A Rough Shaking - George MacDonald (bearly read books TXT) 📗

feet, flat as his equine rotundity would permit. Ashamed of my doubt, I lost not a moment in placing myself in the position suggested by Sir John Falstaff to Prince Hal for the defence of his own bulky carcase-astride the body of the animal, namely. At once he rose and lifted me into the natural relation of man and horse. Then he looked round at his master, and they set off at a leisurely pace.

"You have me captive!" I said.

"Memnon and I," answered Mr. Skymer, "will do what we can to make your captivity pleasant."

A silence followed my thanks. In this procession of horse and foot, we went about half a mile ere anything more was said worth setting down. Then began evidence that we were drawing nigh to a house: the grassy lane between hedges in which we had been moving, was gradually changing its character. First came trees in the hedge-rows. Then the hedges gave way to trees-a grand avenue of splendid elms and beeches alternated. The ground under our feet was the loveliest sward, and between us and the sun came the sweetest shadow. A glad heave but instant subsidence of the live power under me, let me know Memnon's delight at feeling the soft elastic turf under his feet: he had said to himself, "Now we shall have a gallop!" but immediately checked the thought with the reflection that he was no longer a colt ignorant of manners.

"What a lovely road the turf makes!" I said. "It is a lower sky-solidified for feet that are not yet angelic."

My host looked up with a brighter smile than he had shown before.

"It is the only kind of road I really like," he said, "-though turf has its disadvantages! I have as much of it about the place as it will bear. Such roads won't do for carriages!"

"You ride a good deal, I suppose?"

"I do. I was at one time so accustomed to horseback that, without thinking, I was not aware whether I was on my horse's feet or my own."

"Where, may I ask, does my friend who is now doing me the favour to carry 'this weight and size,' come from?"

"He was born in England, but his mother was a Syrian-of one of the oldest breeds there known. He was born into my arms, and for a week never touched the ground. Next month, as I think I mentioned, he will be forty years old!"

"It is a great age for a horse!" I said.

"The more the shame as well as the pity!" he answered.

"Then you think horses might live longer?"

"Much longer than they are allowed to live in this country," he answered. "And a part of our punishment is that we do not know them. We treat them so selfishly that they do not live long enough to become our friends. At present there are but few men worthy of their friendship. What else is a man's admiration, when it is without love or respect or justice, but a bitter form of despite! It is small wonder there should be so many stupid horses, when they receive so little education, have such bad associates, and die so much too young to have gained any ripe experience to transmit to their posterity. Where would humanity be now, if we all went before five-and-twenty?"

"I think you must be right. I have myself in my possession at this moment, given me by one who loved her, an ink-stand made from the hoof of a pony that died at the age of at least forty-two, and did her part of the work of a pair till within a year or two of her death.-Poor little Zephyr!"

"Why, Mr. Gowrie, you talk of her as if she were a Christian!" exclaimed Mr. Skymer.

"That's how you talked of Memnon a moment ago! Where is the difference? Not in the size, though Memnon would make three of Zephyr!"

"I didn't say poor Memnon , did I? You said poor Zephyr ! That is the way Christians talk about their friends gone home to the grand old family mansion! Why they do, they would hardly like one to tell them!"

"It is true," I responded. "I understand you now! I don't think I ever heard a widow speak of her departed husband without putting poor , or
poor dear , before his name.-By the way, when you hear a woman speak of her late husband, can you help thinking her ready to marry again?"

"It does sound as if she had done with him! But here we are at the gate!-Call, Memnon."

The horse gave a clear whinny, gentle, but loud enough to be heard at some distance. It was a tall gate of wrought iron, but Memnon's summons was answered by one who could clear it-though not open it any more than he: a little bird, which I was not ornithologist enough to recognize-mainly because of my short-sightedness, I hope-came fluttering from the long avenue within, perched on the top of the gate, looked down at our party for a moment as if debating the prudent, dropped suddenly on Memnon's left ear, and thence to his master's shoulder, where he sat till the gate was opened. The little one went half-way up the inner avenue with us, making several flights and returns before he left us.

