Chapter Text
When Gabriel Milton was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with his uncle, everybody said he was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.
It was true, too. He had a pointy thin face and a pointy thin body, thin light hair and a sharp, sour expression. His hair was yellow, and his face was yellow, because he had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another. The elder of his two fathers had held a position under the English Government and had always been busy and ill himself; and his younger father had some important position in the missionary church, but for all that Gabriel saw seemed to care only to go to parties and laugh with people in glittering clothes. His name was Luke, and sometimes at first he had amused himself with the child’s gurgles and playfulness for an hour or two; but Gabriel’s older father Michael had not wanted a little boy at all, and so when Gabriel was born he had been handed over to the care of an Ayah, who was made to understand that if she wished to please the Sahibs she must keep the child out of sight as much as possible.
So when Gabriel was a sickly, fretful, ugly little baby he was kept out of the way, and when he became a sickly, fretful, toddling thing he was kept out of the way also. He never remembered seeing familiarly anything but the dark faces of his Ayah and the other native servants, and they always obeyed him and gave him his own way in everything, because the Sahibs would be angry if they were disturbed by his crying. And so by the time he was six years old he was as tyrannical and mischievous a little pig as ever lived. The young English schoolmaster who came to teach him to read and write disliked him so much that he gave up his place in three months, and when other schoolmasters came to try to fill it they always went away in a shorter time than the first one. So if Gabriel had not chosen to really want to know how to read books he would never have learned his letters at all.
One frightfully hot morning, when he was about nine years old, he awakened feeling very cross, and he became crosser still when he saw that the servant who stood by his bedside was not his Ayah.
“You,” he said to the strange man, “why are you here? Send my Ayah to me, or I shall call down the angels of the Christian God, and they will pinch your toes and ears for days.”
The man looked frightened, but he only stammered that the Ayah could not come. When Gabriel threw himself into a passion and beat and kicked him, he only looked more frightened, and repeated that it was not possible for the Ayah to come to Master Sahib.
There was something mysterious in the air that morning. Nothing was done in its regular order and several of the native servants seemed missing, while those whom Gabriel saw slunk or hurried about with ashy and scared faces. But no one would tell him anything, and his Ayah did not come. He was actually left alone as the morning went on, and at last he wandered out into the garden and began to play by himself under a tree near the veranda. He pretended that he was making a flower-bed, and he stuck big scarlet hibiscus blossoms into little heaps of earth, all the time growing more and more angry and muttering to himself the things he would say and the names he would call his Ayah when she returned.
“Pig! Pig! Daughter of Pigs!” he said, because to call a native a pig is the worst insult of all.
He was grinding his teeth and saying this over and over again when he heard his older father come out onto the verandah with someone: a fair young officer. They were talking in low voices. The child stared at the officer, but mostly he stared at his father. He always did this when he had a chance to see him, because the Sahib Michael was such a tall, pale, commanding person, who always seemed to gather the room about him, and could make any person seem small and unimportant merely by looking at them. He looked paler than ever this morning, but his eyes had no disdain in them at all. They were tight and worried, and he looked at the boy officer almost as if he were scared.
“So bad as that?” Gabriel heard him say.
“Awfully,” the young man answered in a trembling voice. “Awfully bad, sir. You ought to have gone to the hills two weeks ago.”
“I know we ought,” cried the Sahib impatiently; “we only stayed because my husband had determined so on that ridiculous dinner party. But ought does no good now. The devil on his dissipations—what a fool I am!”
At that very moment such a loud sound of wailing broke out from the servants’ quarters that Gabriel stood shivering from head to foot, and his father’s face passed from anger to something more awful still. The wailing grew wilder and wilder.
“Some one has died,” gasped the boy officer. “You did not say it had broken out among your servants.”
“How should I know such a thing as that?” the Sahib snapped. “Come with me!” and he turned and ran into the house.
After that, appalling things happened, and the mysteriousness of the morning was explained. The cholera had broken out in its most fatal form and people were dying like flies. The Ayah had been taken ill in the night, and it was because she had just died that the servants had wailed in the huts. Before the next day three other servants were dead and others had run away in terror. There was panic on every side, and dying people in all the bungalows.
During the confusion and bewilderment of the second day Gabriel hid himself in the nursery and was forgotten by everyone. He only knew that people were ill and that he heard mysterious and frightening sounds, and things were being carried in and out of the bungalow. He alternately cried and sulked and slept through the hours. At last he fell into a deep sleep because he was so tired, and angry, and hungry.
When he awakened he lay and stared at the wall. The house was perfectly still. He had never known it to be so silent before. He heard neither voices nor footsteps, and wondered if everybody had got well of the cholera and all the trouble was over. He wondered also who would take care of him now his Ayah was dead. There would be a new Ayah, and perhaps she would know some new stories. Gabriel had been rather tired of the old ones. Or perhaps he would have a master now—he was getting rather too old for a nurse, after all—and the master would teach him interesting things, and show him how to ride horses, and how to speak like a man, so that he might go into company and do as his fathers did.
He did not cry because his nurse had died. He had never learned to be an affectionate child, although he had perhaps the seeds of it, somewhere deep in his nature. The noise and hurrying about and wailing over the cholera had frightened him, and he had been angry because he was frightened, and because no one seemed to remember that he was alive. Everyone was too panic-stricken to think of a little boy no one was fond of. When people had the cholera it seemed that they remembered nothing but themselves. But if everyone had got well again, surely some one would remember and come to look for him.
Almost the next minute he heard footsteps in the compound, and then on the veranda. They were men’s footsteps, and the men entered the bungalow and talked in low voices. No one went to meet or speak to them and they seemed to open doors and look into rooms.
“What desolation!” Gabriel heard one voice say. “Those gallant young men—and the young Captain, so promising a career! I suppose the child, too. I heard there was a child, though no one ever saw him.”
Gabriel was standing in the middle of the nursery when they opened the door a few minutes later. He looked an ugly, cross little thing and was frowning because he was beginning to be hungry and feel disgracefully neglected. The first man who came in was a large officer he had once seen talking to his fathers. He looked tired and troubled, but when he saw Gabriel he was so startled that he almost jumped back.
“The devil!” he cried out. “There is a child here! A child alone! In a place like this! Mercy on us, who is he!”
“I am Gabriel Milton,” the little boy said, crossing his arms arrogantly over his chest as he had seen his fathers do. “I fell asleep when everyone had the cholera and I have only just wakened up. Why does nobody come?”
“It is the child no one ever saw!” exclaimed the man, turning to his companions. “He has actually been forgotten!”
“Why was I forgotten?” Gabriel said, stamping his foot. “Why does nobody come?”
The officer looked at him very sadly.
“Poor little kid!” he said. “There is nobody left to come.”
It was in that strange and sudden way that Gabriel found out that he had not one father left; that they had died and been carried away in the night, and that the few native servants who had not died also had left the house as quickly as they could get out of it, none of them even remembering that there was a Master Sahib. That was why the place was so quiet. There was no one in the bungalow but himself.