Little Lord Fauntleroy (14 page)

“Well, Havisham,” said the Earl's harsh voice behind him. “What is it? It is evident something has happened. What was the extraordinary event, if I may ask?”

Mr. Havisham turned from the sofa, still rubbing his chin.

“It was bad news,” he answered, “distressing news, my lord—the worst of news. I am sorry to be the bearer of it.”

The Earl had been uneasy for some time during the evening, as he glanced at Mr. Havisham, and when he was uneasy he was always ill-tempered.

“Why do you look so at the boy!” he exclaimed irritably. “You have been looking at him all the evening as if—See here now, why should you look at the boy, Havisham, and hang over him like some bird of ill-omen! What has your news to do with Lord Fauntleroy?”

“My lord,” said Mr. Havisham, “I will waste no words. My news has everything to do with Lord Fauntleroy. And if we are to believe it—it is not Lord Fauntleroy who lies sleeping before us, but only the son of Captain Errol. And the present Lord Fauntleroy is the son of your son Bevis, and is at this moment in a lodging-house in London.”

The Earl clutched the arms of his chair with both his hands until the veins stood out upon them; the veins stood out on his forehead too; his fierce old face was almost livid.

“What do you mean!” he cried out. “You are mad! Whose lie is this?”

“If it is a lie,” answered Mr. Havisham, “it is painfully like the truth. A woman came to my chambers this morning. She said your son Bevis married her six years ago in London. She showed me her marriage certificate. They quarrelled a year after the marriage, and he paid her to keep away from him. She has a son five years old. She is an American of the lower classes—an ignorant person—and until lately she did not fully understand what her son could claim. She consulted a lawyer and found out that the boy was really Lord Fauntleroy and the heir to the earldom of Dorincourt; and she, of course, insists on his claims being acknowledged.”

There was a movement of the curly head on the yellow satin cushion. A soft, long, sleepy sigh came from the parted lips, and the little boy stirred in his sleep, but not at all restlessly or uneasily. Not at all as if his slumber were disturbed by the fact that he was being proved a small impostor and that he was not Lord Fauntleroy at all and never would be the Earl of Dorincourt. He only turned his rosy face more on its side as if to enable the old man who stared at it so solemnly to see it better.

The handsome, grim old face was ghastly. A bitter smile fixed itself upon it.

“I should refuse to believe a word of it,” he said, “if it were not such a low, scoundrelly piece of business that it becomes quite possible in connection with the name of my son Bevis. It is quite like Bevis. He was always a disgrace to us. Always a weak, untruthful, vicious young brute with low tastes—my son and heir, Bevis, Lord Fauntleroy. The woman is an ignorant, vulgar person, you say?”

“I am obliged to admit that she can scarcely spell her own name,” answered the lawyer. “She is absolutely uneducated and openly mercenary. She cares for nothing but the money. She is very handsome in a coarse way, but—”

The fastidious old lawyer ceased speaking and gave a sort of shudder.

The veins on the old Earl's forehead stood out like purple cords. Something else stood out upon it too—cold drops of moisture. He took out his handkerchief and swept them away. His smile grew even more bitter.

“And I,” he said, “I objected to—to the other woman, the mother of this child”—pointing to the sleeping form on the sofa—“I refused to recognize her. And yet she could spell her own name. I suppose this is retribution.”

Suddenly he sprang up from his chair and began to walk up and down the room. Fierce and terrible words poured forth from his lips. His rage and hatred and cruel disappointment shook him as a storm shakes a tree. His violence was something dreadful to see, and yet Mr. Havisham noticed that at the very worst of his wrath he never seemed to forget the little sleeping figure on the yellow satin cushions, and that he never once spoke loud enough to awaken it.

“I might have known it,” he said. “They were a disgrace to me from their first hour! I hated them both; and they hated me! Bevis was the worst of the two. I will not believe this yet though! I will contend against it to the last. But it is like Bevis—it is like him!”

And then he raged again and asked questions about the woman, about her proofs, and pacing the room, turned first white and then purple in his repressed fury.

When at last he had learned all there was to be told, and knew the worst, Mr. Havisham looked at him with a feeling of anxiety. He looked broken and haggard and changed. His rages had always been bad for him, but this one had been worse than the rest because there had been something more than rage in it.

He came slowly back to the sofa, at last, and stood near it.

“If anyone had told me I could be fond of a child,” he said, his harsh voice low and unsteady, “I should not have believed them. I always detested children—my own more than the rest. I am fond of this one; he is fond of me” (with a bitter smile). “I am not popular; I never was. But he is fond of me. He never was afraid of me—he always trusted me. He would have filled my place better than I have filled it. I know that. He would have been an honor to the name.”

