by Ouida
He darted into the garden, looked tenderly at his pinks and other plants, cut his best wallflowers, and five fine carnations, tied them together, with some sweet-scented geranium leaves, and slipped out past John Stearne, as that good man unlocked the great gates. Stearne thought the child was going as usual for the morning’s milk. Once free, Gerry ran like a fawn through the empty streets to the railway station.
Few people were about at that hour, but at the railway, no matter the hour, there were always noise, and bustle, and distracting confusion. Gerry did not let these deter him. He went up to the ticket office and asked for a return ticket, third-class, to London. He was told that there was no third-class to the six-twelve metropolitan express.
“How much is there to pay for the second-class?” he asked, seized with fear that the price should be greater than were his means.
“Nine shillings and fourpence,” replied the clerk at the wicket. “Look sharp.”
Gerry pulled out all his money. Some of it dropped down and was lost, but enough remained. He got his ticket; a good-natured woman picked up and restored to him two of his sixpences. Pushed about, bewildered and deafened, he ran along the platform, and was hoisted by a porter into one of the carriages of the waiting train. He was only just in time. In another moment the engine screamed, the steam roared, and the London express swung out of the station.
Then Gerry realized what he had done.
“Oh, poor, poor granny!” ho said piteously; “whatever will she do? “Whatever will she think? I ought to have left a word!”
But it was too late to do so now. The train rushed on apace, and the flying country and the white clouds of steam blinded him; he shrank into his corner by the door and shut his eyes; he had covered his flowers with his handkerchief. Some people opposite looked at him with goodwill and smiled. He looked so fair, and small, and trustful of his fate.
The long black snake of a train shot through the level country. It only stopped once to take in water, and it was still early in the morning when it reached King’s Cross. In the murk, and roar, and confusion of the London terminus, Gerry felt for a moment as if he should drop down dead on the stones. But he resisted his panic manfully, and tried not to be afraid.
A great sob rose in his throat; he had never before been away from granny and the garden. But everything, he knew, depended upon him. He controlled his agony of fright, and followed the crowd out of the station; he kept fast hold of his flowers.
“Please, where does the Prime Minister live?” he asked of a policeman.
“Don’t cheek me, you brat!” said the constable wrathfully.
Gerry addressed his question to a crossing-sweep.
“Top o’ Victoria Tower,” said the sweeper; and Gerry saw that the people round were laughing at him.
The great number of the crowds, the din of the traffic, the hurry and scurry and pandemonium of noise, made him feel very sick, and he had eaten nothing at all, and his legs felt as if they were giving way under him. He approached a cabman. “Please, where does the Prime Minister live?”
The cabman grinned. “Air ye goin’ to breakfast with ’im?”
“I am going to see him,” said Gerry, seriously.
“Well, git in if ye’ll pay me fust,” said the man, and opened the door of his vehicle, holding out his hand. Gerry showed his half-crown.
“Will that do?”
“Well, I’ll make it do as ye’re a little shaver,” said the cabman, with an air of magnanimity.
“It’s a shillin’ fare,” said another driver. “It’s only a shillin’ fare to old Tear’em’s.”
“Who is old Tear’em?” asked Gerry.
“Ye say ye’re a’goin to see ’im,” replied the cabmen in chorus, and they roared with laughter.
Gerry turned away and walked on; he felt so lonely and lost that he would have burst into tears if his manliness had not forced him to choke down his sobs into silence before these very rude and unkind men.
“If you tell me where the Prime Minister lives, I can walk,” he said to them, but naturally no cabman cared to do this. A little crowd began to gather, and listen and laugh and jeer, nobody knew why.
“We are not rude like that in my town,” said Gerry, his indignation burning away his fears. But he remembered the street boys who climbed up the gateway ivy, and felt that there was not very much difference after all. A gentleman passing by looked at him with curiosity.
“What do you want with the Prime Minister? You are a country child.”
“I’ve got to see him for Granny, and John Stearne, and everybody.”
The gentleman laughed.
“I doubt your getting in, but you can try. Take the cab, if you can pay for it.”
“I’ve half-a-crown,” said Gerry; but when he felt in his pocket his half-crown was there no more, and the two sixpences were gone also.
“I had it only this minute!” he cried piteously. Every one laughed.
“Give me a bob, sir, and I’ll take the boy,” said the cabman who had said it was a shilling fare.
The gentleman tossed him a shilling.
“There’s your fare, little shaver,” he said good-naturedly. “But don’t flatter yourself that you’ll see Tear’em, my little man.”
Gerry thanked his unknown friend, and climbed, he never knew how, into the hansom. He was very pale, and his eyes had dark shadows under them, but he kept tight hold on his flowers.
“I won’t go home alive if I don’t see him,” he said to himself.
That he was all alone in London, without a penny, did not trouble him much. What troubled him much more was this fearful name of Tear’em, given to the great person on whom the fates of himself and his grandmother and his friends and all Dame Eleanor’s Cots depended. It was the name of a savage bulldog in one of his story books, and sent an icy chill through his veins as the cab raced on through the noisy streets, shaking him to and fro on its cushions. But he was not daunted, or dissuaded from his purpose; everything depended on him; John Stearne said the Prime Minister could save them. See the Prime Minister he would, or they should take him home dead; then granny would know he had done all he could, and would forgive him for having run away.
