Part 1
[Illustration:
CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART
Fifth Series
ESTABLISHED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS, 1832
CONDUCTED BY R. CHAMBERS (SECUNDUS)
NO. 140.—VOL. III. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 1886. PRICE 1½_d._]
PARK PEARLS.
By the cottage, a stranger is hailed with sharp palpable hostility, followed by a guttural sentence inwardly spoken. The watchdog pours out his durable qualities on the intruder’s ear. To prevent any misunderstanding, he tells, most forcibly, of the consequences of a nearer approach. As the inmates of the hamlet are thus warned, an unknown face gazes on him, waiting at the wicket. I love the creature’s voice. It sounds of a home, although not mine. It hints of a domestic circle with chubby bairns, little dumpy arms, tiny prattling feet, dirty faces—as all children have if left to their own sweet will—children of the woods and parks, little rural arabs—the human world in miniature uncontrolled. The barking is incessant. A mellow voice spreads over the grassy lawns; on the pensive air, a hollow metallic ringing is carried out, eddying as tiny wavelets to the shore of a tiny pool—the music of an echo, touching the high towers of the mansion-house, rebounding to the forest edge—clear, fine, and pleasing. The winter sunny rays moisten the crust by the gateway, and the earth seems saturated by a shower which fell days ago—a shower of snow. Around the open glade, a stately circle of beech and fir trees marks the park’s outline. The day is cold and damp; the seasons hang in the balance.
In summer here, I know a tree whereon the cushat builds, a tree of fir. On the green soft cushion around its base the children gather needles and pins for youthful household purposes—age reflected in infancy. These trees are honestly Scotch, riveted to the soil; the nettle and the thistle lower in the scale. Around the wood-pigeons’ abode, mighty beeches extend their branches, and sycamores shelter the approach—trees born of ancestral days, veterans of the forest; and at eventide, when the sun is warm, carrying its fire-flame westwards, the low Coo, coo! familiarly resounds over the park—a plaintive moaning from the tree-top. The lark from the mossy meadow tells his tale of love and devotion, going high above the forest shadows, revelling in the ether, shouting vocally in the sky, making the aërial hall ring with its joyous out-pourings—a musical day-star, a pearl from earth and the clod paying homage at the footstool of light.
Over the emerald ground-work, a rook is seen; when the wind is high, he courts the lee-side of the forest, and hugs the bushes on the border, passing like a mighty rushing blast, causing the dead leaf to swirl on the grass. Atop the fence circling the copse, the magpie sits with piratical flashes in his eye, brooding over the stratagem required for further business. Down to the field he goes, and over the meadow-land on strong wing, tail floating gaily in the breeze; a gem, a pearl, a bird of surpassing beauty, up to the fir-trees, chattering harshly, loudly, defiantly. A continuous warble, an entertaining exhibition of voice-power on the part of the hedge-sparrow, enlivens the bushes under the shadow of the beeches; its capabilities of a very high order—a low, sweet, liquid song. In a meditating mood it sits; with an inquisitive air it looks for food under the stems. Its little nest is cosy; its contents four blue turquoises set in a brown environment.
Cuck-oo, cuck-oo! What a mystic sound! a half-human, a legendary echo, a resemblance half-bird, half-mammal expression; a source of infinite conjecture, a perfume from an unseen flower. There it sits, a brown, dark, spotted-like creature, with long arrow-like body, lengthy ocean-steamer-formed bird, a true migrant, a sailor on the winds, a voyager across the oceans; an outlaw, a bohemian, living by the way, dropping its egg in the nest of some absent one, leaving the care of its offspring to another; an ichneumon in feathers. Cuck-oo, cuck-oo! The sound comes from the bushes out there. No! There he sits still, not knowing he is observed. Strange bird, dweller in eternal summer climes, hater of northern blasts; and as you reflect, he is gone down the grove to seek his mate.
