“Choosing teachers for a lad with a future so important is of course a most delicate matter. One cannot exercise too much care, or seek too experienced advice.”
Mr. Henry Scoble lolled back in his chair and laughed — with enjoyment rather than annoyance.
“Mr. Elliot, my dear cousin,” he said easily to Frances, “does not know that though I hunt four days a week through the winter, I am none the less a Fellow of Oriel and a scholar. Yes, Mr. Elliot, a scholar. If your attention had ever turned to the poet, Propertius — is it too much to suggest that it never has? — you would have found your way made easier by some trumpery notes of mine. I was glad therefore to offer some suggestions for the direction of my young relative’s studies.”
Mr. Elliot was staggered.
“I hadn’t an idea,” he mumbled. “You must forgive me if I seemed to hint that any other advice should be sought; and so —— —” all his admiration for cultured accomplishment showed in his face—” and so you actually lecture at Oriel?”
Mr. Henry Scoble shrugged his shoulders.
“I do, Mr. Elliot. I am a poor man,” and then he leaned forward and his manner changed altogether.
“But my fortunes are a very small matter compared with those of the boy we are talking about. Latin, Mr. Elliot! You shall give me your opinion upon that in a minute.” It was quite obvious that he would not have given an old frying-pan for Mr. Elliot’s opinion. “In the education of a gentleman, Latin is the first necessity. And not only because Latin makes good tags to a speech, or because the language has a sonority and rhythm which cannot but be of value to one occupying a great position. But above all, because there is a sobriety in Latin authors. Observe that word, if you please, Mr. Elliot. Sobriety! Isn’t it the watchword of the Whigs? And we are a great Whig family, looking forward to the leadership of our chief-to-be, Julian Linchcombe.”
Henry Scoble spoke without bluster but forcibly, leaning forward with his elbows folded upon the mahogany table. There was no longer any indifference in his face or his eyes; and Mr. Elliot, looking round the room where family portraits were framed in the white panels of the walls, understood, or thought that he understood, the spirit in which Henry Scoble spoke.
“For myself,” he said, “I remember that Gaul was divided into three parts and that Virgil sang of arms and the man. And there my Latin comes to a full stop, and, to be honest, I don’t feel a penny the worse for it. But then I don’t belong to a great Whig family.”
“To be sure you don’t,” Henry agreed heartily, and Mr. Elliot was a trifle nettled at being taken up so readily. He was spurred on to put in a word for a subject much nearer to his heart than Latin.
“We ought perhaps not to forget that Julian has a rare and lovely voice.”
Did he notice a sharp flash in the lady’s eyes? A curious hint of a smile, at once amused and disdainful upon her lips? But Mr. Elliot stuck to his point.
“Julian’s father certainly recognized its beauty.
He was having it trained under the best advice. Was not Dr. Handel of the Royal Music himself brought down to Grest? And ought you — I have no right of course, beyond what my old friendship with his father gives me, to interfere — ought you not to continue as the father began?”
Frances Scoble tossed her head back impatiently.
“His voice! Not so great a thing perhaps as teachers in want of a fee are inclined to make out, Mr. Elliot,” she cried with, surely, a spice of venom in the words.
Henry slipped swiftly and smoothly in.
“What my cousin means is that the mere graces of life, music, singing, are at this moment not so important. We shall not neglect them. You may be assured of that, Mr. Elliot. But — well — let me put it in a sentence—” and he smiled: he had when he chose the charming smile of the Linchcombe family. “We don’t want a troubadour in the family, do we? So,” and he waved his hands, “the sobriety of the Latins! More of Horace than of the Odyssey. For to tell you the truth—” He broke off and turned to his cousin. “My dear cousin, I think we ought to take Mr. Elliot fully into our confidence, since we are fortunate enough to have him with us.”
Frances nodded her head very definitely. A conjecture flashed in and out of Mr. Elliot’s thoughts. Were these two coming by a devious way to whatever strange cause it was which had prompted their invitation.
“Julian is nervous for his age,” Henry continued.
