Jim and His Dog—Part III
AND THERE WAS SOMETHING that made her more anxious than she would otherwise have been. The Vicar, the good Vicar, who knew and loved everybody in the parish, and was heartily loved in return, had started with all his family for the Continent only the day before. Yes, in two flys covered with luggage, with all the children and the young ladies, and the Vicar inside (too sad to look out), and two maids; and all the women stood at their doors crying, and the men turned round to touch their hats as they went off to their work.
“Eh! dear, dearie me! he’s looking as if he was never coming back.”
The Vicar, who was ill from over-work, had pleaded hard with our friend, the doctor, first to be let off altogether, and then to be allowed to wait till Christmas. And the doctor had answered that it was certainly a charming arrangement to wait till it would be too late to go at all; or at all events till the time of year which was about the worst for travelling. So he resigned himself with many anxious thoughts about his parish, all the more that the senior curate was away, and ill too, and that, consequently, the youngest curate must be left in charge for a week or two certainly, and perhaps longer.
The young curate, for his part, was delighted to find himself installed, for the time being, at the Vicarage, to be in possession of the two beautiful red Devons, the blue Minorca cocks and hens, and, above all, to trot about the parish upon the pretty Dartmoor pony, and he determined to do his best to supply the Vicar’s place.
He put off visiting Mrs. Curtis for a week or two. He thought he would trot to the distant hamlets first, and take the cottages near the Vicarage last of all, because, he said to himself, the people there could send up to him if they wanted anything. This was how Mrs. Curtis (who never could bear to ask) got deeper and deeper into trouble, with no one to help her. She managed very well the first week, and saved two shillings to help out with the next one; then she went to the shop reluctantly, and asked for a little credit for the most necessary things: bread, soap, a little treacle for the children, and a very little tea and sugar for her husband.
So the children had bread and treacle for a week or two; after that their mother had only the face to ask for bread and soap (for her washing), leaving out the treacle, and the tea and sugar.
The first day Polly was told she could have nothing but dry bread; she made a fine fuss, I assure you, but after a bit of firm discipline, and being told she ought to be ashamed of herself, with her poor father bad and all, she resigned herself to her fate, and quietly ate the dry bread when she was hungry. However, even bread must be paid for some time or another, and the woman at the little shop told Mrs. Curtis at last that she could give her no more. She had a family to maintain herself, she should be turned out of doors, if she didn’t look out. And Mrs. Curtis answered that she was quite right, and went home more despairing than she had been for a long time.
She told Jim to make himself tidy, and go to the Vicarage, and say she had sent him to beg a little bread for the children, explaining exactly how they were circumstanced. Jim had his own private ideas upon the subject. He had had his eyes and ears very wide open the last few weeks, and had lain awake at night, and gone moodily about by day, pondering things in his own mind. He remembered those words of his father, spoken almost in jest—“If things come to the worst, we must sell Spot.” And he remembered, too, answering him once—“Spot wouldn’t fetch much, father!”
But was this true? he was thinking anxiously. Spot was a good dog and very affectionate. He could live on next to nothing; and though he had very short commons as he had now, and his bones were visible under his skin, he was as bright and lively as ever, and could soon be fattened up. Jim knew whom he would ask to buy him if things did come to the worst, but he put these thoughts away from him again and again, hoping the best.
The doctor had looked in once or twice since the operation, and had found the bone knitting well. Mrs. Curtis must be sure to give her husband plenty of nourishment, he said. They would not be forgotten at the Vicarage, he thought to himself.
So Robert Curtis lay patiently waiting to get strong, that he might work for his family, now and then reading his little Testament, or thinking over things the Vicar had said to him in times past; looking at things in general more hopefully and cheerfully than his wife. The neighbours would send him in a little bit of dinner now and then, knowing how things were, but he could not enjoy eating it with so many pairs of little hungry eyes staring at him; and he would divide it into small portions, and give it to the children, unless his wife were there to push them out of the room, and keep guard over him, telling him it was his bounden[6] duty to eat every bit, for the sake of his family.
So things went on till the afternoon when Mrs. Curtis was told she could have no more credit at the shop.
Jim went upstairs to make himself tidy, as his mother had told him, and all the way he went he was saying to himself that things had indeed come to the worst, and that Spot must, if possible, be sold. What was the good of going to the Vicarage to get perhaps a shilling, and then to have to go again and again, and get the character of being a beggar like Mrs. Stanfield and others in the parish?
Jim reasoned sometimes very like an old man. He went to the little glass that was hanging against the wall and plastered his hair well down, taking care to part it neatly; then he took his best suit, in which were several new neat patches, out of the box, and his best shoes, still very good, dressed himself quickly, and went downstairs. He whistled softly to Spot under his breath, for fear his mother might hear him and ask him what he wanted with him, and then catching him up and tucking him under his jacket, set off at a quick pace toward the Vicarage. He had not gone far, however, before he turned down a lane to the right, and walking on a little way, came out again upon the high road farther up. And now his back was to the Vicarage, and his face toward the Hall, two miles off. Jim turned round to make sure that no one was watching him, and then he set Spot down, and told him to follow him. There would be no fear of that; Spot was not the kind of dog to go bounding about, up and down the banks, now half buried in a rabbit-hole, now scampering headlong after a blackbird or hedge-sparrow, or growling defiance at every wayside cur. He was always much more disposed to trot quietly at Jim’s heels, and especially now, when he was half starved, he cowered close to Jim with his tail between his legs, about the most forlorn little object you could well see.
