about it at any time: it is not his way. But he cannot let the thing alone.”
“I know why, my lady,” said Miss Galindo. “That poor lad, Harry Gregson, will never be able to earn his livelihood in any active way, but will be lame for life. Now, Mr Horner thinks more of Harry than of any one else in the world, – except, perhaps, your ladyship.” Was it not a pretty companionship for my lady? “And he has schemes of his own for teaching Harry; and if Mr Gray could but have his school, Mr Horner and he think Harry might be schoolmaster, as your ladyship would not like to have him coming to you as steward’s clerk. I wish your ladyship would fall into this plan; Mr Gray has it so at heart.”
Miss Galindo looked wistfully at my lady, as she said this. But my lady only said, drily, and rising at the same time, as if to end the conversation –
“So Mr Horner and Mr Gray seem to have gone a long way in advance of my consent to their plans.”
“There!” exclaimed Miss Galindo, as my lady left the room, with an apology for going away; “I have gone and done mischief with my long, stupid tongue. To be sure, people plan a long way ahead of today; more especially when one is a sick man, lying all through the weary day on a sofa.”
“My lady will soon get over her annoyance,” said I, as it were apologetically. I only stopped Miss Galindo’s self-reproaches to draw down her wrath upon myself.
“And has not she a right to be annoyed with me, if she likes, and to keep annoyed as long as she likes? Am I complaining of her, that you need tell me that? Let me tell you, I have known my lady these thirty years; and if she were to take me by the shoulders, and turn me out of the house, I should only love her the more. So don’t you think to come between us with any little mincing, peacemaking speeches. I have been a mischief making parrot, and I like her the better for being vexed with me. So goodbye to you, Miss; and wait till you know Lady Ludlow as well as I do, before you next think of telling me she will soon get over her annoyance!” And off Miss Galindo went.
I could not exactly tell what I had done wrong; but I took care never again to come in between my lady and her by any remark about the one to the other; for I saw that some most powerful bond of grateful affection made Miss Galindo almost worship my lady.
Meanwhile, Harry Gregson was limping a little about in the village, still finding his home in Mr Gray’s house; for there he could most conveniently be kept under the doctor’s eye, and receive the requisite care, and enjoy the requisite nourishment. As soon as he was a little better, he was to go to Mr Horner’s house; but, as the steward lived some distance out of the way, and was much from home, he had agreed to leave Harry at the house; to which he had first been taken, until he was quite strong again; and the more willingly, I suspect, from what I heard afterwards, because Mr Gray gave up all the little strength of speaking which he had, to teaching Harry in the very manner which Mr Horner most desired.
As for Gregson the father – he – wild man of the woods, poacher, tinker, jack of all trades – was getting tamed by this kindness to his child. Hitherto his hand had been against every man, as every man’s had been against him. That affair before the justice, which I told you about, when Mr Gray and even my lady had interested themselves to get him released from unjust imprisonment, was the first bit of justice he had ever met with; it attracted him to the people, and attached him to the spot on which he had but squatted for a time. I am not sure if any of the villagers were grateful to him for remaining in their neighbourhood, instead of decamping as he had often done before, for good reasons, doubtless, of personal safety. Harry was only one out of a brood of ten or twelve children, some of whom had earned for themselves no good character in service: one, indeed, had been actually transported, for a robbery committed in a distant part of the county; and the tale was yet told in the village of how Gregson the father came back from the trial in a state of wild rage, striding through the place, and uttering oaths of vengeance to himself, his great black eyes gleaming out of his matted hair, and his arms working by his side, and now and then tossed up in his impotent despair. As I heard the account, his wife followed him, child laden and weeping. After this, they had vanished from the country for a time, leaving their mud hovel locked up, and the door key, as the neighbours said, buried in a hedge bank. The Gregsons had reappeared much about the same time that Mr Gray came to Hanbury. He had either never heard of their evil character, or considered that it gave them all the more claims upon his Christian care; and the end of it was, that this rough, untamed, strong giant of a heathen was loyal slave to the weak, hectic, nervous, self-distrustful parson. Gregson had also a kind of grumbling respect for Mr Horner: he did not quite like the steward’s monopoly of his Harry: the mother submitted to that with a better grace, swallowing down her maternal jealousy in the prospect of her child’s advancement to a better and more respectable position than that in which his parents had struggled through life. But Mr Horner, the steward, and Gregson, the poacher and squatter, had come into disagreeable contact too often in former days for them to be perfectly cordial at any future time. Even now, when there was no immediate cause for anything but gratitude for his child’s sake on Gregson’s part, he would skulk out of Mr Horner’s way, if he saw him coming; and it took all Mr Horner’s natural reserve and acquired self-restraint to keep him from occasionally holding up his father’s life as a warning to Harry. Now Gregson had nothing of this desire for avoidance with regard to Mr Gray. The poacher had a feeling of physical protection towards the parson; while the latter had shown the moral courage, without which Gregson would never have respected him, in coming right down upon him more than once in the exercise of unlawful pursuits, and simply and boldly telling him he was doing wrong, with such a quiet reliance upon Gregson’s better feeling, at the same time, that the strong poacher could not have lifted a finger against Mr Gray, though it had been to save himself from being apprehended and taken to the lock-ups the very next hour. He had rather listened to the parson’s bold words with an approving smile, much as Mr Gulliver might have hearkened to a lecture from a Lilliputian. But when brave words passed into kind deeds, Gregson’s heart mutely acknowledged its master and keeper. And the beauty of it all was, that Mr Gray knew nothing of the good work he had done, or recognised himself as the instrument which God had employed. He thanked God, it is true, fervently and often, that the work was done; and loved the wild man for his rough gratitude; but it never occurred to the poor young clergyman, lying on his sickbed, and praying, as Miss Galindo had told us he did, to be forgiven for his unprofitable life, to think of Gregson’s reclaimed soul as anything with which he had had to do. It was now more than three months since Mr Gray had been at Hanbury Court. During all that time he had been confined to his house, if not to his sickbed, and he and my lady had never met since their last discussion and difference about Farmer Hale’s barn.
This was not my dear lady’s fault; no one could have been more attentive in every way to the slightest possible want of either of the invalids, especially of Mr Gray. And she would have gone to see him at his own house, as she sent him word, but that her foot had slipped upon the polished oak staircase, and her ankle had been sprained.
So we had never seen Mr Gray since his illness, when one November day he was announced as wishing to speak to my lady. She was sitting in her room – the room in which I lay now pretty constantly – and I remember she looked startled, when word was brought to her of Mr Gray’s being at the Hall.
She could not go to him, she was too lame for that, so she bade him be shown into where she sat.
“Such a day for him to go out!” she exclaimed, looking at the fog which had crept up to the windows, and was sapping the little remaining life in the brilliant Virginian creeper leaves that draperied the house on the terrace side.
He came in white, trembling, his large eyes wild and dilated. He hastened up to Lady Ludlow’s chair, and, to my surprise, took one of her hands and kissed it, without speaking, yet shaking all over.
“Mr Gray!” said she, quickly, with sharp, tremulous apprehension of some unknown evil. “What is it? There is something unusual about you.”
