At breakfast next morning he saw by
his parents’ faces that something unusual had
happened. Nothing was said to him about it, whatever
it might be. But once or twice after this, coming
into the parlour suddenly, he found his father and
mother talking low and earnestly together; and now
and then they would go up to his grandmother’s
room and talk.
In some way he divined that there
was a question of leaving home. But the summer
passed and these private talks became fewer.
Toward August, however, they began again; and by-and-by
his mother told him. They were going to a parish
on the North Coast, right away across the Duchy, where
his father had been presented to a living. The
place had an odd name Nannizabuloe.
“And it is lonely,” said
Humility, “the most of it sea-sand, so far as
I can hear.”
It was by the sea, then. How would they get
there?
“Oh, Joby’s van will take us most of the
way.”
Of all the vans which came and went
in the Fore Street, none could compare for romance
with Joby’s. People called it the Wreck
Ashore; but its real name, “Vital Spark, J.
Job, Proprietor,” was painted on its orange-coloured
sides in letters of vivid blue, a blue not often seen
except on ship’s boats. It disappeared
every Tuesday and Saturday over the hill and into
a mysterious country, from which it emerged on Mondays
and Fridays with a fine flavour of the sea renewed
upon it and upon Joby. No other driver wore a
blue guernsey, or rings in his ears, as Joby did.
No other van had the same mode of progressing down
the street in a series of short tacks, or brought
such a crust of brine on its panes, or such a mixture
of mud and fine sand on its wheels, or mingled scraps
of dry sea-weed with the straw on its floor.
“Will there be ships?” Taffy asked.
“I dare say we shall see a few,
out in the distance. It’s a poor, outlandish
place. It hasn’t even a proper church.”
“If there’s no church,
father can get into a boat and preach; just like the
Sea of Galilee, you know.”
“Your father is too good a man
to mimic the Scriptures in any such way. There
is a church, I believe, though it’s a tumble-down
one. Nobody has preached in it for years.
But Squire Moyle may do something now. He’s
a rich man.”
“Is that the old gentleman who
came to ask father about his soul?”
“Yes; he says no preaching ever
did him so much good as your father’s.
That’s why he came and offered the living.”
“But he can’t go to heaven if he’s
rich.”
“I don’t know, Taffy, wherever you pick
up such wicked thoughts.”
“Why, it’s in the Bible!”
Humility would not argue about it;
but she told her husband that night what the child
had said. “My dear,” he answered,
“the boy must think of these things.”
“But he ought not to be talking disrespectfully,”
contended she.
One Tuesday, towards the end of September,
Taffy saw his father off by Joby’s van; and
the Friday after, walked down with his mother to meet
him on his return. Almost at once the household
began to pack. The packing went on for a week,
in the midst of which his father departed again, a
waggon-load of books and furniture having been sent
forward on the road that same morning. Then followed
a day or two during which Taffy and his mother took
their meals at the window-seat, sitting on corded
boxes; and an evening when he went out to the cannon
in the square, and around the little back garden,
saying good-bye to the fixtures and the few odds and
ends which were to be left behind the tool-shed
(Crusoe’s hut, Cave of Adullam, and Treasury
of the Forty Thieves), the stunted sycamore-tree which
he had climbed at different times as Zacchaeus, Ali
Baba, and Man Friday with the bear behind him; the
clothes’ prop, which, on the strength of its
forked tail, had so often played Dragon to his St.
George. When he returned to the empty house,
he found his mother in the passage. She had
been for a walk alone. The candle was lit, and
he saw she had been crying. This told him where
she had been; for, although he remembered nothing
about it, he knew he had once possessed a small sister,
who lived with him less than two months. He had,
as a rule, very definite notions of death and the grave;
but he never thought of her as dead and buried, partly
because his mother would never allow him to go with
her to the cemetery, and partly because of a picture
in a certain book of his, called Child’s Play.
It represented a little girl wading across a pool among
water-lilies. She wore a white nightdress, kilted
above her knees, and a dark cloak, which dragged behind
in the water. She let it trail, while she held
up a hand to cover one of her eyes. Above her
were trees and an owl, and a star shining under the
topmost branch; and on the opposite page this verse:
“I have a little
sister,
They
call her Peep-peep,
She wades through
the waters,
Deep,
deep, deep;
She climbs up
the mountains,
High,
high, high;
This poor little
creature
She
has but one eye.”