The boy that opened the gate, a chubby little fellow of seven, looked up in Mr. Skymer's face as if he had been his father and king in one, and stood gazing after him as long as he was in sight. I noticed also-who could have failed to notice?-that every now and then a bird would drop from the tree we were passing under, and alight for a minute on my host's head. Once when he happened to uncover it, seven or eight perched together upon it. One tiny bird got caught in his beard by the claws.

"You cannot surely have tamed all the birds in your grounds!" I said.

"If I have," he answered, "it has been by permitting them to be themselves."

"You mean it is the nature of birds to be friendly with man?"

"I do. Through long ages men have been their enemies, and so have alienated them-they too not being themselves."

"You mean that unfriendliness is not natural to men?"

"It cannot be human to be cruel!"

"How is it, then, that so many boys are careless what suffering they inflict?"

"Because they have in them the blood of men who loved cruelty, and never repented of it."

"But how do you account for those men loving cruelty-for their being what you say is contrary to their nature?"

"Ah, if I could account for that, I should be at the secret of most things! All I meant to half-explain was, how it came that so many who have no wish to inflict suffering, yet are careless of inflicting it."

I saw that we must know each other better before he would quite open his mind to me. I saw that though, hospitable of heart, he threw his best rooms open to all, there were others in his house into which he did not invite every acquaintance.

The avenue led to a wide gravelled space before a plain, low, long building in whitish stone, with pillared portico. In the middle of the space was a fountain, and close to it a few chairs. Mr. Skymer begged me to be seated. Memnon walked up to the fountain, and lay down, that I might get off his back as easily as I had got on it. Once down, he turned on his side, and lay still.

"The air is so mild," said my host, "I fancy you will prefer this to the house."

"Mild!" I rejoined; "I should call it hot!"

"I have been so much in real heat!" he returned. "Notwithstanding my love of turf, I keep this much in gravel for the sake of the desert."

I took the seat he offered me, wondering whether Memnon was comfortable where he lay; and, absorbed in the horse, did not see my host go to the other side of the basin. Suddenly we were "clothed upon" with a house which, though it came indeed from the earth, might well have come direct from heaven: a great uprush of water spread above us a tent-like dome, through which the sun came with a cool, broken, almost frosty glitter. We seemed in the heart of a huge soap-bubble. I exclaimed with delight.

"I thought you would enjoy my sun-shade!" said Mr. Skymer. "Memnon and I often come here of a hot morning, when nobody wants us. Don't we, Memnon?"

The horse lifted his nose a little, and made a low soft noise, a chord of mingled obedience and delight-a moan of pleasure mixed with a half-born whinny.

We had not been seated many moments, and had scarcely pushed off the shore of silence into a new sea of talk, when we were interrupted by the invasion of half a dozen dogs. They were of all sorts down to no sort. Mr. Skymer called one of them Tadpole-I suppose because he had the hugest tail, while his legs were not visible without being looked for.

"That animal," said his master, "-he looks like a dog, but who would be positive what he was!-is the cleverest in the pack. He seems to me a rare individuality. His ancestors must have been of all sorts, and he has gathered from them every good quality possessed by each. Think what a man might be-made up that way!"

"Why is there no such man?" I said.

"There may be some such men. There must be many one day," he answered, "-but not for a while yet. Men must first be made willing to be noble."

"And you don't think men willing to be made noble?"

"Oh yes! willing enough, some of them, to be made noble!"

"I do not understand. I thought you said they were not!"

"They are willing enough to be made noble; but that is very different from being willing to be noble: that takes trouble. How can any one become noble who desires it so little as not to fight for it!"

The man drew me more and more. He had a way of talking about things seldom mentioned except in dull fashion in the pulpit, as if he cared about them. He spoke as of familiar things, but made you feel he was looking out of a high window. There are many who never speak of real things except in a false tone; this man spoke of such without an atom of assumed solemnity-in his ordinary voice: they came into his mind as to their home-not as dreams of the night, but as facts of the day.

I sat for a while, gazing up through the thin veil of water at the blue sky so far beyond. I thought how like that veil was to our little life here, overdomed by that boundless foreshortening of space. The lines in Shelley's Adonais came to me:

"Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments."

Then I thought of what my host had said concerning the too short lives of horses, and wondered what he would say about those of dogs.

"Dogs are more intelligent than horses,"