He bent down and stood a minute or so looking at the happy, sleeping face. His shaggy eyebrows were knitted fiercely, and yet somehow he did not seem fierce at all. He put up his hand, pushed the bright hair back from the forehead, and then turned away and rang the bell.

When the largest footman appeared, he pointed to the sofa.

“Take,” he said, and then his voice changed a little, “take Lord Fauntleroy to his room.”

W
HEN Mr. Hobbs's young friend left him to go to Dorincourt Castle and become Lord Fauntleroy, and the grocery-man had time to realize that the Atlantic Ocean lay between himself and the small companion who had spent so many agreeable hours in his society, he really began to feel very lonely indeed. The fact was, Mr. Hobbs was not a clever man, nor even a bright one; he was indeed, rather a slow and heavy person, and he had never made many acquaintances. He was not mentally energetic enough to know how to amuse himself, and in truth he never did anything of an entertaining nature but read the newspapers and add up his accounts. It was not very easy for him to add up his accounts, and sometimes it took him a long time to bring them out right; and in the old days, little Lord Fauntleroy, who had learned how to add up quite nicely with his fingers and a slate and pencil, had sometimes even gone to the length of trying to help him; and then too he had been so good a listener and had taken such an interest in what the newspaper said, and he and Mr. Hobbs had held such long conversations about the Revolution and the British and the elections and the Republican party, that it was no wonder his going left a blank in the grocery store. At first it seemed to Mr. Hobbs that Cedric was not really far away, and would come back again; that some day he would look up from his paper and see the lad standing in the doorway, in his white suit and red stockings, and with his straw hat on the back of his head, and would hear him say in his cheerful little voice: “Hello, Mr. Hobbs! This is a hot day—isn't it?” But as the days passed on and this did not happen, Mr. Hobbs felt very dull and uneasy. He did not even enjoy his newspaper as much as he used to. He would put the paper down on his knee after reading it, and sit and stare at the high stool for a long time. There were some marks on the long legs which made him feel quite dejected and melancholy. They were marks made by the heels of the next Earl of Dorincourt, when he kicked and talked at the same time. It seems that even youthful earls kick the legs of things they sit on; noble blood and lofty lineage do not prevent it. After looking at those marks Mr. Hobbs would take out his gold watch and open it and stare at the inscription: “From his oldest friend, Lord Fauntleroy, to Mr. Hobbs. When this you see, remember me.” And after staring at it awhile he would shut it up with a loud snap, and sigh and get up and go and stand in the doorway—between the box of potatoes and the barrel of apples—and look up the street. At night, when the store was closed, he would light his pipe and walk slowly along the pavement until he reached the house where Cedric had lived, on which there was a sign that read, “This House to Let”; and he would stop near it and look up and shake his head, and puff at his pipe very hard, and after a while walk mournfully back again.

This went on for two or three weeks before any new idea came to him. Being slow and ponderous, it always took him a long time to reach a new idea. As a rule he did not like new ideas, but preferred old ones. After two or three weeks, however, during which, instead of getting better, matters really grew worse, a novel plan slowly and deliberately dawned upon him. He would go to see Dick. He smoked a great many pipes before he arrived at the conclusion, but finally he did arrive at it. He would go to see Dick. He knew all about Dick. Cedric had told him, and his idea was that perhaps Dick might be some comfort to him in the way of talking things over.

So one day when Dick was very hard at work blacking a customer's boots, a short stout man with a heavy face and a bald head stopped on the pavement and stared for two or three minutes at the boot-black's sign, which read:

 

PROFESOR DICK TIPTON
CAN'T BE BEAT.

 

He stared at it so long that Dick began to take a lively interest in him, and when he had put the finishing touch to his customer's boots he said:

“Want a shine, sir?”

The stout man came forward deliberately and put his foot on the rest.

“Yes,” he said.

Then when Dick fell to work, the stout man looked from Dick to the sign and from the sign to Dick.

“Where did you get that?” he asked.

“From a friend o' mine,” said Dick, “a little feller. He guv' me the whole outfit. He was the best little feller ye ever saw. He's in England now. Gone to be one of them lords.”

“Lord—Lord,” asked Mr. Hobbs, with ponderous slowness, “Lord Fauntleroy—goin' to be Earl of Dorincourt?”

Dick almost dropped his brush.

“Why, boss,” he exclaimed, “d'ye know him yerself?”

“I've known him,” answered Mr. Hobbs, wiping his warm forehead, “ever since he was born. We were lifetime acquaintances—that's what
we
were.”

