A Simpleton

C >> Charles Reade >> A Simpleton


He then invited them languidly to his house. They went with him, and
as he volunteered no more remarks, they questioned him, and learned his
father had been a Hollander, and so had his vrow's. This accounted for
the size and comparative cleanliness of his place. It was stuccoed with
the lime of the country outside, and was four times as large as the
miserable farmhouses of the degenerate Boers. For all this, the street
door opened on the principal room, and that room was kitchen and parlor,
only very large and wholesome. "But, Lord," as poor dear Pepys used to
blurt out--"to see how some folk understand cleanliness!" The floor was
made of powdered ants' nests, and smeared with fresh cow-dung every day.
Yet these people were the cleanest Boers in the colony.

The vrow met them, with a snow-white collar and cuffs of Hamburgh linen,
and the brats had pasty faces round as pumpkins, but shone with soap.
The vrow was also pasty-faced, but gentle, and welcomed them with a
smile, languid, but unequivocal.

The Hottentots took their horses, as a matter of course. Their guns were
put in a corner. A clean cloth was spread, and they saw they were to sup
and sleep there, though the words of invitation were never spoken.

At supper, sun-dried flesh, cabbage, and a savory dish the travellers
returned to with gusto. Staines asked what it was: the vrow told
him--locusts. They had stripped her garden, and filled her very rooms,
and fallen in heaps under her walls; so she had pressed them, by the
million, into cakes, had salted them lightly, and stored them, and they
were excellent, baked.

After supper, the accomplished Reginald, observing a wire guitar, tuned
it with some difficulty, and so twanged it, and sang ditties to it, that
the flabby giant's pasty face wore a look of dreamy content over his
everlasting pipe; and in the morning, after a silent breakfast, he said,
"Mine vriends, stay here a year or two, and rake in mine rubbish. Ven
you are tired, here are springbok and antelopes, and you can shoot
mit your rifles, and ve vil cook them, and you shall zing us zongs of
Vaderland."

They thanked him heartily, and said they would stay a few days, at all
events.

The placid Boer went a-farming; and the pair shouldered their pick and
shovel, and worked on their heap all day, and found a number of pretty
stones, but no diamond.

"Come," said Falcon, "we must go to the river;" and Staines acquiesced.
"I bow to experience," said he.

At the threshold they found two of the little Bulteels, playing with
pieces of quartz, crystal, etc., on the door-stone. One of these stones
caught Staines's eye directly. It sparkled in a different way from the
others: he examined it: it was the size of a white haricot bean, and one
side of it polished by friction. He looked at it, and looked, and saw
that it refracted the light. He felt convinced it was a diamond.

"Give the boy a penny for it," said the ingenious Falcon, on receiving
the information.

"Oh!" said Staines. "Take advantage of a child?"

He borrowed it of the boy, and laid it on the table, after supper.
"Sir," said he, "this is what we were raking in your kopjes for, and
could not find it. It belongs to little Hans. Will you sell it us? We
are not experts, but we think it may be a diamond. We will risk ten
pounds on it."

"Ten pounds!" said the farmer. "Nay, we rob not travellers, mine
vriend."

"But if it is a diamond, it is worth a hundred. See how it gains fire in
the dusk."

In short, they forced the ten pounds on him, and next day went to work
on another kopje.

But the simple farmer's conscience smote him. It was a slack time; so
he sent four Hotteatots, with shovels, to help these friendly maniacs.
These worked away gayly, and the white men set up a sorting table, and
sorted the stuff, and hammered the nodules, and at last found a little
stone as big as a pea that refracted the light. Staines showed this to
the Hottentots, and their quick eyes discovered two more that day, only
smaller.

Next day, nothing but a splinter or two.

Then Staines determined to dig deeper, contrary to the general
impression. He gave his reason: "Diamonds don't fall from the sky. They
work up from the ground; and clearly the heat must be greater farther
down."

Acting on this, they tried the next strata, but found it entirely
barren. After that, however, they came to a fresh layer of carbonate,
and here, Falcon hammering a large lump of conglomerate, out leaped, all
of a sudden, a diamond big as a nut, that ran along the earth, gleaming
like a star. It had polished angles and natural facets, and even a
novice, with an eye in his head, could see it was a diamond of the
purest water. Staines and Falcon shouted with delight, and made the
blacks a present on the spot.

They showed the prize, at night, and begged the farmer to take to
digging. There was ten times more money beneath his soil than on it.