Following each other, wailing, calling, the lapwings dive, rise, and scream again, flapping their rounded paddles—brilliant pearls of colour touched by the sunlight. What hilarity; what gestures they cut over the park, down the slope, and across the fields. Joyful birds, birds of the earth and the fullness thereof. The cheerful merry notes come on the breeze, and contain a wildness, a free, piquant taste of nature’s highways. In spring, the notes bring with them the milkboy’s song and the ploughman’s whistle. You feel the air refreshed; a balminess fills the glade, seeks between the tree arms, clusters round the hedge, reassuring the crocus and the primrose. Your heart goes out to meet the bird, even be it unseen, as if photographed on the mind; the rural scene within a certain range springs before the imagination, called up afresh. All nature claps its hands in pride and ecstasy.
With a hurried Cha, cha, cha, cha! the blackbird leaves the stone wall—a cock-bird, black as jet—to attend his lady on the park’s surface. A rollicking sprightliness characterises his movements; his tone is sharp, full of intricacies, hard to interpret. In autumn, when the nests are empty, how delightful to walk through the copse—a clump of dwarfed trees, everything in repose. The nests, the homes, the beds of the departed little ones, rest there between the forks and amongst the benty undergrowth, remnants of blithe mirth-making and droll expressions. A few feathers—vivid remembrance of garments—the broken twigs and sere leaves are toys. Singing now is in silvery strains; before, it was golden; now restricted in its compass and its range.
The pheasant from the cover skulks hastily away, and in the sun shines as a pearl of great price. His ruby head he cannot hide—it is too lovely. It sets off as a coronet his kingly robes. ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’ An irresistible habit attends the luckless bird; he peers from the herbage, and the sun catches the treacherous colours, denouncing the retreat of this majestic park glory. There is an unspeakable mellowness. Insect and bird, both are loth to frolic; they are not now so fond of being seen, eluding the watchful eye; contented trills are all that is now heard. Yellow, full-eared cornfields, charged with the honey of a season, like soldiers, laden with booty, now ‘pile their arms’ in squares and companies over the harvest battle-field.
With the stillness of a mid-day in the park, at that moment when even the birds are gone, the insect world vanished, there is a sudden seeming pause. The daisy and the clover say it is the meridian, the exact moment when the dial casts no side shadow. It resembles the dinner-hour, the din and rattle hushed for a time. When the cuckoos meet here in the gushing summer day, when the down-pouring of the golden rays from the clear sky parches the pebbly brook, and curls up the grass of the park, then the combination of pride, blitheness, and mid-day fervour of breezes modified, refined by the park trees, disperse in the quiet inclosure, and mingling in space with the warm air, vanish, as it were, in an unanswerable manner.
Kittiwakes from the rocky heights wander, by the aid of their beautiful wings, over the park round the copse, circling, screaming with angry voice, with a majesty, an aristocratic air, no flurried haste. These wings are seasoned by the salt of the ocean. They move over the reefs, the shoals, the surface-swells of the landscape; but their gaze pierces not the crest of the earth, but is thrown back tauntingly, while their eyes search pleadingly. These water-washed pearls rest in twos and threes, white dots on the carpet of green. The daisy, dandelion, clover, and the tints of many grasses, cut out lovely patterns before your eyes; the primrose makes a golden margin, the bushes raise the edge. In the language of flowers, the surface holds communion. Above the long rank growth on the ditch-side, the sorrel loves to dwell, and thistles keep watch over their lowly neighbours.
A transient glimpse of a pretty bird in the depths of the bushes rivets the attention—a redstart!—jerky, flirting beauty. This tangled undergrowth seems a fit habitation only for the badger, or a likely cover for the fox. That admixture of ruby and turquoise might well adorn the scrupulously trimmed lawn before the mansion-house. Why stay in such a sequestered nook? You are an uncommon friend. Right glad am I to make the acquaintance of such as you, even here. How restless you wander along the bough, your shrill note doubtless being apprehensive of danger, away under the bushes without a parting word. A robin fills the place—that hero of many a tale, that picture-painted creature evolved from the reddish-tinted egg shells. His family meet him on the broom that overhangs the bank. The earthwork has fallen, disclosing the boughs that were once underground, appearing now like strong cables from ship to anchor. Its home is there, behind the rootlet, and between that and the earthen wall. At evening, puffed up, ball-formed, it sits challenging a robin not far off in vocal speech, a ruby spot, a blood-stained front without a scar. The notes remind you of olden days. Something is gone, is awanting; a vagueness immeasurable borders the song. There is a want, although he sings in language liquid and clear. It is in harmony with the half-sleeping water babbling through the grasses. He is a wild Red Indian, sighing, jerking, laughing, smiling at the weather of the seasons.
