The Surprising Adventures of Sir Toady Lion with Those of General Napoleon Smith

But General Smith did not answer any of these questions. He well knew Janet's tone of simulated anger when she was "putting it on."

"Go and fetch it!" he said darkly.

CHAPTER VIII

THE FAMILIAR SPIRIT

NOW there was a skeleton in the cupboard of General Napoleon Smith. No distinguished family can be respectable without at least one such. But that of the new field-marshal was particularly dark and disgraceful.

Very obediently Janet Sheepshanks vanished from the sick-room, and presently returned with an oblong parcel, which she handed to the hero of battles.

"Thank you," he said; "are you sure that the children are out?"

"They are sailing paper boats on the mill-dam," said Janet, going to the window to look.

Hugh John sighed a sigh. He wished he could sail boats on the mill-dam.

"I hope every boat will go down the mill lade, and get mashed in the wheel," he said pleasantly.

"For shame, Master Hugh!" replied Janet Sheepshanks, shaking her head at him, but conscious that he was exactly expressing her own mind, if she had been lying sick a-bed and had been compelled to listen to some other housekeeper jingling keys that once were hers, ransacking her sacredest repositories, and keeping in order the menials of the house.

Hugh John proceeded cautiously to unwrap his family skeleton. Presently from the folds of tissue paper a very aged and battered "Sambo" emerged. Now a "Sambo" is a black woolly-haired negro doll of the fashion of many years ago. This specimen was dressed in simple and airy fashion in a single red shell jacket. As to the rest, he was bare and black from head to foot. Janet called him "that horrid object"; but, nevertheless, he was precious in the eyes of Hugh John, and therefore in hers.

Though twelve years of age, he still liked to carry on dark and covert intercourse with his ancient "Sambo." In public, indeed, he preached, in season and out of season, against the folly and wickedness of dolls. No one but a lassie or a "lassie-boy" would do such a thing. He laughed at Priscilla for cleaning up her doll's kitchen once a week, and for organising afternoon tea-parties for her quiet harem. But secretly he would have liked very well to see Sambo sit at that bounteous board.

Nevertheless, he instructed Toady Lion every day with doctrine and reproof that it was "only for girls" to have dolls. And knowing well that none of his common repositories were so remote and sacred as long to escape Priscilla's unsleeping eye, or the more stormy though fitful curiosity of Sir Toady Lion, Hugh John had been compelled to take his ancient nurse and ever faithful friend Janet into his confidence. So Sambo dwelt in the housekeeper's pantry and had two distinct odours. One side of him smelt of paraffin, and the other of soft soap, which, to a skilled detective, might have revealed the secret of his dark abode.

But let us not do our hero an injustice.

It was not exactly as a doll that General Smith considered Sambo. By no means so, indeed. Sometimes he was a distinguished general who came to take orders from his chief, sometimes an awkward private who needed to be drilled, and then knocked spinning across the floor for inattention to orders. For, be it remembered, it was the custom in the army of Field-Marshal-General Smith for the Commander-in-Chief to drill the recruits with his own voice, and in the by no means improbable event of their proving stupid, to knock them endwise with his own august hand.

But it was as Familiar Spirit, and in the pursuit of occult divination, that General Napoleon most frequently resorted to Sambo. He had read all he could find in legend and history concerning that gruesomely attractive goblin, clothed all in red, which the wicked Lord Soulis kept in an oaken chest in a castle not so far from his own father's house of Windy Standard.

And Hugh John saw no reason why Sambo should not be the very one. Spirits do not die. It is a known fact that they are fond of their former haunts. What, then, could be clearer? Sambo was evidently Lord Soulis' Red Imp risen from the dead. Was Sambo not black? The devil was black. Did Sambo not wear a red coat? Was not the demon of the oaken chest attired in flaming scarlet, when all cautiously he lifted the lid at midnight and looked wickedly out upon his master?

Yet the General was conscious that Sambo Soulis was a distinct disappointment in the part of familiar spirit. He would sit silent, with his head hanging idiotically on one side, when he was asked to reveal the deepest secrets of the future, instead of toeing the line and doing it. Nor was it recorded in the chronicles of Soulis that the original demon of the chest had had his nose "bashed flat" by his master, as Hugh John vigorously expressed the damaged appearance of his own familiar.

