yon steeple could walk and talk!”
“Who is Prime Minister now?” asked Gerry.
John Stearne told him, being an old man who read his newspaper regularly. Gerry listened with extreme attention.
“Where does he live?” he asked.
“In London mosely, I believe,” replied Stearne.
“Somebody should tell him,” said Gerry.
Stearne laughed drearily.
“Them people are up above like the sun. Who’s to get at ’em?”
Gerry looked a little scornful.
“He’s only a man,” he answered.
The remark shocked Stearne.
“You’ll be an Anarchist, if you don’t respeckit great folks more’n that,” he said with horror.
Gerry did not even ask what this word meant; he was absorbed in a new idea which had entered his head — a wonderful and daring idea which he hugged to himself as he hugged Prim. He could not breathe a word of it to any one, for even granny would most certainly have considered him out of his senses and have given him a dose of senna tea as a cure for delirium. Gerry was a resolute little lad and courageous; he had considerable ingenuity also in combining plans and ways and means. He went indoors and said to Mrs. Lane:
“If you please, granny, let me have my savings-box.”
She went to her cupboard, took out a little box with a picture of a goldfinch and a hawthorn bough on it, and gave it him. All he earned went into it. It was heavy with copper money.
“Have you anything to put in?” she asked, seeing him walk away with it. He hesitated a moment, then said valorously:
“I’m going to break it open, granny.”
“Lord sakes, child! What for?”
“To get at the money.”
“Of course. But what d’ye want the money for, boy?”
“I would rather not say.”
Mrs. Lane was disposed to be sorely huffed. What! Was a child like this to be allowed to have secrets?
“It’s my own, isn’t it?” he asked, seeing that she was amazed and angry.
“Oh, for that — yes, ’tis your own!”
“Well, then —— ?”
“Somebody’s diddlin’ you out of your pence. There’s a good lot in that ’ere box.”
“I want it for myself,” said Gerry, and went away with it.
He sought out a quiet spot in the churchyard, and with a big stone smashed the wooden bank, and poured out its contents on the slab of a flat moss-grown tombstone. There were several sixpences, a great number of pence and halfpence, and one half-crown; all counted, the sum mounted up to fourteen shillings odd, for the box had not been opened for two years. He had always meant to buy a black silk gown for Mrs. Lane with its contents.
He went to his garden with the money in his handkerchief, leaving the pieces of the broken box behind him. Being, as he thought, unobserved, he dug a hole under a southernwood bush and put the money into it, then filled up the hole again.
“It will be safe there till to-morrow morning,” he thought as he trod the moist earth flat over it.
Prim sat and looked on without sympathy. She thought she could dig better holes with her claws.
Mrs. Lane, herself unseen, saw from within what Gerry was doing. “He thinks ’tisn’t safe in the house,” she thought, and, reassured that he was not foolishly squandering his savings, she forbore to speak on the matter; after all, she reflected, it was no use to force a child’s confidence, and Gerry was a prudent little man. Nevertheless, i
t pained her that he did not confide in her, and to see him so “miserly-like” over his hoard.
All that day Gerry was silent, even more so than usual, and he was “off his food,” as Sarah Lane phrased it, and he seemed always lost in reverie. At tea his eyes were always glancing through the lattice at the bush of southernwood.
It was a fine evening in May.
“Shall we go for a walk on the moors, Gerry?” asked John Stearne.
But Gerry, who loved such a walk be-yond everything, said he must work in the garden, for things were so dry, and did so, until he was called in at eight o’clock to take his bread and milk, and go to bed.
He slept in a little closet adjoining Mrs. Lane’s chamber underneath the eaves, where he could see the building of the swallows’ nest and the budding of the Noisette rose. He did not sleep very much this night, which seemed to him unusually long; and the twittering morning song of the birds in the first greyness of dawn aroused him from a troubled slumber. He rose, washed, dressed, and went downstairs.
It was his habit to make “a bit o’ fire,” as Sarah Lane called it, put on the kettle, and then go to work in his garden, so that the old woman was not disturbed by his movements, as she was used to hear him stir at that hour. But when the kettle was on, and the breakfast things set ready, Gerry, instead of gardening, put on his Sunday blouse and knickerbockers, which he had brought into the kitchen, and went and dug up his savings in the dark and dewy garden. Then he possessed himself of a copy of the Petition which was in Sarah Lane’s workbox, and, taking up Prim, tried to put that calm and methodical person into a basket; “for if he sees Prim he’ll feel so sorry for her to be turned out,” he thought. But she, ignorant of the momentous reasons which justified this attempt at her incarceration, spit, scratched, and became suddenly such a demon of rage, that he gave up the effort as hopeless; moreover, he heard the church clock chime a quarter to six, and remembered that the first train to London left Milltown at twelve minutes past six.