Two, three! Keep still; there go the rabbits. Move your foot amongst those dead leaves—magic, they are gone! Thud, thud! be it anger, fear, or defiance. Thud! the very earth vibrates in harmony with the animals’ spirit. Over the entrance, on the tree-roots grow long variegated lines of stainless white vegetation—whiter under there, against the earth—a soft quartz in a soft rock. That sapling is dead, nipped in its youth. Its leaves are golden, its virgin beauty was green. All other trees are in their native garb. In its fall, its dying agony, its roots wrenched from the soil, the earth still adhering; it had groaning, fallen, clenched its comrade; and now petrified, its arms are rigid, death-like. The bunnies burrow under the shelter of the upturned sapling; but otherwise its history is wrapped in unconcern. Only the bee, that in its flight catches the reddish glow, and halts to know the cause. The common blue butterfly, in its diurnal flight over the park in search of sweets, at times erects its wings, there exhibiting the rows of matchless pearls imprinted on the border of its garment. The wren leaves not the tree in its misfortune, but twits its plaintive miniature trill from under the withered leaves and débris swept against its surface, accumulating with every fresh breeze.
Again the participating musical stumble of the blackbird comes from the tree-branch on the copse margin—a male voice, a bass, with variations of chattering fluency. Late insects linger at the outskirts, and roam the extent of the park. The insect hum rises from the herbage here and there; a bee, trapped by the spider’s snare, hums, buzzing vengeance on the fisher casting his silken net there. In the bushes, a slight fluttering—a leaf floats unheard to the ground, to increase the mouldy earth. The repose is broken again and again—droning beetles, and the tingling flight of the moths fluttering around the willows at the burn. The tawny owls hoot, throwing a weird enchantment on things adjacent, their muffled, softened wings carrying them from view along the forest edge. A solitary starry pearl, a snowdrop of the heavens, bursts the crust of the empyrean—then it is night.
IN ALL SHADES.
BY GRANT ALLEN,
AUTHOR OF ‘BABYLON,’ ‘STRANGE STORIES,’ ETC. ETC.
CHAPTER XLIII.
When Nora and the doctor reached the door of Orange Grove, they found Edward Hawthorn waiting to receive them, and the servants already busy trying to remove as far as possible the signs of the wreck so lately effected by the wild rioters. Several neighbouring planters, who had come down from the hills above, stood in armed groups around the gate; and a few mounted black constables, hastily summoned to the spot by the fire, were helping to extinguish the smouldering ashes. Only Delgado’s dead body lay untouched upon the sofa, stiff and motionless, for not one of the negroes dare venture to set hands upon it; and in the room within, Marian sat still, looking anxiously at Harry Noel’s pallid face and livid eyelids, and his bloodstained shirt, that yet heaved faintly and almost imperceptibly upon his broad bosom at each long slow-drawn inspiration.
‘He is living?’ Nora asked, in a hushed voice of painful inquiry; and Marian answered under her breath, looking up at the bluff doctor: ‘Yes; he’s living still. He’s breathing quite regularly, though very feebly.’
As for Macfarlane, he went to work at once with the cool business-like precision and rapidity of his practised profession, opening the bloodstained shirt in front, and putting his hand in through the silk vest to feel the heart that still beat faintly and evenly. ‘He’s lost a great deal of blood, no doubt, Mrs Hawthorn,’ he said cheerily; ‘but he’s a strong man, and he’ll pull through yet; ye needn’t be too anxious—thanks to whoever put this handkerchief around his arm. It’s a good enough tourniquet to use on an emergency.—Was it you, Miss Dupuy, or Mrs Hawthorn?’
