Knight Rupert: II

Chapter II.

It is engender’d in the eyes,
With gazing fed; and Fancy dies
In the cradle where it lies.
-Shakespeare

‘THERE! THAT’S the last rope tied, and your box won’t be flying open on the road. I only hope you didn’t forget to put something in, Sophia, for I’ll not undo all those knots again, you may depend upon it!’
A small girl sat in the alcove, watching reflectively the people and carts going past the window in the rain. Her hair was fair-coloured and her eyes were grey like her dress. On hearing her name (she was Sophia), she turned from the window, blinked twice, and tried to remember what had just been said to her.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Yes, Mrs. Huxley; I’m quite sure everything’s there. I can’t think of anything I could have forgotten.’
‘I hope not, for there’s quite enough here already,’ said Mrs. Huxley, who was a stout lady with a cheerful face and a frilled cap. She stood in the middle of the small room with a collection of travelling articles scattered around her.
‘I had quite a time getting the lid closed as it was,’ she went on. Now be sure to look after your things and don’t let any of them get lost on the way. There’s your bonnet and shawl and your reticule and the basket with your dinner and your portmanteau.’
‘And my bird, Mrs. Huxley,’ said Sophia, standing up on the window seat to take down a birdcage which hung in the alcove. ‘I hope travelling agrees with her. How far is it again, Mrs. Huxley?’
‘How far is what?’
‘How far to the place where I’m going?’
‘Goodness, child, the letter didn’t say. I imagine it’s quite a journey, though, and you’ll go amongst people who speak many queer languages, no doubt. What a mercy it is Miss Haskins started teaching you French! I think everybody ought to know a foreign language, for one never knows when one may have to use it. I wish I remembered some of the French and German I learned at my finishing school! But that was a long time ago—nearly fifty years. I hope you remember what Miss Haskins taught you, Sophia.’
‘I am to say s’il vous plaît when I want someone to pass something and merci when he passes it.’
‘No, no—wasn’t it the other way round? I’m quite sure it was the other way round.’
‘Perhaps we ought to ask Miss Haskins,’ said Sophia.
‘Well, I only hope those foreign people will understand you. Now be careful to observe all that you’ve been taught: speak out when you are spoken to, and mind you cross your ankles when you sit down. Do please be careful on the train. You’ll take care not to fall under the wheels, won’t you? Oh dear, I shall be so worried about you!’
‘Don’t worry, Mrs. Huxley. I’m sure I shall be all right. I won’t go near the wheels at all if I can help it, and I’ll do my best to remember my manners. I know I do forget them sometimes, but I am getting better. I really must go, you know.’
‘Yes, you must go,’ said Mrs. Huxley, briskly dusting her hands on her apron. ‘I admit I always expected to bring you up myself as your father left you in my care, but as someone of means has chosen to take an interest in you and wishes to give you a good education and make you a fine lady—why, I shan’t stand in the way. It’s very good of him, I’m sure, although I confess I shall miss you. The house will be quite lonesome when you’re gone. What Mr. Morton will do without you I don’t know, he’s grown that fond of you—and all the boarders, indeed! They’ll miss you sorely, I dare say.’
‘I shall miss them too,’ said Sophia. ‘I left my geranium with Mr. Morton and I think it will help to cheer him up. He’s very fond of flowers, you know, and I couldn’t very well take my poor geranium with me on the train.’
‘Of course not,’ said Mrs. Huxley, ‘and Mr. Morton remarked to me as how he was pleased to have it and that it would remind him of you. Do you see anyone coming yet, Sophia?’
Sophia knelt down on the window seat and put her face against the glass.
‘I see a great many people, Mrs. Huxley,’ she said.
‘Silly! I mean anyone turning in at the gate. The letter said definitely he would come this morning.’
Sophia looked up and down the street. It was a very busy street and there were always people going past all day long. The window seat was Sophia’s favourite place in the house because she liked to sit there and watch everything that went on outside. She liked people, although she liked them better to look at and think about than to talk to.
