the real mr. gray—nurse bundle regards him with disfavour

my feelings may therefore be "better imagined than described" when, at about ten o'clock the following morning, my father called me downstairs, and said, with an odd expression on his face,

"regie, mr. gray has come."

not for one instant did i in my mind accuse my father of deceiving me. my faith in him was as implicit as he well deserved that it should be. black might be white, two and two might make five, impossible things might be possible, but my father could not be in the wrong. it was evident that i must have misunderstood him last night. i looked very crestfallen indeed.

my father, however, seemed particularly cheerful, even inclined to laugh, i thought. he took my hand and we went to the front door, my heart beating wildly, for i was a delicate unrobust lad yet, far too easily upset and excited. more like a girl, in fact, if the comparison be not an insult to such sturdy maids as cousin polly.

outside we found a man-servant on a bay horse, holding a little white pony, on which, i supposed, the little tutor had been riding. but he himself[121] was not to be seen. i tried hard to be manly and calm, and being much struck by the appearance of the pony, who, when i came down the steps, had turned towards me the gentlest and most intelligent of faces, with a splendid long curly white forelock streaming down between his kind dark eyes, i asked—

"is that mr. gray's pony, father?"

"what do you think of it?" said my father.

"oh, it's a little dear," was my emphatic answer, and as the pony unmistakably turned his head to me, i met his friendly advances by going up to him, and in another moment my arms were round his neck, and he was rubbing his soft, strong nose against my shoulder, and we were kissing and fondling each other in happy forgetfulness of everything but our sudden friendship, whilst the man-servant (apparently an irishman) was firing off ejaculations like crackers on the fifth of november.

"sure, now, did ever anyone see the like—just to look at the baste—sure he knows it's the young squire himself entirely. och, but the young gintleman's as well acquainted with horses as myself—sure he'd make friends with a unicorn, if there was such an animal; and it's the unicorn that would be proud to let him, too!"

"it has been used to boys, i think?" said my father.

"ye may say that, yer honour. it likes boys better than man, woman, or child, and it's not every baste ye can say that for."

"a good many beasts have reason to think very differently, i fear," said my father.

"and that's as true a word as your honour ever spoke," assented the groom.[122]

meanwhile a possible ground of consolation was beginning to suggest itself to my mind.

"will mr. gray keep his pony here?" i asked,

"the pony will live here," said my father.

"oh, do you think," i asked, "do you think, that if i am very good, and do my lessons well, mr. gray will sometimes let me ride him? he is such a darling!" by which i meant the pony, and not mr. gray. my father laughed, and put his hand on my shoulders.

"i have only been teasing you, regie," he said. "you know i told you there was no tutor in the case. mr. andrewes and i were talking about this pony, and when mr. andrewes said grey, he spoke of the colour of the pony, and not of anybody's name."

"then is the pony yours?" i asked.

my father looked at my eager face with a pleased smile.

"no, my boy," he said, "he is yours."

the wild delight with which i received this announcement, the way i jumped and danced, and that rubens jumped and danced with me, my gratitude and my father's satisfaction, the renewed amenities between myself and my pony, his obvious knowledge of the fact that i was his master, and the running commentary of the irishman, i will not attempt to describe.

the purchase of this pony was indeed one of my father's many kind thoughts for my welfare and amusement. my odd pilgrimage to the rectory in search of change and society, and the pettish complaints of dulness and monotony at home which i had urged to account for my freak of "dropping in," had seemed to him not without a certain serious foundation. except for walks about the farm with[123] him, and stolen snatches of intercourse with the grooms, and dogs, and horses in the stables (which both he and nurse bundle discouraged), i had little or no amusement proper to a boy of my age. i was very well content to sit with rubens at mrs. bundle's apron-string, but now and then i was, to use an expressive word, moped. my father had taken counsel with mr. andrewes, and the end of it all was that i found myself the master of the most charming of ponies, with the exciting prospect before me of learning to ride. the very thought of it invigorated me. before the irish groom went away i had asked if my new steed "could jump." i questioned my father's men as to the earliest age at which young gentlemen had ever been allowed to go out hunting, within their knowledge. i went to bed to dream of rides as wild as mazeppa's, of hairbreadth escapes, and of feats of horsemanship that would have amazed mr. astley. and hopes and schemes so wild that i dared not bring them to the test of my father's ridicule, i poured with pride into nurse bundle's sympathetic ear.

dear, good, kind nurse bundle! she was indeed a mother to me, and a mother's anxieties and disappointments were her portion. the effect of her watchful constant care of my early years for me, was whatever good there was about me in health or manners. the effect of it for her was, i believe, that she was never thoroughly happy when i was out of her sight. in these circumstances, it seemed hard that when most of my infantile diseases were over, when i was just becoming very intelligent (the best company possible, mrs. bundle declared), when i wore my clothes out reasonably, and had exchanged the cries which[124] exercise one's lungs in infancy for rational conversation by the nursery fireside, i should be drawn away from nurse and nursery almost entirely. it was right and natural, but it was hard. nurse bundle felt it so, but she never complained. when she felt it most, she only said, "it's all just as it should be." and so it was. boys and ducklings must wander off some time, be mothers and hens never so kind! the world is wide, and duck-ponds are deep. the young ones must go alone, and those who tremble most for their safety cannot follow to take care of them.

i really shrink from realizing to myself what nurse bundle must have suffered whilst i was learning to ride. the novel exercise, the stimulus of risk, that "put new life into me," were to her so many daily grounds for the sad probability of my death.

