CHAPTER XXII

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BOOKS AND SOLDIERS.

The day after I saw Freda I went with General MacNeill to call on his friend, Mr. Linklater. I can tell you my heart beat as we went in through the narrow nest of streets that make the publishing quarter, and I saw names on the street corners that told me we were in the heart of my Mecca. Paternoster Row, Ave Maria Lane, Amen Corner,--I whispered the names to myself as softly as though I were a votary.

We went through a narrow passage into a kind of shop on the first-floor of a tall house, but no one was buying or selling. Only a clerk sat at a desk, with a pen behind his ear, amid walls of books in bundles of brown paper, or standing in piles in their outer wrappings.

"Mr. Linklater, sir?" he said in answer to the General; "I will see if he is in. Will you and the lady step in here?"

We followed him into a stuffy room, ventilated only by a window opening on the outer office. The walls of the room were of muffled glass, and when the clerk had switched on the electric light and left us I was free to walk about and look at the books published by the firm which stood about on tables and shelves. Would mine ever be there, I wondered, as we waited!

The General had taken off his hat and was mopping his brows with his handkerchief while he grumbled at the stuffiness of the place. It was stuffy--but I didn't mind it a bit. I thought I should love to be one of the people whose shadows I could see passing along the glass corridors--to breathe and smell books all day, to see famous authors, and handle proofs.

Presently the clerk returned to us and asked us to follow him. We went up in a comfortable padded lift, which in itself was a delightful experience to me. Then the clerk opened the door, and we stepped out into a long corridor. He knocked at a door which stood a little open, and in answer to a "Come in" he ushered us across the threshold, and left us with a low bow.

A tall, dusty, untidy man came to meet us, and greeted the General very warmly. I stood in the background and looked at him. His reddish-brown hair was sprinkled thickly with gray. He wore a very old coat, the lapels of which bore some traces of tobacco ash. He had a rough grayish-brown beard and bright shrewd hazel eyes. He seemed as if he were always running his hands through his hair in desperation, and as if he had slept in his clothes.

So much I noticed while the old friends were greeting each other. Then the two turned to me.

"And so this is the author of _Love in the Valley_!" said the great publisher in a singularly musical voice. "Upon my word, I could not have believed it was such young work, General."

"Ah! Miss Brandon is very old for her age," replied the General, highly delighted at the implied compliment to the book. "You've been reading it, Linklater?"

We had sent in the manuscript before leaving home.

"Yes, yes," said Mr. Linklater, still looking at me very kindly; "I've dipped into the early chapters. I think well of it, very well, for a first book. It isn't a _Jane Eyre_, you know, nor a _Wuthering Heights_. Still, 'tis pleasant reading, and very hopeful."

"That's all we wanted you to say," said the General, a bit testily. "We're not fools about our first book, are we, Hilda?"

"Indeed," said I truthfully, "Mr. Linklater's verdict is far kinder than I had dared to hope for."

The publisher looked away from me as if the subject were done with.

"And how are pheasants in your part of the world, MacNeill?"

"Not much, Linklater. Poaching has been rampant for years. There's no such system of fat and comfortable preserving as you have here; and then the heavy rains kill off the young birds, all but the strongest."

"Ah! that's bad, that's bad. Any blackcock?"

"The mountains simply swarm with every kind of game, from deer to snipe. But nothing's been taken care of. My place has been derelict for years. I'll put in a couple of keepers, and next year you must come and judge for yourself, if God spares us all."

"Why shouldn't He?" said the publisher hastily.

"Ah! Linklater, you're a young man still, while I've turned sixty. And life is uncertain to the youngest of us."

"So it is, so it is!" said the publisher, as if the question had no interest for him. "I hear you've good trout rivers over there."

"The best in Europe," said the General heartily. "My cook will send you up a salmon-trout if you'll come over next May or June--off your own rod, too--that you'll never forget as long as you live."

"You were always a lucky dog!" said the publisher enviously. "I suppose there's no man alive hates the smell of printer's ink more than I do, and yet here I am, condemned to it all my life, while you've been living the life of a man, fighting half the time, and now sitting down to enjoy your elder years in a half-wild country flowing with milk and honey."

"You are shocking this child, Linklater," said the General, and indeed I had heard him in amazement. "Miss Brandon thinks Paternoster Row the centre of the universe."

The publisher looked at me kindly.

"So did I when I was her age, or I shouldn't be where I am now."

"Hear him!" said the General. "Who would think the man was one of the finest scholars alive?"

"Grubbing among the bones of dead men."

"My lad told me that when he was at Oxford you were still remembered as the Bodleian Bookworm."

"I had less complimentary names than that. I was an idle dog in those days, or at least learnt nothing that could bring me honours. I read at my own sweet will, and came out badly in the Schools, though better than I deserved. I was really the idlest man of my time, except Fennings of New, who lay all day in a hammock with a pack of cards, and played the right hand against the left when he could no longer get anyone to play with him. He afterwards became a great colonial administrator,--"

"And you a scholar, whose scholarship altogether overshadows you as a publisher."