“He has odd fancies. He’s a dreamer of queer, outlandish dreams. He is a little more sensitive to impressions perhaps than he should be.” Mr. Elliot could not find in this farrago of words amongst which Henry was treading, as it were on tiptoe, anything very alarming. “In fact we are rather disturbed,” Henry declared and he turned to his cousin. “Frances, tell Mr. Elliot what happens.”
Lady Frances Scoble threw a glance towards the little ormolu clock which stood on the marble mantelpiece in front of a Hondecoeter picture of a peacock and hens with a stately mansion in the distance.
“Yes,” she answered quickly. “It is almost ten.”
“Oh, of course, I didn’t mean that....” Henry began, and his voice trailed away.
“I shall have to go in any case,” said Frances.
“Well, of course, I am merely the tutor,” observed Mr. Henry. “It’s for you, my dear, altogether.” Whatever it was, it seemed to James Elliot that they were making a great to-do before they let him into the secret. But for their very manifest concern, he would have believed that they were deliberately engaged in fomenting in him a condition of excitement and expectation.
“At ten, or a little after, every night,” Frances explained, “Julian is seized in his sleep by some sort of horror. If he is alone, he wakens with a scream, a scream of sheer terror. If I am with him in time — and I make it a rule to be — and hold him close and comfort him — it’s the sound of the words as much as their meaning which soothes and quiets him,” she explained with a smile, “why then he never really wakes up at all. He lies back upon his pillow, the fear dies out of his face and he sleeps till morning.”
“Does he never say what waked him — what terrified him?” asked Elliot.
“He remembers nothing the next morning.”
“Not even when you are not at his side, when he wakes screaming?”
“Not even then.”
Mr. Elliot, in his turn, was disturbed. Hysteria? But the boy wasn’t hysterical. Mr. Elliot was indignant that so outrageous an idea should have occurred to him.
Frances Scoble got up from her chair.
“You are going up to him?” Elliot asked.
“Yes. Will you come with me?”
I was going to ask for your consent.”
II. MR. ELLIOT IS PUZZLED
MR. ELLIOT FOLLOWED her along a corridor towards the east side of the house. Ever since Grest had been built there had been a great bedroom and a dressing-room on the ground floor which had been used by the owner of the house. It was Julian’s room by right of birth; but when the lights were all out, and servants and guests were all comfortably bedded on the upper floor, it was a lonely part of the house, given over to echoes and all those sly, menacing, mysterious sounds which emanate when darkness and silence brings furniture to life.
“Julian is alone down here amongst these big black empty rooms?” Elliot asked in a low voice.
“Gurton sleeps in the dressing-room.”
That was all very well. But a boy of twelve? Imaginative too. Wouldn’t a woman have been more desirable?
“His old nurse for instance?” Mr. Elliot asked.
“Old nurses are difficult to please when the tutors come,” said Frances Scoble, and Elliot had no answer. She put her finger to her lips as she stopped at a high pedimented door. She opened it gently and looked in. Then she turned her head and nodded to Mr. Elliot. He followed her into a dark room, big as a wilderness. The walls were hung with brown silk, the windows shuttered and curtained. A door at the side led into the dressing-room and far away, in a great be
d of blue and gold with a shaded night light on a stand at the side, the boy was lost. He was asleep. They could just hear him breathing regularly, normally. Frances Scoble picked up her skirt so that it should not rustle. As they approached the bed, Mr. Elliot upon his tip-toes, they could see Julian. The bed-clothes were tucked up under his chin, his mouth was open just enough to show the gleam of his teeth, the dark eyelashes lay quiet upon his cheeks. There was colour in his face. Except for the lift and fall of his chest, he lay without movement, untroubled by dark dreams, a boy just stoking himself with sleep to seize his handfuls of the glory and wonder of the next day. Mr. Elliot could hardly refrain from a chuckle of sheer pleasure.