Mrs. Huxley’s boarding house and the street that ran in front of it was Sophia’s whole world, for she never went farther than the grocer’s shop on the corner. It was a strange world that stayed in one place and yet was always changing. The people on the street came and went and the people in the house came and went, too, because they were only boarders. Sophia made friends with the people inside and made up stories about the ones outside but both sorts of people seemed very far away from her and not quite real, like puppets in a toy theatre.
That was why she did not mind leaving her small world and going to a strange new place. She could not love a world that changed all the time and she was not sorry to say good bye to it. She would miss Mrs. Huxley, who never changed, but perhaps she would find new friends in the place she was going to. As she gazed out of the window thinking these things, she saw a hansom cab draw up at the door and a man get out.
‘Here he comes, Mrs. Huxley,’ she sang out.
‘Bless me,’ said Mrs. Huxley, looking out the window; ‘here he is, to be sure! He isn’t half so fine as I expected, but perhaps he’s only a servant of the folks who sent for you.’
There was no time for her to say anything more, for the bell rang and the maid hurried to open the door.
He was a queer-looking man and unlike anyone Sophia had ever seen. He was dressed in a charcoal-grey suit and wore a heavy overcoat and a wide-awake hat. These were quite ordinary things: the odd thing about him was his face, which was marked all over with dreadful scars so that Sophia supposed he must have once been in some dreadful accident.
‘Good morning, sir! You are most welcome. Please to be seated,’ said Mrs. Huxley graciously. ‘I am Mrs. Huxley, and I was very pleased to receive your kind letter. You are very good to come, sir.‘
‘Thank you, madam,’ said the strange man in a foreign accent.
His shoes and coat were damp from the rain and he smelt of coal smoke and train coaches. His eyes kept glancing around the room as if he were watching for something.
‘You must have come very far, sir. Do let me offer you some tea,’ said Mrs. Huxley hospitably.
‘No, thank you, madam,’ he said, sitting down and quickly getting up again. ‘I’m afraid that I am in a great hurry.’
‘No? Are you quite sure? Well then! This is Sophia—stand up straight, child—whom you wrote about. I’m sure she will be no trouble to you at all. No trouble! She is very well behaved, sir.’
‘Yes, madam; I have come for her. My employer bid me say—’
‘To be sure, your master. Forgive my mistake: the letter was difficult to make out, you see. But I am sure you are going to explain everything. Do sit down.’
‘Thank you, if you don’t mind, I think it would be best to leave at once,’ said the man, still standing. ‘The journey is very long, you see, and—’
‘Oh, but you’ve only just got here! Well, if you’re quite determined… I shall call Mr. Morton to carry Sophia’s box out to the cab. We don’t keep a manservant, you see, and we call Mr. Morton when we require a gentleman’s services.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ said the man, ‘I’ll carry it out myself.’
‘Oh, well—if you don’t mind, that would be quite as good of an arrangement,’ said Mrs. Huxley. ‘Are you quite sure you won’t have any tea before you go?’
‘No, thank you, madam. You’re most kind.’
‘I can help you carry it,’ said Sophia, stepping forward as the man bent to pick up her portmanteau.
‘Thank you, I can manage on my own,’ said the man and with one quick movement while his eyes were busy looking elsewhere he swung the little box to his shoulder and carried it out.
‘You must remember not speak until you’re spoken to, Sophia,’ said Mrs. Huxley when he was gone. ‘Come here and let me help you on with your bonnet. We mustn’t keep the gentleman waiting. You’ll be careful and mind what he tells you to do, now won’t you? You mustn’t give him any trouble.’
‘I shall try not to,’ said Sophia, rather crestfallen because she had forgotten as she so often did and had spoken before she was spoken to.
