1.07.01 Book 7: 1. Thomas Gajetan Ragland

1. THOMAS GAJETAN RAGLAND "She took me like a child of suckling time, And cradled me in roses." NOT so was Ragland cradled. The first glimpse of him is of a tiny, serious boy, delicate in feature and in colouring, bereft of both parents, dressed in deep mourning, kneeling, like the little Samuel of nursery pictures, on the floor of the Roman Catholic church in Gibraltar, his piteous little hands, it was remembered afterwards, always most anxiously folded. The next is brighter. He was swept off to Lancashire, and there, ready created for him, the lonely child found one whom he calls his "very dearest best earthly friend, both a mother and a sister." She was a cousin, ordinarily speaking, but she was what he said, and she never failed him all the days of his life. His parentage was interesting. It explained him, and he must have considerably astonished himself at times; for he was essentially English, calm, steadfast, shy; whence, then, those strange upshootings of swift flame within him? It was as if a young volcano had suddenly sprouted right in the orderly middle of a velvety English lawn. And the lawn, alarmed and shocked, did exactly as one might expect: hastened to cover the upstart thing with a tidy layer of turf.

Gajetan stood for Gajetani, his Italian grand­mother’s name. It was she who mixed lava in his cool English blood. He had a noble grand­father on the English side, a man who chose exile rather than stain his conscience; and his father was a soldier. There was nothing dull about the boy fashioned thus.

We may fly through the next years: school, where he worked hard at classics, and for pastime poked into obscure corners of history, and worried through genealogies with amazing pertinacity till he knew the ins and outs of the royal families of all the kingdoms of Europe with most unboylike precision; office, where his uncle meant him to reign in his stead; but as he had no heart for it, college, where he won the silver cup every year for four years, finally coming out Fourth Wrangler in the mathematical tripos, at that time the only tripos at Cambridge. The day the letter of all letters was expected he shut himself up in his room, feeling like a fiddle tuned to snapping point. The post came. His family clamoured round his door and apparently called the good news through the key-hole. "With some natural excite­ment," admits his grave biographer, Ragland emerged, asked for the letter, read it and then­ shut his door again. But that could not last long. His people had to be appeased, and for a very glad minute they jubilated together, and thanked the Giver of this good gift.

Some time between childhood and boyhood he had chosen whom he would serve. Frank as he was, with a frankness that sometimes astonishes (the Italian in him, perhaps), this one matter of his faith’s beginning he kept hidden in a reticence no pleadings even from his mother-friend could penetrate. "No, this cannot be," he wrote when she asked him to tell her of those thoughts and feelings. And another matter he held as a secret between him and his Lord. Of the love that might have been he never wrote or spoke, though it was known that his missionary call cut straight across that hope. For his generous soul, so joyfully opened to all who cared enough to enter, had its profound reserves.