It appeared that Honoria and Taffy
were to do lessons together, and Mr. Raymond was to
teach them. This had been the meaning of his
visit to Tredinnis House. They began the very
next day in the library at Tredinnis a
deserted room carpeted with badgers’ skins,
and lined with undusted books works on farriery,
veterinary surgery, and sporting subjects, long rows
of the Annual Register, the Arminian Magazine.
Taffy began by counting the badgers’
skins. There were eighteen, and the moths had
got into them, so that the draught under the door
puffed little drifts of hair over the polished boards.
Then he settled down to the first Latin declension Musa,
a muse; vocative, Musa, O muse!; genitive,
Musae, of a muse. Honoria began upon the ABC.
Mr. Raymond brought a pile of his
own books, and worked at them, scribbling notes in
the margin or on long slips of paper, while the children
learnt. A servant came in with a message from
Squire Moyle, and he left them for a while.
“I call this nonsense,”
said Honoria. “How am I to get these silly
letters into my head?”
Taffy was glad of the chance to show
off. “Oh, that’s easy. You
make up a tale about them. See here. A
is the end of a house; it’s just like one with
a beam across. B is a cat with his tail curled
under him watch me drawing it. C is
an old woman stooping; and D is another cat, only
his back is more rounded. Once upon a time, there
lived in a cottage an old woman who went about with
two cats, one on each side of her that’s
how you go on.”
“But I can’t go on. You must do
it for me.”
“Well, each of these cats had
a comb, and was combed every Saturday night.
One was a good cat, and kept his comb properly like
E, you see. But the other had broken a tooth
out of his that’s F ”
“I expect he was a fulmart,” said Honoria.
Taffy agreed. He didn’t
know what a fulmart was, but he was not going to confess
it. So he went on hurriedly, and Honoria thought
him a wonder. They came to W.
“So they got into a ship (I’ll
show you how to make one out of paper, exactly like
W), and sailed up into the sky, for the ship was a
Ship of Stars you make X’s for stars;
but that’s a witch-ship; so it stuck fast in
Y, which is a cleft ash-stick, and then came a stroke
of lightning, Z, and burnt them all up!” He
stopped, out of breath.
“I don’t understand the
ending at all,” said Honoria. “What
is a Ship of Stars?”
“Haven’t you ever seen one?”
“No.”
“I have. There’s a story about it ”
“Tell me about it.”
“I’ll tell you lots of
stories afterwards; about the Frog-king and Aladdin
and Man Friday and The Girl who trod on a Loaf.”
“And the Ship of Stars?”
“N no.”
Taffy felt himself blushing. “That’s
one of the stories that won’t come and
they’re the loveliest of all,” he added,
in a burst of confidence.
Honoria thought for a moment, but
did not understand in the least. All she said
was, “what funny words you use!” She went
back to her alphabet A, house; B, cat.
It came more easily now.
After lessons she made him tell her
a story; and Taffy, who wished to be amusing, told
her about the “Valiant Tailor who killed Seven
at a Blow.” To his disgust, it scarcely
made her smile. But after this she was always
asking for stories, and always listened solemnly, with
her dark eyes fixed on his face. She never seemed
to admire him at all for his gift, but treated it
with a kind of indulgent wonder, as if he were some
queer animal with uncommon tricks. This dashed
Taffy a bit, for he liked to be thought a fine fellow.
But he went on telling his stories, and sometimes
invented new ones for her. George Vyell was much
more appreciative. Sir Harry had heard of the
lessons, and wrote to beg that his son might join the
class. So George rode over three times a week
to learn Latin, which he did with uncommon slowness.
But he thought Taffy’s stories stunning, and
admired him without a shade of envy. The two
boys liked each other; and when they were alone Taffy
stood an inch or two higher in self-conceit than when
Honoria happened to be by. But he took more
pains with his stories if she was listening.
As for her lessons, Honoria got through them by honest
plodding. She never quite saw the use of them,
but she liked Mr. Raymond. She learnt more steadily
than either of the boys.
One day George rode over with two
pairs of boxing-gloves dangling from his saddle.
After lessons he and Taffy had a try with them, in
a clearing behind the shrubberies where the gardener
had heaped his sweepings of dry leaves to rot down
for manure.
“But, look here,” said
George, after the first round; “you’ll
never learn if you hit so wild as that. You
must keep your head up, and watch my eyes and feint.”
Taffy couldn’t help it.
As soon as ever he struck out, he forgot that it
was not real fighting. And he felt ashamed to
look George straight in the face, for his own eyes
were full of tears of excitement. At the end
of the bout, when George said, “Now we must
shake hands; it’s the proper thing to do,”
he looked bewildered for a moment. It made George
laugh in his easy way, and then Taffy laughed too.