As Mrs. Huxley finished tying her bonnet strings, three of the boarders came down to bid Sophia goodbye. They were Mr. Morton, who was an artist and had a studio in the attic, Miss Haskins who was a governess, and Miss Haskins’s mother who lived with her. They were all good friends of Sophia, although they had only lived at Mrs. Huxley’s for a few months. They stood on the step and waved to Sophia as Mrs. Huxley helped her arrange her things comfortably in the cab and while the strange man gave directions to the cab driver.
At last they were quite ready and the man shut the cab door.
‘Goodbye, Mrs. Huxley,’ said Sophia, embracing her through the cab window, ‘I shall miss you ever so much!’
‘Goodbye, dear little Sophia!’ said Mrs. Huxley, giving her a kiss and beginning to cry.
Sophia leaned out of the window as the cab started off, and waved her reticule to all her friends who had gathered on the doorstep. A flurry of white handkerchiefs waved back.
Then she was off. The cab wound up and down through the wet, busy streets full of noises and interesting people until it drew up in an inn yard where there was a post coach just getting ready to start. The man in the grey suit paid the cabman and put Sophia’s things into the coach and her in after them. Then he got in too and they started off again.
They were nearing the outskirts of London and soon the air began to smell fresher and they were out on the high road to Dover. Sophia, who had not travelled much before and never in the south of England, looked out at the dim grey meadows where highwaymen used to hide in the old days.
At Dover she and the man got out and, after a good bit of pushing and bumping against other passengers and shouting for porters who carried the luggage, they got aboard a sooty little ferry that was about to set out across the channel to France.
The sea was choppy and the thin rain steeped down as Sophia looked back at the coast she was leaving behind. She had been born in England and had never before been away from it, and she did not know that it would be many, many years before she saw it again.
Directly the ferry reached France, Sophia and the man with the grey suit made their way to a busy station and boarded a train travelling westwards into Belgium. Sophia had of course ridden the cars before but not in France! Everything looked different and interesting because they weren’t in England anymore and Sophia found that French sounded very different when spoken by Miss Haskins than it did when it was spoken by Frenchmen.
The train was soon steaming through the countryside and they passed little farms and vineyards and wide fields of new grain which would have been very beautiful if everything had not had a dreary tinge from the rain. Sophia sat folded in her wool shawl, for the coach had no stove, and watched the view through the rain-spotted window. The man in the grey suit pulled his hat over his eyes and went to sleep.
It was a long journey and very dull as long journeys often are. The man did not seem disposed to talk, so Sophia passed the time in imagining what the person looked like who had sent for her and what sort of a house he would have.
Sophia could not remember her mother at all who had died when she was a baby, but her father, who had died only a year ago, she missed sorely. When I tell you that her father had been a good, kind father, and that Sophia had loved him better than anyone else in the world, you will understand why it was that Sophia was now a lonely, quiet child, who liked best to sit by herself with her storybooks and her daydreams.
Grown-ups often thought her a bit strange and different from other children, but nearly everyone who knew her liked her, for she liked everybody. She wasn’t bold, but she was very trustful of other people. Sometimes Mrs. Huxley worried that she was too trustful, but it was only because Sophia was so true herself that she never suspected others of being untrue.
Before her father had died, Sophia had had a little grey pony and had spent long days out-of-doors riding with her father who was a splendid rider and kept a stable of horses for people to hire. They had often ridden over the woods and meadows for they had lived in the countryside then and Sophia still thought that there was no place in the world so beautiful as their old home. All around it there had been quiet, shady lanes and hedge rows with stiles that tumbled over them and meadows full of wild flowers and far off in the distance high blue hills.
There were fairies there, too, so her father used to tell her. Sophia had never seen a fairy but her father had sometimes shown her the fairy rings made of mushrooms that grew where they had danced at night in the forest. Sometimes he told her stories of the fairy king and queen and all their court and the many things they did and the tricks they played on the farmers. Sophia wished she might be a fairy, and sometimes when she played by herself in the meadow behind their house she pretended that she was the fairy queen with a crown of meadow flowers in her hair and sheep and cows for her courtiers. They made rather large fairies, it was true, but there were no other children who wanted to play her games and Sophia had always liked to play with animals better than with other children anyway.
