THE SHARP SPUR
Though, therefore, the mystery remained as impenetrable as ever, I think
that the fact of the absence of Lalor Maitland put new vigour into all
of us. Richard Poole was buried in Dumfries, where all the "good jovial
fellows" of a dozen parishes gathered to give him an impressive funeral.
The firm closed up its ranks and became merely Messrs. Smart and Smart.
There was a new and loquacious tablet in St. Michael's relating in
detail (with omissions) the virtues and attainments of the deceased Mr.
Richard. But of the other Mr. Poole, calling himself Wringham Pollixfen,
not a trace, not a suggestion, not a suspicion of his whereabouts had he
left behind since he stepped out of our window into the dark.
But, nevertheless, in Eden Valley the air was clearer, the summer day
longer and brighter, and the land had rest. It was an impressive day
when Irma brought Louis to my father's school. The Academy remembers it
yet.
The morning had opened rather desolately. With the dawn the slate-grey
fingers of the rain clouds had reached down, spanning from Criffel to
Screel. The sea mist did what faith also can do. It removed mountains.
One after another they faded and were not. A chillish wind began to blow
up from the Solway, and even in Eden Valley was heard the distant roar
of the surf, through the low pass which is called the Nick of Benarick.
The long grass first stood in beads and then began to trickle. Flowers
drooped their heads if of the harebell sort, or stood spikily defiant
like the yellow whin and the pink thistle.
I had got ready cloaks and hoods, you may be sure. I was on the spot at
my grandmother's door a full hour before the time. Within I found Mary
Lyon raging. Neither of the bairns should go out of her house on such a
day! What for could they not be content to take their learning from
Duncan and Agnes Anne? Miss Irma, she was sure, was well able to teach
the bairn. It was all a foolishness, and very likely would end in
something uncanny. If it did--well, let nobody blame her. She had lifted
up her testimony, and thrown away her wisdom on deaf ears.
Which, indeed, was something not unlike the case.
For just then the sun shone out. The clouds divided to right and left,
following the steep purpling ridges on either side of Eden Valley--and
in the middle opening out a long sweet stream of brightness. Little
Louis clapped his hands. He ached for the company of his kind. He talked
"boys." He dreamed "boys"--not grown-up boys like me, but children of
his own age. He despised Irma because she was a girl. Only Agnes Anne
could anyways satisfy him, when she put on over her dress a pair of her
grandfather's corduroy trousers, buttoned them above her shoulder, and
pretended to give orders as in the pirn-mill. Even then, after a happy
hour with the toys which Agnes Anne contrived for him, all at once Louis
grew whimpering disappointedly, stared at her and said, "You are not a
real little boy."
And I, who had the pick of the Eden Valley boys on my hand every time I
went near my father's (and knew them for little beasts), wondered at his
taste, when he could have Irma's company, not to speak of Agnes Anne's.
But I resolved that I should keep a bright look-out and make the little
villains behave. For at an early age our Eden Valley boys were just
savages, ready to mock and rend any one of themselves who was a little
better dressed, who wore boots instead of clogs with birch-wood soles,
or dared to speak without battering the King's English out of all
recognition.
My father and Miss Huntingdon would, of course, be ready to protect our
small man as far as was in their power. But they, especially my father,
were often far removed in higher spheres of work, while Miss Huntingdon
was never in the boys' playground at all. But I had none of these
disabilities. I was instructed, sharp-eyed, always on the spot, with
fists in good repair--armed, too, with a certain authority and the habit
of using it to the full.
So little Louis found himself among his boys. I picked him out
half-a-dozen of the most peaceable to play with, after he had received
his first lesson from a very proud and smiling Miss Huntingdon. Miss
Irma, after being formally introduced to the school, left the sort of
throne which had been set for her beside my father, to go and sit beside
Agnes Anne at the top of the highest form of girls.
