HAPPY MEETINGS

It was to the same railway station as that at which they had parted from their guardian and been handed over to Mr Merryboy years before that Bobby Frog now drove.  The train was not due for half an hour.

“Tim,” said Bob after they had walked up and down the platform for about five minutes, “how slowly time seems to fly when one’s in a hurry!”

“Doesn’t it?” assented Tim, “crawls like a snail.”

“Tim,” said Bob, after ten minutes had elapsed, “what a difficult thing it is to wait patiently when one’s anxious!”

“Isn’t it!” assented Tim, “so hard to keep from fretting and stamping.”

“Tim,” said Bob, after twenty minutes had passed, “I wonder if the two or three dozen people on this platform are all as uncomfortably impatient as I am.”

“Perhaps they are,” said Tim, “but certainly possessed of more power to restrain themselves.”

“Tim,” said Bob, after the lapse of five-and-twenty minutes, “did you ever hear of such a long half-hour since you were born?”

“Never,” replied the sympathetic Tim, “except once long ago when I was starving, and stood for about that length of time in front of a confectioner’s window till I nearly collapsed and had to run away at last for fear I should smash in the glass and feed.”

“Tim, I’ll take a look round and see that the bays are all right.”

“You’ve done that four times already, Bob.”

“Well, I’ll do it five times, Tim.  There’s luck, you know, in odd numbers.”

There was a sharpish curve on the line close to the station.  While Bob Frog was away the train, being five minutes before its time, came thundering round the curve and rushed alongside the platform.

Bob ran back of course and stood vainly trying to see the people in each carriage as it went past.

“Oh! what a sweet eager face!” exclaimed Tim, gazing after a young girl who had thrust her head out of a first-class carriage.

“Let alone sweet faces, Tim ­this way.  The third classes are all behind.”

By this time the train had stopped, and great was the commotion as friends and relatives met or said good-bye hurriedly, and bustled into and out of the carriages ­commotion which was increased by the cheering of a fresh band of rescued waifs going to new homes in the west, and the hissing of the safety valve which took it into its head at that inconvenient moment to let off superfluous steam.  Some of the people rushing about on that platform and jostling each other would have been the better for safety valves! poor Bobby Frog was one of these.

“Not there!” he exclaimed despairingly, as he looked into the last carriage of the train.

“Impossible,” said Tim, “we’ve only missed them; walk back.”

They went back, looking eagerly into carriage after carriage ­Bob even glancing under the seats in a sort of wild hope that his mother might be hiding there, but no one resembling Mrs Frog was to be seen.

A commotion at the front part of the train, more pronounced than the general hubbub, attracted their attention.

“Oh! where is he ­where is he?” cried a female voice, which was followed up by the female herself, a respectable elderly woman, who went about the platform scattering people right and left in a fit of temporary insanity, “where is my Bobby, where is he, I say?  Oh! why won’t people git out o’ my way? Git out o’ the way,” (shoving a sluggish man forcibly), “where are you, Bobby?  Bo-o-o-o-o-by!”

It was Mrs Frog!  Bob saw her, but did not move.  His heart was in his throat!  He could not move.  As he afterwards said, he was struck all of a heap, and could only stand and gaze with his hands clasped.

“Out o’ the way, young man!” cried Mrs Frog, brushing indignantly past him, in one of her erratic bursts.  “Oh!  Bobby ­where has that boy gone to?”

“Mother!” gasped Bob.

“Who said that?” cried Mrs Frog, turning round with a sharp look, as if prepared to retort “you’re another” on the shortest notice.

“Mother!” again said Bob, unclasping his hands and holding them out.

Mrs Frog had hitherto, regardless of the well-known effect of time, kept staring at heads on the level which Bobby’s had reached when he left home.  She now looked up with a startled expression.

“Can it ­is it ­oh!  Bo ­” she got no further, but sprang forward and was caught and fervently clasped in the arms of her son.

Tim fluttered round them, blowing his nose violently though quite free from cold in the head ­which complaint, indeed, is not common in those regions.

