Major Lawrence, F. L. S. A novel

Front matter

MAJOR LAWRENCE, F.L.S. MAJOR LAAVBENCE, F.L.S. A NOVEL. BY THE HON. EMILY LAWLESS, AUTHOR OF " HVERISK : A STVDY," ETC. NEW EDITION. LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 1888. LONDON : PRINTED BT WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMIT RD, STAMFORD STREF.T AND CHARING CROSS. L. TO MY MOTHER. Will Fate, we sometimes ask, turn kind, And let a promised tribute find Its laggard way to these same feet, The same too-kindly eyes to greet ? If so then well, if not still take This story, less for its own sake Than for its giver's; words to you Gilding much dross; remembering, too, That books, like lives, are often things 'Scaped from the husk on nerveless wings. Not launched on vigour's breezy dance, Gav lords of Fate and Circumstance, But playthings of the sun and wind, Of hazards rough, and hazards kind, And grown with little conscious plan Less as they would than as they can. E, X'iv>_'iaher, 1887. CONTENTS.

Chapter I

He had only a year's leave, hut, as barely two months of it were as yet expended, it seemed a reasonably long time to look forward to. John Lawrence was thirty-two years old, and already fourteen years of his life had been spent in India. He was not quite eighteen when his father received the offer of a commission in an Indian regiment for one of his sons, and there seemed to be a good many excellent reasons why John — Johnnie as he was then called — should be the one selected. There were no very terrifying examina tions to he passed in those days, and there were five young Lawrences, all boys, and as Johnnie was neither the eldest nor the youngest, neither the cleverest, nor perceptibly the stupidest, neither his father's favourite, nor his mother's favourite, nor the favourite of any one in parti cular except of a crabbed old uncle, whose predilections did not count for much one way or other, as moreover he had attained the right age, it seemed in every way fitting that he should be the one selected.

He did not himself rebel against his destiny. He had B not formed any very distinct ideas of India, but thought that he should perhaps like to see it. He would have preferred on the whole to have done so without having to become a soldier for the purpose. The more ornamental side of soldiering,— scarlet clothes, gold lace, admiring glances, the consciousness of entering life under (he guise of a conquering hero, the sudden sense of emancipation — all that ordinarily suffuses life in general with a roseate mist to the young recruit, did not particularly commend itself to his imagination, certainly not as much as to that of most young gentlemen of eighteen. He was a shy boy, not awkward, but often appearing so at the first glance, given to mooning about with his hands in his pockets, though with his eyes, it must be added, com mendably wide open.

"When he was about twelve years old an accident had befallen him, from which at the time it had seemed unlikely that he would ever entirely recover. He had fallen some thirty feet from the top of the wall of a dis mantled church, where he had stationed himself to watch the return of a pair of jackdaws who were bringing up a callow family amongst the ivy, and where the treacherous masonry had suddenly given way under his feet, pre cipitating him downward, and half-burying him under stones and rubbish into the bargain. The house to which he -was carried on this occasion was not his own home, merely a farmhouse which his father Mr. Lawrence, a barrister with au increasing Chanceiy practice, was in the habit of hiring annually, as a con venient spot for his turbulent brood to disport themselves in during the holidays.

Mrs. Lawrence was not there at the time, but hurried back upon hearing of the accident, and devoted herself to the care of her injured son. Eor a long time the boy lay between life and death. At last he worked his way back to life, got out of bed, and on to a pair of crutches, upon which he hobbled about with much awkwardness and considerable dissatisfaction to himself. Besides the lameness, he had a good do il of stiffness in one wrist, and a long scar upon the left side of the face, beginning at the chin and running right up the cheek, until it lost itself amongst the hair. It was not deep enough actually to disfigure him, but it gave his face a curious expression, half-humorous, half deprecating, which had not been there before, and which from that time forward, became one of its most distinctly marked characteristics.

Before this stage of his recovery had arrived, the period for which the farmhouse had been taken had come to an end. The other boys had gone back to school ; Mr. Lawrence was settled again at his work in London, where his wife's presence was urgently called for. The question therefore arose, what was to be done with Johnnie ? The doctors desired him to have as much as possible of fresh air, and as little as possible of schooling, at any rate for some time longer. Where could he be sent ? was therefore the question. Fortunately at this juncture a half-brother of his father's, a retired sea-captain, living in a little cottage upon the coast of Devonshire, volun teered, to every one's astonishment, to have the boy sent to him, and the offer was promptly and gratefully accepted. Johnnie went to Devonshire, where, the day after his arrival, he dropped one of his crutches into a deep cleft in the rocks, out of which he had been trying to hook the skeleton of a sea-bird which had got wedged between, a couple of big stones.

