Chapter VII.
Clare and his brothers.
After a year or two, Mr. Person became anxious lest the boy should
grow up too unlike other boys--lest he should not be manly, but of a
too gently sad behaviour. He began, therefore, to take him with him
about the parish, and was delighted to find him show extraordinary
endurance. He would walk many miles, and come home less fatigued than
his companion. To be sure, he had not much weight to carry; but it
seemed to Mr. Porson that his utter freedom from thought about himself
had a large share in his immunity from weariness. He continued slight
and thin--which was natural, for he was growing fast; but the muscles
of his little bird-like legs seemed of steel. The spindle-shanks went
striding, striding without a check, along the roughest roads, the pale
face shining atop of them like a sweet calm moon. To Mr. Person's
eyes, the moon, stooping, as she sometimes seems to do, downward from
the sky, always looked like him. The child woke something new in the
heart and mind of every one that loved him, but was himself
unconscious of his influence. His company was no check to his father
when meditating, after his habit as he walked, what he should say to
his people the next Sunday. For the good man never wrote or read a
sermon, but talked to his people as one who would meet what was in
them with what was in him. Hence they always believed "the parson
meant it." He never said anything clever, and never said anything
unwise; never amused them, and never made them feel scornful, either
of him or of any one else.
Instead of finding the presence of Clare distract his thoughts, he had
at times a curious sense that the boy was teaching him--that his
sermon was running before, or walking sedately on this side of him or
that. For Clare could run like the wind; and did run after
butterflies, dragon-flies, or anything that offered a chance of seeing
it nearer; but he never killed, and seldom tried to catch anything, if
but for a moment's examination. The swiftest run would scarcely
heighten the colour of his pale cheeks.
He soon came to be known in the farm-houses of the parish. The
farmer-families were a little shy of him at first, fancying him too
fine a little gentleman for them; but as they got to know him, they
grew fond of him. They called him "the parson's man," which pleased
Clare. But one old woman called him "the parson's cherubim."
One day Mr. Porson was calling at the house of the largest farm in the
parish, the nearest house to the parsonage. The farmer's wife was ill,
and having to go to her room to see her, he said to the boy--
"Clare, you run into the yard. Give my compliments to any one you
meet, and ask him to let you stay with him."
When the time came for their departure, Mr. Porson went to find
him. He did not call him; he wanted to see what he was about. Unable
to discover him, and coming upon no one of whom he might inquire, for
it was hay-time and everybody in the fields, he was at last driven to
use his voice.
He had not to call twice. Out of the covered part of the pigsty, not
far from which the parson stood, the boy came creeping on all fours,
followed by a litter of half-grown, grunting, gamboling pigs.
"Here I am, papa!" he cried.
"Clare," exclaimed his father, "what a mess you have made of
yourself!"
"I gave them your compliments," answered the boy, as he scrambled over
the fence with his father's assistance, "and asked them if I might
stay with them till you were ready. They said yes, and invited me
in. I went in; and we've been having such games! They were very kind
to me."
His father turned involuntarily and looked into the sty. There stood
all the pigs in a row, gazing after the boy, and looking as sorry as
their thick skins and bony snouts would let them. Their mother rose in
a ridge behind them, gazing too. Mr. Skymer always spoke of pigs as
about the most intelligent animals in the world.
I do not know when or where or how his love of the animals began, for
he could not tell me. If it began with the pigs, it was far from
ending with them.
The next day he asked his father if he might go and call upon the
pigs.
"Have you forgotten, Clare," said his mother, "what a job Susan and I
had with your clothes? I wonder still how you could have done such a
thing! They were quite filthy. When I saw you, I had half a mind to
put you in a bath, clothes and all. I doubt if they are sweet yet!"
"Oh, yes, they are, indeed, mamma!" returned Clare; "and you know I
shall be careful after this! I shall not go into their house, but get
the farmer to let them out. I've thought of a new game with them!"
His mother consented; the farmer did let the pigs out; and Clare and
they had a right good game together among the ricks in the yard.
His growing nature showed itself in a swiftly widening friendship for
live things. The spreading ripples of his affection took in the cows
and the horses, the hens and the geese, and every creature about the
place, till at length it had to pull up at the moles, because he could
not get at them. I doubt if he would have liked them if he had seen
one eat a frog! He called the pigs little brothers, and the horses and
cows big brothers, and was perfectly at home with them before people
knew he cared for their company. I think his absolute simplicity
brought him near to the fountain of life, or rather, prevented him
from straying from it; and this kept him so alive himself, that he was
delicately sensitive to all life. He felt himself pledged to all other
life as being one with it. Its forms were therefore so open to him as
to seem familiar from the first. He knew instinctively what went on in
regions of life differing from his own--knew, without knowing how,
what the animals were thinking and feeling; so was able to interpret
their motions, even the sudden changes in their behaviour.