Hetty, who had lost her mother in the crowd, now ran forward with Matty.  Bob saw them, let go his mother, and received one in each arm ­ squeezing them both at once to his capacious bosom.

Mrs Frog might have fallen, though that was not probable, but Tim made sure of her by holding out a hand which the good woman grasped, and laid her head on his breast, quite willing to make use of him as a convenient post to lean against, while she observed the meeting of the young people with a contented smile.

Tim observed that meeting too, but with very different feelings, for the “sweet eager face” that he had seen in the first-class carriage belonged to Hetty!  Long-continued love to human souls had given to her face a sweetness ­and sympathy with human spirits and bodies in the depths of poverty, sorrow, and deep despair had invested it with a pitiful tenderness and refinement ­which one looks for more naturally among the innocent in the higher ranks of life.

Poor Tim gazed unutterably, and his heart went on in such a way that even Mrs Frog’s attention was arrested.  Looking up, she asked if he was took bad.

“Oh! dear no.  By no means,” said Tim, quickly.

“You’re tremblin’ so,” she returned, “an’ it ain’t cold ­but your colour’s all right.  I suppose it’s the natur’ o’ you Canadians.  But only to think that my Bobby,” she added, quitting her leaning-post, and again seizing her son, “that my Bobby should ‘ave grow’d up, an’ his poor mother knowed nothink about it!  I can’t believe my eyes ­it ain’t like Bobby a bit, yet some’ow I know it’s ’im!  Why, you’ve grow’d into a gentleman, you ’ave.”

“And you have grown into a flatterer,” said Bob, with a laugh.  “But come, mother, this way; I’ve brought the wagon for you.  Look after the luggage, Tim ­Oh!  I forgot.  This is Tim, Hetty ­Tim Lumpy.  You remember, you used to see us playing together when we were city Arabs.”

Hetty looked at Tim, and, remembering Bobby’s strong love for jesting, did not believe him.  She smiled, however, and bowed to the tall good-looking youth, who seemed unaccountably shy and confused as he went off to look after the luggage.

“Here is the wagon; come along,” said Bob, leading his mother out of the station.

“The waggin, boy; I don’t see no waggin.”

“Why, there, with the pair of bay horses.”

“You don’t mean the carridge by the fence, do you?”

“Well, yes, only we call them wagons here.”

“An’ you calls the ’osses bay ’osses, do you?”

“Well now, I would call ’em beautiful ’osses, but I suppose bay means the same thing here.  You’ve got strange ways in Canada.”

“Yes, mother, and pleasant ways too, as I hope you shall find out ere long.  Get in, now.  Take care!  Now then, Hetty ­come, Matty.  How difficult to believe that such a strapping young thing can be the squalling Matty I left in London!”

Matty laughed as she got in, by way of reply, for she did not yet quite believe in her big brother.

“Do you drive, Tim; I’ll stay inside,” said Bob.

In another moment the spanking bays were whirling the wagon over the road to Brankly Farm at the rate of ten miles an hour.

Need it be said that the amiable Merryboys did not fail of their duty on that occasion?  That Hetty and Matty took violently to brown-eyed Martha at first sight, having heard all about her from Bob long ago ­as she of them; that Mrs Merryboy was, we may say, one glowing beam of hospitality; that Mrs Frog was, so to speak, one blazing personification of amazement, which threatened to become chronic ­there was so much that was contrary to previous experience and she was so slow to take it in; that Mr Merryboy became noisier than ever, and that, what between his stick and his legs, to say nothing of his voice, he managed to create in one day hubbub enough to last ten families for a fortnight; that the domestics and the dogs were sympathetically joyful; that even the kitten gave unmistakeable evidences of unusual hilarity ­ though some attributed the effect to surreptitiously-obtained cream; and, finally, that old granny became something like a Chinese image in the matter of nodding and gazing and smirking and wrinkling, so that there seemed some danger of her terminating her career in a gush of universal philanthropy ­need all this be said, we ask?  We think not; therefore we won’t say it.