Not he. He was a farmer: did not believe in diamonds. Two days
afterwards, another great find. Seven small diamonds.

Next day, a stone as large as a cob-nut, and with strange and beautiful
streaks. They carried it home to dinner, and set it on the table, and
told the family it was worth a thousand pounds. Bulteel scarcely looked
at it; but the vrow trembled and all the young folk glowered at it.

In the middle of dinner, it exploded like a cracker, and went literally
into diamond-dust.

"Dere goes von tousand pounds," said Bulteel, without moving a muscle.

Falcon swore. But Staines showed fortitude. "It was laminated," said he,
"and exposure to the air was fatal."

Owing to the invaluable assistance of the Hottentots, they had in
less than a month collected four large stones of pure water, and a
wineglassful of small stones, when, one fine day, going to work calmly
after breakfast, they found some tents pitched, and at least a score
of dirty diggers, bearded like the pard, at work on the ground. Staines
sent Falcon back to tell Bulteel, and suggest that he should at once
order them off, or, better still, make terms with them. The phlegmatic
Boer did neither.

In twenty-four hours it was too late. The place was rushed. In other
words, diggers swarmed to the spot, with no idea of law but digger's
law.

A thousand tents rose like mushrooms; and poor Bulteel stood smoking,
and staring amazed, at his own door, and saw a veritable procession
of wagons, Cape carts, and powdered travellers file past him to take
possession of his hillocks. Him, the proprietor, they simply ignored;
they had a committee who were to deal with all obstructions, landlords
and tenants included. They themselves measured out Bulteel's farm into
thirty-foot claims, and went to work with shovel and pick. They held
Staines's claim sacred--that was diggers' law; but they confined it
strictly to thirty feet square.

Had the friends resisted, their brains would have been knocked out.
However, they gained this, that dealers poured in, and the market not
being yet glutted, the price was good. Staines sold a few of the small
stones for two hundred pounds. He showed one of the larger stones. The
dealer's eye glittered, but he offered only three hundred pounds,
and this was so wide of the ascending scale, on which a stone of that
importance is priced, that Staines reserved it for sale at Cape Town.

Nevertheless, he afterwards doubted whether he had not better have taken
it; for the multitude of diggers turned out such a prodigious number of
diamonds at Bulteel's pan, that a sort of panic fell on the market.

These dry diggings were a revelation to the world. Men began to think
the diamond perhaps was a commoner stone than any one had dreamed it to
be.

As to the discovery of stones, Staines and Falcon lost nothing by being
confined to a thirty-foot claim. Compelled to dig deeper, they got into
a rich strata, where they found garnets by the pint, and some small
diamonds, and at last, one lucky day, their largest diamond. It weighed
thirty-seven carats, and was a rich yellow. Now, when a diamond is
clouded or off color, it is terribly depreciated; but a diamond with
a positive color is called a fancy stone, and ranks with the purest
stones.

"I wish I had this in Cape Town," said Staines.

"Why, I'll take it to Cape Town, if you like," said the changeable
Falcon.

"You will?" said Christopher, surprised.

"Why not? I'm not much of a digger. I can serve our interest better by
selling. I could get a thousand pounds for this at Cape Town."

"We will talk of that quietly," said Christopher.

Now, the fact is, Falcon, as a digger, was not worth a pin. He could not
sort. His eyes would not bear the blinding glare of a tropical sun upon
lime and dazzling bits of mica, quartz, crystal, white topaz, etc., in
the midst of which the true glint of the royal stone had to be caught in
a moment. He could not sort, and he had not the heart to dig. The only
way to make him earn his half was to turn him into the travelling and
selling partner.

Christopher was too generous to tell him this; but he acted on it, and
said he thought his was an excellent proposal; indeed, he had better
take all the diamonds they had got to Dale's Kloof first, and show them
to his wife, for her consolation: "And perhaps," said he, "in a matter
of this importance, she will go to Cape Town with you, and try the
market there."

"All right," said Falcon.

He sat and brooded over the matter a long time, and said, "Why make two
bites of a cherry? They will only give us half the value at Cape Town;
why not go by the steamer to England, before the London market is
glutted, and all the world finds out that diamonds are as common as
dirt?"

"Go to England! What! without your wife? I'll never be a party to that.
Me part man and wife! If you knew my own story"--

"Why, who wants you?" said Reginald. "You don't understand. Phoebe is
dying to visit England again; but she has got no excuse. If you like to
give her one, she will be much obliged to you, I can tell you."