He clambered to the top without it, and hopped back as best he could to the house, but before long got on so well that he discarded the other, and with the help of a big stick borrowed from his uncle, was soon limping all over the place nearly as actively as ever. Captain Pelligrew Parr was what is called a " character," which means in this case that he was as crusty above the surface, and as estimable below it, as characters— at any rate in fiction and upon the stage— are supposed to be. He had left the service in a pique, and had never, as the phrase runs, repented of that act but once. He was a born salt, saturated with the flavour of the sea from the crown of his head even to the soles of his feet. There was not a sentiment, or a prejudice — and that was saying a good deal — which had not imbibed this briny flavour, and was not nearly as much a direct product of the ocean as a mussel or a limpet.

Such a man tied for life to the shore is like a herring in a fresh-water aquarium ; discomfort pervades his very breathing. Seeing that he could not habitually live on board ship, he had built himself a house, which as closely resembled a ship as one thing radically dissimilar can resemble another. Colt's Head Cottage stood upon the very brink of the shore, within easy reach of the spray, which even in the mildest weather had a playful fashion of rendering the windows upon the seaward side useless for observation, and which in bad weather it was necessary to keep out with strong iron shutters, the putting up and taking down of which was one of the chief excitements of the Captain's life. Not only was the house close to the sea, but it stood upon a narrow neck of rock, which jutted out a good hundred yards in advance of the rest of the world, and was surrounded on three sides by the waves, which, whenever the wind was more than usually high, rendered any ordinarily pitched conversation perfectly inaudible.

The timbers of which this house was constructed, and with which the walls of its rooms were panelled, were of drift wood picked up upon the shore, legacies of vessels long since foundered and perished. There was hardly a door or a shutter in which a careful examination might not have detected the small but suggestive hole left by the destroying tooth of the Teredo. To any boy, but especially to a boy like Johnnie Lawrence, such a house and surroundings seemed to be what one of the quaintest and most delightful of writers has called " a handsome anticipation of Heaven ; " a heaven to which the howling wind, the swirling brine, the naked rocks, the absolute treelessness, the all but total absence of vegetation, the grimness, sullenness, bleakness of everything on which the eye rested, seemed only so many additionally celestial elements.

It put the finishing touch to that inborn passion of his for poking after his inferior fellow-creatures and remote relations ; "watching their ways, and trying to ascertain their rather inscrutable motives, which would probably always have been observable in him, but which in this favouring medium rose at once to the foremost place in his mind. To burrow from morning till night in the rock pools, which yawned black, green, and purple below the windows ; to fill every tub and washhand-basin with crawling, creeping, wriggling gentry, sending out im portunate tentacles, and long spiny or gelatinous fila ments ; to go fishing with the Captain in his yawl, or assisting Phil Kudd, his factotum, to set lobster-pots — all this became his life, his thought by day, and his dream by night. He went home from Devonshire cured of his lameness, but radically confirmed in these inquisi tive propensities, which in London proved of more plague than pleasure, and which at school brought him into perpetual collision with the authorities.

This did not much matter. Johnnie was one of those extremely well behaved boys who never allow themselves to be interfered with, quietly and unostentatiously pursuing their own way, untroubled by other people's opinions. Though shy, he was, fortunately for himself, not self-conscious. After this, he visited the Captain several times, never, however, remaining quite so long as upon his first visit. He never again, for one thing, fell down a wall thirty feet high, though of other adventures in furtherance of the beloved pursuit he had not a few. When the question of the Indian commission came under discussion, Captain Parr was vehemently opposed to Johnnie being despatched into exile. India a quarter of a century ago was a good deal further off, practically, than at present. A lad con signed there was like a stone dropped into the void ; the air closed in behind.

His place might be vacant for a while, but the knowledge that the thing was done, and done for life, tended to fill up the gap and to keep it filled. Captain Parr never forgave his brother for robbing him of his favourite nephew ; it remained ever afterwards a sore spot in his mind, a distinct grievance. Even to him, however, poor Johnnie appeared after a while to belong to the category of things, if not lost, at any rate hopelessly mislaid. He did not forget him, as he eventually proved, but the pen was not a weapon which came comfortably or naturally to his fingers. He never wrole to his nephew, and his nephew, after a few spasmodic efforts, ceased to write to him. He too felt that he had been " dropped ; " that, for the next twenty or thirty years, India, and not England, was the country to which he had to look.

