“Take that slate!”
He made as if he would not contaminate his hand by passing it to me,
laying it on the table and pointing a disdainful finger at it.
Again I obeyed.
“Now, Miss Deceitful, wipe every figure off that slate, and never try
any such cock-and-bull story upon me again as long as you live! I am
too old a bird to be caught with _your_ chaff!”
He laughed aloud in savage glee, dismissed the class with a wave of his
hand, and called up the next.
I was turned back to Short Division, with the added stigma of
intentional deception and cheating shadowing me.
Nearly fifteen years after our first tutor withdrew his baleful
presence from our home, my husband was urging upon my brother Herbert
the claims of the ministry of reconciliation as the profession to which
the younger man was evidently called by nature and by Providence.
Herbert looked up with the frank smile those who knew him will never
forget. It was like the clear shining of the sweetest and purest soul
ever committed to mortal keeping.
“‘Plato! thou reasonest well!’ There is but one argument you have not
bowled over. I registered an oath—as bitter as that Hamilcar exacted of
Hannibal—when I was a boy, that I would thrash that cur Tayloe within
an inch of his life as soon as I should be big enough to do it. And it
wouldn’t be quite the thing to flog a brother clergyman. If anything
could keep me out of the pulpit, it would be the fact that he is in it.
That fellow’s cruelties scarred my memory for life, although I was not
seven years old when I knew him.”
In dismissing the disagreeable theme, I offer this bit of testimony
to the truth of my story of the reign of terror neither of us ever
forgave.