Children of Destiny. 1893 Book Reviews

Children of Destiny. 1893 by M. Elliot Seawell Book Summary

CHAPTER I.
The hot June sunshine poured down upon the great fields of yellow wheat at Deerchase, and the velvet wind swept softly over them, making long billows and shadowy dimples in the golden sea of grain. The air was all blue and gold, and vibrating with the music of harvest time—the reedlike harmonies of the wind-swept wheat, the droning of many bees, the merry drumming of the cicada in the long grass, and, above all, the song of the black reapers, as they swung their glittering scythes in the morning sun. One side of the vast field was skirted by purplish woods, through which went constantly a solemn murmur—the only sad note in the symphony. On the other side rose great clumps and groves of live oaks and silver beeches and feathery elms, shading a spacious brick house with innumerable peaks and gables. Beyond this house and its pleasure grounds a broad and glittering river went merrily on its way to the south Atlantic. Nature in this coast country of Virginia is prodigal of beauty, and bestows all manner of charms with a lavish hand. Here are
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 found blue rivers and bluer skies, and pale splendours of moonlit nights and exquisite dawns and fair noons. Here Nature runs the whole gamut of beauty—through the laughing loveliness of spring mornings, the capricious sweetness of summer days, when the landscape hides itself, like a sulky beauty, in white mists and silvery rains, to the cold glory of the winter nights; there is no discord nor anything unlovely. But in the harvest time it is most gracious and love-compelling. There is something ineffably gay in harvest, and the negroes, those children of the sun, sang as merrily and as naturally as the grasshoppers that chirped in the green heart of the woods.
The long row of black reapers swung their scythes in rhythm, their voices rising and falling in cadence with the cutting of the wheat. The head man led the singing as he led the reapers. After them came a crowd of negro women, gathering up the wheat and tying it into bundles—it was as primitive as the harvesting in the days of Ruth and Boaz. It was not work, it was rather play. The song of the reapers had an accompaniment of shrill laughter from the women, who occasionally joined in the singing—
“When I was young, I useter to wait
Behine ole marster, han’ he plate,
An’ pass de bottle when he dry,
An’ bresh away dat blue-tail fly.”
The men’s voices rolled this out sonorously and melodiously. Then came the chorus, in which the high sweet voices of the women soared like the larks and the thrushes:
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“Jim, crack corn, I doan’ keer,
Jim, crack corn, I doan’ keer,
Jim, crack corn, I doan’ keer.
Ole—marster’s—gone—away!”
The last line was a wail; but the first lines were full of a devil-may-care music, which made some of the women drop their bundles of wheat, and, picking up their striped cotton skirts, they danced a breakdown nimbly. A dozen little negro boys carried buckets of water about the field to refresh the thirsty harvesters, and one negro girl, with her arms folded and a great pail on her head of whisky and water with mint floating around in it, was vociferously greeted whenever she appeared, and a drink from the gourd in the pail invariably caused a fresh outburst of song.
Hot and bright as the fields were, it was not too hot and bright for these merry labourers. But there was a stretch of coolness and of shade on the edge of the woods where the dew still sparkled upon the blackberry-bushes and the grass and undergrowth. And in a shady place under a hawthorn bush sat a black-eyed little boy with a dog across his knees. They had for company a Latin book, which the boy made a lazy pretence of studying, wearing all the time a sulky scowl. But when he found that he could put the book to a better use than studying, by propping the dog’s head upon it so as to bring the tawny, intelligent eyes upon a level with his own, the scowl cleared away. His face, then, though full of archness and sweetness, was not altogether happy. He gazed into the dog’s eyes wistfully, for, although many people gazed upon him kindly, no creature in
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 the wide world ever gazed upon him so affectionately as this one poor brute of a dog.
Presently, while lost in a sort of dream, listening to the song of the reapers as it melted away in the distance, and following up pretty, idle fancies that danced before him like white butterflies in the sun, he heard a crashing behind him of a burly figure making its way through the leaves and grass, and an ungainly man, past middle age, and blear-eyed and snuffy, appeared before him. In the pure, fresh morning light he looked coarser, more dissipated than could be imagined; but when his voice rang out, not even the wood bird’s note put it to shame—it was so clear, so rich, so sweet. That voice was the one charm left to him.
“Well, Lewis, my lad,” he cried out, “how are you and my old friend Horatius Flaccus getting on this deuced fine morning? Drat the dog—you always have him about.”