For years Taffy believed that this
was his little sister, one-eyed, and always wandering;
and that his mother went out in the dusk to persuade
her to return; but she never would.
When he woke next morning his mother
was in the room; and while he washed and dressed she
folded his bed-clothes and carried them down to a
waggon which stood by the door, with horses already
harnessed. It drove away soon after. He
found breakfast laid on the window-seat. A neighbour
had lent the crockery, and Taffy was greatly taken
with the pattern on the cups and saucers. He
wanted to run round again and repeat his good-byes
to the house, but there was no time. By-and-by
the door opened, and two men, neighbours of theirs,
entered with an invalid’s litter; and, Humility
directing, brought down old Mrs. Venning. She
wore the corner of a Paisley shawl over her white
cap, and carried a nosegay of flowers in place of
her lace-pillow; but otherwise looked much as usual.
“Quite the traveller, you see!”
she cried gaily to Taffy.
Then the woman who had lent the breakfast-ware
came running to say that Joby was getting impatient.
Humility handed the door-key to her, and so the little
procession passed out and down across Mount Folly.
Joby had drawn his van up close to
the granite steps. They were the only passengers,
it seemed. The invalid was hoisted in and laid
with her couch across the seats, so that her shoulders
rested against one side of the van and her feet against
the other. Humility climbed in after her; but
Taffy, to his joy, was given a seat outside the box.
“C’k!” they were off.
As they crawled up the street a few
townspeople paused on the pavement and waved farewells.
At the top of the town they overtook three sailor-boys,
with bundles, who climbed up and perched themselves
a-top of the van, on the luggage.
On they went again. There were
two horses a roan and a grey. Taffy
had never before looked down on the back of a horse,
and Joby’s horses astonished him; they were
so broad behind, and so narrow at the shoulders.
He wanted to ask if the shape were at all common,
but felt shy. He stole a glance at the silver
ring in Joby’s left ear, and blushed when Joby
turned and caught him.
“Here, catch hold!” said
Joby handing him the whip. “Only you mustn’t
use it too fierce.”
“Thank you.”
“I suppose you’ll be a scholar, like your
father? Can ee spell?”
“Yes.”
“Cipher?”
“Yes.”
“That’s more than I can.
I counts upon my fingers. When they be used
up, I begins upon my buttons. I ha’n’t
got no buttons visible that is ’pon
my week-a-day clothes; so I keeps the long sums for
Sundays, and adds ’em up and down my weskit during
sermon. Don’t tell any person.”
“I won’t.”
“That’s right. I don’t want
it known. Ever see a gipsy?”
“Oh, yes often.”
“Next time you see one you’ll
know why he wears so many buttons. You’ve
a lot to learn.”
The van zigzagged down one hill and
up another, and halted at a turnpike. An old
woman in a pink sun-bonnet bustled out and handed
Joby a pink ticket. A little way beyond they
passed the angle of a mining district, with four or
five engine-houses high up like castles on the hillside,
and rows of stamps clattering and working up and down
like ogres’ teeth. Next they came
to a church town, with a green and a heap of linen
spread to dry (for it was Tuesday), and a flock of
geese that ran and hissed after the van, until Joby
took the whip and, leaning out, looped the gander
by the neck and pulled him along in the dust.
The sailor-boys shouted with laughter and struck
up a song about a fox and a goose, which lasted all
the way up a long hill and brought them to a second
turnpike, on the edge of the moors. Here lived
an old woman in a blue sun-bonnet; and she handed Joby
a yellow-ticket.
“But why does she wear a blue
bonnet and give yellow tickets?” Taffy asked,
as they drove on.
Joby considered for a minute.
“Ah, you’re one to take notice, I see.
That’s right, keep your eyes skinned when you
travel.”
Taffy had to think this out.
The country was changing now. They had left
stubble fields and hedges behind, and before them the
granite road stretched like a white ribbon, with moors
on either hand, dotted with peat-ricks and reedy pools
and cropping ponies, and rimmed in the distance with
clay-works glistening in the sunny weather.
“What sort of place is Nannizabuloe?”
“I don’t go on there. I drop you
at Indian Queens.”
“But what sort of place is it?”
