A Tatter of Scarlet: Adventurous Episodes of the Commune in the Midi 1871, Page 3

  CHAPTER II

  KITH AND KIN

  I don't think I troubled much about my father when I resolved to runaway from the _Lycee_ St. Andre. He had, as I thought, never troubledmuch about me.

  Afterwards I found that I had been mistaken, but perhaps not more thanmost. For it is the rarest thing in the world to find a son enteringupon life, able to do justice to his father's ideas and motives.

  Yet it was for my sake that he had given up the society of his fellowsavants and had exiled himself to Aramon le Vieux, with only his booksfor company. At Nice, Mentone, or Cap Martin, the author of "The Historyand Growth of Italian Art" could have lived a great part of the yearamong kindred spirits, but because of me and St. Andre, he had shuthimself up with his books and collections in the Villa Gobelet on thepiney southern slopes of the long convent ridge, the summit of which wascrowned by the immense acreage of rambling white masonry whichconstituted our _lycee_.

  My father, Gordon Cawdor, mixed freely enough with the engineers in NewAramon. But I knew very well that he endured rather than enjoyed theirsociety.

  They talked of springs and hoppers, of pauls and recoil tampons, and myfather sat with his gentle wise head nodding as if taking in each point.But he never spoke to them of his own work, and, excepting Deventer'sfather, there was not one who knew more about Italian art than a dimmemory of a bad lithograph of Da Vinci's "Last Supper" could recall tohim.

  Dennis Deventer, a tall dark grey man with the most mobile eyebrows Iever saw in my life, lives much in my early memories of my father'shouse. He seems now to have been always there, though of course he couldreally have come but seldom--a massive, slow-moving, swiftlyscrutinising man, who bent shaggy eyebrows upon his son and myself, andin whose presence it was not good to make the easily forged excuseswhich served so well for my scholarly father.

  Hugh said that it was because he listened all day to excuses andexplanations over at the Arms Factory, without believing any one ofthem.

  He had succeeded a manager who had been driven from Aramon because hewas afraid of his men. But now the men, though they hated him as therepresentative of the Company, freely acknowledged his courage andaustere justice.

  His house was the largest in New Aramon, and he had within it threedaughters all verging on, or just overlapping early womanhood, besides acomfortable wife who purred her way contented and motherly through alldomestic storms. She alone could tame her husband's furies. They sankbefore her eye, her husband changing obviously to all men's sight, hisfactory oaths silenced, his bullying temper visibly crumbling, and theman growing sweet and wholesome as newly ground meal.

  These were the two houses best known to me as a boy, and indeed to theedge of manhood. Judge ye which I liked the best?

  My father was a beautifully profiled Scottish minister of the oldschool, whom an unexpected fortune had enabled to follow his impulses inthe matter of work. He had long ago retired from his parish, indeedbefore I could remember, and as I learned from his steadfast retainer,old Saunders McKie, immediately after the death of my mother.

  "Irongray Parish was no more for him, oh no," Saunders would say,sententiously pausing in the polishing of my father's silvershoe-buckles. "He laid down his wark as if he had been stricken. Henever preached again, and his pulpit was silent for three whole weeksafter her death. Assistants and siccan cattle werena sae common to comeat then as now--when ye send a telegram in the morning, and the laddieis down on the six train wi' his baggie. So the elders juist read aportion, and sent down to the Cameronian meeting-house for a man fit toput up a prayer. We were Established, ye see, so the like was no to beexpected o' _us_!

  "Eh, a broken man was your farther in thae days. He would wander fromroom to room, tak' down a book here, look at it a while and then put itup again with a muttered 'Tush' as if he could make nothing of it. Idoubt if he so much as saw the print line by line, but alltroubled-like, as one might through a green whorl of skylight glass.Then he would dawner into the room where you were lying, or maybe beingfed, and at sight o' ye, the state that man would be in!

  "He could not get out o' the nursery quick enough, yet for all that hewould be back within the hour."

  Saunders was a great standby. His humour jumped with mine far morenearly than my father's. This, too, in spite of the fact that I rarelysaw him without calling down the vials of his wrath. My father seldomreproved me, never in anger, but Saunders, with the care of my youngsoul heavy on his Calvinistic conscience, laboured faithfully with me inseason and out of season.

  One good he did me. He kept me from forgetting my Scottish tongue, andthere was never a day that he did not supply me with some phrase sappywith mother wit and drowned in Scotland.

  "Aaengus," he would say, "I kenna wha it is ye favour--nane o' yourfaither's folk at any rate--all chestnut-brown and quick as an eel. Nowonder ye can tie knots in yoursel' at the parallel bars that weresiccan a trouble to set up for ye to caper on, and your e'en like sloesafter the first frosts. It's a gipsy ye are and no real Cawdor of all.Though they do say that the Cawdors have gipsy blood on the distaffside. At ony rate ye will never be the 'sponsible sober man your faitheris."

  In spite of all this I stood high in the good graces of Saunders, and hewould sometimes ask my father for the additional pocket-money which Idared not hint at myself. Saunders often wandered back into reminiscenceof the time when he had been a jobbing stonemason on the Cromarty Firth,a companion of Hugh Miller's, and "the very deevil for raking thecountry."

  He had tramped scores of miles with Hugh Miller only for the sake ofhearing him talk, yet I gathered that he had not believed a single wordhe had been told about the great fishes and curious monsters that onceswam in the lakes of the Old Red Sandstone.

  "But I never telled him sae," he would conclude; "oh, no, Saunderskenned better. Hugh Miller was no doubt a wonderful genius, but at thattime he was a man easily angered, and when roused, violent of hishands."

  So now I have sketched the school, and the several domestic surroundingswhich we proposed to leave behind us. I do not think that we thoughtmuch about these. I know that I did not, and I don't believe thatDeventer did either--not, that is, till we saw the soldiers retreatingfrom the barracks and forts of Aramon, and that little oblong blot ofred in the sky which meant insurrection, and God only knew what ofterror and destruction, fluttering in the brisk mistral wind from thetower on which we had so long seen the tricolour.

  At that time we had only the vaguest idea of what the Commune was, andnone whatsoever of the new ideas of justice and equality which underlaythat cumbrously ill-managed business.