"Well, well, I ought to have been a farmer, and tramped the furrows all day in muddy boots. Books are not living."

"You're an ungrateful fellow!" said the General. "If you were one of the failures, now?"

"Ah!" said the publisher; "everyone knows in his own heart how much he has failed or succeeded. But here is Miss Brandon, a beginner still at the cross-roads, and with the will yet hers to choose which she will take. You're not afraid of hard work, Miss Brandon?"

"Not a bit," I answered fervently.

"You can bear having your things rejected by stupid editors and publishers, while they publish work you feel to be infinitely less good? You can bear to see popularity pass you by, on its way to writers whose work you think beneath your contempt? You can bear to see your books published and forgotten, as utterly as a stone is forgotten that is dropped in the water; and to endure the stupidity and neglect of the critics, as well as of the public?"

"I can bear it all," said I cheerfully.

"Well, then, if you can," said he, with a change of tone, "you will find the roses in your path thicker than the thorns. The work is exquisite for its own sake, and if it is good, and it _will_ be good, you will have a little audience that will love you and it. You will never write a word to fall on deaf ears. You will find even a few critics to believe in you, and say so. And you will gain the most unselfish friendship. I have heard of envy and malice in literature, but I have never yet discovered them."

"Ah! there speaks the cynic," said the General; "and yet you would tramp the furrows and depend on the weather?"

"I would plant cabbages against the rainy time, so that if my oats were rotting my vegetables would be waxing fat. The weather is a good or a bad fellow according as you take him."

"Well, Linklater, we're taking up too much of your valuable time."

"I'm the idlest man in London this minute."

"Well, if you are, come and lunch with us at the Cecil."

"Ah! but others are not so idle as I. I have a good many people to see before lunch time. By the way, we must meet again. Suppose you dine with me one evening? I want to hear a good many things about yourself."

As we went out Mr. Linklater drew the General aside, and said something to him in a low voice. I guessed at its purport, for the General shook his head very sadly in answer.

"Ah, well!" said the publisher; "I wouldn't give up hope, man. Lance was always a fellow of so much resource, and again and again men have returned after being given up for lost, as he has been."

"And many have not returned," said the General. "But thank you, Linklater, for your sympathy all the same."

"We are both lonely men," said the publisher. "But you have yet hope."

"And you have certainty," said the General, looking up and lifting his hat. "I have often wished I could have as much."

"Ah! that is where you religious men score."

"Yes," said the General simply; "I do not know where my boy is, but there is One that knows."

The two men shook hands in silence. Then the publisher turned to me with his kind smile.

"We shall make you formal publishing proposals in a day or two, Miss Brandon. It would never do to arrange such matters during a morning call."

After we had gone out in the street the General told me that Mr. Linklater had lost his wife and daughter by scarlet fever a few years previously.

"Poor fellow! poor fellow!" he said; "he looks as if he wanted a woman's hand about him. You would hardly believe, Hilda, that I remember him as one of the golden youth?"

"I don't think the carelessness of his attire misbecomes him," I said.

"Ah! it has a sad look to me, remembering him so far otherwise."

"I always supposed that all scholars were rather dusty. Books are such dusty things."

"Linklater was the exception. His wife was a lovely, soft creature, and devoted to him. And the little red-haired girl was a thing of such light and colour that she seemed more like a bird or a flower than a human creature. It is hard to imagine Death stilling all that wild and gracious life."

"Or fixing it for ever."

"True, my child. He carries the elixir of life if we would only see it. But now, how are you pleased about your own affairs?"

"Oh, dear General, how could I be anything but pleased? And I owe it all to you. What a blessed, blessed day it was that brought you to Rose Hill!"

"It was blessed for me. I have often since thought it so strange that we should have been brought together, you having known my boy."

I said nothing in answer to this, but as we were in a hansom I just pressed my old friend's hand to assure him of my sympathy. Then to distract his mind I told him about Freda, and how I had got to the root of her mystery. He was greatly interested.

"She must be a brave creature," he said, "though I think her foolish to have kept you all in the dark. But young people are romantic, and will take views, especially in the matter of self-sacrifice, that we sadder and older ones cannot share. And there was no wilful deception; the thing seems to have grown up of itself. But don't you feel happier, now that your golden castles for her are all in ruins?"

"I feel as if my sister had been given back to me," I said, "and if I'm not mistaken, Aline will feel just the same way."

"Ah, that's right! Better to have her heart in the right place than to have her a rich woman, eh?"

"Much better."

"I fancy I knew Mrs. Vincent at one time," he said musingly. "At least I remember meeting the wife of an excellent soldier and good comrade, Ned Vincent, of the Frontier Rifles. I heard he died of fever up-country. I wonder if it could be the same!"