"every blessed afternoon do i look to see him brought home on a shutter, with his precious neck broken, poor lamb!" she exclaimed one afternoon, overpowered by the sight of me climbing on to the pony's back, which performance i had brought her downstairs to witness, and endeavoured to render more entertaining and creditable by secretly stimulating the pony to restlessness, and then hopping after him with one foot in the stirrup, in what i fancied to be a very knowing manner.

"why, my dear mrs. bundle," said my father, smiling, "you kill him at least three hundred and sixty-four times oftener in the course of the year than you need. if he does break his neck, he can only do it once, and you bewail his loss every day."

"now, heaven bless the young gentleman, sir, and meaning no disrespect, but don't ye go for to[125] tempt providence by joking about it, and him perhaps brought a hopeless corpse to the side door this very evening," said mrs. bundle, her red cheeks absolutely blanched by the vision she had conjured up. why, i cannot say, but she had fully made up her mind that when i was brought home dead, as she believed that, sooner or later, i was pretty sure to be, i should be brought to the side-door. now "the side-door," as it was called, was a little door leading into the garden, and less used, perhaps, than any other door in the house. mrs. bundle, i believe, had decided that in that tragedy which she was constantly rehearsing, the men who should find my body would avoid the front-door, to spare my father the sudden shock of meeting my corpse. the side-door, too, was just below the nursery windows. mrs. bundle herself, would, probably, be the first to hear any knocking at it, and she naturally pictured herself as taking a prominent part in the terrible scene she so often fancied. it was perhaps a good thing, on the whole, that she chose this door in preference to those in constant use, otherwise every ring or knock at the front or back door must have added greatly to her anxieties.

i fear i did not do much to relieve them. i rather aggravated them. partly i believe in the conceit of showing off my own skill and daring, and partly by way of "hardening" mrs. bundle's nerves. when more knowledge, or longer custom, or stronger health or nerves, have placed us beyond certain terrors which afflict other people, we are apt to fancy that, by insisting upon their submitting to what we do not mind, our nervous friends can or ought to be forced into the unconcern which we feel ourselves; which is, perhaps,[126] a little too like dosing the patient with what happens to agree with the doctor.

thus i fondled my pony's head and dawdled ostentatiously at his heels when nurse bundle was most full of fears of his biting or kicking. but i feel sure that this, and the tricks i played to show the firmness of my "seat," only made it seem to her the more certain that, from my recklessness, i must some day be bitten, kicked, or thrown.

i had several falls, and one or two narrow escapes from more serious accidents, which, for the moment, made my father as white as mrs. bundle. but he was wise enough to know that the present risks i ran from fearlessness were nothing to the future risks against which complete confidence on horseback would ensure me. and so with the ordinary mishaps, and with days and hours of unspeakable and healthy happiness, i learnt to ride well and to know horses. and poor mrs. bundle, sitting safely at home in her rocking-chair, endured all the fears from which i was free.

"now look, my deary," said she one day; "don't you go turning your sweet face round to look up at the nursery windows when you're a riding off. i can see your curls, bless them! and that's enough for me. keep yourself still, love, and look where you're a going, for in all reason you've plenty to do with that. and don't you go a waving your precious hand, for it gives me such a turn to think you've let go, and have only got one hand to hold on with, and just turning the corner too, and the pony a shaking its tail, and shifting about with its back legs, till how you don't slip off on one side passes me altogether."

"why, you don't think i hold on by my hands, do you?" i cried.[127]

"and what should you hold on with?" said mrs. bundle. "many's the light cart i've rode in, but never let go my hold, unless with one hand, to save a bag or a bandbox. and though it's jolting, i'm sure a light cart's nothing to pony-back for starts and unexpectedness."

i tried in vain to make nurse bundle like my pony.

"i've seen plenty of ponies!" she said, severely; by which she meant not that she had seen many, but that what she had seen of them had been more than enough. "my brother-in-law's first cousin had one—a little red-haired beast—as vicious as any wild cat. it won a many races, but it was the death of him at last, according to the expectations of everybody. he was brought home on a shutter to his family, and the pony grazing close by in the ditch as if nothing had happened. many's the time i've seen him on it expecting death as little as yourself, and he refused twenty pound for it the tuesday fortnight before he was killed. but i was with his wife that's now his widow when the body was brought."

by the time that i heard this anecdote i was happily too good a rider to be frightened by it; but i did wish that mrs. bundle's relative had died any other death than that which formed so melancholy a precedent in her mind.

the strongest obstacle, however, to any chance of my nurse's looking with favour on my new pet was her profound ignorance of horses and ponies in general. except as to colour or length of tail, she recognized no difference between one and another. as to any distinctions between "play" and "vice," a fidgety animal and a determined kicker, a friendly nose-rub and a malicious resolve[128] to bite, they were not discernible by mrs. bundle's unaccustomed eyes.

"i've seen plenty of ponies," she would repeat; "i know what they are, my dear," and she invariably followed up this statement by rehearsing the fate of her brother-in-law's cousin, sometimes adding—

"he was very much giving to racing, and being about horses. he was a little man, and suffered a deal from the quinsies in the autumn."

"what a pity he didn't die of a quinsy instead of breaking his neck!" i felt compelled to say one day.

"he might have lived to have done that if it hadn't a been for the pony," said mrs. bundle emphatically.