“I hope the kettle didn’t boil over,” he thought, as the hansom rattled along. A kettle left all to itself on the fire was very likely to do so, and perhaps it might have scalded poor Prim. “And if I don’t get back early,” he thought also, “who’ll water the stocks? And the lilies, they want such a lot.”
The hansom was just then pulled up, with the usual cruel jerk, and the poor horse thrown on his haunches.
“Here you are,” said the driver, and made Gerry descend. They were in front of a grand, gloomy mansion with a pillared portico, and a barouche with a pair of roans waiting before the doorway. There were some detectives in plain clothes in the street watching the house.
Gerry rang the bell.
The stately functionary who opened the door looked at him superciliously in silence.
“Can I see the Prime Minister?” asked Gerry?
The door was shut in his face. He waited outside.
“They must open again some time,” he thought.
The bell was, indeed, rung several times by other persons, who received various answers from the doorkeeper; but Gerry got none. At last, exasperated, the man said to him:
“Take yourself off, my lad, or I shall send for a policeman.”
Gerry said patiently, “I want to see the Prime Minister.”
He had edged himself on to the doorstep; the pale London sunrays shone through the colonnade of the entrance on to his little figure; he could see into the dark hall, where several servants stood, and on to the wide staircase with its oak balustrades and tapestries.
A gentleman was coming down the stairs, a powerfully built form bowed by age and by the burden of power. Gerry took off his hat, and before the outraged footmen could stop him, said:
“Please, sir, are you the Prime Minister?�
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The great gentleman looked at him, and signed to his servants to let the audacious intruder stay where he was. The small form, the sunlit curls, the childish voice, recalled a little boy — his son — dead of fever long, long before, at seven years of age.
“What do you want, little man?” he inquired as he came down across the hall.
Gerry, emboldened, came nearer.
“I want to speak to you.”
The gentleman smiled; his colleagues did not address him so very unceremoniously. The scandalized servants anxiously awaited the order to collar the imp and deliver him to the police; but Gerry came nearer still.
“John Stearne said, ‘It’s only the Prime Minister as can do it.’ And John Stearne he knows everything, so I came.”
The statesman was amused. As fortune kindly disposed it, he was merely going for his eleven o’clock drive in the Park, and he had a few minutes at his disposal.
A sorely troubled functionary endeavoured to interfere, but the Minister made no answer; he opened a door on his right, and signed to the little boy to pass into the room beyond. Gerry, triumphant, entered the study, which was book-lined, solemn, and dark; he was too entirely absorbed in his mission to feel either hesitation or timidity, but his pulse beat very fast, and he felt cold and hot by turns.
“Now, what do you want?” said the great personage curtly. No doubt, he thought, the child was only sent to beg; but the small fair face touched his heart and made him think of his own dead boy — dead thirty years and more.
“John Stearne says — —” began Gerry.
“Leave John Stearne alone, and speak for yourself,” said the Minister.
“They’re going to take all our Cots away,” said Gerry; “Dame Eleanor’s Cots, they are; and pull ’em all down, and ruin my garden, and make a railway, and send us all out anywheres, and granny’ll die of it, and me too, and where’ll the swallows go? Prim we can take, but she’ll be miserable, and they’ll do it just when my new rose — and she’s a White Baroness — is comin’ on so beautiful, and we’ll have to go and live in the streets, and they’ll pull it all down, and they’ll build in my garden — —”
And Gerry ceased with a sob.
“I confess that I fail to understand,” said the statesman, in blandest, grandest tones. “What are these Cots? Where are they situated? Try to explain yourself.”
Gerry fumbled with his hand in his breeches pocket and drew out the petition of the pensioners to the Mayor of Milltown.
“We all paid to have this put in writin’ by a man o’ law, and then printed,” he said, as he offered the paper.
The Premier’s countenance changed; the child was only an emissary of grownup importunates! But he deigned to cast his eyes over the petition, and gleaned its meaning with the rapidity of a highly trained intellect.
“The almshouses are to be valued, sold, and built over by the Milltown Corporation — a common case of expropriation, I cannot possibly interfere,” he murmured; then he looked at Gerry again.
“They sent you here?” he asked. Gerry shook his head.
“I come all o’ myself,” he answered. “They don’t know — nobody knows — granny even don’t know.”
“Who paid your journey?”
“Me, myself. I broke my savings-box. ’Twas my own.”
“You are a person of resources,” said the Premier; “of energy also. How did; you find your way here?”
“I asked peoples.”
“Why did you come to me? This is entirely a local matter — a matter for your town.”
“What’s been gived to the people, shouldn’t never be took away,” said Gerry, falling back on his mainstay of John Stearne’s wisdom.
“An axiom; an excellent axiom. But even axioms yield to exigencies. It is wholly impossible for me to interfere.”