It was a cold, dreary afternoon, the north-east wind howling through the trees, and blowing Jim and Spot sideways as they walked—all the flowers and ferns dead in the hedge-rows, and the road hard with one of the first frosts. Jim plodded on with his head down and his hands in his pockets to keep them warm. Only now and then he would stop for a minute and pat Spot all over, taking him in his arms and laying his head down upon him lovingly; then he would hurry on again, to make up for lost time.
He arrived at last at the entrance to a long approach—not the grand one, with a lodge on each side of the gate, and a winding road, with stately trees on each side, here and there, and turf stretching away to the lake in front of the house. Jim would as soon have gone up to the grand entrance to Buckingham Palace, for Jim was very much afraid of the Squire; first, because he was an old gentleman, and secondly, because he was the Squire, and a king in Jim’s eyes. And yet, with it all, Jim believed he stood a better chance with the Squire, when he had a favour to ask, than with most people in the parish. So he opened the gate bravely and entered one of the back approaches, shut in on both sides by tangled brushwood and trees, except here and there, where, through an opening, you got a peep of the wild deer-park to the right. His heart began to beat fast as he walked on quickly, and arriving at a back door, rang the bell softly and timidly. A cook answered it.
“Want to speak to the Squire, do you? A likely story; you must tell me what you want, and maybe I can find some one presently to carry your message. Come in, and sit in the lobby out of the cold, and if any one passes, I’ll tell them.”
Jim thought this rather kind on the whole, and he followed the cook, and sat down on a bench between the kitchen and the servants’ hall, where he could get a peep sideways into the kitchen and watch the preparations going on for dinner. The smell of so many good things might have made him hungry at any other time; but just now, though he had tasted nothing but a piece of bread that morning, he was too anxious to have eaten, even if anything had been offered him. But would anyone ever come? They all seemed to have forgotten him, and he had been waiting at least half an hour. Presently, however, a swing door was pushed open close to him, and Master Harry (the Squire’s grandson), of all people, made his way through on his way to the stables to visit his pony.
“Hullo! what are you waiting for?” he said. “Aren’t you the little boy who held my pony at the flower-show the other day?”
“Yes, sir,” said Jim; and then he confided his errand to Harry in hurried whispers, looking anxiously toward the kitchen from time to time, lest the servants might be listening.
“Oh, I’ll go and see about it,” said Harry, “if you’ll wait here.” He pushed through the door again.
He ran along a passage, through another swing door, then out into the hall and up a flight of broad oak stairs; opening a door to the left, he bolted down another passage, covered with crimson drugget, and opening a door nearly at the end of it, burst into the school-room, where his sisters were at their afternoon lessons with their governess (if, indeed, the pleasant occupations Miss Lang allotted to the afternoon could be called lessons). They were all drawing in their several albums. Miss Lang had a bunch of Christmas roses in a glass before her, which she was drawing.
“I say,” said Master Harry, “that little boy that held my pony one day—you know, I told you, Miss Lang—has come to know whether grandpapa would like to buy a little beast of a dog he’s got with him.” And Harry threw himself into an arm-chair in a fit of merry laughter.
“What could have made him think of it?” said Miss Lang.
“Oh! he says his father’s ill, or something,” said Harry. “I suppose I must go and tell grandpapa, anyhow.”
“I daresay he’s just as fond of his dog as we are of Muff,” said little Alice, very indignantly, looking up from her drawing.
“That’s right, Alice,” said Miss Lang; “you may be sure there’s some trouble, or he never would have come all this way to ask such a thing.”
“If you could only see the dog,” said Harry, a little ashamed; “it’s the greatest little brute; and its bones! I’m sure you could easily count all its bones.”
“Half starved, I suppose,” said Miss Lang.
“Well, now I’m going to take him in to grandpapa,” said Harry, “and I’ll come up and tell you what he says,” he added, looking in at the door again before he finally departed.
When he got back to Jim, who was waiting patiently, he told him to follow him; then he paused for a moment as he looked down at Jim’s nailed shoes.
“Perhaps, if you don’t mind, you’d better take off your shoes, because Henrietta is very particular about the carpets. She makes me take mine off sometimes, when she can catch me.”
Harry was quite sobered now, and full of interest and sympathy for Jim.
Jim took off his shoes obediently, and then the two boys trotted along the passage together; and when they reached the hall, they crossed it and stood for a minute at the library-door, opposite the drawing-room.
“Wait here,” said Harry, “while I go in and speak to grandpapa.”
Grandpapa was sitting in a comfortable green morocco chair, with a pair of gold spectacles on, close to a good fire, reading the Times.
“Grandpapa,” said Harry, “you remember that little boy who was at the flower-show, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t remember any little boy,” said the Squire, putting down his paper, and looking rather roguishly at Harry from under his eyelids, “except you; I couldn’t very easily forget you.”