But it was not till Bob Frog got his mother all to himself, under the trees, near the waterfall, down by the river that drove the still unmended saw-mill, that they had real and satisfactory communion.  It would have been interesting to have listened to these two ­with memories and sympathies and feelings towards the Saviour of sinners so closely intertwined, yet with knowledge and intellectual powers in many respects so far apart.  But we may not intrude too closely.

Towards the end of their walk, Bob touched on a subject which had been uppermost in the minds of both all the time, but from which they had shrunk equally, the one being afraid to ask, the other disinclined to tell.

“Mother,” said Bob, at last, “what about father?”

“Ah!  Bobby,” replied Mrs Frog, beginning to weep, gently, “I know’d ye would come to that ­you was always so fond of ‘im, an’ he was so fond o’ you too, indeed ­”

“I know it, mother,” interrupted Bob, “but have you never heard of him?”

“Never.  I might ‘ave, p’r’aps, if he’d bin took an’ tried under his own name, but you know he had so many aliases, an’ the old ’ouse we used to live in we was obliged to quit, so p’r’aps he tried to find us and couldn’t.”

“May God help him ­dear father!” said the son in a low sad voice.

“I’d never ’ave left ’im, Bobby, if he ’adn’t left me.  You know that.  An’ if I thought he was alive and know’d w’ere he was, I’d go back to ’im yet, but ­”

The subject was dropped here, for the new mill came suddenly into view, and Bob was glad to draw his mother’s attention to it.

“See, we were mending that just before we got the news you were so near us.  Come, I’ll show it to you.  Tim Lumpy and I made it all by ourselves, and I think you’ll call it a first-class article.  By the way, how came you to travel first-class?”

“Oh! that’s all along of Sir Richard Brandon.  He’s sitch a liberal gentleman, an’ said that as it was by his advice we were goin’ to Canada, he would pay our expenses; and he’s so grand that he never remembered there was any other class but first, when he took the tickets, an’ when he was show’d what he’d done he laughed an’ said he wouldn’t alter it, an’ we must go all the way first-class.  He’s a strange man, but a good ’un!”

By this time they had reached the platform of the damaged saw-mill, and Bob pointed out, with elaborate care, the details of the mill in all its minute particulars, commenting specially on the fact that most of the telling improvements on it were due to the fertile brain and inventive genius of Tim Lumpy.  He also explained the different kinds of saws ­the ripping saw, and the cross-cut saw, and the circular saw, and the eccentric saw ­just as if his mother were an embryo mill-wright, for he felt that she took a deep interest in it all, and Mrs Frog listened with the profound attention of a civil engineer, and remarked on everything with such comments as ­oh! indeed! ah! well now! ain’t it wonderful? amazin’! an’ you made it all too!  Oh!  Bobby! ­and other more or less appropriate phrases.

On quitting the mill to return to the house they saw a couple of figures walking down another avenue, so absorbed in conversation that they did not at first observe Bob and his mother, or take note of the fact that Matty, being a bouncing girl, had gone after butterflies or some such child-alluring insects.

It was Tim Lumpy and Hetty Frog.

And no wonder that they were absorbed, for was not their conversation on subjects of the profoundest interest to both? ­George Yard, Whitechapel, Commercial Street, Spitalfields, and the Sailor’s Home, and the Rests, and all the other agencies for rescuing poor souls in monstrous London, and the teachers and school companions whom they had known there and never could forget!  No wonder, we say, that these two were absorbed while comparing notes, and still less wonder that they were even more deeply absorbed when they got upon the theme of Bobby Frog ­so much loved, nay, almost worshipped, by both.

At last they observed Mrs Frog’s scarlet shawl ­which was very conspicuous ­and her son, and tried to look unconscious, and wondered with quite needless surprise where Matty could have gone to.

Bobby Frog, being a sharp youth, noted these things, but made no comment to any one, for the air of Canada had, somehow, invested this waif with wonderful delicacy of feeling.

Although Bob and his mother left off talking of Ned Frog somewhat abruptly, as well as sorrowfully, it does not follow that we are bound to do the same.  On the contrary, we now ask the reader to leave Brankly Farm rather abruptly, and return to London for the purpose of paying Ned a visit.