Charley

“ It is all good and picturesque in its way, but tuneful Charley is more to our liking when he gets into an English corn-field, strolls down an English lane, or sits at the door of an English cottage. He is then as natural as Moreland treating the same subjects on canvas. The fragrance of the fields comes on the wings of his song, and his English home and peasant are still more truly English than his English ships and sailors. ”

“ Charley stood on the embankment above the road, the notables of the parish round him.
Rosalie had been taken to the Cure's house. In that wild moment in the church when she had fallen insensible in Charley's arms, a new feeling had sprung up in her. She loved him in every fibre, but she had a strange instinct, a prescience, that she was lying on his breast for the last time. She had wound her arms round his neck, and, as his lips closed on hers, she had cried: "We shall die together—together." ”

“ Charley pulled up hard. “Ay,” said he, “you may beat me by the head, because it always goes so much before you; but if the bet was neck-and-neck, and that’s the go between the old mare and Desdemona, I’d win it hollow!”
It appeared as if the stranger was well aware of what was passing in Charley’s mind, for he suddenly broke out quite loquacious.
“Charley Culnane,” says he, “you have a stout soul in you, and are every inch of you a good rider. ”

“ Again a flush swept up Charley's face and seemed to blur his sight. His monocle dropped the length of its silken tether, and he caught it and slowly adjusted it again as he replied evenly:
"You always hit the nail on the head, Kathleen." There was a kind of appeal in his voice, a sort of deprecation in his eye, as though he would be friends with her, as though, indeed, there was in his mind some secret pity for her. ”

“ He bores everybody to death with his locomotive as artlessly as grown people do with their hobbies.
Our Charley.
When the blaze of the wood-fire flickers up and down in our snug evening parlor, there dances upon the wall a little shadow, with a pug nose, a domestic household shadow—a busy shadow—a little restless specimen of perpetual motion, and the owner thereof is “our Charley.” Now we should not write about him and his ways, if he were strictly a peculiar and individual existence of our own home-circle; but it is not so. “Our Charley” exists in a thousand, nay, a million families ”

“ Charley wondered bitterly if he had made an irreparable error in saying those ill-chosen words. This might mean a breach between them, and so make his position in the parish untenable. He had no wish to go elsewhere—where could he go? It mattered little what he was, tinker or tailor. He had now only to work his way back to the mind of the peasant; to be an animal with intelligence; to get close to mother earth, and move down the declivity of life with what natural wisdom were possible. ”

“ But Charley, she felt, was out of the question. She would die before she would stoop to ask help of a man she had despised as heartily as she had once despised Charley. She must sink or swim by her own strength, not by another's. ”

“ Paramount. Damn him, I never intend to do either—See again how he bows—there again—how the mob throw up their hats, split their throats; how they huzza too; they make a mere god of the fellow; how they idolize him—Ignorant brutes!
Charley. A scoundrel; he has climb'd up the stilts of preferment strangely, my Lord.
Paramount. Strangely, indeed; but it's our own faults.
Charley. He has had better luck than honester folks; I'm surpris'd to think he has ever rose to the honour of presenting a remonstrance, or rather, that he could ever have the impudence to think of remonstrating. ”

“ Charley opened the door to go out, when George raised himself on his elbow, and said, "Charley, where are you going?"
"Going!" said Charley, "going for a doctor."
"Going for a doctor!" rejoined George; "for what?"
"For what?" repeated Charley, "why, you've got the delirium tremens!"
"The delirium tremens—have I?" repeated George. "How do you know I've got the delirium tremens?"
"Easy enough," says Charley; "you've commenced seeing rats."
"Seeing rats!" said George, in a sort of musing way; "seeing rats. Think you must be mistaken, Charley." ”

“ Then Charley smiled and said uncertainly:
"While I'm taking my own share of you, I think I'll take Felicia's too. Then I'll have all of you!"
"Charley! Oh, Charley! My dearest love! My dearest!" Roger jumped up, pulled Charley to her feet and clasping the slender body in his arms laid his lips hungrily to hers. He kissed her eyes, her hair. "Charley! Charley! I'm a selfish brute, but you'll never know what you're doing for me. You ought to have a man worth ten of me but I'm going to have you just the same. Now I can bear even Ernest's failure. Do you really love me, my darling?" ”

