Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages

In my rovings and ramblings as a boy I had often skirted the old stone house in the hollow. But my first clear remembrance of it is of a hot summer's day. I had climbed to the crest of a hill till then unknown to me, and stood there, hot and breathless in the bright slippery grass, looking down on its grey walls and chimneys as if out of a dream. And as if out of a dream already familiar to me.

My real intention in setting out from home that morning had been to get to a place called East Dene. My mother had often spoken to me of East Dene--of its trees and waters and green pastures, and the rare birds and flowers to be found there. Ages ago, she had told me, an ancestor of our family had dwelt in this place. But she smiled a little strangely when I asked her to take me there. "All in good time, my dear," she whispered into my ear, "all in very good time! Just follow your small nose." What kind of time, I wondered, was very good time. And _follow my nose_--how far? Such reflections indeed only made me the more anxious to be gone.

Early that morning, then, I had started out when the dew was still sparkling, and the night mists had but just lifted. But my young legs soon tired of the steep, boulder-strown hills, the chalky ravines, and burning sun, and having, as I say, come into view of the house in the valley, I went no further. Instead, I sat down on the hot turf--the sweet smell of thyme in the air, a few harebells nodding around me--and stared, down and down.

After that first visit, scarcely a week passed but that I found myself on this hill again. The remembrance of the house stayed in my mind; would keep returning to me, like a bird to its nest. Sometimes even in the middle of the night I would wake up and lie unable to sleep again for thinking of it--seeing it in my head; solemn, secret, strange.

There is a little flickering lizard called the Chameleon which, they say, changes its colour according to the place where it happens to be. So with this house. It was never the same for two hours together. I have seen it gathered close up in its hollow in the livid and coppery gloom of storm; crouched like a hare in winter under a mask of snow; dark and silent beneath the changing sparkle of the stars; and like a palace out of an Arabian tale in the milky radiance of the moon. THRAE was the name inscribed on its gateway, but in letters so faint and faded as to be almost illegible.

In a sense I was, I suppose, a trespasser in this Thrae; until at least I became acquainted with Miss Taroone, the lady who lived in it. For I made pretty free with her valley, paddled and fished in its stream, and now and then helped myself to a windfall in her green bird-haunted orchards, where grew a particularly sharp and bright-rinded apple of which I have never heard the name. As custom gave me confidence, I ventured nearer and nearer to the house and would sometimes take a rest squatting on a manger in the big empty barn, looking out into the sunshine. The wings of the flies shone like glass in its shafts of light, and the robins whistled under its timber roof so shrill as almost to deafen one's ears.

Few strangers passed that way. Now and then I saw in the distance what might have been a beggar. To judge from his bundle he must have done pretty well at the house. Once, as I turned out of a little wood of birches, I met a dreadful-faced man in the lane who lifted up his hand at sight of me, and with white glaring eyes, uttered a horrible imprecation. He was chewing some fruit stolen out of the orchard, and at the very sight of him I ran like Wat himself.

Once, too, as my head looked over the hill-crest, there stood an old carriage and a drowsy horse drawn up beside the porch--with its slender wooden pillars and a kind of tray above, on which rambled winter jasmine, tufts of self-sown weeds and Traveller's Joy. I edged near enough to see there was a crown emblazoned on the panel of the carriage door. Nobody sat inside, and the coachman asleep on the box made me feel more solitary and inquisitive than ever.

Yet in its time the old house must have seen plenty of company. Friends of later years have spoken to me of it. Indeed, not far distant from Thrae as the crow flies, there was a crossing of high roads, so that any traveller from elsewhere not in haste could turn aside and examine the place if he cared for its looks and was in need of a night's lodging. Yet I do not think many such travellers--if they were men merely of the Town--can have chosen to lift that knocker or to set ringing that bell. To any one already lost and benighted its looks must have been forbidding.

Well, as I say, again and again, my lessons done, morning or evening would find me either on the grass slopes above Thrae, or actually in its valley. If I was tired, I would watch from a good distance off its small dark windows in their stone embrasures, and up above them the round greenish tower or turret over which a winged weather-vane twirled with the wind. I might watch: but the only person that I ever actually observed at the windows was an old maid with flaps to her cap, who would sometimes shake a duster out into the air as if for a signal to someone up in the hills.

Apart from her, I had occasionally seen Miss Taroone herself in the overgrown garden, with her immense shears, or with her trencher of bread-crumbs and other provender, feeding the birds. And I once stole near enough under a hedge to watch this sight. They hopped and pecked in a multitude beneath her hands, tits and robins, starlings and blackbirds, and other much wilder and rarer birds, as if they had no need here for wings, or were under an enchantment more powerful than that of mere crumbs of bread. The meal done, the platter empty, Miss Taroone would clap her hands, and off they would fly with a skirring of wings, with shrill cries and snatches of song to their haunts.