“You shouldn’t drat him, Mr. Bulstrode,” answered Lewis, “because old Service likes Latin better than I do. He has scarcely blinked since I put the book in his paw.”
“Dogs do like Latin,” answered Bulstrode, with a wink; “let me show you, sir.”
Lewis burst out laughing at the idea that dogs had any taste for the classics; and the dog, withdrawing his head, showed his teeth in a snarl.
“Snarl away, my friend,” said Bulstrode jovially, seating himself, with awkward comfort, on the grass. “I lay I’ll make you change your tune. Do you know—” Bulstrode’s pronunciation was not equal to the music of his voice, and he said “D’ye know.”
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 “D’ye know, boy, that the two great powers to charm women and dogs are the eye and the voice? Now, as for my eyes—Lord, I never had any charm in ’em, and the life I’ve led wasn’t calculated to give ’em any. But see if that damned dog doesn’t stop his growling when I give him some first-class Latin.”
Bulstrode took the book and began to read sonorously one of the longer odes. Lewis, whose black eyes were wonderfully expressive, was laughing to himself, the more so when, as Bulstrode rolled out the lines of rhythmic beauty, old Service ceased his growling and appeared to be listening gravely. Bulstrode put out his hand and drew the dog toward him, and in a little while Service was resting his head on Bulstrode’s knee and blinking placidly and solemnly into his face.
“There you have it!” cried Bulstrode, slapping the book together. “Let me tell you, Lewis, in the old days, when my face was fresh and fair, I used to walk up and down the river bank at Cambridge, reciting these odes to a gang of undergraduates, and sometimes there’d be a don on the outskirts of the crowd. Don’t know what a don is? Well, I’ll tell you some day. And the reason my Latin and Greek are so much better than my English is because I learned my English from the vulgar. But my Latin and Greek I learned from the very finest old Latin and Greek gentlemen that ever were—the cream of the company, boy; and that and my voice are about the only decent things left about me.”
“And your philosophy,” said Lewis, hesitating—“that great book you’re helping Mr. Skelton on.”
“Philosophy—fudge!” cried Bulstrode carelessly.
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 “There’s Skelton now, shut up in that musty library yonder”—jerking his thumb toward the Deerchase house—“grinding away at his system of philosophy; and here am I, the true philosopher, enjoying this infernally glorious harvest and these picturesque black people, that I never can get used to, no matter how long I live in this odd country. D’ye know what Kant says? Of course you don’t; so I’ll tell you. He says that two men, like him over yonder”—Bulstrode jerked his thumb again over his shoulder—“and your humble servant, engaged in pursuing abstract philosophy, are like two idiots who want a drink of milk; so one milks a post, while the other holds a sieve. That’s philosophy, my dear boy.”
This puzzled Lewis very much, who was nevertheless accustomed to hearing Bulstrode pooh-poohing philosophy, while Mr. Skelton always uttered the word reverently.
“You see yourself,” cried Bulstrode, giving his battered hat a rakish cock, “Skelton is a fine example of what enormous study and research will bring a man to, and I’m another one. He has been studying for twenty years to write the greatest book that ever was written. He’s spent the twenty best years of his life, and he’s got fifteen thousand books stored away in that grand new library he has built, and he’s bought me, body and soul, to help him out, and the result will be—he’ll never write the book!”
Bulstrode slapped his hand down on his knee as he brought out the “never” in a ringing voice; the dog gave a single loud yelp, and Lewis Pryor jumped up in surprise.
“You don’t mean it, Mr. Bulstrode!” he cried
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 breathlessly, for he had been bred upon the expectation that a great work was being then written in the Deerchase library by Mr. Skelton, and when it was given to the world the planet would stop revolving for a time at least. Bulstrode had an ungovernable indiscreetness, and, the string of his tongue being loosed, he proceeded to discuss Skelton’s affairs with great freedom, and without regarding in the least the youth of his companion.
“Yes, I do mean it. Skelton’s milking the post, and he’s hired me to hold the sieve. He’s been preparing—preparing—preparing to write that book; and the more he prepares, the more he won’t write it. Not that Skelton hasn’t great powers; you know those things he wrote at the university, particularly that ‘Voices of the People’? Well, Skelton’s got a bogie after him—the bogie of a too brilliant promise in his youth. He’s mortally afraid of the young fellow who wrote ‘Voices of the People.’ But he’ll carry out that other project of his—no doubt at all about that.”