“ Charley,” said I, “how the dickens do you expect a fellow to sleep if you sit pulling such long faces opposite him. No wonder I couldn’t keep quiet. What is the matter now? Still thinking of your mysterious fiddlesticks?”
“Hush!” said Charley, “there she is!”
I jumped round—sure enough next the other window on my side sat a lady, wrapped, as Charley had described, in a white bournous; the curl of which he had spoken escaping from under the thick veil which concealed her face from us. ”

“ What a great age,” said my guardian. “What a great age, Charley!”
I cannot describe the tenderness with which he spoke to her, half playfully yet all the more compassionately and mournfully.
“And do you live alone here with these babies, Charley?” said my guardian.
“Yes, sir,” returned the child, looking up into his face with perfect confidence, “since father died.”
“And how do you live, Charley? Oh! Charley,” said my guardian, turning his face away for a moment, “how do you live?” ”

“ After a while, the sufferer spoke again.
“Where is Charley? Why is he not with me?”
“It was feared that his grief might agitate you.”
“Poor dear Charley!” said Ernest with tenderness; “it will be a pleasure to him now to think that we always have loved one another. But I should greatly like to see him; I have so much to say to him before we part.”
“I will call him,” said Mr. Ewart, rising.
He found poor Charles weeping at the door.
“You must command yourself, dear boy, for his sake. ”

“ He laid down his crook and lifted Charlie at once. Then the beauty of the dream, its light, its ladder, the Good Shepherd, seemed to vanish, slowly though, even as the stars die away out of the early morning sky. Charley knew what it all meant. When he awoke and thought it over, he knelt by his bed and he prayed to the Saviour. He told him that he wanted to lead that better life, and would he not lift a little fellow where he could not climb himself? And a Saviour’s arms, ever waiting to raise us all, were lowered for Charlie’s help, and they lifted him to the “round higher up.” ”

“ To be patronized by the son of such a person poor Charley considered “a very fine thing.”
“Wasn’t Phillip Redgill one of the sparks of fashion? Did not fair dames (of doubtful virtue, perhaps) smile bewitchingly upon him? Was he not nodded to by this lord and that one? Could he not handle a sword with almost any man?” said Charley, and many others. “And was it not a ‘great thing,’ therefore, to be known to, and to be hand and glove with such a person when I am only a chief clerk in the India House, and nought to depend upon but my own advancement and old Sir Richard’s generosity?” ”

“ Charley loved the young man with all the large capacity of his loving nature, looked with the most lenient eye on his boyish frivolities and dissipations, and had hitherto never feared for his future, hoping that he would settle down into some useful career before he thought of settling himself for life. ”

“ I hope I have not pained you, Charley dearest,” she continued, observing a slight shade of annoyance on her husband’s good-humoured face; “but truth is truth; I cannot like that man; I wish he were not your brother, and oh! how I wish he were not to be the husband of our darling Annie. I say, Charley, how came it you never fell in love with her yourself? ”

“ Ernest looked at Charley—"I've got to talk about her, Charley, to make them understand."
Charley moistened her lips, but nodded and Dick put his hand over his eyes.
"She was like Charley too in that she was the kind of a girl that decent men instinctively love—not with one of these headlong, unreasoning loves, you understand. But with the kind of a deep-seated adoration for beauty and goodness and brain that gets a man where he lives and never leaves him. That's the way I got to caring for Charley and that's the way, in embryo, we all loved Felicia. ”

“ Charley's monocle was the token of what was behind his blue eye- one ceaseless interrogation. It was that everlasting questioning, the ceaseless who knows! which had in the end unsettled John Brown's mind, and driven him at last from the church and the possible gaiters of a dean into the rough business of life, where he had been a failure. Yet as Brown looked at Charley the old fascination came on him with a rush. His hand suddenly caught Charley's as he took a cigarette, and he said: "Perhaps I'll find arsenic a good thing yet." ”

