Richard Blackmore - Cradock Nowell - A Tale of the New Forest. Volume 2 of 3

Alas, poor Bob! Nature, who overlooks nothing, was well aware of the difficulties when she cried, “Jump up on my lap, Bob, and never be weaned from me.” She knew that things of all sorts would come between herself and her child, some of them drawn from her own mother–milk, but most of them from manʼs muzzling. Of the latter she had not much fear with Bob; but the former, she knew, were beyond her, and she had none but herself to thank for them. She knew that the lad, so strongly imbued with her own pleasant affluences, was almost sure to be touched with that one which comes from her breast the warmest. And then what would become of zoology, phytology, entomology, and all the other yard–long names which her children spin out of her apron–strings?

While Bob was still fiddling with his fingers, and forgetting all about butterflies, Miss Eudoxia, fetched by Amy, came to hold discourse with him.

“Why, Master Robert, I do declare, Robert, my butterfly boy! I have not seen you for such a time, Robert.” And she held out her hand, which Bob took with very little sense of gratitude. To be called a “butterfly boy” before Amy, and Amy to acquiesce in it!

“Ah, you think I have nothing for you, Robert. You school–boys live upon suction. But just wait a moment, my dear.”

She drew forth an old horn comfit–box, which had belonged to her grandmother, and was polished up like amber from the chafing of many a lining. This she opened with much ado, poured three crinkled sugar–plums on her gloved palm, and a smooth one as large as a hazel–nut, and offered them all to Robert, with a smile of the finest patronage.

“No, thank you, Miss Rosedew; no, thank you. I am very much obliged to you.”

Miss Eudoxia had been wondering at her own generosity, and thought that he was overcome with it. So her smile became one of encouragement and assurance against self–sacrifice.

“Oh, you need not be afraid, Robert. And you can put some under your pillow, and wake up in the night and suck them. How nice that will be, to be sure! You see I know what boys are. And I have plenty left for the infant–school. And they donʼt deserve them as you do, Robin.”

“Miss Rosedew,” said Bob, in his loftiest manner, though he was longing for them, only that Amy was there; “you will believe me when I assure you that I never touch sweets of any sort; not even at a late dinner–party.”

Miss Eudoxia turned her eyes up, and almost dropped the sugar–plums. But Amy, instead of being impressed, merrily laughed, and said,

“Give them to me, then, auntie, please. Some of the men at the night–school eat sweets after early suppers.”

Bob said “good–bye” disconsolately, for he knew that he had affronted Miss Doxy, without rising in Amyʼs opinion. He forgot all about the gladiolus, and let many great prizes escape him; for the day was the last of the soft and sunny, which tempt forth the forest denizens ere the frosty seal is set on them. In the glimpses of every brown arcade, in the jumbled gleam of the underwood, in the alleys between the upstanding trees, even in the strong light where the golden patches shone, and the wood fell back to look at them, in all of these he seemed to see and then to lose his angel. Her face he could not see clearly yet, hard as he strove to do it; affection is, but love is not, a photographic power. Still he could see her shadowly; her attitude, the fall of her hair, the manner of her gestures; even the ring of her voice would seem to dwell about the image. But he never got them all together; one each time was the leading thing; vague; and yet it went through him.

He made one attempt – for he feared from the first, although he never could feel it so, that his love was a thorough wild–goose chase – the poor boy made one last attempt to catch at some other pursuit.

“Father,” he said that very same night, after sitting for hours of wandering, “will you give me a gun and let me take to shooting?”

“A gun!” cried Bull Garnet, starting; “a gun, Bob! What do you mean by it?”

“I meant nothing at all, father. Only I know the way to stuff birds, and there are some rare ones here sometimes, and I want to make a collection.”

“Bob Garnet, as long as I am alive, you never shall have a gun.”

“Then, will you lend me yours, father? I know very well how to use it. I mean your patent – ”

“Never, Bob. My son, if you love me, never speak of it again.”

When Miss Rosedew and her niece came in to get ready for dinner, Amy cried out suddenly, “Oh, only look at the roses, aunt; how they have opened to–day! What delicious Louise Odier, and just look at General Jacqueminot! and I do declare Jules Margottin is finer than he was at Midsummer. I must cut a few, for I know quite well there will come a great frost if I donʼt, and then where will all my loves be?”

Amyʼs prediction about the weather was as random a guess as we may find in great authorities, who are never right, although they give the winds sixteen points of the thirty–two to shuffle in. But it so turned out that the girl was right – a point of the compass never hit till a day too late by our weather–clerks.

That very same night such a frost set in as had not been known in October for very nearly a century. It lasted nine nights and eight days; twice the mercury fell more than half way from the freezing point to zero, and the grass was crisp in the shade all day, though the high sun wiped off the whiteness at noon wherever he found the way to it. Boys rejoiced, and went mitching, to slide on the pools of the open furzery: no boys since the time of their great–grandfathers had done the heel–tap in October. But the birds did not appreciate it. What in the world did it mean? Why, there were the hips not ripe yet, and the hollyberries come to no colour, and half the blackberries still too acid, and, lo! it was freezing hard enough to make a worm cold for the stomach, even if you could get him! Surely there was some stupid mistake of two months in the piperʼs almanac. All they could say was that, if it were so, those impudent free–and–easy birds who came sponging on them in the winter – and too stuck up, forsooth! to live with them after sucking all the fat of the land, and winning their daughters’ affections – those outlandish beggars – be hanged to them – had got the wrong almanac too.

Why, they had not even heard the chatter, the everlasting high–fashion clack, of those jerk–tail fieldfares yet; nor had a missel–thrush come swaggering to bully a decent throstle that had sung hard all the summer, just because his breast and his coarse–shaped spots were bigger. Why, they had not even seen a clumsy short–eared owl flopping out of the dry fern yet – much good might it do him, the fern that belonged to themselves! – nor a single wedge of grey–lag geese, nor a woodcock that knew his business. And those nasty dissolute quacking mallards that floated in bed all day, the sluggards, and then wouldnʼt let a respectable bird have a chance of a good nightʼs roost – there they were still on the barley–stubble; please God they might only get frozen!

And yet, confound it all, what was the weather coming to? You might dig, and tap, and jump with both feet, and put your head on one side in the most knowing manner possible, and get behind a tuft of grass, and wait there ever so long, and devil a worm would come up! And, as for the slugs, oh, donʼt let me hear of them! Though the thieves had not all got home yet, they were ten degrees too cold for even an oyster–catcherʼs stomach: feathers and pip, my dear fellow! it gives me the colic to think of one. Put your head under my wing, Jenny Wren; oh, my darling, how cold your beak is!

Such, so far as I could gather them, were the sentiments of the birds, and their confabulation, when they went to roost, half an hour earlier than usual – for bed is the warmest place after all; besides, what was there to do? – on the 24th of October, 1859. And they felt the cold rime settling down on grey twig, and good brown leaf. Yet some of the older birds, cocks of long experience, buffers beyond all chaff, perked one eye at the eastern heavens, before tucking it under the scapular down – the eastern heavens all barred with murky red. Then they gave a little self–satisfied tweedle, which meant to the ear of Melampus,