It cannot be said that he accepted his lot with any glowing satisfaction. He was a decently good soldier, but hardly an enthusiastic one. Eegimental life, with its recurrent round of petty obligations, was — he did not disguise it from himself — a tediousness to him, that sense of finality which was so excessively soothing to his rela tions at home, not perhaps, proving equally so to him. It is possible that he might even have dismayed those relations by throwing up the advantages that bad been secured to him, and returning precipitately to England, but for two events which occurred not long after he had joined. The Mutiny was over, but its after-effects were still rumbling and muttering about, and in one sharp brush upon the Punjab frontier the native regiment to which he belonged suffered so severely, that young Lawrence found himself one fine morning gazetted a captain at the age of twenty-three.

This was naturally cheeiing, and three months' leave, which he spent a year later amongst the Himalayas, proved even more so. Then, for the first time, he seemed to find himself genuinely face to face with Nature; not in scraps and hints, catching a glimpse here and a glimpse there, as it were behind backs, but fate to face, in the heart of one of her own fastnesses, amid a crowd of forms, new, not only to him, but in many cases at that remote period to Science herself also. He took to his old pursuits again with a will, devoting every spare moment of time to them, to the no slight bewilderment of his brother-officers, whose sense of the becoming was not a little outraged by so unheard-of a variation of a subaltern's recreations. He was not unpopular, but this and a few other points about him tended to set him apart, and hinder him and them from ever thoroughly amalgamating.

He had been about eight years in India when it was his good fortune to make the acquaintance of that brilliant savant and physiologist, Henneker Jenkyll, since, as every one knows, grown to be a conspicuous star in the sky of science, but at that date a mere scientist ad venturer or free-lance, who having some private means of his own, had gone out to India for the purpose of working up certain still obscure problems, for which it appeared to him to offer a good, and as yet comparatively an undisputed field. In all these researches John Law rence was able to be of considerable help, his previous studies, informal as they were, having put him into possession of a number of somewhat out-of-the-way facts, all of -which were very much at his new friend's service. The two men made several expeditions together, and when in due time Professor Jenkyll returned to England, and published those researches which at once brought his name into the foremost rank of contemporary zoologists, he made handsome mention — in foot-notes and other places — of Captain Lawrence as his kind and invaluable assistant.

Some people — those who were jealous of the Professor — said that it was the least he could have done, and that in strict justice some of those laurels with which his own head was so abundantly adorned should have fallen to the lot of his undistinguished coadjutor. It is only fair to add that this was not John Lawrence's own opinion. He was Jenkyll's jackal, he always declared, and was perfectly content to call himself so. In this capacity he did good if obscure work in the cause of zoology, and it was in recognition of his services in this respect that the Professor bestirred himself, some six or seven years later, to get his friend elected, first as asso ciate, afterwards as member of that illustrious Society, to which it was ever afterwards our modest hero's pride and chief distinction to belong.

He had been fourteen years in India, as already stated, before he returned home. He could have obtained leave sooner, but the expense of the journey was a consideration not without weight, and it seemed wiser therefore to remain doggedly where he was for the present. At last the moment, long delayed, came, and a few weeks after receiving his majority he found himself on board of a troopship, bound from Bombay to Southampton. Naturally, the world to which he returned was not precisely the same world as the one he had sailed away from. His mother was dead, so also was one of his brothers. Two were settled in Australia, another was married and a parson in the north of Yorkshire. His father, too, had married again, and now at the age of sixty-nine was the proud parent of a couple of baby girls.

Captain Parr was also dead, and this perhaps was the fact which in some ways affected our Major most, for, by the provisions of his uncle's will, Colt's Head Cottage, the paradise of his boyish days, had been left to him, with many minute directions as to the keeping of it in the same condition in which it had been left. He did not go there immediately upon his arrival, but had not been back long before he found occasion to do so. His father's new menage did not, it must be owned entirely suit him ; perhaps it would be more accurate to say, that ho did not entirely suit it. His stepmother was universally spoken of as a charming young woman bril liant, social, popular; his father, now a judge, seemed upon the whole to be rather younger than when he last remembered him, fourteen years of unceasing forensic labour having apparently had rather a rejuvenating effect upon his constitution than otherwise.

