Rodney Stone, Arthur Conan Doyle [the best books of all time .TXT] 📗

do you think the prettiest of them?”

“Why, that!” said I, pointing to a picture which hung opposite to me.  It was of a tall and slender girl, with the rosiest cheeks and the tenderest eyes—so daintily dressed, too, that I had never seen anything more perfect.  She had a posy of flowers in her hand and another one was lying upon the planks of wood upon which she was standing.

“Oh, that’s the prettiest, is it?” said she, laughing.  “Well, now, walk up to it, and let us hear what is writ beneath it.”

I did as she asked, and read out: “Miss Polly Hinton, as ‘Peggy,’ in The Country Wife, played for her benefit at the Haymarket Theatre, September 14th, 1782.”

“It’s a play-actress,” said I.

“Oh, you rude little boy, to say it in such a tone,” said she; “as if a play-actress wasn’t as good as any one else.  Why, ’twas but the other day that the Duke of Clarence, who may come to call himself King of England, married Mrs. Jordan, who is herself only a play-actress.  And whom think you that this one is?”

She stood under the picture with her arms folded across her great body, and her big black eyes looking from one to the other of us.

“Why, where are your eyes?” she cried at last.  “I was Miss Polly Hinton of the Haymarket Theatre.  And perhaps you never heard the name before?”

We were compelled to confess that we never had.  And the very name of play-actress had filled us both with a kind of vague horror, like the country-bred folk that we were.  To us they were a class apart, to be hinted at rather than named, with the wrath of the Almighty hanging over them like a thundercloud.  Indeed, His judgments seemed to be in visible operation before us when we looked upon what this woman was, and what she had been.

“Well,” said she, laughing like one who is hurt, “you have no cause to say anything, for I read on your face what you have been taught to think of me.  So this is the upbringing that you have had, Jim—to think evil of that which you do not understand!  I wish you had been in the theatre that very night with Prince Florizel and four Dukes in the boxes, and all the wits and macaronis of London rising at me in the pit.  If Lord Avon had not given me a cast in his carriage, I had never got my flowers back to my lodgings in York Street, Westminster.  And now two little country lads are sitting in judgment upon me!”

Jim’s pride brought a flush on to his cheeks, for he did not like to be called a country lad, or to have it supposed that he was so far behind the grand folk in London.

“I have never been inside a play-house,” said he; “I know nothing of them.”

“Nor I either.”

“Well,” said she, “I am not in voice, and it is ill to play in a little room with but two to listen, but you must conceive me to be the Queen of the Peruvians, who is exhorting her countrymen to rise up against the Spaniards, who are oppressing them.”

And straightway that coarse, swollen woman became a queen—the grandest, haughtiest queen that you could dream of—and she turned upon us with such words of fire, such lightning eyes and sweeping of her white hand, that she held us spellbound in our chairs.  Her voice was soft and sweet, and persuasive at the first, but louder it rang and louder as it spoke of wrongs and freedom and the joys of death in a good cause, until it thrilled into my every nerve, and I asked nothing more than to run out of the cottage and to die then and there in the cause of my country.  And then in an instant she changed.  She was a poor woman now, who had lost her only child, and who was bewailing it.  Her voice was full of tears, and what she said was so simple, so true, that we both seemed to see the dead babe stretched there on the carpet before us, and we could have joined in with words of pity and of grief.  And then, before our cheeks were dry, she was back into her old self again.

“How like you that, then?” she cried.  “That was my way in the days when Sally Siddons would turn green at the name of Polly Hinton.  It’s a fine play, is Pizarro.”

“And who wrote it, ma’am?”

“Who wrote it?  I never heard.  What matter who did the writing of it!  But there are some great lines for one who knows how they should be spoken.”

“And you play no longer, ma’am?”

“No, Jim, I left the boards when—when I was weary of them.  But my heart goes back to them sometimes.  It seems to me there is no smell like that of the hot oil in the footlights and of the oranges in the pit.  But you are sad, Jim.”

“It was but the thought of that poor woman and her child.”

“Tut, never think about her!  I will soon wipe her from your mind.  This is ‘Miss Priscilla Tomboy,’ from The Romp.  You must conceive that the mother is speaking, and that the forward young minx is answering.”

And she began a scene between the two of them, so exact in voice and manner that it seemed to us as if there were really two folk before us: the stern old mother with her hand up like an ear-trumpet, and her flouncing, bouncing daughter.  Her great figure danced about with a wonderful lightness, and she tossed her head and pouted her lips as she answered back to the old, bent figure that addressed her.  Jim and I had forgotten our tears, and were holding our ribs before she came to the end of it.

“That is better,” said she, smiling at our laughter.  “I would not have you go back to Friar’s Oak with long faces, or maybe they would not let you come to me again.”

She vanished into her cupboard, and came out with a bottle and glass, which she placed upon the table.