"Oh, that is a very different matter. If Mrs. Falcon can leave her
farm--"

"Oh, that brute of a brother of hers is a very honest fellow, for that
matter. She can trust the farm to him. Besides, it is only a month's
voyage by the mail steamer."

This suggestion of Falcon's set Christopher's heart bounding, and his
eyes glistening. But he restrained himself, and said, "This takes me by
surprise; let me smoke a pipe over it."

He not only did that, but he lay awake all night.

The fact is that for some time past, Christopher had felt sharp twinges
of conscience, and deep misgivings as to the course he had pursued in
leaving his wife a single day in the dark. Complete convalescence had
cleared his moral sentiments, and perhaps, after all, the discovery
of the diamonds had co-operated; since now the insurance money was no
longer necessary to keep his wife from starving.

"Ah!" said he; "faith is a great quality; and how I have lacked it!"

To do him justice, he knew his wife's excitable nature, and was not
without fears of some disaster, should the news be communicated to her
unskilfully.

But this proposal of Falcon's made the way clearer. Mrs. Falcon, though
not a lady, had all a lady's delicacy, and all a woman's tact and
tenderness. He knew no one in the world more fit to be trusted with
the delicate task of breaking to his Rosa that the grave, for once, was
baffled, and her husband lived. He now became quite anxious for Falcon's
departure, and ardently hoped that worthy had not deceived himself as to
Mrs. Falcon's desire to visit England.

In short, it was settled that Falcon should start for Dale's Kloof,
taking with him the diamonds, believed to be worth altogether three
thousand pounds at Cape Town, and nearly as much again in England, and
a long letter to Mrs. Falcon, in which Staines revealed his true story,
told her where to find his wife, or hear of her, viz., at Kent Villa,
Gravesend, and sketched an outline of instructions as to the way, and
cunning degrees, by which the joyful news should be broken to her. With
this he sent a long letter to be given to Rosa herself, but not till she
should know all: and in this letter he enclosed the ruby ring she had
given him. That ring had never left his finger, by sea or land, in
sickness or health.

The letter to Rosa was sealed. The two letters made quite a packet;
for, in the letter to his beloved Rosa, he told her everything that had
befallen him. It was a romance, and a picture of love; a letter to lift
a loving woman to heaven, and almost reconcile her to all her bereaved
heart had suffered.

This letter, written with many tears from the heart that had so
suffered, and was now softened by good fortune and bounding with joy,
Staines entrusted to Falcon, together with the other diamonds, and with
many warm shakings of the hand, started him on his way.

"But mind, Falcon," said Christopher, "I shall expect an answer from
Mrs. Falcon in twenty days at farthest. I do not feel so sure as you
do that she wants to go to England; and, if not, I must write to Uncle
Philip. Give me your solemn promise, old fellow, an answer in twenty
days--if you have to send a Kafir on horseback."

"I give you my honor," said Falcon superbly.

"Send it to me at Bulteel's Farm."

"All right. 'Dr. Christie, Bulteel's Farm.'"

"Well--no. Why should I conceal my real name any longer from such
friends as you and your wife? Christie is short for Christopher--that IS
my Christian name; but my surname is Staines. Write to 'Dr. Staines.'"

"Dr. Staines!"

"Yes. Did you ever hear of me?"

Falcon wore a strange look. "I almost think I have. Down at Gravesend,
or somewhere."

"That is curious. Yes, I married my Rosa there; poor thing! God bless
her; God comfort her. She thinks me dead."

His voice trembled, he grasped Falcon's cold hand till the latter winced
again, and so they parted, and Falcon rode off muttering, "Dr. Staines!
so then YOU are Dr. Staines."




CHAPTER XXII.


Rosa Staines had youth on her side, and it is an old saying that youth
will not be denied. Youth struggled with death for her, and won the
battle.

But she came out of that terrible fight weak as a child. The sweet pale
face, the widow's cap, the suit of deep black--it was long ere these
came down from the sickroom. And when they did, oh, the dead blank!
The weary, listless life! The days spent in sighs, and tears, and
desolation. Solitude! solitude! Her husband was gone, and a strange
woman played the mother to her child before her eyes.

Uncle Philip was devotedly kind to her, and so was her father; but they
could do nothing for her.

Months rolled on, and skinned the wound over. Months could not heal. Her
boy became dearer and dearer, and it was from him came the first real
drops of comfort, however feeble.