It was distinctly a successful marriage, the new Mrs. Lawrence not apparently regarding the discrepancy of age between herself and her husband as more than a picturesque and amusing element of their union. She was not at all too young for her de lightful old judge, but she was certainly — it began to strike her — rather too young for her delightful old judge's son. This big bronzed man arriving from India and sitting down with an air of preoccupation at her breakfast table ; not knowing a single soul of all her numerous acquaintances, or a single one of the allusions with which her conversation bristled; with a certain vague reputation for cleverness, or rather learning, but with nothing appa rently to show for it ; with brown faintly humorous eyes which followed her slowly round the room with an air of mild bewilderment ; he puzzled her ; he was not somehow malleable or readily assignable to any category she was acquainted with ; she did not, in truth, know exactly what to make of him.

He was very excellent — so she conscientiously assured all her acquaintances ; — but — with a slight movement of the shoulders — just a little — a little — well, ponderous you know. Poor John ! He was perfectly aware of it ! — more so probably than his sprightly stepmother gave him credit for. He felt like a bull in a china shop, a bumble-bee enclosed in the calyx of a harebell — anything suggestive of inappropriate and unwarrantable bigness, when he found himself, after his fourteen years of soldiering and bachelor existence, adrift in that decorative establishment. He had been excessively astonished when he heard of his father's second marriage, but had not felt called upon seriously to resent it. At bottom he was rather amused by the whole aspect of affairs, and his own somewhat incongruous share in them.

His sense of humour was latent, however, rather than ostensible ; it was not very available for social purposes ; it lurked in his eyes, but did not often reveal itself on his lips ; when it did, it was half unconsciously. He was shy, too, having never entirely got over his youthful failings in that respect, and the position in which he found himself in the household was, it must be owned, trying to the sus ceptibilities of a man afflicted with that most uncom fortable of complaints. He got on best with the nurseiy portion of the estab lishment. These two little sisters, who might so easily have been his daughters, were a sort of revelation to him, while he, upon his side, was promptly accepted by them as a new, and upon the whole desirable vassal and play mate. They called him Donny and Doddy, and other nursery perversions of his name; they got him down upon all-fours, and rode both together upon his back, kicking him vigorously in the ribs to make him go faster ; they fed him with comfits, and bits of stale cake, and insisted upon his drinking innumerable thimblefuls of cold currant tea out of their dolls' teacups. — Sophonisba Maria, the largest and plainest of those ladies, and he were to be married shortly, they announced.

To these requisitions the Major submitted with the complacency of a large dog, half-astonished, half-gratified. He had an unacknowledged passion for childreu, as many big unexpansive men have, of whom nobody would ever have suspected it, and would have liked nothing better than to have had just such a pair of his own, if circum stances had only7 been good enough to allow of the possi bility of such a thing, which it is plain to all rational people that they had not. There are men, as well as women, who seem born to go through the world seeing its best things mainly through other people's eyes, which is rather like seeing a fire through a sheet of glass, which gives the light but cuts off nearly all the warmth. In spite of the unbounded wrath and astonishment of his two little yellow-headed tyrants, the Major did not remain long in London.

His father's house, outside the nursery, did not particularly suit him, and a man of thirty-three cannot spend all his days in a nursery, especially in his stepmother's nursery. He made various excuses for his departure, and hastened away, not without a sensation of escape, to Devonshire. He breathed a long sigh of relief when he found him self in the train, and several more when, having driven the eight or nine miles that intervened between Colt's Head and the. nearest railway station, he found himself upon the little narrow wind-scraped peninsula which he remembered so well, which he had thought of so often, the very feel of whose slippery grass and gritty rocks was so different from the feel of any other grass or rocks in the world. Here at least, he said to himself, he would find his old self again and his old world.

Here at least he was at home — as much home as he seemed destined to have. The first day he did nothing; nothing, that is, but sit or stand, his mouth half-ajar, facing the sea. This was what he had been waiting for ! this was what had kept him going during those interminable days and nights in India ; this was England ! those rocks, this tufted grass, that interminable sweep of grey! He hugged the country, metaphorically speaking, to his bosom ! Yet to ordinary observation, unstimulated by exile, Colt's Head would not have been regarded as by any means a characteristically English scene, being much more suggestive of North Scotland or "West Ireland. This, however, he did not mind, rather liked it the better for. To a man, too, who has never in all his life owned any spot which he could call his own, beyond the temporary7 occupancy of some corner of a barrack, the mere sense of possession — even though it were only the possession of a rickety cabin, and a few worthless acres of stones and sea thrift — is in itself an exhilaration.

