CHRISTOBEL SIGNS HER NAME

“I am exhausted,” said the Boy, reaching out a long arm, and securing his third piece of hot buttered-toast. “I am ruffled. My usual calm mental poise is overthrown and on the Sabbath, of all days! Every feather I possess has been rubbed up the wrong way.” He lay back in the depths of his chair, stretched out his legs, and looked dejectedly at Christobel.

Her quiet smile enveloped him. Her look was as a cool touch on a hot forehead.

“Poor Little Boy Blue! I thought something was wrong. I should feel a keener anxiety, were the hot buttered-toast less obviously consoling.”

“I’ll jolly well never go again,” said the Boy, with indignation. “Not me!”

“Before you were born, Boy; when I went to school,” said Miss Charteris, “we were taught to say ‘Not I.’ And if you were to tell me where you have been, on this Sabbath afternoon, I might be able to give you more intelligent sympathy.”

“I’ve been to a drawing-room meeting,” said the Boy, “and I’ve heard a woman hold forth. For an hour and a quarter, I’ve sat stuffed up, breathing the atmosphere of other people’s go-to-meeting clothes, and heard a good lady go meandering on, while I had no room for my legs.”

“I thought you seemed finding them extra long, Boy. Why did you go to a drawing-room meeting?”

“I went,” said the Boy, “because the dear old thing in whose house it was held asked me to go. She used to know my mother. When I was at Trinity she looked me up, often invited me to her charming home, gave me excellent little dinners, followed by the kindest, nicest, most nervous little preachments. Don’t look amused, dear. I never failed to profit. I respected her for it. She is as good and genuine as they make ’em; and if she had stood up this afternoon, with her friendly smile, and dear shaky old voice, and given us an exposition of the twenty-third Psalm, we should have all come away quite ’good and happy.’ Instead of which oh, my wig!”

The Boy took an explosive bun, and put it whole into his mouth. “The only way to manage them on Sunday,” he explained, as soon as speech was possible, “when sweeping is not the right thing. But let us hope Mollie’s papa’s ‘clerical brethren’ won’t find it out. There would certainly be less conversation and fewer crumbs, but no fun at all.”

“I don’t think you need be afraid, Boy dear. Even should such a way out of the difficulty occur to them, I am inclined to think they would prefer the explosion, to the whole bun at a mouthful. It has a rather startling effect, you know, until one gets used to seeing it done. I can’t quite imagine an archdeacon doing it, while standing on the hearthrug in conversation with my brother. Now tell me what the good lady said, which you found so trying.”

“Oh, she meandered on,” grumbled the Boy. “She told us all we should have been, if we had not been what we were; and all we might be, if we were not what we are; and all we shall be, when we are not what we are! She implored us to consider, and weigh well, where we should go, if, by a sudden and unexpected dispensation of Providence, we ceased to be where we then were. I jolly well knew the answer to that; for if Providence had suddenly dispensated which it didn’t, for a good three-quarters of an hour I should have been here, here, HERE, as fast as my best Sunday boots could carry me!” His brown eyes softened. “Ah, think what ‘here’ means,” he said. “Think! ‘Here’ means You!”

But Miss Charteris did not wish the conversation to become too meltingly personal.

“What else did she say, Boy?”

He consulted the mulberry leaves, then bounded in his chair. “Ha, I have it! I kept this tit-bit for you. She used an astronomical illustration, I haven’t the least idea apropos of what, but she told us exactly how many millions of miles the sun is from the earth; and then she smiled upon us blandly, and said: ‘Or is it billions?’ Think of that! She said: ‘Or is it billions?’ in exactly the same tone of voice as she might have said of the bonnet she had on: ’I bought it, at a sale, for elevenpence three farthings, or was it a shilling?’”

“Oh, Boy, you really are naughty! I never connected you with personal sarcasm.”

“Yes, but that sort of woman shouldn’t,” complained the Boy. “And with half Cambridge sitting listening. ‘Millions, or is it billions?’ Oh lor!”

“Poor thing!” remarked Miss Charteris. “She could not have known that she had in the audience a person who had only just avoided the drawback to future enterprise, of being Senior Wrangler. Had she realized that, she would have been more careful with her figures.”

“Tease away!” said the Boy. “I don’t care, now I am safe here. Only I shan’t tell you any more.”

“I don’t want to hear any more, Boy. I always enjoy appreciations, even of things I do not myself appreciate. But non-appreciations do not appeal to me. If a person has meant to be effective and proved inadequate, or tried to do good and done harm, I would rather not know it, unless I can help to put matters right. Have some more tea, Boy; and then I want to talk to you myself. I have something rather special to tell you.”

The Boy stood up and brought his cup to the little table. When she had filled it, he knelt on one knee beside her, his elbow on the arm of her chair, and drank his tea there.

“I am sorry, dear,” he said, presently. “I won’t do it again. Perhaps I listened wrong, because I was bored at being there at all. I say, Christobel it has just occurred to me did you know my mother?”

The old garden was very still. A hush, as of the Paradise of God, seemed suddenly to fall upon it. As the Boy asked his quiet question, a spirit seemed to hover, between them and the green dome of mulberry leaves above them, smoothing the Boy’s tumbled hair, and touching the noble brow of the woman the Boy loved; a gentle, watching, thankful spirit eternally remembering, and tenderly glad to be remembered. For a few moments the silence was a silence which could not be broken. The Boy lifted wondering eyes to the moving leaves. Christobel laid her hand upon his, as it gripped her chair. An unseen voice seemed to whisper to the Boy not in the stern tones of the Church, but as an eager, anxious, question: “Wilt thou have this woman to be thy wedded wife?” And silently the Boy replied: “Please God, I will”; and, bending, kissed the hand resting on his.

The spell lifted. Christobel spoke.

“Yes, Boy dear, I knew her. I have often wondered whether I might tell you. She and my mother were dear friends. I was thirteen when she died. You were three, poor Little Boy Blue! Two things I specially remember about your mother: the peculiar radiance of her face a light from within, shining out; and the fact that when she was in a room the whole atmosphere seemed rarefied, beautified, uplifted. I think she lived very near heaven, Boy; and, like Enoch, she walked straight in one day, and came back no more. She ‘was not’; for God took her.”

Another long holy silence. The mulberry leaves were still. Then the Boy said, softly: “Some day, will you tell me heaps more details lots of little things about her? No one ever has. But I seem almost to begin to remember her, when you talk of her. Meanwhile, may I show you this?”

He drew from the inner pocket of his coat, a small well-worn pocket-Bible. Opening it at the fly-leaf, he passed it to Miss Charteris.

“It was hers,” he said.

She bent over it and read the inscription:

M. A. Chelsea

“Through faith and patience inherit the promises.”

Below, in a delicate writing, traced by a hand that trembled:

To my Baby Boy from his Mother

“I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not.”

She looked at it in silence. How much had this book meant during all these years, to the “Baby Boy”? Had the book in his pocket, and the prayers hovering about him, something to do with the fact that he was still just Little Boy Blue?

The Boy had taken a fountain pen from his pocket, and was shaking it vigorously over the grass.

Now he passed it to her.

“Write your dear name beneath,” he said.

Infinitely touched, she made no comment, raised no question. She took the pen, and wrote just “Christobel.”

“And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.”