“Well, I’ll tell you what folks say of
it:”
’All sea
and san’s,
Out of the
world and into St. Ann’s.’
“That’s what they say, and if I’m
wrong you may call me a liar.”
“And Squire Moyle?” Taffy persevered.
“What kind of man is he?”
Joby turned and eyed him severely.
“Look here, sonny. I got my living to
get.”
This silenced Taffy for a long while,
but he picked up his courage again by degrees.
There was a small window at his back, and he twisted
himself round, and nodded to his mother and grandmother
inside the van. He could not hear what they answered,
for the sailor-boys were singing at the top of their
voices:
“I will sing you
One, O!
What is your One,
O?
Number One sits
all alone, and ever more shall be-e so.”
“They’re home ’pon
leave,” said Joby. The song went on and
reached Number Seven:
“I will sing you
Seven, O!
What is your Seven,
O?
Seven be seven
stars in the ship a-sailing round in Heaven, O!”
One of the boys leaned from the roof
and twitched Taffy by the hair. “Hullo,
nipper! Did you ever see a ship of stars?”
He grinned and pulled open his sailor’s jumper
and singlet; and there, on his naked breast, Taffy
saw a ship tattooed, with three masts, and a half-circle
of stars above it, and below it the initials W. P.
“D’ee think my mother’ll
know me again?” asked the boy, and the other
two began to laugh.
“Yes, I think so,” said
Taffy gravely; which made them laugh more than ever.
“But why is he painted like
that?” he asked Joby, as they took up their
song again.
“Ah, you’ll larn over
to St. Ann’s, being one to notice things.”
The nearer he came to it, the more mysterious this
new home of Taffy’s seemed to grow. By-and-by
Humility let down the window and handed out a pasty.
Joby searched under his seat and found a pasty, twice
the size of Taffy’s, in a nose-bag. They
ate as they went, holding up their pasties from time
to time and comparing progress. Late in the afternoon
they came to hedges again, and at length to an inn;
and in front of it Taffy spied his father waiting with
a farm-cart. While Joby baited his horses, the
sailor-boys helped to lift out the invalid and trans-ship
the luggage; after which they climbed on the roof
again, and were jogged away northward in the dusk,
waving their caps and singing.
The most remarkable thing about the
inn was its signboard. This bore on either side
the picture of an Indian queen and two blackamoor
children, all with striped parasols, walking together
across a desert. The queen on one side wore
a scarlet turban and a blue robe; but the queen on
the other side wore a blue turban and a scarlet robe.
Taffy dodged from side to side, comparing them, and
had not made up his mind which he liked best when
Humility called him indoors to tea.
They had ham and eggs with their tea,
which they took in a great hurry; and then his grandmother
was lifted into the cart and laid on a bed of clean
straw beside the boxes, and he and his mother clambered
up in front. So they started again, his father
walking at the horse’s head. They took
the road toward the sunset. As the dusk fell
closer around, Mr. Raymond lit a horn lantern and carried
it before them. The rays of it danced and wheeled
upon the hedges and gorse bushes. Taffy began
to feel sleepy, though it was long before his usual
bedtime. The air seemed to weigh his eyelids
down. Or was it a sound lulling him? He
looked up suddenly. His mother’s arm was
about him. Stars flashed above, and a glimmer
fell on her gentle face a dew of light,
as it were. Her dark eyes appeared darker than
usual as she leaned and drew her shawl over his shoulder.
Ahead, the rays of the lantern kept
up their dance, but they flared now and again upon
stone hedges built in zigzag layers, and upon unknown
feathery bushes, intensely green and glistening like
metal.
The cart jolted and the lantern swung
to a soundless tune that filled the night. When
Taffy listened it ceased; when he ceased listening,
it began again.
The lantern stopped its dance and
stood still over a ford of black water. The
cart splashed into it and became a ship, heaving and
lurching over a soft, irregular floor that returned
no sound. But suddenly the ship became a cart
again, and stood still before a house with a narrow
garden-path and a light streaming along it from an
open door.
His father lifted him down; his mother
took his hand. They seemed to wade together
up that stream of light. Then came a staircase
and room with a bed in it, which, oddly enough, turned
out to be his own. He stared at the pink roses
on the curtains. Yes; certainly it was his own
bed. And satisfied of this, he nestled down in
the pillows and slept, to the long cadence of the
sea.