“What is it?” asked Lewis, full of curiosity, though not altogether comprehending what he heard.
“Oh, that determination of his to ruin Jack Blair and his wife,” replied Bulstrode, flapping away a fly. “Mrs. Blair, you know, jilted the Great Panjandrum fifteen years ago, and ran away with Blair; and they’ll pay for it with every acre of land and stick of timber they’ve got in the world!”
Lewis pondered a moment or two.
“But I thought Mr. Skelton and the Blairs were so friendly and polite, and—”
“O Lord, yes. Deuced friendly and polite!
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 That’s the way with gentlefolks—genteel brutality—shaking hands and smiling one at the other, and all the time a knife up the sleeve. Don’t understand gentlefolks myself.”
This rather shocked Lewis, who was accustomed to hearing everybody he knew called a gentleman, and the title insisted upon tenaciously.
“Why, Mr. Bulstrode,” he said diffidently, “ain’t you a gentleman?”
“Lord bless you, no!” cried Bulstrode loudly and frankly. “My father kept a mews, and my mother—God bless her!—I’ll say no more. But look you, Lewis Pryor,” said he, rising, and with a sort of rude dignity, “though I be not a gentleman here,” slapping his body, “I’m a gentleman here,” tapping his forehead. “I’m an aristocrat from my chops upward.”
Lewis had risen too. He thought this was very queer talk, but he did not laugh at it, or feel contempt for Bulstrode, who had straightened himself up, and had actually lost something of his plebeian aspect.
“And,” he added with an ill-suppressed chuckle, “I’m a gentleman when I’m drunk. You see, as long as I’m sober I remember the mews, and my father in his black weepers driving the hearse, and the delight I used to feel when the young sprigs of the nobility and gentry at the university would ask me to their wine parties to hear me spout Ovid and Anacreon, for they knew I wasn’t a gentleman. But when I’m drunk, I only remember that I was a ‘double first’; that every Greek and Latinist in England knows Wat Bulstrode’s name; and when this precious philosopher
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 Skelton was scouring the universities to find a man to help him out with his—ha! ha!—great work, he could not for love or money get any better man than ragged, drunken, out-at-elbows Wat Bulstrode. I tell you, boy, when I’m drunk I’m a king! I’m more—I’m a gentleman! There is something in Greek which provokes an intolerable thirst. You say that Latin is dry; so it is, so it is, my boy—very dry and musty!” and then Bulstrode, in a rich, sweet, rollicking voice, as delicious as his speaking voice, trolled out the f*g end of a song that echoed and re-echoed through the green woods:
“I went to Strasburg, when I got drunk,
With the most learned Professor Brunck.
I went to Wortz, where I got more drunken,
With the more learned Professor Bruncken.”
Bulstrode had quite forgotten the boy’s presence. Lewis gazed at him with wide, innocent boyish eyes. It was rather a tipsy age, and to be a little convivial was considered a mark of a liberal spirit, but Lewis was astute enough to see that this was not the sort of gentlemanly joviality which prevailed in the age and in the country. The song of the reapers was still mellowly heard in the distance; their scythe blades glittered in the sun, the merriment, the plenty, the beauty and simplicity of the scene was like Arcady; but the contrast between what Nature had made, and what man had made of himself, in Bulstrode, was appalling.
Suddenly, the careless delight expressed in Bulstrode’s look and manner vanished, and a strange passion of despair overcame him.
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“But then, there is the waking up—the waking up—great God!” he shouted. “Then I see that I’m, after all, nothing but a worthless dog; that this man Skelton owns me; that I never will be anything but worthless and learned and drunken; that I’m no better than any other hanger-on, for all my Greek and Latin! However,” he added, stuffing his hands in his pockets and as suddenly laying aside his tragic air, “there never was such a hanger-on. Upon my soul, it’s a question whether Richard Skelton owns Wat Bulstrode, or Wat Bulstrode and the books own Richard Skelton. But look’ee here, boy, I had almost forgot you, and the dog too. I don’t envy Richard Skelton. No man pursues his enemy with gaiety of heart. He has spent more money in ruining Jack Blair than would have made ten good men prosperous; and, after all, it’s that passion of Blair’s for horse racing that will ruin him in the end. Gad! I don’t know that I’m any worse than Skelton, or any other man I know.—Why, hello! what the devil—”
This last was involuntarily brought out by Skelton himself, who at that moment stood before him. Lewis had seen Skelton coming, and had vainly tugged at Bulstrode’s coat-tails without any effect.