"I am sure it is," said I, "for Mrs. Vincent always speaks of 'Ned'."

"I had no idea he left his widow poor. Something ought to be done for her if she is Ned Vincent's widow. I wonder if I have enough influence at the War Office to try!"

"You had better make sure about her first. Supposing we go to-morrow? I'll send a card to Freda to-night."

The thing was agreed upon, and the General and I drove down to Magnolia Cottage next day. The General had gone out in the morning on a mysterious business, and several brown-paper parcels of odd shapes had been left afterwards by quickly-arriving errand-boys. I didn't ask what the things were, but I guessed pretty accurately without the assistance of Miss MacNeill's indiscretion.

She had accompanied us to the hall-door, and noticed the General, with a pretence of there being no secrecy about the matter, carrying his parcels to the hansom.

"Now whatever have you got there?" she blurted. "Not a toy drum, surely. You're not going back to your second childhood, Hugh?"

"Madam," said the General in his angriest voice, "folly and meddlesomeness are not confined to any age, as you've the best right in all the world to know."

And he stalked away from the gibe I saw trembling on Miss Lucy's lips.

When we were seated and packed round about with very angular parcels, he explained to me apologetically that he had taken the liberty of bringing some toys for the little soldier.

"Your sister won't mind, my dear," he said. "She will forgive an old man who once had a little soldier of his own."

"She will think it very kind," I assured him, and indeed those toys were a passport for the General to the hearts of the two women who loved Jacky more than all the world.

Mrs. Vincent proved to be the widow of the General's old friend, and as they seemed to have a thousand things to talk of, Freda and I left them together while we made Jacky's toilet. It had been made earlier in the day, but he had undone it all by falling into the bath while giving his puppy, Captain, a bath in honour of the brave soldier man they were both going to be introduced to.

Jacky certainly looked very smart when we had got him into a fresh white sailor suit, and with his hair more curly than ever after his cold-water dip, presented him to the General. Jacky immediately stood "at attention", with his finger to his curls as a military salute.

"Why, come here, my brave lad, and see whether the young soldier can learn anything from the old soldier!" cried the General, beaming; and a few seconds later Jacky was perched on his knee, showing him his good-conduct stripes, and explaining that at the end of the year, if his conduct was all that could be desired, he was to receive a medal.

"Where are your medals, old soldier?" Jacky cried. "And why don't you wear them on your tunic as I shall?"

The general explained to him that custom required the grown-up soldier to dress like an ordinary citizen at times, and then he described, with the utmost painstaking, so that a little child might understand, the various medals he had, and the battles for which they were given.

Freda and Mrs. Vincent were as much absorbed as Jacky. I enjoyed it from an outsider's point of view, thinking how pretty it was--the old man with the child's heart bringing down his years to the level of the child's, and the two women with their pleasure and pride in it all.

Presently, when they were quite old friends, for the friendship advanced by strides, the General's gifts were offered, and received with such shrieks of delight on Jacky's part that I was fain to clap my hands to my ears.

When we left, Jacky played us out, marching backwards and forwards as he had seen the Highland pipers do in the streets, girt with sword and drum, and with a shrill fife at his lips, so that all Grove Avenue turned out to see.

"A brave little chap!" the General pronounced him; and as we drove away he leaned from the hansom to look back at him. I thought he looked sad. He was thinking of his own soldier boy, I made sure.

We had very gay times after that, and on several occasions the General took Jacky with us on our expeditions, bearing with the child so patiently and sweetly that I thought no mother could have done more. Not that Jacky didn't behave admirably. He had an immense admiration for "Old Soldier" as he called him; but then a lively boy of six is apt to prove a handful to a veteran with a gun-shot wound in the leg, and to a slightly-limping girl.

We saw the Tower, and Hampton Court, and Windsor Castle, and the exhibition at Earl's Court, and the waxworks at Madame Tussaud's, and the Crystal Palace, all with Jacky to bear us company.

Then the General and I saw one or two theatres, and one evening we dined with Mr. Linklater, and it was all very pleasant. But by the time our little holiday was up I was beginning to feel rather fagged, and to wish for Brandon and the library at Rose Hill.

The very last morning we were in London came the publishing proposal from Messrs. Linklater, Lee, and Warner, with a stamped agreement for me to sign, which I did, feeling it the proudest moment of my life. The book was to come out before Christmas, and the proposal seemed to me a very handsome one, for I should have been overjoyed to get the book published without any suggestion of being paid for it.

However, as the General said, that wouldn't be business, or at least business as an honourable firm like Linklater, Lee, and Warner understood it.

I couldn't send back the agreement till I had taken it home for Aline and Esther and the boys to see, not even if it delayed the book, but the General said he thought there would be no fear of that.

And now that I had to look forward to such happy things--the book, and the reviews, and all that--I longed for the time to pass till the published book should be an accomplished fact, and Hilda Brandon the name of a real author.

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