She used to read her lost one's diary every day, and worship, in deep
sorrow, the mind she had scarcely respected until it was too late. She
searched in his diary to find his will, and often she mourned that he
had written on it so few things she could obey. Her desire to obey
the dead, whom, living, she had often disobeyed, was really simple and
touching. She would mourn to her father that there were so few commands
to her in his diary. "But," said she, "memory brings me back his will in
many things, and to obey is now the only sad comfort I have."

It was in this spirit she now forced herself to keep accounts. No fear
of her wearing stays now; no powder; no trimmings; no waste.

After the usual delay, her father told her she should instruct a
solicitor to apply to the insurance company for the six thousand
pounds. She refused with a burst of agony. "The price of his life," she
screamed. "Never! I'd live on bread and water sooner than touch that
vile money."

Her father remonstrated gently. But she was immovable. "No. It would be
like consenting to his death."

Then Uncle Philip was sent for.

He set her child on her knee; and gave her a pen. "Come," said he,
sternly, "be a woman, and do your duty to little Christie."

She kissed the boy, cried, and did her duty meekly. But when the money
was brought her, she flew to Uncle Philip, and said, "There! there!"
and threw it all before him, and cried as if her heart would break. He
waited patiently, and asked her what he was to do with all that: invest
it?

"Yes, yes; for my little Christie."

"And pay you the interest quarterly."

"Oh, no, no. Dribble us out a little as we want it. That is the way to
be truly kind to a simpleton. I hate that word."

"And suppose I run off with it? Such confiding geese as you corrupt a
man."

"I shall never corrupt you. Crusty people are the soul of honor."

"Crusty people!" cried Philip, affecting amazement. "What are they?"

She bit her lip and colored a little; but answered adroitly, "They are
people that pretend not to have good hearts, but have the best in the
world; far better ones than your smooth ones: that's crusty people."

"Very well," said Philip; "and I'll tell you what simpletons are. They
are little transparent-looking creatures that look shallow, but are as
deep as Old Nick, and make you love them in spite of your judgment.
They are the most artful of their sex; for they always achieve its great
object, to be loved--the very thing that clever women sometimes fail
in."

"Well, and if we are not to be loved, why live at all--such useless
things as I am?" said Rosa simply.

So Philip took charge of her money, and agreed to help her save money
for her little Christopher. Poverty should never destroy him, as it had
his father.

As months rolled on, she crept out into public a little; but always on
foot, and a very little way from home.

Youth and sober life gradually restored her strength, but not her color,
nor her buoyancy.

Yet she was perhaps more beautiful than ever; for a holy sorrow
chastened and sublimed her features: it was now a sweet, angelic,
pensive beauty, that interested every feeling person at a glance.

She would visit no one; but a twelvemonth after her bereavement, she
received a few chosen visitors.

One day a young gentleman called, and sent up his card, "Lord
Tadcaster," with a note from Lady Cicely Treherne, full of kindly
feeling. Uncle Philip had reconciled her to Lady Cicely; but they had
never met.

Mrs. Staines was much agitated at the very name of Lord Tadcaster; but
she would not have missed seeing him for the world.

She received him with her beautiful eyes wide open, to drink in every
lineament of one who had seen the last of her Christopher.

Tadcaster was wonderfully improved: he had grown six inches out at sea,
and though still short, was not diminutive; he was a small Apollo, a
model of symmetry, and had an engaging, girlish beauty, redeemed from
downright effeminacy by a golden mustache like silk, and a tanned cheek
that became him wonderfully.

He seemed dazzled at first by Mrs. Staines, but murmured that Lady
Cicely had told him to come, or he would not have ventured.

"Who can be so welcome to me as you?" said she, and the tears came thick
in her eyes directly.

Soon, he hardly knew how, he found himself talking of Staines, and
telling her what a favorite he was, and all the clever things he had
done.

The tears streamed down her cheeks, but she begged him to go on telling
her, and omit nothing.

He complied heartily, and was even so moved by the telling of his
friend's virtues, and her tears and sobs, that he mingled his tears with
hers. She rewarded him by giving him her hand as she turned away her
tearful face to indulge the fresh burst of grief his sympathy evoked.

When he was leaving, she said, in her simple way, "Bless you"--"Come
again," she said: "you have done a poor widow good."

Lord Tadcaster was so interested and charmed, he would gladly have
come back next day to see her; but he restrained that extravagance, and
waited a week.