Her presence made a hush among the elder boys, and such of the young men
as happened to be there that day. For though we had scholars up to the
age of twenty, most of these were at work during the summer and came
only in the winter season--though in the interval betwixt sowing and
hay-harvest and between that again and the ripening of the corn we would
receive stray visits from them, especially in the long wet spells of
weather.
It was at noon and the girls were walking in their playground talking
with linked arms, apart from the noisy sportings of the boys, when I
caught my first glimpse of Uncle Rob. He was standing right opposite the
school in the big door of the Eden Valley Mill. I wondered what he was
doing there, for it was not the season for grinding much corn. Besides,
it would have been handier to send it down and call for it again during
such a busy season on the farm.
So I ran across and asked him what he was doing there. I could hardly
hear his answer, for the loud _plash-plash_ of the buckets of water as
they fell into the great pool underneath the wheel.
I understood him, however, to say that it was open to me to attend to my
own business and leave him to look after his.
In a moment the demon of jealousy entered into my soul. Could it be that
he came there to be near Irma--Irma, whom I had fought for and saved
half-a-dozen times over all by myself--for it is not worth while going
back to what Agnes Anne did, as it were, accidentally. I was so angry at
the mere thought that there and then I charged him with his perfidy. He
laughed a short, contemptuous laugh.
"And what for no," he answered; "at least _I_ have a trade at my
finger-ends. I can drive a plough. I can thresh a mow. At a pinch I can
even shoe a horse. But you--you have quit even the school-mastering!"
I do not know whether or not he said it unwittingly or with intent to
sting me. But at any rate the thrust went home. I could hardly wait till
my father had got through with his work that night, and was stretched in
his easy-chair, his long pipe in one hand and a volume of Martial in the
other. I broke in upon him with the words, "Father, I want to go to
college with Freddie Esquillant!"
My father looked at me in surprise. I can see him still staring at me
bemazed with his pipe half-way to his mouth, and the open book laid face
downward upon his knee.
"Go to college--you?" His surprise was more cutting than Uncle Rob's
mockery. Because, you see, my father knew. That is, he knew my
scholarship. What he did not know was how much of my grandmother's
spirit there was in me, and how I could keep working on and on if I had
the chance.
"You have thought of this long?" he asked.
"No, father!"
"Ah, well, what put it into your head?" he asked kindly.
This I could hardly tell him without entering into my furious foolish
jealousy of Uncle Rob, his waiting at the mill, and our exchange of
words. So I only said, "It just came to me that I would like to get
learning, father!"
"Ah, yes," he meditated, "that is mostly the way. It is like heavenly
grace. It comes to a man when he least expects it--the desire for
learning. We seek it diligently with tears. It comes not. We wake in the
morning and lo! it is there!"
It is characteristic of my father that even then he did not concern
himself about ways and means. For at the colleges of our land are
"bursaries" provided by pious patrons, once poor themselves, and often
with a thirst for knowledge unquenched--boys put too early to the bench
or the counter. Now my father had the way of winning these for his
pupils. He did not teach them directly how to gain them, but he supplied
the inspiration.
"Read much and well. Get the spirit. Learn the grammar, certainly. But
read Latin--till you can speak Latin, think Latin. It is more difficult
to think Greek. Our stiff-necked, stubborn Lowland nature, produce of
half-a-score of conquering nations, has not the right suppleness. But if
there is any poetry in you, it will find you out when you read
Euripides."
So though certainly I never got so far--the verbs irregular giving me a
distaste for the business--at least I fell into line, and in due
time--but there I am anticipating. I am writing of the day, the
wonderful day when the sharp spur of Uncle Rob's reproach entered into
my soul and I resolved to be--I hardly knew what. A band of little boys,
all eager to see the pirn-mill in the Marnhoul wood, volunteered to
accompany Louis home. They went on ahead, gambolling and shouting. Agnes
Anne would have come also, but I suggested to her that she had better
stay and help her mother.
She gave me one look--not by any means of anger. Rather if Agnes Anne
had ever permitted herself to make fun of me, I should have set it down
to that. But I knew well that could not be. She stayed at home,
contentedly enough, however.
