Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 2).djvu/644

 Smith, hazarding a guess, "that mamma will be likely to miss you?"

"She's gone away," said the child; "Betsy says she isn't coming back again."

"Now, do you know," said the poet, with an air of weight and gravity, "I don't believe in Betsy? I think it very likely that mamma's at home this minute. I don't know, mind you. I only say I think it very likely. Suppose we go and see."

"She went away this morning," the child answered. There was a catch in his voice, and the resolute corners of his mouth began to droop a little. "She went away before the sale, and Betsy says she's never coming back again."

"We won't trouble our heads about Betsy," said the bard, with an air of weightier decision than before. "Betsy's talking nonsense, evidently. Why, bless your soul,” he continued, in a voice altogether convinced and intimate, "I daresay I'm twice as old as you are—three times as old, perhaps—and I never heard of such a thing. The idea of mamma going away and never coming back again! Why, that is obviously preposterous. Perhaps you don't know what it is to be obviously preposterous? But when a thing is obviously preposterous, people always laugh at it. I know that, because I have been obviously preposterous myself, and people have laughed at me."

This mild joke tickled him a little, and his own kindly humour had opened his heart, and made laughter easy. He laughed gaily, and his infant charge laughed also. The pup sat up in the bard's lap, and barked for company.

"Why, the little dog laughs to see such fun," Brown-Smith continued. "He knows when a thing is obviously preposterous, don't you, doggie? What's your name, old fellow?"

"His name's Tiny," said the infant wanderer, who was quite certain of his man by this time. "Mine's Bob. He's two months old, and I'm five years."

"How's Tiny going to be rated on the ship's books?" asked the poet. "Is he going to be a cabin boy?" The child looked at him half ashamed, and wholly wonderstricken. "I know a lot," said Brown-Smith, solemnly. "I could tell you a lot of things. I don't wonder at your punching Master Gordon, but perhaps you needn't have hit him quite so hard."

From that moment Brown-Smith's reputation was established. It was evident that concealment was absolutely worthless with a man like that, and Bob was easily won to the relation of his own short and simple annals. Papa, it seems, had died ever so long ago, when Bob was little. "Less than I am now," he said, explanatorily. Mamma, of course, was mamma. They lived at the Fir Trees. He could give her a local habitation, but no name.

"Are you ever hungry?" Brown-Smith demanded. "I am."

He thought of the cold meat and salad ordered now two hours ago, and his inner man yearned at the fancy.

"We passed a nice place five minutes back. A place that looked to my mind as if it had milk and biscuits in it. Not at all an unlikely place for cake, I should fancy. There might even be plum cake there. I knew a place of that sort once, where they had plum cake with frosted sugar on the top—frosted sugar as thick as that, upon my word of honour." He held up his thumb in illustration. "That's not a thing to be looked for every day," he hastened to add, "but still it might be there. Suppose we go and see, eh?"

The immediate resolution to escape from the tyrannies of Betsy, and to become a cabin boy, made itself air when the poet conjured up this splendid vision. Bob, resuming charge of the puppy, was hoisted on to Brown-Smith's shoulder, and presently the two invaded a tidy roadside inn, where, as good fortune would have it, plum cake and milk were actually obtainable. The poet himself sat down to beef and ale, and rejoiced wholesomely above them.

"You know this little gentleman?" Brown-Smith asked of the landlord.

"I've seen him afore," the landlord answered. "His mother's a widow. She lives about three mile from here. I did hear as she was to be sold up to-day."

"Have you such a thing as a trap handy?" asked the poet. "I should like to drive him home again."

The landlord had a trap, and in ten minutes it was ready.

"Drive to Mrs. Barton's, Jim," cried the landlord, and Brown-Smith started at the name, and even paled a little. The old sweetheart, about whom he had been spinning verses all the morning, bore that name. It was hardly likely that there were two Mrs. Bartons in the same outlying village. It was by no means an impossible thing that there should be two, but to his mind it seemed improbable. Was his old