She had many make-believe games which she made up from the stories her father told her and from her storybooks. She had many storybooks—mostly books of fairy stories by Lang and Anderson or tales of King Arthur. She read them over and over and when she was tired of them she made up stories of her own. Her own stories were nearly always about castles and dragons and princesses, and Sophia had sometimes told them to her father, although she had never been brave enough to tell them to anyone else. She was afraid that people who didn’t understand might laugh at her stories and the worst thing is for someone to laugh at a story because then it doesn’t seem real anymore.
Sophia and her father had been very happy together, but sometimes she had seen him a sad, far-off look in his eyes and when she asked him what was the trouble he would say that he missed her mother. But there were some times when he would say nothing at all when she asked him, and the way he looked out over the fields and lines of trees between them, as if he were trying to look very far away indeed, seemed to have a different sort of sadness about it.
No one knew anything about Sophia’s father before he came to England. He had never spoken of his former life to anyone, not even Sophia. He had always had a slight accent that some people said was German and others said was Polish, but besides this and one other thing, he had never given any hint of what his homeland was. Sophia sometimes pretended that he had once been a king and that he was living in exile and that she herself was a princess although nobody knew it.
Then one day her father had fallen ill and they had become poor and the stable and pony had been sold and they had had to go to London to live at Mrs. Huxley’s boarding house. And when Sophia’s father died soon after, Sophia had nothing left but her make-believe world of fairies and dragons and brave knights with flying pennants.
But now again her life had suddenly changed. A mysterious letter with a foreign postmark had come to Mrs. Huxley telling her that that the sender would take charge of Sophia and that she was to go to a new home. There was nothing in the letter about the home or the person who had sent it, but Mrs. Huxley supposed that it was someone who had known Sophia’s father. Sophia wondered if perhaps it was someone who had no children of his own and wanted Sophia to be his own little girl.
He was a man, she knew, for the writing in the letter had been a man’s. She thought perhaps he might have kind eyes and a beard and a pleasant, deep voice as her father had had. The house, she imagined, would be brick with flower gardens all round it and wide green lawns and great oak trees. There would be streams and fields and forests, and there would be a stable with a little grey pony in it.
She knew, of course, that all this was only make-believe and that the place where she was going might be very different from what she imagined, but she half believed her fancies all the same.
She thought of all this as the long journey passed, and amused herself by imagining the fields and meadows around her new home. Some of the time she passed in looking at her storybooks which she had brought with her in her basket. She had read them so many times before that she was rather tired of the stories, but she loved to look at the pictures. There were a good many because they were the right sort of books where the pictures are just as nice as the stories and there are lots of them.
Sophia loved pictures. One of her favourites was of Rapunsel leaning out of the tower window while the witch climbed up by her hair. Another was of a wolf who met a boy in the forest and whom the boy caught by the tail. Her favourite of all, however, and the one she liked best to look at, was of St. George slaying a great green dragon. The dragon looked so horrible and St. George looked so brave, and in the back of the picture was a little grey castle with pointed turrets.
When it grew too dark to see the pictures any longer, Sophia began once more to play the game in which she was a princess in exile, only now she made believe that she was travelling back to her own country. There was an evil villain reigning in the capital, but a brave knight would defeat him and set her on the throne.
There was a Knight in all of Sophia’s make-believes. He was always the same—gay, kind, and very brave—and he always appeared just when she needed him most. Once it had been when a fierce lion was about to gobble her up, once it had been when she was drowning in a rushing river, and many times it had been when she was locked in the dungeon of the villain’s castle. Whatever the story happened to be, it was always he who rescued her when the danger was greatest.