There was one dangerous animal on the place--a bull, of which the
farmer had often said he must part with him, or he would be the death
of somebody. One morning he was struck with terror to find Clare in
the stall with Nimrod. The brute was chained up pretty short, but was
free enough for terrible mischief: Clare was stroking his nose, and
the beast was standing as still as a bull of bronze, with one curved
and one sharp, forward-set, wicked-looking horn in alarming proximity
to the angelic face. The farmer stood in dismay, still as the bull,
afraid to move. Clare looked up and smiled, but his delicate little
hand went on caressing the huge head. It was one of God's small high
creatures visiting with good news of hope one of his big low
creatures--a little brother of Jesus Christ bringing a taste of his
father's kingdom to his great dull bull of a brother. The farmer
called him. The boy came at once. Mr. Goodenough told him he must not
go near the bull; he was fierce and dangerous. Clare informed him that
he and the bull had been friends for a long time; and to prove it ran
back, and before the farmer could lay hold of him, was perched on the
animal's shoulders. The bull went on eating the grass in the manger
before him, and took as little heed of the boy as if it were but a fly
that had lighted on him, and neither tickled nor stung him.
By degrees he grew familiar with all the goings on at the farm, and
drew nearer to a true relation with the earth that nourishes
all. Where the soil was not too heavy, the ploughman would set him on
the back of the near horse, and there he would ride in triumph to the
music of the ploughman's whistle behind. His was not the pomp of the
destroyer who rides trampling, but the pomp of the saviour drawing
forth life from the earth. In the summer the hayfield knew him, and in
the autumn the harvest-field, where busily he gathered what the earth
gave, and for himself strength, a sense of wide life and large
relations. The very mould, not to say the grass-blades and the
daisies, was dear to him. He was more sympathetic with the daisies
ploughed down than was even Burns, for he had a strong feeling that
they went somewhere, and were the better for going; that this was the
way their sky fell upon them.
All the people on the farm, all the people of the village, every one
in the parish knew the boy and his story. From his gentleness and
lovingkindness to live things, there were who said he was half-witted;
others said he saw ghosts. The boys of the village despised, and some
hated him, because he was so unlike them. They called him a girl
because where they tormented he caressed. At this he would smile, and
they durst not lay hands on him.
The days are long in boyhood, and Clare could do a many things in
one. There was the morning, the forenoon, and the long afternoon and
evening! He could help on the farm; he could play with ever so many
animals; he could learn his lessons, which happily were not heavy; he
could read any book he pleased in his father's library, where
_Paradise Lost_ was his favourite; he could nurse little Maly. He had
the more time for all these that he had no companion of his own age,
no one he wanted to go about with after school-hours. His father was
still his chief human companion, and neither of them grew tired of the
other.
The most remarkable thing in the child was the calm and gentle
greatness of his heart. You often find children very fond of one or
two people, who, perhaps, in evil return, want to keep them all to
themselves, and reproach them for loving others. Many persons count it
a sign of depth in a child that he loves only one or two. I doubt it
greatly. I think that only the child who loves all life can love right
well, can love deeply and strongly and tenderly the lives that come
nearest him. Low nurses and small-hearted mothers dwarf and pervert
their children, doing their worst to keep them from having big hearts
like God. Clare had other teaching than this. He had lost his father
and mother, but many were given him to love; and so he was helped to
wait patiently till he found them again. God was keeping them for him
somewhere, and keeping him for them here.
The good for which we are born into this world is, that we may learn
to love. I think Clare the most enviable of boys, because he loved
more than any one of his age I have heard of. There are people--oh,
such silly people they are!--though they may sometimes be
pleasing--who are always wanting people to love them. They think so
much of themselves, that they want to think more; and to know that
people love them makes them able to think more of themselves. They
even think themselves loving because they are fond of being loved!
You might as soon say because a man loves money he is generous;
because he loves to gather, therefore he knows how to scatter; because
he likes to read a story, therefore he can write one. Such lovers are
only selfish in a deeper way, and are more to blame than other selfish
people; for, loving to be loved, they ought the better to know what an
evil thing it is not to love; what a mean thing to accept what they
are not willing to give. Even to love only those that love us, is, as
the Lord has taught us, but a pinched and sneaking way of
loving. Clare never thought about being loved. He was too busy loving,
with so many about him to love, to think of himself. He was not the
contemptible little wretch to say, "What a fine boy I am, to make
everybody love me!" If he had been capable of that, not many would
have loved him; and those that did would most of them have got tired
of loving a thing that did not love again. Only great lovers like God
are able to do that, and they help God to make love grow. But there is
little truth in love where there is no wisdom in it. Clare's father
and mother were wise, and did what they could to make Clare wise.