It really made him feel quite agitated to speak of it. He pulled the splendid gold watch out of his pocket and opened it, and showed the inside of the case to Dick.

“‘When this you see, remember me,'” he read. “That was his parting keepsake to me. ‘I don't want you to forget me'—those were his words—I'd ha' remembered him,” he went on, shaking his head, “if he hadn't given me a thing, an' I hadn't seen hide nor hair on him again. He was a companion as
any
man would remember.”

“He was the nicest little feller I ever see,” said Dick. “An' as to sand—I never seen so much sand to a little feller. I thought a heap o' him, I did—an' we was friends too—we was sort o' chums frum the fust, that little young 'un an' me. I grabbed his ball from under a stage fur him, an' he never forgot it; an' he'd come down here, he would, with his mother or his nuss an' he'd holler: ‘Hello, Dick!' at me, as friendly as if he was six feet high, when he warn't knee high to a grasshopper, and was dressed in gal's clo'es. He was a gay little chap, and when you was down on your luck it did you good to talk to him.”

“That's so,” said Mr. Hobbs. “It was a pity to make an earl out of him. He would have
shone
in the grocery business—or dry goods either; he would have
shone!
” And he shook his head with deeper regret than ever.

It proved that they had so much to say to each other that it was not possible to say it all at one time, and so it was agreed that the next night Dick should make a visit to the store and keep Mr. Hobbs company. The plan pleased Dick well enough. He had been a street waif nearly all his life, but he had never been a bad boy, and he had always had a private yearning for a more respectable kind of existence. Since he had been in business for himself, he had made enough money to enable him to sleep under a roof instead of out in the streets, and he had begun to hope he might reach even a higher plane in time. So, to be invited to call on a stout, respectable man who owned a corner store, and even had a horse and wagon, seemed to him quite an event.

“Do you know anything about earls and castles?” Mr. Hobbs inquired. “I'd like to know more of the particulars.”

“There's a story of some on 'em in the
Penny Story Gazette,
” said Dick. “It's called the ‘Crime of a Coronet; or, the Revenge of the Countess May.' It's a boss thing too. Some of us boys 're takin' it to read.”

“Bring it up when you come,” said Mr. Hobbs, “an' I'll pay for it. Bring all you can find that have any earls in 'em. If there aren't earls, markises 'll do, or dooks—though
he
never made mention of any dooks or markises. We did go over coronets a little, but I never happened to see any. I guess they don't keep 'em 'round here.”

“Tiffany 'd have 'em if anybody did,” said Dick, “but I don't know as I'd know one if I saw it.”

Mr. Hobbs did not explain that he would not have known one if he saw it. He merely shook his head ponderously.

“I s'pose there is very little call for 'em,” he said, and that ended the matter.

This was the beginning of quite a substantial friendship. When Dick went up to the store Mr. Hobbs received him with great hospitality. He gave him a chair tilted against the door, near a barrel of apples, and after his young visitor was seated, he made a jerk at them with the hand in which he held his pipe, saying:

“Help yerself.”

Then he looked at the story papers, and after that they read and discussed the British aristocracy; and Mr. Hobbs smoked his pipe very hard and shook his head a great deal. He shook it most when he pointed out the high stool with the marks on its legs.

“There's his very kicks,” he said impressively; “his very kicks. I sit and look at 'em by the hour. This is a world of ups an' it's a world of downs. Why, he'd set there, and eat biscuits out of a box, an' apples out of a barrel, an' pitch his cores into the street; an' now he's a lord a-livin' in a castle. Those are a lord's kicks; they'll be an earl's kicks some day. Sometimes I says to myself, says I, ‘Well, I'll be jiggered!'”

He seemed to derive a great deal of comfort from his reflections and Dick's visit. Before Dick went home, they had a supper in the small back room; they had biscuits and cheese and sardines, and other canned things out of the store, and Mr. Hobbs solemnly opened two bottles of ginger ale, and pouring out two glasses, proposed a toast.

“Here's to
him!
” he said, lifting his glass, “an' may he teach 'em a lesson—earls an' markises an' dooks an' all!”

After that night the two saw each other often, and Mr. Hobbs was much more comfortable and less desolate. They read the
Penny Story Gazette
and other interesting things, and gained a knowledge of the habits of the nobility and gentry which would have surprised those despised classes if they had realized it. One day Mr. Hobbs made a pilgrimage to a bookstore down town for the express purpose of adding to their library. He went to a clerk and leaned over the counter to speak to him.

“I want,” he said, “a book about earls.”

“What!” exclaimed the clerk.