“Oh yes, you will! Oh yes, you must!” cried Gerry in a paroxysm of desperate woe. “They haven’t no right to ‘a — lie — enate’ the property o’ the poor. John Stearne says so, and a man o’ law says so too, but we haven’t got money to go against the Corp’ration — else we’d win, and we’d live and die in our homes. And I brought you my wallflowers and my mignonette, but they’ve gone bad in the train; if you put ’em in water, they’ll come to themselves, and they’re out o’ my own garden, and I would have brought you Prim, but she scratched so — —”
“I thank you greatly,” said the statesman, and he took the bunch of faded flowers, with his grandest and blandest air. “They shall have all the water they require.”
He smelt their lingering sweetness, and then laid them down on a table near him.
He placed the petition beside them, and stood lost in thought for a few moments. “It is a mere question of money, I imagine,” he murmured; then he turned to the child.
“What is your name?”
“I’m Gerald Lane.”
The Premier wrote it down on the margin of the petition.
“You live in these almshouses?”
“Yes, sir.”
“With whom?”
“My granny.”
“And all the pensioners are unwilling to be turned out?”
“Oh yes, oh yes!” Gerry’s eyes brimmed over, and his mouth quivered. “We’ll all die of it if they drive us out, because it’s our home, and we love it so, and they’ll break up the grass and the gardens.”
“The reasons scarcely seem strong enough to justify so high-handed an expropriation,” thought the statesman as he looked again over the petition; it was, on a small scale, one of those tyrannous, meddlesome, irritant measures such as, on a large scale, his party loved, and he himself abhorred.
“Go home, my little man,” he said in a kind tone. “You shall hear from me.”
“You won’t let ’em sell?” said Gerry, in anguish.
“I can say nothing. You will hear from me when I shall have examined the matter. Buy something as you go home. You are tired.”
He held out a sovereign as he spoke.
Gerry drew back, and did not put out his hand.
“I don’t take money,” he said, with a flush on his face.
“How did your savings-box fill, then?”
“I earned it, doing people’s gardens.”
“I respect you, my boy,” said the great man; and he laid his hand on Gerry’s curls with the same gesture of benediction as Sarah Lane was wont to use.
Gerry timidly and reverently touched the coat of the great man.
“When you’re so very, very kind, sir,” he murmured, “why do they call you ‘Tear’em’?”
“I am not always kind. Far from it,” said the Premier, with an indulgent smile. “Farewell, my little friend.”
Then he went into the hall.
“Soames,” he said to one of his servants, “there are some flowers to be put in water on the table within; you will accompany this little boy to the station at King’s Cross and see him safely into the train for Milltown. You will give him his luncheon here first.”
Gerry had instinct true enough to keep him silent; he felt the cause of the Cots was gained. The great gentleman bowed to him with his finest courtesy, then wearily went to his carriage; he was grateful to the child for having made him for a few moments forget the toil and travail of power and the baseness and folly of men; he sighed as his head dropped on his breast, and he leaned back on the cushions of his brougham.
“He won’t forget,” thought Gerry; “he didn’t forget the flowers wanted water.”
And, greatly comforted, he ate the good things they gave him with appetite, undismayed by the liveried footmen standing round; then he went with the servant Soames in a hansom cab to King’s Cross.
When he reached Milltown the sun was setting behind the spire of the church, and men were preparing to drag the ink-black river in search of his body; and there was rapture beyond words at the sight of the tired little truant as he entered the almshouse garden.
Gerry took his way home, and entered the square
as calmly as if he had never left it.
“You might ha’ killed me and your granny!” said John Stearne. “Why didn’t you tell us, and spare us all this misery?”
“You wouldn’t have let me go,” said Gerry; and he began to tie up his stocks in the evening air as though nothing had happened.
“You was cruel to me, Gerry,” said Sarah Lane, who had not ceased to sob and laugh by turns. “You was brutal cruel to me.”
“I couldn’t help that,” said Gerry. Who (he thought) could help hurting the seeding grass who had to mow a lawn?
“And you’ve actually seen him?” cried John Stearne, pushing his spectacles up on to his forehead.
Gerry nodded.
“And will he do anything?”
“I don’t know,” said Gerry.
He had grown very much in the eyes of all the dwellers in the almshouses.
He had been to London all by himself, and he had come back safe and sound. To the old folks, who had never been beyond the moors surrounding Milltown, he seemed a prodigious and most intrepid explorer.
But he was strangely and vexatiously silent to them all.
He told them nothing, but worked on in his taciturn, quiet way in his own garden or in theirs, and might never have left the Cots for any adventures that he related, or any signs of travel that he wore.
In his own heart Gerry was sorely anxious. He did not deceive himself or build any castles in the air.
He had told his trouble to the great man, but he had received no promise, nothing in return which could make him feel any surety that he had won the great man’s help. He hoped, but he had only hope; and that is little more to the soul than honey to the stomach. He had done all he could, he had spent all he had, and there was nothing to do but to wait. He sat hour after hour on the base of the sundial, watching to see if a postman or a telegraph-boy passed, and turned in at the gate. Many passed, but none entered.
“You little goose, you little donkey!” said Sarah Lane. “Could you ever expect such a mighty person as that to remember the likes of us?”