Also the animals, though they were not aware of it, did much to save
him from being spoiled by the humans whom the boy loved more than
them. For Clare's charity began at home. Those who love their own
people will love other people. Those who do not love children will
never love animals right.
Here I will set down a strange thing that befell Clare, and caused him
a sore heart, making him feel like a traitor to the whole animal race,
and influencing his life for ever. I was at first puzzled to account
for the thing without attributing more imagination to the animals--or
some of them--than I had been prepared to do; but probably the main
factor in it was heart-disease.
He had seen men go out shooting, but had never accompanied any
killers. I do not quite understand how, as in my story, he came even
to imitate using a gun. There was nothing in him that belonged to
killing; and that is more than I could say for myself, or any other
man I know except Clare Skymer.
He was at the bottom of the garden one afternoon, where nothing but a
low hedge came between him and a field of long grass. He had in his
hand the stick of a worn-out umbrella. Suddenly a half-grown rabbit
rose in the grass before him, and bolted. From sheer unconscious
imitation, I believe, he raised the stick to his shoulder, and said
_Bang_. The rabbit gave a great bound into the air, fell, and lay
motionless. With far other feelings than those of a sportsman, Clare
ran, got through the hedge, and approached the rabbit trembling. He
could think nothing but that the creature was playing him a trick. Yet
he was frightened. Only how could he have hurt him!
"I dare say the little one knows me," he said to himself, "and wanted
to give me a start! He couldn't tell what a start it would be, or he
wouldn't have done it."
When he drew near, however, "the little one" did not, as he had hoped
and expected, jump up and run again. With sinking heart Clare went
close up, and looked down on it. It lay stretched out, motionless.
With death in his own bosom he stooped and tenderly lifted it. The
rabbit was stone-dead! The poor boy gazed at it, pressed it tenderly
to his heart, and went with it to find his mother. The tears kept
pouring down his face, but he uttered no cry till he came to her. Then
a low groaning howl burst from him; he laid the dead thing in her lap,
and threw himself on the floor at her feet in an abandonment of
self-accusation and despair.
It was long before he was able to give her an intelligible account of
what had taken place. She asked him if he had found it dead. In answer
he could only shake his head, but that head-shake had a whole tragedy
in it. Then she examined "the little one," but could find no mark of
any wound upon it. When at length she learned how the case was, she
tried to comfort him, insisting he was not to blame, for he did not
mean to kill the little one. He would not hearken to her loving
sophistry.
"No, mother!" he said through his sobs; "I wouldn't have blamed
myself, though I should have been very sorry, if I had killed him by
accident--if I had stepped upon him, or anything of that kind; but I
meant to frighten him! I looked bad at him! I made him think I was an
enemy, and going to kill him! I shammed bad--and so was real bad."
He stopped with a most wailful howl.
"Perhaps he knew me," he resumed, "and couldn't understand it. It was
much worse than if I had shot him. He wouldn't have known then till he
was dead. But to die of terror was horrible. Oh, why didn't I think
what I was doing?"
"Nobody could have thought of such a thing happening."
"No; but I ought to have thought, mother, of what I was doing. I was
trying to frighten him! I must have been in a cruel mood. Why didn't I
think love to the little one when I saw him, instead of thinking death
to him? I shall never look a rabbit in the face again! My heart must
have grown black, mother!"
"I don't believe there is another rabbit in England would die from
such a cause," persisted his mother thoughtfully.
"Then what a superior rabbit he must have been!" said Clare. "To think
that I pulled down the roof of his church upon him!"
He burst into a torrent of tears, and ran to his own room. There his
mother thought it better to leave him undisturbed. She wisely judged
that a mind of such sensibility was alone capable of finding the
comfort to fit its need.
Such comfort he doubtless did find, for by the time his mother called
him to tea, calmness had taken the place of the agony on his
countenance. His mother asked him no questions, for she as well as her
husband feared any possible encouragement to self-consciousness. I
imagine the boy had reflected that things could not go so wrong that
nobody could set them right. I imagine he thought that, if he had done
the rabbit a wrong, as he never for a moment to the end of his life
doubted he had, he who is at the head of all heads and the heart of
all hearts, would contrive to let him tell the rabbit he was sorry,
and would give him something to do for the rabbit that would make up
for his cruelty to him. He did once say to his mother, and neither of
them again alluded to the matter, that he was sure the rabbit had
forgiven him.
"Little ones are _so_ forgiving, you know, mother!" he added.
Is it any wonder that my friend Clare Skymer should have been no
sportsman?