A round spot of vivid colour flashed for a moment into Nora’s white cheek as she answered quietly: ‘It was me, Dr Macfarlane!’ and then died out again as fast as it had come, when Macfarlane’s eyes were once more removed from her burning face.
‘Ye’re a brave lass, and no mistake,’ the doctor went on, removing the tourniquet, and stanching the fresh flow rapidly with a proper bandage, produced with mechanical routine from his coat pocket. ‘Well, well, don’t be afraid about him any longer. It’s a big cut, and a deep cut, and it’s just gone and severed a good big artery—an ugly business; but ye’ve taken it in time; and your bandage has been most judiciously applied; so ye may rest assured that, with a little nursing, the young man will soon be all right again, and sound as ever. A cutlass is a nasty weapon to get a wound from, because those nigger fellows don’t sharpen them up to a clean edge, as they ought to do rightly, but just hack and mutilate a man in the most outrageous and unbusiness-like manner, instead of killing him outright like good Christians, with a neat, sharp, workman-like incision. But we’ll pull him through—we’ll pull him through yet, I don’t doubt it. And if he lives, ye may have the pleasure of knowing, young lady, that it was the tourniquet ye made so cleverly that just saved him at the right moment.’
As Macfarlane finished dressing and tending Harry’s wound, and Harry’s eyes began to open again, slowly and glassily, for he was very faint with loss of blood, Nora, now that the excitement of that awful evening was fairly over, seemed at last to realise within herself her great loss with a sudden revulsion. Turning away passionately from Harry’s bedside, she rushed into the next room, where the women-servants were already gathered around their master’s body, keening and wailing as is their wont, with strange hymns and incoherent songs, wherein stray scraps of Hebrew psalms and Christian anthems were mingled incongruously with weird surviving reminiscences of African fetichism, and mystic symbols of aboriginal obeah. Fully awake now to the blow that had fallen so suddenly upon her, Nora flung herself in fierce despair by her father’s side, and kissed the speechless lips two or three times over with wild remorse in her fresh agony of distress and isolation. ‘Father, father!’ she cried aloud, in the self-same long-drawn wail as the negresses around her, ‘they’ve killed you, they’ve killed you! my darling—my darling!’
‘Dem kill you—dem kill you!’ echoed Rose and Nita and the other women in their wailing sing-song. ‘But de Lard ob hebben himself avenge you. De grabe yawnin’ wide this ebenin’ for Louis Delgado. De Lard smite him—de Lard smite him!’
‘Get away, all you auld crones!’ the doctor said, coming in upon them suddenly with his hearty Scotch voice, that seemed to break in too harshly on the weird solemnity of the ghastly scene. ‘Let me see how it was they killed your master. He’s dead, you say—stone-dead, is he? Let me see—let me see, then.—Here you, there—lift up his head, will you, and put it down decently on the pillow!’
Nita did as she was told, mechanically, with a reproachful glance from her big white-fringed eyes at the too matter-of-fact and common-sense Scotchman, and then sat down again, squatting upon the floor, moaning and crooning piteously to herself, as decorum demanded of her under such circumstances.
The doctor looked closely at the clotted blood that hung in ugly tangles on the poor old man’s gray locks, and whistled a little in a dubious undertone to himself, when he saw the great gash that ran right across Mr Dupuy’s left shoulder. ‘An awkward cut,’ he said slowly—‘a very severe and awkward cut, I don’t deny it. But I don’t precisely see, myself, why it need have positively killed him. The loss of blood needn’t have been so very excessive. He’s hacked about terribly, poor old gentleman, with their ugly cutlasses, though hardly enough to have done for a Dupuy, in my opinion. They’re very tough subjects indeed to kill, all the Dupuys are.’