He sniffed the air with a sense of possession which could hardly have been greater, had all that he could sweep with his eyes been in truth his own. His nearest neighbour was an old Lady Mordaunt, who had been a warm friend of his mother in early days, and who upon his return forthwith elected herself into a sort of amateur aunt or grandmother, insisting upon his coming to stay with her, and taking the liveliest interest in his fortunes and prospects generally7. Apart from this amiability, Lady Mordaunt was a delightful woman, her sapphire-blue eyes looking only the bluer and the brighter for the tower of white hair brushed into a sort of crown upon the top of her head, and arranged under a Spanish-looking combination of black lace. It was not an old face, though she was turned sixty, and if there were wrinkles on it, not one of them at least betokened a mean, sordid, or dissatisfied pre-occupation.

She might have suggested a Marie Antoi nette who had survived her troubles, and lived to smile again. One of those crownless old queens, whoso royalty no one has ever been found bold enough to question. Lady Mordaunt, like Marie Antoinette, had had her full share of trouble, if not upon so heroic a scale. Her son Lord Helversdale — Earl of Helversdale and Kenneth, to give him his full designations — was popularly supposed to be going to the dogs as fast as race-horses and other cognate extravagances could combine to carry him. She had had another son, but he had died seven years before of malarious fever, and the first account his mother had received of his death had been through the news papers. She had also lost two daughters, within a week of each other, of diphtheria. She rarely -spoke of these troubles.

It seemed as if she had lived through them, and come out again upon the other side — as if nothing could now affect her other than superficially. She was in the enjoyment of a considerable fortune of her own, aud iu earlier days had lived a good deal in the world, openly preferring town to country. The last six years,' however, she had spent in Devonshire, upon a property of her son's, which she had taken under her charge, and to which she devoted nearly the whule of her income. It was a dull life for a woman who in her day had tasted the sweets of social power, and had as pretty a turn for domi nation, too, as any old lady in the three kingdoms. That the advent of our Major was, under the circumstances, a godsend may be imagined. She laid out her plans for his advantage ; consulted him upon all her most private affairs ; turned over every heiress of her acquaintance with an eye to his interests ; scolded him in motherly fashion whenever she considered he required it — which was frequently — would have had him take up his quarters permanently in her house, if he would have consented to do so.

He did not avail himself of these benevolences as much as he might have done. He liked Lady Mordaunt im mensely, but she had a rival who, had she been a woman, would perhaps by this time have been getting a little into her decadence, but who, being superior to the foibles of humanity, seemed only in her admirer's eyes to get younger and fresher every day, and whose charms too had been additionally heightened by the obstacles which a remorseless fate had hitherto thrust in the path of his passion. In other words he had embarked, with all the zest X)f a novice upon his old zoological pursuits, and daily de spatched pages of closely filled memoranda to his friend Jenkyll ; pages brimming over with suggestions ; with new facts ; with lines of investigation, which only required proper following out ; contributions which that brilliant investigator, who had plenty of such fish of his own to fry, received with, it must be owned, somewhat daunting indifference.

The immortal discoveries of one man are apt unluckily to seem a little flat and jejune to another. It did not daunt our Major. He laughed at his own enthusiasm, but he revelled in it none the less. He dredged, he trawled, he rifled the patient bosom of the deep. He peered indefatigably night and day into his microscope. He drew diagrams and sections — very badly7, to tell the truth — of the subjects under observation. Blessed, thrice blessed, is the man possessed by a hobby ! For him dulness existeth not, and boredom is unknown ; his solitude is never really solitude, for it is enlivened by the presence of the Beloved ! Of all hobbies, too, which have been ridden since the beginning of the world, not one is so indefatigable, not one so delightful in its paces, as that bestridden by the naturalist, be he scientist or amateur, world-famous benefactor of his species, or the sorriest " mere collector " that ever aired his wants and superfluities in the columns of a penny zoological journal.

In this respect our Major maybe said to occupy a midway position between the two extremes. He was no needle eyed specialist ; still more emphatically no immortal and soaring genius ; had never even flattered himself that he could be either the one or the other. For all that, at the very bottom of his soul he did nourish hopes of doing good work, in some form or other, in the cause of zoologic science. It was the only form of ambition in which he ever indulged. Nothing could be less inflated than the view he took of himself in most respects ; few men needed less Sir Thomas Brown's prudent advice as to the laying of early plummets on the heels of pride ; few entertained saner views of their own capabilities ; his tendency, in fact, had always been to underrate them. Only in this one, this to most people obscure direction, he did cherish hopes and dream dreams — hopes and dreams known only to himself.