He was only make-believe, like everything else, but somehow he seemed the most real of all her games. Sophia thought sometimes that he really was real and someday truly would rescue her from danger. She didn’t know what he looked like, for her stories had always ended before he raised the visor of his helmet, but Sophia knew, by that queer knowledge which even the dullest of people has deep within him, that if he should ever appear, she would know him at once. Strangers sometimes wondered why she looked at them so earnestly, as if she were looking them through and through, but it was only that she was looking for the Knight.
The dim golden lamps in the railroad coach had been lit and Sophia paused in her imagining to gaze at the man who had come to take her to her new home and who sat on the seat opposite her. She had had the thought, when he had first come, that he might be the Knight in disguise, but the more she looked at him the more she was sure he was not. He was not sleeping any more, but reading a newspaper and happened to glance up and see her solemn grey eyes fixed steadfastly on him. He seemed quite startled and his face grew red and he began to read the paper again very studiously. No, Sophia was certain that he was not the Knight. He looked more like the villain or one of his accomplices.
Sophia turned to look out of the window again and wondered if the place where she was going was very far away and if the country it was in was at all like England. She did not see the man looking at her over the top of his paper.

I should not like to tell everything about the journey, for it would take a very long time and make this story too dull. It was a strange journey for Sophia, with the strange, scarred man who never spoke to her or anyone else unless he had to, who wouldn’t put up at inns but travelled through the night, and who seemed afraid of being asked too many questions. They crossed mountains and rivers, passed through forests and plains, and travelled sometimes by railroad and sometimes by mail coach for several days.
At last, near the end of the eighth day, very exhausted, they got out of the cars at a little mountain station and the man hired a cart and horse for the last part of their journey. He piled the luggage on the cart and lifted Sophia up on the top of it. Sophia smoothed her dress and dusted her shawl and bonnet. She was conscious of having gotten rather mussed in her journey and she wanted to make a good impression on her unknown benefactor, for she felt that she was very soon to meet this mysterious person.
The man led the horse along a narrow road which led up the mountain. It was late in the afternoon when they started up, and as they went the sun sank lower and lower and the road grew steeper and steeper. For a long time they travelled through a thick forest, full of the smells of moss and pine, where the trees grew so closely together that every sound was muffled and quiet. The man had to stop to let the horse rest several times as the path became more difficult to climb.
Up they went, until they came very suddenly to the place where the path reached the top of the pass and started down the other side. There were not so many trees on the other side of the mountain and Sophia could see before her a great valley stretching away towards the dark horizon, for the sun was setting behind her back. Over part of the valley the mountains cast their early-evening shadow, but beyond that the land glowed softly with the dying sunlight.
Sophia drew in a deep, glad breath. It was a beautiful country. Dark green forests spread away from the foot of the mountains, spotted with little bright green pastures. Farther away the woodland turned to fields of wheat and rye, lying neat and foursquare like gingham, and punctured by little farms and villages, and further away still lay a large, sprawling city with dim, tiny spires, fuzzy from the dust which came up from its streets. Beyond it were more forests and beyond them more mountains, while down through the centre of the valley a great wide river flowed, all pink and pearl and lavender in the sunset.
Sophia gazed at it all only for a moment, and then they began to descend the steep road again and were soon swallowed up by more forest. Only now Sophia knew that all that beauty was before them and that she was going to live somewhere in that lovely place.
The evening began to fall around them as they made their way slowly down the mountain and the forest around them grew dark and frightening. Sophia wrapped herself more snugly in her shawl and wondered if there were wolves in that country. But she was too tired to be very frightened even of wolves and before she knew it, she had fallen asleep.
Still they travelled on down the dark path. Sophia sometimes felt a jolt in her sleep, but she never quite woke up until at last she was awakened thoroughly by a new sound. It was the rumble of the cartwheels on cobblestones, and the next minute Sophia realised that they had stopped. The man came round behind the cart, closed some sort of heavy gate behind them, and then shook Sophia by the arm.
‘Wake up,’ he said. ‘We are here.’

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