I went home with Irma. I did so because I had the cloaks and hoods to
carry. Also I had something to tell her. It seemed something so
terrible, so mighty, so full of risk and danger that my heart failed me
in the mere thinking of it. I was to go away and leave her, for many
years, seeing her only at intervals. It seemed a thing more and more
impossible to be thought upon.
At the least I resolved to make myself out a martyr. It would be a blow
to Irma also, and the thought that she would feel it so almost made up
to me for my own pain, an ache which at the first moment had been of
the nature of a sudden and deadly fear.
Yet I might have saved myself the trouble. Irma looked upon the matter
in a very different light. She was not moved in the least.
"Yes, of course," she said, "you are only wasting your time here. Men
must go out and see things in the world, that afterwards they may do
things there. Here it is very well for us who have no friends and
nowhere else to go. But as soon as Louis is at school or has to leave
me--oh, it will happen in time, and I like looking forward--I shall go
too."
"But what could you do?" I cried in amazement, for such a thing as a
girl of her rank finding a place for herself was not dreamed of then.
Only such as my grandmother and Aunt Jen worked "in the sphere in which
Providence had placed them," as the minister said in his prayer.
"Never trouble your head," said Irma, "there never was a Maitland yet
but gat his own will till he met with a Maitland to counter him!"
"Lalor!" I suggested. At the name she twisted her face into an
expression of great scorn.
"Lalor!" she said; "well, and have I not countered him?"
She had, of course, but as far as I remembered there was something to be
said about another person who had at least helped. Now that is the worst
of girls. They are always for taking all the credit to themselves.
It was a grave day when I quitted Eden Valley for the first time. Every
one was affected, the women folk, my mother, my grandmother, even Aunt
Jen, went the length of tears. That is, all with only two exceptions, my
father and Miss Irma. My father was glad and triumphant--confident
that, though never the scholar Freddie Esquillant was bound to be, I was
yet stronger in the more material parts of learning--those which most
pleased the ordinary run of regents and professors.
I had already seen Irma early in the morning in that clump of trees
beyond the well where the flowering currants made a scented wall, and in
the midst the lilac bushes grow up into a cavern of delicately tinted,
constantly tremulous shade.
I told her of my fears, whereat she scorned them and me, bidding me go
forward bravely.
"I have never promised to be anybody's friend before," she said; "I
shall not break my word!"
"But, Irma," I urged, for indeed I could not keep the words back, they
being on the tip of my tongue, "what if in the meantime, when I am away
so far and seeing you so little, you should promise somebody else to be
more than a friend!"
She stood a moment with the severe look I had grown to fear upon her
face. Then she smiled at me, at once amused and forgiving.
"You are a silly boy," she said; "but after all, you are but a boy. You
will learn that I do not say one thing one day and another the next.
There--I promised you a guerdon, did I not? That is the picture of my
mother. You can open the back if you like!"
I set my thumb-nail to it, and there, freshly cut and tied with a piece
of the very blue ribbon she was wearing, lay a lock of her hair, a curl
curiously and as it seemed wilfully twisted back upon itself, as if it
had refused to be so imprisoned--just, in fact, like Irma herself.
I should have kissed her hand if I had known how, but instead I kissed
the lock of hair. When I looked up I am afraid that there was most
unknightly water in my eyes.
"Come," she said, "this will never do. There must be none of that if you
are to carry Irma Sobieski's pledge. Stand up--smile--ah, that is
better. Look at me as if I were Lalor Maitland himself, rather than cry
about it. You have my pledge, have you not--signed, sealed, and
delivered? There!"
But how the legal formula was carried out by Miss Irma is nobody's
business except our own--hers and mine, I mean. But at all events I went
forth from the lilac clump by the well, and picked up my full water cans
with a heart wondrously strengthened, and so up the path to Heathknowes
with a back straight as a ramrod, because of the eyes that I knew were
watching me through the chinks in the wall of summer blossom.