After this they had a bout almost
every day; and he was soon able to hold his own and
treat it as sport. But somehow he always felt
a passion behind it, whispering to him to put some
nastiness into his blows, especially when Honoria
came to look on. And yet he liked George far
better than he liked Honoria. Indeed, he adored
George, and the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings
when George appeared were the bright spots in his
week. Lessons were over at twelve o’clock;
by one o’clock Taffy had to be home for dinner.
Loneliness filled the afternoons, but the child peopled
them with extravagant fancies. He and George
were crusaders sworn to defend the Holy Sepulchre,
and bound by an oath of brotherhood, though George
was a Red Cross Knight and he a plain squire; and
after the most surprising adventures Taffy received
the barbed and poisoned arrow intended for his master,
and died most impressively, with George and Honoria,
and Richard Coeur de Lion, and most of the characters
from “Ivanhoe,” sobbing round his bed.
There was a Blondel variant too, with George
imprisoned in a high tower; and a monstrous conglomerate
tale in which most of the heroes of history and romance
played second fiddle to George, whose pre-eminence,
though occasionally challenged by Achilles, Sir Lancelot,
or the Black Prince, was regularly vindicated by Taffy’s
timely help.
This tale, with endless variations,
actually lasted him for two good years. The
scene of it never lay among the towans, but round about
his old home or the well-remembered meadow at Tewkesbury.
That was his plain of Troy, his Field of Cressy,
his lists of Ashby de la Zouche. The high road
at the back of the towans crossed a stream, by a ford
and a footbridge; and the travelling postman, if he
had any letters for the Parsonage, would stop by the
footbridge and blow a horn. He little guessed
what challenges it sounded to the small boy who came
running for the post.
The postman came by, as a rule, at
two o’clock or thereabouts. One afternoon
in early spring Mr. Raymond happened to be starting
for a walk when the horn was blown, and he and Taffy
went to meet the post together. There were three
or four letters which the Vicar opened; and one for
Humility, which he put in his pocket. In the
midst of his reading, he looked up, smiled over his
spectacles, and said:
“Oxford has won the boat-race.”
Taffy had been deep in the Fifth Aeneid
for some weeks, and boat-racing ran much in his mind.
“Who is Oxford?” he asked.
Mr. Raymond took off his spectacles
and wiped them. It came on him suddenly that
this child, whom he loved, was shut out from many of
his dearest thoughts.
“Oxford is a city,” he
answered; and added, “the most beautiful city
in the world.”
“Shall I ever go there?” Taffy asked.
Mr. Raymond walked off without seeming
to hear the question. But that evening after
supper he told the most wonderful tales of Oxford,
while Taffy listened and hoped his mother would forget
his bedtime; and Humility listened too, bending over
her guipure. The love with which he looked
back to Oxford was the second passion of Samuel Raymond’s
life; and Humility was proud of it, not jealous at
all. He forgot all the struggle, all the slights,
all the grip of poverty. To him those years
had become an heroic age, and men Homeric men.
And so he made them appear to Taffy, to whom it was
wonderful that his father should have moved among such
giants.
“And shall I go there too?”
Humility glanced up quickly, and met her husband’s
eyes.
“Some day, please God!”
she said. Mr. Raymond stared at the embers of
wreck-wood on the hearth.
From that night Oxford became the
main scene of Taffy’s imaginings; a wholly fictitious
Oxford, pieced together of odds and ends from picture-books,
and peopled with all the old heroes. And so,
with contests on the models of the Fifth Aeneid, the
story went forward gallantly for many months.
But the afternoons were long; and
at times the interminable sand-hills and everlasting
roar of the sea oppressed the child with a sense of
loneliness beyond words. The rabbits and gulls
would not make friends with him, and he ached for
companionship. Of that ache was born his half-crazy
adoration of George Vyell. There were hours
when he lay in some nook of the towans, peering into
the ground, seeing pictures in the sand pictures
of men and regiments and battles, shifting with the
restless drift; until, unable to bear it, he flung
out his hands to efface them, and hid his face in the
sand, sobbing, “George! George!”
At night he would creep out of bed
to watch the lighthouse winking away in the north-east.
George lived somewhere beyond. And again it
would be “George! George!”
And when the happy mornings came,
and George with them, Taffy was as shy as a lover.
So George never guessed. It might have surprised
that very careless young gentleman, when he looked
up from his verbs which govern the dative, and caught
Taffy’s eye, could he have seen himself in his
halo there.