Then he visited her again. He had observed the villa was not rich
in flowers, and he took her down a magnificent bouquet, cut from his
father's hot-houses. At sight of him, or at sight of it, or both, the
color rose for once in her pale cheek, and her pensive face wore a sweet
expression of satisfaction. She took his flowers, and thanked him for
them, and for coming to see her.

Soon they got on the only topic she cared for, and, in the course of
this second conversation, he took her into his confidence, and told her
he owed everything to Dr. Staines. "I was on the wrong road altogether,
and he put me right. To tell you the truth, I used to disobey him now
and then, while he was alive, and I was always the worse for it; now he
is gone, I never disobey him. I have written down a lot of wise, kind
things he said to me, and I never go against any one of them. I call it
my book of oracles. Dear me, I might have brought it with me."

"Oh, yes! why didn't you?" rather reproachfully.

"I will bring it next time."

"Pray do."

Then she looked at him with her lovely swimming eyes, and said tenderly,
"And so here is another that disobeyed him living, but obeys him dead.
What will you think when I tell you that I, his wife, who now worship
him when it is too late, often thwarted and vexed him when he was
alive?"

"No, no. He told me you were an angel, and I believe it."

"An angel! a good-for-nothing, foolish woman, who sees everything too
late."

"Nobody else should say so before me," said the little gentleman
grandly. "I shall take HIS word before yours on this one subject. If
ever there was an angel, you are one; and oh, what would I give if I
could but say or do anything in the world to comfort you!"

"You can do nothing for ME, dear, but come and see me often, and talk to
me as you do--on the one sad theme my broken heart has room for."

This invitation delighted Lord Tadcaster, and the sweet word "dear,"
from her lovely lips, entered his heart, and ran through all his veins
like some rapturous but dangerous elixir. He did not say to himself,
"She is a widow with a child, feels old with grief, and looks on me as a
boy who has been kind to her." Such prudence and wariness were hardly to
be expected from his age. He had admired her at first sight, very nearly
loved her at their first interview, and now this sweet word opened a
heavenly vista. The generous heart that beat in his small frame burned
to console her with a life-long devotion and all the sweet offices of
love.

He ordered his yacht to Gravesend--for he had become a sailor--and
then he called on Mrs. Staines, and told her, with a sort of sheepish
cunning, that now, as his yacht HAPPENED to be at Gravesend, he could
come and see her very often. He watched her timidly, to see how she
would take that proposition.

She said, with the utmost simplicity, "I'm very glad of it."

Then he produced his oracles; and she devoured them. Such precepts to
Tadcaster as she could apply to her own case she instantly noted in her
memory, and they became her law from that moment.

Then, in her simplicity, she said, "And I will show you some things, in
his own handwriting, that may be good for you; but I can't show you
the whole book: some of it is sacred from every eye but his wife's. His
wife's? Ah me! his widow's."

Then she pointed out passages in the diary that she thought might be for
his good; and he nestled to her side, and followed her white finger with
loving eyes, and was in an elysium--which she would certainly have put
a stop to at that time, had she divined it. But all wisdom does not come
at once to an unguarded woman. Rosa Staines was wiser about her husband
than she had been, but she had plenty to learn.

Lord Tadcaster anchored off Gravesend, and visited Mrs. Staines nearly
every day. She received him with a pleasure that was not at all lively,
but quite undisguised. He could not doubt his welcome; for once, when he
came, she said to the servant, "Not at home," a plain proof she did not
wish his visit to be cut short by any one else.

And so these visits and devoted attentions of every kind went on
unobserved by Lord Tadcaster's friends, because Rosa would never go out,
even with him; but at last Mr. Lusignan saw plainly how this would end,
unless he interfered.

Well, he did not interfere; on the contrary, he was careful to avoid
putting his daughter on her guard: he said to himself, "Lord Tadcaster
does her good. I'm afraid she would not marry him, if he was to ask her
now; but in time she might. She likes him a great deal better than any
one else."

As for Philip, he was abroad for his own health, somewhat impaired by
his long and faithful attendance on Rosa.

So now Lord Tadcaster was in constant attendance on Rosa. She was
languid, but gentle and kind; and, as mourners, like invalids, are apt
to be egotistical, she saw nothing but that he was a comfort to her in
her affliction.

While matters were so, the Earl of Miltshire, who had long been sinking,
died, and Tadcaster succeeded to his honors and estates.

Rosa heard of it, and, thinking it was a great bereavement, wrote him
one of those exquisite letters of condolence a lady alone can write. He
took it to Lady Cicely, and showed it her. She highly approved it.