She seemed to mind no weather; standing bare-headed in heavy rain or scorching sunlight. And I confess the sight of her never failed to alarm me. But I made up my mind always to keep my wits about me and my eyes open; and never to be caught trespassing.

Then one day, as I slid down from the roof of the barn from amid the branches of a chestnut tree, green with its spiky balls of fruit, I found Miss Taroone standing there in the entry, looking out on me as if out of a frame, or like a stone figure in the niche of a church. She made no stir herself, but her eyes did. Clear cold eyes of the colour of pebbly water, in which I seemed to be of no more importance than a boat floating on the sea. I could neither speak nor run away. I could only gawk at her, my pockets bulging with the unripe chestnuts I had pilfered, and a handsome slit in one leg of my breeches.

She asked me what I did there; my name; why I was not at school; where I lived; and did I eat the chestnuts. It appeared she had more often seen me--I suppose from her windows--than I had seen her. She made no movement, never even smiled while I stammered out answers to her questions, but merely kept her eyes steadily fixed on me, while her own lips just opened enough to let the words out of her mouth. She listened to me with a severe face, and said, "Well, if you are happy to be here with the rest, so much the better."

It was a relief when she turned away, bidding me follow her--and a foolish figure I must have cut as I clattered after her across the cobbled yard under the old red-brick arch and so through the porch and into the house.

When I was sat down in one of the shaded rooms within the house, she summoned the tall gaunt old maid with the cap-flaps I had seen at the windows, and bade her bring me some fruit and a dish of cream. Miss Taroone watched me while I ate it. And uncommonly good it was, though I would rather have been enjoying it alone. From the way she looked at me it might have been supposed it was a bird or a small animal that was sitting up at her table. The last spoonful finished, she asked me yet more questions and appeared to be not displeased with my rambling answers, for she invited me to come again and watched me take up my cap and retire.

This was the first time I was ever in Miss Taroone's house--within its solid walls I mean; and what a multitude of rooms, with their coffers and presses and cabinets, containing I knew not what treasures and wonders! But Thrae was not Miss Taroone's only house, for more than once she spoke of another--named SURE VINE, as if of a family mansion and estate, very ancient and magnificent. When, thinking of my mother, I myself ventured a question about East Dene, her green-grey eyes oddly settled on mine a moment, but she made no answer. I noticed this particularly.

Soon I was almost as free and familiar in Miss Taroone's old house as in my own father's. Yet I cannot say that she was ever anything else than curt with me in her manner. It was a long time before I became accustomed to the still, secret way she had of looking at me. I liked best being in her company when she appeared, as was usually so, not to be aware that she was not alone. She had again asked me my name "for a sign" as she said, "to know you by"; though she always afterwards addressed me as Simon. Certainly in those days I was "simple" enough.

My next friend was the woman whom I had seen shaking her duster out of the upper windows. She, I discovered, was called Linnet Sara Queek or Quek or Cuec or Cueque, I don't know how to spell it. She was an exceedingly curious woman and looked as if she had never been any different, though, of course, she must once have been young and have grown up. She was bony, awkward, and angular, and when you spoke to her, she turned on you with a look that was at the same time vacant and piercing. At first she greeted me sourly, but soon became friendlier, and would allow me to sit in her huge kitchen with her parrot, her sleek tabby cat, and perhaps a dainty or two out of her larder.

She was continually muttering--though I could never quite catch what she said; never idle; and though slow and awkward in her movements, she did a vast deal of work. With small short-sighted eyes fixed on her mortar she would stand pounding and pounding; or stewing and seething things in pots--strange-looking roots and fruits and fungi. Her pantry was crammed with pans, jars, bottles, and phials, all labelled in her queer handwriting. An extraordinary place--especially when the sunbeams of evening struck into it from a high window in its white-washed wall.

Linnet she might be called, but her voice was no bird's, unless the crow's; and you would have guessed at once, at sight of her standing in front of the vast open hearth, stooping a little, her long gaunt arms beside her, that her other name was Sara. But she could tell curious and rambling stories (as true as she could make them); and many of them were about the old days in Thrae, older days in Sure Vine, and about Miss Taroone, in whose service she had been since she was a small child.

She told me, too, some specially good tales--as good as Grimm--about some villages she knew of called the Ten Laps; and gave me a custard when I asked for more. I once mentioned East Dene to her, too, and she said there was a short cut to it (though it seemed to me a long way about) through the quarry, by the pits, and that way round. "And then you come to a Wall," she said, staring at me. "And you climb over."