As he spoke, he leant down cautiously over the body, and listened for a minute or two attentively with his ear at the heart and lips. Then he held his finger lightly with close scrutiny before the motionless nostrils, and shook his head once or twice in a very solemn and ominous fashion. ‘It’s a most singular fact,’ he said with slow deliberation, looking over at Edward, ‘and one full of important psychological implications, that the members of every nationality I have ever had to deal with in the whole course of my professional experience—except only the Scottish people—have a most illogical and ridiculous habit of jumping at conclusions without sufficient data to go upon. The man’s not dead at all, I tell you—not a bit of it. He’s breathing still, breathing visibly.’
Nora leapt up at the word with another sudden access of wild energy. ‘Breathing!’ she cried—‘breathing, doctor! Then he’ll live still. He’ll get better again, will he, my darling?’
‘Now ye’re jumping at conclusions a second time most unwarrantably,’ Macfarlane answered, with true Scotch caution. ‘I will not say positively he’ll get better again, for that’s a question that rests entirely in the hands of the Almighty. But I do say the man’s breathing—not a doubt of it.’
The discovery inspired them all at once with fresh hope for Mr Dupuy’s safety. In a few minutes they had taken off his outer clothing and dressed his wounds; while Nora sat rocking herself to and fro excitedly in the American chair, her hands folded tight with interlacing fingers upon her lap, and her lips trembling with convulsive jerks, as she moaned in a low monotone to herself, between suspense and hope, after all the successive manifold terrors of that endless evening.
By-and-by the doctor turned to her kindly and gently. ‘He’ll do,’ he said, in his most fatherly manner. ‘Go to bed, lass, go to bed, I tell ye. Why, ye’re bruised and beaten yourself too, pretty awkwardly! Ye’ll need rest. Go to bed; an’ he’ll be better, we’ll hope and trust, to-morrow morning.’
‘I won’t go to bed,’ Nora said firmly, ‘as long as I don’t know whether he will live or not, Dr Macfarlane.’
‘Why, my lass, that’ll be a very long watch for ye, then, indeed, I promise you, for he’ll not be well again for many a long day yet, I’m thinking. But he’ll do, I don’t doubt, with care and nursing. Go to bed, now, for there’ll be plenty to guard you. Mr Hawthorn and I will stop here to-night; and there’s neighbours enough coming up every minute to hold the place against all the niggers in the whole of Trinidad. The country’s roused now; the constabulary’s alive; and the governor’ll be sending up the military shortly to take care of us while you’re sleeping. Go to bed at once, there’s a guid lassie.’
Marian took her quietly by the arm and led her away, once more half fainting. ‘You’ll stop with me, dear?’ Nora whispered; and Marian answered with a kiss: ‘Yes, my darling; I’ll stop with you as long as you want me.’
‘Wait a minute,’ the good doctor called out after them. ‘Ye’ll need something to make you sleep after all this excitement, I take it, ladies. There’s nothing in the world so much recommended by the faculty under these conditions as a good stiff glass of old Highland whisky with some lime-juice and a lump of sugar in it.—Ye’ll have some whisky in the house, no doubt, won’t you, Uncle Ezekiel?’
In a minute or two, Uncle ’Zekiel had brought the whisky and the glasses and the fruit for the lime-juice, and Macfarlane had duly concocted what he considered as a proper dose for the young ladies. Edward noticed, too, that besides the whisky, the juice, and the sugar, he poured furtively into each glass a few drops from a small phial that he took out unperceived by all the others from his waistcoat pocket. And as soon as the two girls had gone off together, the doctor whispered to him confidentially, with all the air of a most profound conspirator: ‘The poor creatures wanted a little sedative to still their nerves, I consider, after all this unusual and upsetting excitement, so I’ve just taken the liberty to give them each a drop or two of morphia in their whisky, that’ll make them both sleep as sound as a child till to-morrow morning.’
But all that night, the negroes watched and prayed loudly in their own huts with strange devotions, and the white men and the constables watched—with more oaths than prayers, after the white man’s fashion—armed to the teeth around the open gate of Mr Dupuy’s front garden.
RECENT NOTES FROM THE LAND OF EGYPT.