But Frances Scoble was not satisfied. She lifted a hand to ensure Mr. Elliot’s silence. She drew up a chair to the side of the bed without a sound; she sat down, she drew out her watch from her bosom, looked at it with a shake of the head and held the face of it towards Elliot. The time was still two minutes short of ten. She replaced the watch and leaned forward, watching Julian, her face above and near to his. The night light burned on the stand beyond her. Elliot could only see the dark side of her profile. It was set like ivory, the eyes open and steady like the eyes of an image. Of the two, Elliot would have said that the boy lived, the woman had ceased. But the change came.
Julian stirred. He frowned, his eyelids tightened over his eyes, his face puckered and creased until it was the face of a little old man; and a cry like an old man’s whimper broke from his lips. He pushed the bed clothes down from his chin, but before he could struggle up, Frances had slipped her hands behind his shoulder blades and lifted him against her breast. For a moment or two he fluttered in her arms, his head thrown back, his mouth working and such small sobs bursting from his throat as a boy makes who for his boyhood’s sake will not, though he wants to, give way and weep.
For a little while — about a minute Mr. Elliot reckoned — this agitation continued. Then the whimpering ceased, the small body grew still and Frances Scoble laid him gently back upon his pillow and drew up the clothes to his chin. His breath was as easy, his face as composed as when she and Elliot had first entered the room. Elliot, who had been closely watching the boy with a trouble at his heart which quite surprised him, turned towards the young woman and was startled. Her gaze was fixed upon his face with an extraordinary intensity. Her eyes stared, not at Julian but at him. In the dim gleam of the candle under the shade, they seemed to him black as night — and as unfathomable. Elliot actually recoiled a step as they watched him. Then with a sign to him she rose. He followed her to the door of the big, long room.
“In the morning,” she said in a whisper, “he will not remember one thing about this troubled dream of his.” —
“And you of course do not remind him?”
“Never,” she agreed. “Come!”
She opened the door silently and went out. Again Mr. Elliot followed her, but as he was carefully drawing the door shut, he looked back to the bed and now he was more than startled, he was shocked.
The boy’s eyes were wide open. They looked to him enormous. They were watching him as he went. Julian lay quite still; not a hand fluttered outside the sheet. But he was awake, completely awake, and Elliot read in those wide, staring eyes — or seemed to read, he could not be sure whether his imagination played him tricks — a warning, a prayer not to betray him. Elliot nodded his head to reassure him and silently latched the door. Frances was waiting for him in the passage and together they went back to the dining-room where Henry was sitting over his port. Henry half rose from his chair as he saw Elliot’s face.
“Here, sit down!” he cried. “You look a bit white. You are fond of the boy, eh? Like the rest of us, yes!” and as Elliot sat down a trifle heavily and wiped his face with his handkerchief, he passed the decanter across the table to him.
“Try a glass of that! It’ll renew the blood in you. So you saw, eh, you saw?”
Elliot filled his glass with a shaking hand.
“Yes, I saw.”
But what he had seen he did not say. With another glance at him Henry turned a little anxiously to Frances.
“Something new?”
“No,” she answered.
Henry leaned back. He was undoubtedly easier in his mind. “But disturbing.” He sat pursing his lips and nodding his head thoughtfully. “You’ll have to call in the doctors, coz. Though we know what they’ll say.” He laughed contemptuously. “They’ll suck the gold heads of their canes and look as wise as owls and say in a chorus, ‘A change of scene.’ I can hear ’em. There’s some little trouble deeper than that will reach. But that’s what they’ll say, my dear, and you’ll have to try it. A change of scene!”
Mr. Elliot had by this time recovered sufficiently from his shock to wonder whether the half-sister and her cousin were not making too much of this nightly interruption of the boy’s placid sleep. Queer little things which they themselves forgot entered the minds of children and remained somehow to come to life again in their dreams; and they grew out of them, as Julian would. Only — and he pondered a good deal over that word “only”, as he went to bed — only, Julian woke and wanted his waking not to be known. Why? Fear could not be the reason. Yet Mr. Elliot slept ill with the vision of the boy staring at him with open eyes across the room.
“But in this odd world of sevens and sixes
Nothing is quite as it ought to be.”
