The door slammed violently on such further speech
as he had in him to utter. He seemed at first
astonished; but finding the terrified boy about to
sob, he drew a pretty box from one of his pockets and
thrust a delicious sweetmeat between the whimpering
lips. Then, after some moments of irresolution,
during which he struck his chest soundingly and gazed
down, talked alternately to himself and the boy, and
cast his eyes along the windows of the house, he at
last dropped on one knee and swaddled the boy in the
folds of the shawl. Raising him in a business-like
way, he settled him on an arm and stepped briskly across
gravel-walk and lawn, like a horse to whose neck a
smart touch of the whip has been applied.
The soft mild night had a moon behind it somewhere;
and here and there a light-blue space of sky showed
small rayless stars; the breeze smelt fresh of roots
and heath. It was more a May-night than one of
February. So strange an aspect had all these
quiet hill-lines and larch and fir-tree tops in the
half-dark stillness, that the boy’s terrors were
overlaid and almost subdued by his wonderment; he had
never before been out in the night, and he must have
feared to cry in it, for his sobs were not loud.
On a rise of the park-road where a fir-plantation
began, he heard his name called faintly from the house
by a woman’s voice that he knew to be his aunt
Dorothy’s. It came after him only once:
’Harry Richmond’; but he was soon out
of hearing, beyond the park, among the hollows that
run dipping for miles beside the great highroad toward
London. Sometimes his father whistled to him,
or held him high and nodded a salutation to him, as
though they had just discovered one another; and his
perpetual accessibility to the influences of spicy
sugarplums, notwithstanding his grief, caused his father
to prognosticate hopefully of his future wisdom.
So, when obedient to command he had given his father
a kiss, the boy fell asleep on his shoulder, ceasing
to know that he was a wandering infant: and,
if I remember rightly, he dreamed he was in a ship
of cinnamon-wood upon a sea that rolled mighty, but
smooth immense broad waves, and tore thing from thing
without a sound or a hurt.
CHAPTER II
AN ADVENTURE ON MY OWN ACCOUNT
That night stands up without any clear traces about
it or near it, like the brazen castle of romance round
which the sea-tide flows. My father must have
borne me miles along the road; he must have procured
food for me; I have an idea of feeling a damp forehead
and drinking new milk, and by-and-by hearing a roar
of voices or vehicles, and seeing a dog that went
alone through crowded streets without a master, doing
as he pleased, and stopping every other dog he met.
He took his turning, and my father and I took ours.
We were in a house that, to my senses, had the smell
of dark corners, in a street where all the house-doors
were painted black, and shut with a bang. Italian
organ-men and milk-men paraded the street regularly,
and made it sound hollow to their music. Milk,
and no cows anywhere; numbers of people, and no acquaintances
among them; my thoughts were occupied by the singularity
of such things.
Copyrights
The Adventures Harry Richmond — Volume 1 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