Whether Skelton’s philosophy commanded respect or not, his personality certainly did. He was about medium height, lean, dark, and well made. Also, whether he was handsome or not the world had not yet decided during all his forty years of life; but certain it was few men could look handsome beside him. His eyes, though, were singularly black and beautiful, like those of the boy standing by him. He was in riding dress, and held a little whip in his
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 hand; he had ridden out to the harvest field, and then dismounted and left his horse while he walked through the stubble and clover. He had overheard much that Bulstrode had last said, and, in spite of his invincible composure, his face showed a silent rage and displeasure. Bulstrode and Lewis knew it by the sultry gleam of his black eyes. Bulstrode instantly lost his air of independence, and all of his efforts to retain it only resulted in a half-cowed swagger.
“Bulstrode,” said Skelton in a cool voice, “how often have I recommended you not to discuss me or my affairs?”
“Don’t know, I’m sure,” blustered Bulstrode, his hands still in his pockets. Both of them had realised the boy’s presence. As Bulstrode really loved him, he hated to be cowed before Lewis. The boy was looking downwards, his eyes on the ground; the dog nestled close to him. Both Skelton and Bulstrode remained silent for a moment or two.
“You know,” said Skelton after a pause, “I am not a man to threaten.”
“Yes, by Jove, I do,” answered Bulstrode, breaking into a complaining whine. “I don’t know why it is, Skelton, that you can always bully me; unless it’s because you’re a gentleman, and I ain’t. You dashed patricians always have us plebes under the hack—always, always. The fellows that went ahorseback were always better than those who went afootback. Sometimes, by George, I wish I had been born a gentleman!”
Bulstrode’s collapse was so rapid and complete that wrath could not hold against him. Skelton
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 merely said something about an unbridled tongue being a firebrand, and then, turning to Lewis, said:
“The harvest is the black man’s holiday. Come with me, and we will see him enjoy it.”
Skelton’s tone to Lewis was peculiar; although his words were cold, and his manner reserved, his voice expressed a strange fondness. Lewis felt sorry for Bulstrode, standing alone and ashamed, and after he had gone a little way by Skelton’s side he turned back and ran toward Bulstrode, holding out his book.
“Won’t you have my Horace for company, Mr. Bulstrode?” he cried; “though I believe you know every word in it. But a book is company—when one can’t get a dog, that is.”
“Yes, boy,” answered Bulstrode, taking one hand out of his pocket. “Old Horace and I will forget this workaday world. We have had a good many bouts in our time, Horatius Flaccus and I. The old fellow was a good judge of wine. Pity he didn’t know anything about tobacco.” He began speaking with a sigh, and ended with a grin.
Skelton and Lewis turned off together, and walked along the edge of the field. The fresh, sweet scent of the newly cut wheat filled the air; the clover blossoms that grew with the wheat harboured a cloud of happy bees; over the land hung a soft haze. Lewis drank in delightedly all of the languid beauty of the scene, and so did Skelton in his quiet, controlled way.
Lewis shrewdly suspected that the reason Skelton carried him off was to get him out of Bulstrode’s way, for although Bulstrode was nominally his tutor, and had plenty of opportunities for talking, he was not always as communicative as on that morning. The
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 boy was much in awe of Skelton. He could not altogether make out his own feelings in the matter. He knew of no relationship between them, and thought he knew he was the son of Thomas Pryor, in his lifetime a tutor of Skelton’s. He called Skelton “Mr. Skelton,” and never remembered to have had a caress from him in all his life. But he never looked into Skelton’s eyes, which were precisely like his own, that he did not feel as if some strong and secret bond united them.
Meanwhile, Bulstrode stood in his careless attitude, looking after them, his eyes fixed on Skelton’s straight, well set-up figure.
“There you go,” he apostrophised. “Most men think they could advise the Almighty; but you, Richard Skelton, think yourself the Lord Almighty Himself! Unbridled tongue, indeed! I lay odds that I’ll make you write that sixth section of your Introduction over again before this day is out. I know a weak spot in your theory that knocks that chapter into flinders, and I’ve been saving it up for just such an occasion as this. But go your way, and I’ll go mine.”
“Fair and free is the king’s highway!”
he sang, loudly and sweetly.

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