III. TWO TRUANTS
THE WORDS OF the song jingled in Elliot’s brain until he fell asleep, but in the morning, when the sun slanted across the garden, he took a more cheerful view. He rode with Julian at half past twelve, he on a quiet cob, Julian on a pony, and could hardly believe that the boy at his side was the same who had whimpered in his sleep and then opened his tragic eyes upon him the night before. For all the boy’s talk was of ships and great seamen and great victories upon the waters. He was full to the brim of Commodore Anson who had captured the great galleon Acapulco and just lately brought his ship, the Centurion, back to Spithead after circumnavigating the world in the wake of Francis Drake. All his conversation was in terms of the sea. They never moved to the right or to the left, but always to starboard or to port. However, Julian was very gentle with Mr. Elliot, when owing to his ignorance he made a mistake and Mr. Elliot enjoyed himself immensely. They came out from a ride, cut through a wood on to a high knoll where the fields of grass and plough were spread below them, and in the distance the great house overlooked its Italian garden and its lake.
“So you are going to be an Admiral, Julian,” said Elliot. “And what of Grest?”
The boy looked across the country to his house and said with a smile:
“I shall always come back to Grest.”
“You are fond of it?”
“It’s my home.”
He looked up at Elliot.
“I am not a politician, you see.”
Mr. Elliot nodded gravely.
“No?”
“No. But my wife and children will be there. Between voyages I shall always come back to Grest, and when I’m old I shall stump about looking after it.”
“Oh, yes. Old Timbertoes. I had forgotten you were going to lose a leg,” said Mr. Elliot.
Julian laughed and they rode homewards. Neither had mentioned the ominous little moment of the night before. In the clear daylight with the countryside laughing to the sun and the blood brisk in their veins, night and its terrors were very far away. This was the real Julian Linchcombe, the Admiral to be, who was not a politician but would stump happily about his garden on his wooden leg with his wife and his children and manage his affairs in the quarter-deck style, gruff and kindly, masterful and wise. There was nothing amiss with Julian, Mr. Elliot thought comfortably; and a small incident later confirmed him in his belief.
It happened on the Monday morning. The vicar of the parish church which stood in the park under the east side of the house, had come in to supper after his last service on the Sunday evening. One or two neighbours
were present and Julian, who had been allowed to sit up, had thrown off his mourning and appeared resplendent in a pink silk suit with an embroidered waistcoat of white satin. The hour of ten had struck whilst they were all still at the table and the dreaded moment had passed unnoticed. At eleven on Monday morning Mr. Elliot had made his adieux, his chaise was waiting at the door to drive him away and he went up to his room to make sure that none of his belongings had been left behind. Satisfied upon that point he came out into the long corridor, just as Julian ran quickly up the stairs with a book under his arm. He did not notice Mr. Elliot at the first, for he was continually looking over his shoulder as if he feared to be pursued. He opened a door and slipped through the doorway. At that moment the boy’s tutor, a short-sighted old scholar in horn-rimmed spectacles, called out from the vestibule below.
“Julian! Julian!”
Mr. Elliot followed Julian, thinking that the cry had not reached him. He found himself in a short passage from which a narrow staircase climbed to a great attic hidden away in the roof. Elliot remembered it as a lumber room full of old furniture and cabinets, pictures and big, disused mirrors. On the bottom step stood Julian. When he saw his friend Mr. Elliot, the look of concern upon his face changed to an impish grin. He flourished the book he was carrying, a volume of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, and then laying a finger on his lips, scuttled upstairs as quickly and silently as he could.
Meanwhile the tutor’s voice continued to call upon his pupil from the vestibule. Mr. Elliot went back into the long corridor, carefully closing the door behind him, and saw the tutor panting up the stairs with a hand heavy upon the bannisters. He stopped when he saw Mr. Elliot.
“Have you seen Julian, Mr. Elliot?”
Mr. Elliot lied regrettably without the least hesitation.
“No, Sir! I said good-bye to him in the portico.”
“Dear! Dear!” cried the tutor with a groan. “I am sure that he has gone up to the attic. But I can never find him there. He has some hiding-place.” The tutor wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. “There’s a morning wasted, Mr. Elliot! And I was going to introduce him to Cicero’s De Senectute!”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 729