“ With a dash of patronage true to his nature, “You are wonderful for a tailor,” the Notary rejoined. Charley laughed—seldom, if ever, had he laughed since coming to Chaudiere. It was, however, a curious fact that he took a real pleasure in the work he did with his hands. In making clothes for habitant farmers, and their sons and their sons’ sons, and jackets for their wives and daughters, he had had the keenest pleasure of his life. ”

“ Charley laughed, as he ran aft to the tiller.
And never in my experience have I seen a man so anxious for the capture of another as was our prisoner in the chase that followed. His eyes fairly snapped, and his nostrils quivered and dilated in a most extraordinary way. Charley steered while he tended the sheet; and though Charley was [110] as quick and alert as a cat, the Greek could hardly control his impatience.
The Italians were cut off from the shore, which was fully a mile away at its nearest point. ”

“ Charley smiled, and said, "That's so, mother. Father loves me, and I love him dearly. But he loves the birdies too I am sure. He whistles to them every morning when they are eating their cherries, and they don't seem a bit afraid of him, although he is near enough to catch them. Mother I wish everything loved me as they do father."
"Do as father does, Charley, and they will. Love all things and be kind to them. Don't kick the dog, or speak roughly to him. Don't pull pussy's tail, nor chase the hens, nor try to frighten the cow. Never throw stones at the birds. Never hurt nor tease anything. ”

“ Evidently Charley was an Independent, though I imagined, from what I had seen of him before going to the wizard's tent, that his bravado now was more because he was under present civilized rule than from any real strength of mind in the matter.
The other natives pulling the boat were servilely obedient. At a signal from the angeko, who swung his arms on high, my Innuit crew tossed up their oars, and turned their attention to the shore. There we saw him surrounded by the villagers, and making signs for us to return. ”

“ It was easy to fancy the admiration he must have inspired forty years ago among the wild people, in whose eyes physical strength and perfection were the great qualities of a man. In the cabin, while the cook squeezed limes for the first of many rum punches, Charley took off his tunic of white drill, and as he sat there in his singlet I saw that his arms and chest, like his face, were tanned to an indelible dull brown, and that patterns in tattooing ran from wrist to shoulder—greenish blue and barbaric. ”

“ His name is Charley. A common name for a horse, and yet he was a most uncommon horse, of a sweet and cheerful disposition, and celebrated for his travels over the sea. This is his portrait, taken the day before he left America, for the benefit of sorrowing friends. He looks as if he thought he was going abroad. There is something in his eye and the expressive flirt of his tail that seems to suggest strange doings. Charley is going to Scotland, over the sea, and he is having his feet cared for by the Doctor. He stands very steady now, even on three legs. ”

“ Because I wanted to say that Charley was a man of too strong a desire after personal excellence not to wage eternal war after such vermin. A shrewd observer would have known the existence of his besetting faults only by the unusual prominence of just the opposite virtues, just as you recognize the former drunkard in the man who has a special horror now of all that can intoxicate. ”

“ The violets were there in the dingle, sure enough; both blue and white. I picked a handful, ran in with them, and put them on my mother's lap. The Rector was sitting by her still, but he got up then.
"Oh, Charley, they are very sweet," she said with a smile—"very sweet and lovely. Thank you, my precious boy, my darling."
She kissed me a hundred times. She might have kissed me a hundred more, but papa drew me away.
"Do not tire yourself any more to-day, Lucy; it is not good for you. Charley, boy, you can take your fairy tales and show them to Leah." ”

“ You know he had never been taught, as you have been, to kneel at his mother's side and pray; but he covered his face in both his hands, and began to repeat, as well as he could remember, Charley's prayer,—
"O God! I know I've been awful wicked. I'm real sorry, God, that I forgot. I do want to be a good boy. I don't like being ugly and cross and naughty all the time, as I used to be. Will you help me be like Charley, who is good and happy all the time? Will you help mother be good, too? For I know she's trying real hard."
CHAPTER VIII. CHARLEY'S REWARD. ”