Across the Stream - The Original Classic Edition. Benson Edward

to his store, and that was when a whipping seemed imminent, and he saw one of Miss Schwarz's medicine-bottles standing on his father's table.

       CHAPTER IV

       Lady Davidstow and Miss Bampton were sitting together that night in Lady Davidstow's bedroom. She had sent her maid away, say-ing that she would not want her again that night, and now she held in her hand the sheet of paper covered with lines of meaningless scribbles, with the one intelligible sentence at the end, which Archie had written that day when he should have been doing his copy.

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       In the other hand she held a letter written in ink that was now rather faded, and she was comparing the two. She looked at them for some time in silence, then turned to Miss Bampton.

       "Yes, you are quite right, Cathie," she said. "What Archie wrote might actually be in Martin's handwriting. Look for yourself: there's the last letter he ever wrote to me."

       Miss Bampton took the two papers from her.

       "There's absolutely no difference," she said. "The moment I saw what Archie had written, I thought of Martin's handwriting. And then it was signed 'Martin.' Are you sure he has never heard of him? Not that that would account for the handwriting."

       Lady Davidstow shook her head.

       "I think it's impossible," she said. "Jeannie assured me she had never spoken to him about Martin, nor has Blessington. He may have heard his name. He probably has heard his name mentioned. I remember mentioning it in Archie's hearing the other day, but he didn't pay the slightest attention. And he can't possibly recollect him even in the vaguest way. It is five years now since Martin died, and Archie was then only just two, and for six months before that Martin was with me at Grives."

       Cathie Bampton laid down the two papers.

       "I can't think why you never told Archie about him," she said. Lady Davidstow's great grey eyes grew dim.

       "Ah, my dear, if you were Martin's mother and Archie's mother you would know," she said. "If you had seen your eldest son die of consumption and your second son threatened with it, you would understand how natural it was not to tell Archie yet of the brother he had never consciously seen. Jack agreed with me, too. I have long been prepared for Archie asking questions, which certainly I would answer truthfully, and let the knowledge come to him quietly by degrees. I may have done wrong; I don't know. But I think I did right. I couldn't begin saying to Archie, 'You had a brother, but he died.' More would have come out; that he died of consumption; that for fear of that Archie lives so much in the open air."

       "But, my dear, how will Archie begin to know unless you tell him?"

       "Oh, in many ways. There is Martin's picture, for instance, in my room. Archie may ask who it is. Or, when he hears Martin's name mentioned, he will ask some time who Martin was. Indeed, I have often thought it odd that he hasn't. Only the other day Jack was talking to me about it, suggesting that it was time that Archie knew. Indeed, he rather urged me to tell him. And now, all of a sudden, we find Archie writing in Martin's handwriting, and signing with Martin's name."

       "Shall you tell Lord Davidstow?" asked Miss Bampton.

       "No, I certainly shall not. Jack hates all that approaches the neighbourhood of anything that might be called occult or spiritualistic. He says 'Pshaw,' as you know, if even hypnotism is mentioned. I did tell him about Archie's intuition in that guessing game, and, as you again know, he asked you not to play it any more, though at the same time he insisted that it was a mere guess on Archie's part."

       Cathie was silent a moment.

       "And those scribbles of Archie's?" she asked. "Do they not make it more difficult for you to tell him about Martin now? A sensitive

       boy like that might get it into his head that his dead brother was writing to him."

       "Certainly I don't want Archie to think that," said his mother. "No, I shall put off telling him now." "And if he asks?" said Miss Bampton.

       "I have an idea that he won't ask."

       She got up and moved about the room for a moment in silence.

       "My dear, all children have got a secret life of their own," she said, "and, oh, how their mothers want to be admitted! But every

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       young thing has a walled-up place in his heart, to which he admits nobody, and, if you ask to be admitted, not only is the door shut, but locked. We all had our secret places, and I make a guess that this bit of paper--by the way, mind you put it back in the school-room where Archie left it--lives in Archie's secret place. How I long to get in, the darling! But all I can do is to wait outside, and take what he gives me. Archie doesn't tell me everything, why should he? He didn't tell me what it was that made him put the burning coals out of the fire on to my hearthrug."

       "Probably he didn't know."

       "Something inside him knew, or else he wouldn't have done it. All we do is accountable for by what is inside us. Impulses come from within."

       "But they are suggested by what is without," said Miss Bampton.

       "Yes; that's the box on which the match is struck, but the fire is in the match. All you can do for a child, even your own child, is to

       suggest, and hope he'll take your suggestions." Miss Bampton got up.

       "It's late; I must go," she said. "But I want to ask you one thing. Do you believe in the possibility of Martin's having made a communication to Archie?"

       "Yes; I think I do. That's why this affair has upset me so. The idea is so strange and new, that I'm frightened about it, though why I should be so I can't tell. With my whole heart I believe that my darling is living somewhere in an existence as individual as ever, and even more vivid, because the weakness and the illness and the weariness are past. So why should I be frightened at the thought that he could communicate with Archie? Ah, my dear, if only he would communicate with me! Or with Jack! Poor Jack, how he would scout the idea! How shocked he would be! I suppose that's part of my secret garden which I keep from Jack!"

       She held her friend a moment after kissing her.

       "Jack never really got over Martin's death," she said. "He couldn't bring himself into line with it. It was then that it became a settled habit with him to try to forget... Just lately he has been very bad. There, good-night, my dear; I can't talk about it."

       *

       The whole incident affected Archie far less than it affected either his mother or his governess, and next day when he found his scribbled paper lying where he had left it the day before, it excited no further curiosity in his mind. He put the thought of it away on his shelf of secret things which had nothing to do with his ordinary normal life. In certain moods, which, after all only lasted for a moment or two, the things that shelf contained became far more real to him than any other of his experiences; but for weeks and months at a time its contents remained out of his reach, and if he shared them, as his mother had said, with nobody else, he had no share in them himself except at these odd, queer moments. So when, next day, he came across this curious sentence again, caught

       by him, as by some process of wireless telegraphy, he felt but little interest in it, though he sat for a couple of minutes with his pen held idly in his hand, just to see if anything else happened. But there was no sensation that ever so faintly resembled the twitching and yearning of his hand to write he knew not what, and he crumpled the paper up, and put it into the fire. Somewhere below the threshold of his conscious self lay the perceptions that were concerned with it, those perceptions that guessed what Miss Bampton had thought of, that somehow swam up to the surface, as he used to lie in bed of a morning, and sink into the depths that lay below the green-tinted ceiling of his room; and, while they lay dormant, it was as if they never existed.

       But now for some weeks there had been no light whatever on his ceiling, and morning after morning he awoke with no sense of exhilaration at all in the coming of another day, but with a drowsy depression lying thick upon him, as he heard the rustle of the endless rain in the shrubs outside, and languidly went through those exercises that used to invigorate him but now only tired him. All through the month the damp chilly weather persisted, and day after day the same lowering heavens obscured the sun; never