Worse than all, Hugh John had tried to keep Sambo in his rabbit-box. But not only did he utterly fail to put his "fearful head, crowned with a red night-cap" over the edge of the hutch at the proper time – as, had he been of respectable parentage, he would not have failed to do, but, in addition, he developed in his close quarters an animal odour so pungent and unprofitable that Janet Sheepshanks refused to admit him into the store-cupboard till he had been thoroughly fumigated and disinfected. So for a whole week Sambo Soulis swung ignominiously by the neck from the clothes line, and Hugh John went about in fear of the questioning of the children or of the confiscation by his father of his well-beloved but somewhat unsatisfactory familiar spirit.

It was in order to consult him on a critical point of doctrine and practice that Hugh John had now sent for Sambo Soulis.

He propped him up before him against a pillow, on which he sat bent forward at an acute angle from the hips, as if ready to pounce upon his master and rend him to pieces so soon as the catechism should be over.

"Look here," said General-Field-Marshal Smith to the oracle, "supposing the governor tells me to split on Nipper Donnan, the butcher boy, will it be dasht-mean if I do?"

Sambo Soulis, being disturbed by the delicacy of the question or perhaps by the wriggling of Hugh John upon his pillow, only lurched drivellingly forward.

"Sit up and answer," cried his master, "or else I'll hike you out of that pretty quick, for a silly old owl!"

And with his least bandaged hand he gave Sambo a sound cuff on the side of his venerable battered head, before propping him up at a new angle with his chin on his knees.

"Now speak up, Soulis," said General Smith; "I ask you would it be dasht-mean?"

The oracle was understood to joggle his chin and goggle his eyes. He certainly did the latter.

"I thought so," said Soulis' master, as is usual in such cases, interpreting the reply oracular according to his liking. "But look here, how are we to get back Donald unless we split? Would it not be all right to split just to get Donald back?"

Sambo Soulis waggled his head again. This time his master looked a little more serious.

"I suppose you are right," he said pensively, "but if it would be dasht-mean to split, we must just try to get him back ourselves – that is, if the beasts have not cut his throat, as they said they would."

CHAPTER IX

PUT TO THE QUESTION

IN the chaste retirement of his sick room the Field-Marshal had just reached this conclusion, when he heard a noise in the hall. There was a sound of the gruff unmirthful voices of grown-ups, a scuffling of feet, a planting of whips and walking-sticks on the zinc-bottomed hall-stand, and then, after a pause which meant drinks, heavy footsteps in the passage which led to the hero's chamber.

Hugh John snatched up Sambo Soulis and thrust him deep beneath the bedclothes, where he could readily push him over the end with his toes, if it should chance to be "the doctor-beast" come to uncover him and "fool with the bandages." I have said enough to show that the General was not only frankly savage in sentiment, but resembled his great imperial namesake in being grateful only when it suited him.

Before General Napoleon had his toes fairly settled over the back of Sambo Soulis' neck, so as to be able to remove him out of harm's way on any sudden alarm, the door opened and his father came in, ushering two men, the first of whom came forward to the bedside in an easy, kindly manner, and held out his hand.

"Do you know me?" he said, giving Hugh John's second sorest hand such a squeeze that the wounded hero was glad it was not the very sorest one.

"Yes," replied the hero promptly, "you are Sammy Carter's father. I can jolly well lick – "

"Hugh John," interrupted his father severely, "remember what you are saying to Mr. Davenant Carter."

"Well, anyway, I can lick Sammy Carter till he's dumb-sick!" muttered the General between his teeth, as he avoided the three pairs of eyes that were turned upon him.

"Oh, let him say just what he likes!" said Mr. Davenant Carter jovially. "Sammy is the better of being licked, if that is what the boy was going to say. I sometimes try my hand at it myself with some success."

The other man who had come in with Mr. Smith was a thick-set fellow of middle height, with a curious air of being dressed up in somebody else's clothes. Yet they fitted him very well. He wore on his face (in addition to a slight moustache) an expression which somehow made Hugh John think guiltily of all the orchards he had ever visited along with Toady Lion and Sammy Carter's sister Cissy, who was "no end of a nice girl" in Hugh John's estimation.

"This, Hugh," said his father, with a little wave of his hand, "is Mr. Mant, the Chief Constable of the county. Mr. Carter and he have come to ask you a few questions, which you will answer at once."

"I won't be dasht-mean!" muttered Napoleon Smith to himself.

"What's that?" ejaculated Mr. Smith, catching the echo of his son's rumble of dissent.

"Only my leg that hurted," said the hypocritical hero of battles.

"Don't you think we should have the other children here?" said Mr. Chief Constable Mant, speaking for the first time in a gruff, move-on-there voice.

"Certainly," assented Mr. Smith, going to the door. "Janet!"

"Yes, sir!"

The answer came from immediately behind the door.