“You are too young for strong waters,” she said, “but this talking gives one a dryness, and—”

Then it was that Boy Jim did a wonderful thing.  He rose from his chair, and he laid his hand upon the bottle.

“Don’t!” said he.

She looked him in the face, and I can still see those black eyes of hers softening before the gaze.

“Am I to have none?”

“Please, don’t.”

With a quick movement she wrested the bottle out of his hand and raised it up so that for a moment it entered my head that she was about to drink it off.  Then she flung it through the open lattice, and we heard the crash of it on the path outside.

“There, Jim!” said she; “does that satisfy you?  It’s long since any one cared whether I drank or no.”

“You are too good and kind for that,” said he.

“Good!” she cried.  “Well, I love that you should think me so.  And it would make you happier if I kept from the brandy, Jim?  Well, then, I’ll make you a promise, if you’ll make me one in return.”

“What’s that, miss?”

“No drop shall pass my lips, Jim, if you will swear, wet or shine, blow or snow, to come up here twice in every week, that I may see you and speak with you, for, indeed, there are times when I am very lonesome.”

So the promise was made, and very faithfully did Jim keep it, for many a time when I have wanted him to go fishing or rabbit-snaring, he has remembered that it was his day for Miss Hinton, and has tramped off to Anstey Cross.  At first I think that she found her share of the bargain hard to keep, and I have seen Jim come back with a black face on him, as if things were going amiss.  But after a time the fight was won—as all fights are won if one does but fight long enough—and in the year before my father came back Miss Hinton had become another woman.  And it was not her ways only, but herself as well, for from being the person that I have described, she became in one twelve-month as fine a looking lady as there was in the whole country-side.  Jim was prouder of it by far than of anything he had had a hand in in his life, but it was only to me that he ever spoke about it, for he had that tenderness towards her that one has for those whom one has helped.  And she helped him also, for by her talk of the world and of what she had seen, she took his mind away from the Sussex country-side and prepared it for a broader life beyond.  So matters stood between them at the time when peace was made and my father came home from the sea.

p. 50CHAPTER IV.
THE PEACE OF AMIENS.

Many a woman’s knee was on the ground, and many a woman’s soul spent itself in joy and thankfulness when the news came with the fall of the leaf in 1801 that the preliminaries of peace had been settled.  All England waved her gladness by day and twinkled it by night.  Even in little Friar’s Oak we had our flags flying bravely, and a candle in every window, with a big G.R. guttering in the wind over the door of the inn.  Folk were weary of the war, for we had been at it for eight years, taking Holland, and Spain, and France each in turn and all together.  All that we had learned during that time was that our little army was no match for the French on land, and that our large navy was more than a match for them upon the water.  We had gained some credit, which we were sorely in need of after the American business; and a few Colonies, which were welcome also for the same reason; but our debt had gone on rising and our consols sinking, until even Pitt stood aghast.  Still, if we had known that there never could be peace between Napoleon and ourselves, and that this was only the end of a round and not of the battle, we should have been better advised had we fought it out without a break.  As it was, the French got back the twenty thousand good seamen whom we had captured, and a fine dance they led us with their Boulogne flotillas and fleets of invasion before we were able to catch them again.

My father, as I remember him best, was a tough, strong little man, of no great breadth, but solid and well put together.  His face was burned of a reddish colour, as bright as a flower-pot, and in spite of his age (for he was only forty at the time of which I speak) it was shot with lines, which deepened if he were in any way perturbed, so that I have seen him turn on the instant from a youngish man to an elderly.  His eyes especially were meshed round with wrinkles, as is natural for one who had puckered them all his life in facing foul wind and bitter weather.  These eyes were, perhaps, his strangest feature, for they were of a very clear and beautiful blue, which shone the brighter out of that ruddy setting.  By nature he must have been a fair-skinned man, for his upper brow, where his cap came over it, was as white as mine, and his close-cropped hair was tawny.

He had served, as he was proud to say, in the last of our ships which had been chased out of the Mediterranean in ’97, and in the first which had re-entered it in ’98.  He was under Miller, as third lieutenant of the Theseus, when our fleet, like a pack of eager fox hounds in a covert, was dashing from Sicily to Syria and back again to Naples, trying to pick up the lost scent.  With the same good fighting man he served at the Nile, where the men of his command sponged and rammed and trained until, when the last tricolour had come down, they hove up the sheet anchor and fell dead asleep upon the top of each other under the capstan bars.  Then, as a second lieutenant, he was in one of those grim three-deckers with powder-blackened hulls and crimson scupper-holes, their spare cables tied round their keels and over their bulwarks to hold them together, which carried the news into the Bay of Naples.  From thence, as a reward for his services, he was transferred as first lieutenant to the Aurora frigate, engaged in cutting off supplies from Genoa, and in her he still remained until long after peace was declared.

How well I can remember his home-coming!  Though it is now eight-and-forty years ago, it is clearer to me than the doings of last