“A book,” repeated the grocery-man, “about earls.”

“I'm afraid,” said the clerk, looking rather queer, “that we haven't what you want.”

“Haven't?” said Mr. Hobbs anxiously. “Well, say markises then—or dooks.”

“I know of no such book,” answered the clerk.

Mr. Hobbs was much disturbed. He looked down on the floor, then he looked up.

“None about female earls?” he inquired.

“I'm afraid not,” said the clerk with a smile.

“Well,” exclaimed Mr. Hobbs, “I'll be jiggered!”

He was just going out of the store, when the clerk called him back and asked him if a story in which the nobility were chief characters would do. Mr. Hobbs said it would—if he could not get an entire volume devoted to earls. So the clerk sold him a book called
The Tower of London,
written by Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, and he carried it home.

When Dick came they began to read it. It was a very wonderful and exciting book, and the scene was laid in the reign of the famous English queen who is called by some people Bloody Mary. And as Mr. Hobbs heard of Queen Mary's deeds and the habit she had of chopping people's heads off, putting them to the torture and burning them alive he became very much excited. He took his pipe out of his mouth and stared at Dick, and at last he was obliged to mop the perspiration from his brow with his red pocket-handkerchief.

“Why, he ain't safe!” he said. “He ain't safe! If the women folks can sit up on their thrones an' give the word for things like that to be done, who's to know what's happening to him this very minute? He's no more safe than nothing! Just let a woman like that get mad, an' no one's safe!”

“Well,” said Dick, though he looked rather anxious himself, “ye see this 'ere 'un isn't the one that's bossin' things now. I know her name's Victohry, an' this 'un here in the book—her name's Mary.”

“So it is,” said Mr. Hobbs, still mopping his forehead, “so it is. An' the newspapers are not sayin' anything about any racks, thumbscrews, or stake-burnin's—but still it doesn't seem as if 'twas safe for him over there with those queer folks. Why, they tell me they don't keep the Fourth o' July!”

He was privately uneasy for several days; and it was not until he received Fauntleroy's letter and had read it several times, both to himself and to Dick, and had also read the letter Dick got about the same time, that he became composed again.

But they both found great pleasure in their letters. They read and reread them, and talked them over and enjoyed every word of them. And they spent days over the answers they sent, and read them over almost as often as the letters they had received.

It was rather a labor for Dick to write his. All his knowledge of reading and writing he had gained during a few months when he had lived with his elder brother, and had gone to a night school; but, being a sharp boy, he had made the most of that brief education, and had spelled out things in newspapers since then, and practiced writing with bits of chalk on pavements or walls or fences. He told Mr. Hobbs all about his life and about his elder brother, who had been rather good to him after their mother died, when Dick was quite a little fellow. Their father had died some time before. The brother's name was Ben, and he had taken care of Dick as well as he could, until the boy was old enough to sell newspapers and run errands. They had lived together, and as he grew older Ben had managed to get along until he had quite a decent place in a store.

“And then,” exclaimed Dick with disgust, “blest if he didn't go an' marry a gal! Just went and got spoony, an' hadn't any more sense left! Married her, an' set up housekeepin' in two back rooms. An' a hefty 'un she was, a regular tiger-cat. She'd tear things to pieces when she got mad—and she was mad
all
the time. Had a baby just like her—yell day 'n' night! An' if I didn't have to 'tend it, an' when it screamed, she'd fire things at me. She fired a plate at me one day an' hit the baby—cut its chin. Doctor said he'd carry the mark till he died. A nice mother she was! Crackey! but didn't we have a time—Ben 'n' mehself 'n' the young 'un. She was mad at Ben because he didn't make money faster; 'n' at last he went out West with a man to set up a cattle ranch. An' hadn't been gone a week 'fore one night, I got home from sellin' my papers, 'n' the rooms wus locked up 'n' empty, 'n' the woman o' the house. she told me Minna 'd gone—shown a clean pair o' heels. Some 'un else said she'd gone across the water to be nuss to a lady as had a little baby too. Never heard a word of her since—nuther has Ben. If I'd ha bin him, I wouldn't ha' fretted a bit—'n' I guess he didn't. But he thought a heap o' her at the start. Tell you, he was spoons on her. She was a daisy-lookin' gal, too, when she was dressed up 'n' not mad. She'd big black eyes 'n' black hair downs too her knees; she'd make it into a rope as big as your arm, and twist it 'round 'n' 'round her head; 'n' I tell you her eyes 'd snap! Folks used to say she was part Itali-un—said her mother or father 'd come from there, 'n' it made her queer. I tell ye she was one of 'em—she was!”