“Yes, but it’s little Jim Curtis, grandpapa,” Harry went on impatiently; “his father’s ill, and he wants you to buy his little dog.”
“Curtis, Curtis!” said the Squire, “I know Curtis; he took some prizes at the flower-show. Tell him to come in, for of course you’ve got him out there treading over the carpets in his clodhopper shoes.”
“No, he’s taken them off. Come in, Jim,” said Harry, calling to him.
Jim walked in bashfully, with Spot in his arms.
“Come up to me,” said the Squire, “and tell me what’s the matter with your father.”
Then Jim, feeling that it was now or never, told his story very plainly and simply, in his own way.
“And no one’s been near you all that time—not even the new curate?” said the Squire, after listening attentively.
“No, sir,” answered Jim.
“And so you want me to buy your dog, do you?”
“Yes, thank you, sir,” said Jim.
“How much do you want for him?”
“I don’t know, sir,” answered Jim, whose wits forsook him instantly.
“What do you think he’s worth?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Do you think he’s worth five shillings?”
Jim smiled a little, but made no answer, looking down at Spot, and stroking him to keep himself in countenance.
“What is he worth to you?” said the Squire.
“He’s worth ever so much to me,” said Jim, recovering his tongue again; “I’ve had him ever since he was a little pup, pretty nigh two year agone; I wouldn’t a’ parted with him if it hadn’t been that father’s bad.”
There was a little pause, and then the Squire felt in his waistcoat pocket, and took out a small morocco purse, with a silk strap across it.
Jim’s heart began to beat and Harry’s eyes to sparkle with expectation and interest as he leaned against the arm-chair.
“Hold out your hand,” said the Squire, and opening the purse, he took out a piece of shining gold money, and laid it in the very middle of Jim’s outstretched hand.
“You may go home and tell your father that you’re one of the best boys I know, and that I’ve bought your little dog for a gold sovereign; and that the very next time he’s in any trouble, he’s to send up to me directly, whether the parson’s at home or not. Do you hear? Now be off with you.”
Jim turned, and was making off as usual without thanks or comment, but at the door he recollected himself, and half turning, made a little awkward bow.
“Where shall we leave the dog?” said Harry, for Jim was not capable of putting two and two together just then.
“Give him to the coachman,” said the Squire, “and tell him to see that he has some food and clean straw, and he’s to be kept in the stable for the present.”
“There be a good many shillings in a sovereign, aren’t there?” said Jim to Harry as they walked down the passage together.
“A good many shillings,” answered Harry, stopping in amazement; “why twenty, of course. Don’t you know that?”
“I haven’t ever seen a sovereign before,” said Jim, beginning to realise the extent of his riches. “My father gets ten shillings wages, but the farmer pays him mostly in shillings and half-crowns. And if he does get one in gold, mother changes it directly for what she wants for the week.”
“Well, I’ve never had a sovereign yet of my own,” confessed Harry. “I shall perhaps soon, or half one, perhaps, for a tip when I go to school. Are you going to give all yours to your mother?”
“Yes, I’m forced to,” said Jim. “We have got so behind one way and another. She would give me a halfpenny or two most times, but I shan’t get anything out of this.”
“Well, here are your shoes behind the door; you were just going to forget them,” said Harry laughing. “Don’t you think you’d better give me your little dog now?”
Jim gave up Spot, who submitted meekly, and then with two or three parting pats, and touching his cap to Harry, he set off home. He ran most of the way, except where the road was too hilly, holding the precious sovereign tight between his finger and thumb in his pocket. He was so delighted with the possession of it, so pleased to take it to his mother, so proud that Spot should have fetched such a princely price, so confused altogether, that he did not feel his loss. Only when he drew near the cottage, and remembered how late it was, and that his mother would probably begin by scolding him roundly for being so long, his heart sank a little, and his pleasure was dampened suddenly.
She began at once as he had expected, but Jim stopped her by clapping the sovereign down upon the table.
“There it is, mother; I’ve sold Spot. The Squire’s bought him, and gave me that for him.”
And suddenly he began to cry and sob, just as he had done when he told the doctor his father’s leg was broken.
“Come, Jim, tell me all about him,” said his mother.
At last Jim recovered sufficiently to tell her.
But when she asked him, relieved, delighted, and triumphant as she was, whether Jim wouldn’t like to come with her to the shop to change the sovereign and see how the woman would stare, he said he would rather stay with his father.
When she had departed, he went and sat by him, feeling very faint and exhausted; with a consciousness that the fire had burned down very low, and that Spot’s saucer was in the corner half full of water, which he would never want to drink any more, and that he was not there to go to bed with him that evening, and that altogether everything was sad and dreary. After a few minutes, his head sank against his father’s pillow, and he was sleeping heavily.
Half an hour afterward his mother came back more triumphant than ever, saying that all the village knew it by this time, and that Jim was quite a hero, what with his conversation with the Squire and all. He got up slowly and sadly, with eyes half shut, to eat some bread and milk by the fire; his little sisters all assured him it was “gude new milk, not scald,” and begged him to give them the crust of it, if he didn’t want it himself.
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