The breakfast-table showed little correlation to a haunted house. It was
surrounded with bright and smiling faces when Desmond, to his chagrin a
trifle tardy, opened the door. The sunshine lay among the potted plants
blooming in wire stands at the two casements opposite the great
bay-window, and through its broad outlook one could see the immense
shining expanse of the king of rivers, with a golden glister on its
ripples, and in the distance a line of tender brownish gray to denote
the growth of cottonwood fringing the farther banks against the blue
sky. The sylvan hunt on the wall-paper, in the medley of scrolls and
fantastic tracery, had a realistic effect of motion as the sunshine and
shadow shifted over it through the stirring boughs of the great live-oak
tree close without. A fire of light wood glowed on the hearth, more it
might seem for gladsome cheer than needed warmth, this balmy day of the
southern winter, and old Joel, the butler, was holding on a silver tray
a large, low basket of ripe figs and brilliant hothouse flowers, while
Mrs. Faurie read a note that had come with the fruit. She paused for a
moment and glanced up as the tutor entered.
“Good-morning, Mr. Desmond. I hope you rested well.” Then, rustling the
missive, she read aloud: “‘Congratulations on the date’—what the
mischief is the date, Uncle Clarence?—the 5th of December?—Heavens and
earth! The cruel woman! She is reminding me of my birthday.” She tossed
the note aside with a gesture of mock desperation. “Let me give you some
coffee, Mr. Desmond,—I can swallow my mortification later,—or will you
have chocolate?”
As she sat at the head of the table, moving the pieces of the large
old-fashioned silver service, that glittered with polish, but showed
here and there an indentation that bespoke the battering proclivity of
years of daily usage, the light from the several windows was full on her
face. Her complexion was more than ever like a white rose in its
softness and delicacy thus displayed. Her fine, long throat was shown by
the surplice cut of her plain white lawn blouse, of which the sleeves
reached only to the elbow of her softly rounded arms, with their slim,
dainty hands; her skirt was of plain pleated black voile, and her brown
hair was rolled straight up from her forehead. Nothing could be more
homelike, more simple; but the effect of her eyes as she looked at him
from under her long lashes, her level brows slightly drawn, had a
vaguely bewildering effect on Desmond. He had seen charming women
heretofore, but none to parallel her loveliness. His mind was acclimated
to the idea, the tradition of incomparable beauty, but not in these
close relations. To breakfast with Helen of Troy, to receive a cup of
chocolate from the hand of Diana herself, to reply to a word of simple
inquiry and assured authority from the embodiment of the ideal that
poets have sung and painters have limned in all ages, was disconcerting.
Had she seemed herself more aware of her preëminent endowment, had she
been self-conscious, he could have better adjusted himself to its
continual contemplation; but he had the sentiment of a unique discovery,
of perceiving somewhat unknown, unnoted.
“I can’t see any cause for mortification; it seems to me a very pretty
compliment, mamma.” Reginald had taken the note up with some anxiety and
was perusing it with a clearing brow.
“A compliment!—to be reminded of my dreadful age.”
“Ah, Honoria, you are absurd, my dear,” Mr. Stanlett protested, with an
air of concern. “Thirty-four is still young,—still young, my dear.”
“Oh, how can you mention it, Uncle Clarence? Let me forget the exact
number! I feel one foot in the grave! I am the prey of time!”
She cast up her beautiful eyes in an affectation of distress; then,
catching the serious regards of the youngest boy fixed upon her,
dubiously, uncertain of her mood, she looked at him intently for a
moment, and burst into a ripple of smiles, to which, reassured, he
responded with a callow chuckle, infinitely alluring.
“But we will have the basket in the centre of the table,” she continued.
“All of you who have the heart can eat a fig. I’ll bet there are just
thirty-four of them.”
The two younger boys strained over the table to count.
“Dead to rights, mamma,” said Rufus, the tenyear old, who enjoyed the
preëminence of “baby.” “Just thirty-four figs.”
“A very pretty compliment, mamma,” protested Reginald again. “For my
part, I am obliged to Mrs. Kentopp, and I am ashamed that I did not
remember the date myself.”
“Oh, ho! You bet I did!” said Rufus, with a triumphant nod.
Mrs. Faurie put down her spoon, and cast a look across the silver
service so replete with maternal affection, so embellishing to her proud
beauty, that it seemed indeed a pity that the face on which it was
bestowed should be so round, so freckled, so jocosely creased, so
facetiously winking.
“What have you got for me, Chubby?” she asked. Her look was angelic.
“You’ll see,—you’ll see!” He smiled widely. The dentist had been at work
on that smile, and had eliminated two teeth, and the interval interfered
with the happiest expression of filial affection.
The other two brothers, though manifestly disconcerted and deprecatory,
looked at him with the quizzical contempt with which an elder boy cannot
refrain from tormenting his junior. “Chub, don’t be such a chump,”
Horace admonished him. “You ought to be ashamed to give mamma a birthday
offering of some of the trash that you have collected in your European
_towers_,”—with a leer to emphasize the taunting mispronunciation,—“a
last year’s calendar or a cigarette tag.”
“’Tain’t no old European bibelot!” Chubby declared, his round cheeks no
longer distended with happy smiles. His eyes were grave and flashing
fire,—he was consciously on the defensive. He breathed hard and deep.
“Oh, to be sure,—some of his chiffons from the Rue de la Paix,—souvenir
de Paree,” Reginald twitted him, with a nettling laugh.
“’Tain’t,—it’s brand-new,” Chub protested.
“Where did you get it?” the other two asked in a breath.
“I bought it with my own money,”—there was an intonation of pride in
this assertion.
“But where?—bloated capitalist!” asked Reginald, really curious, for
there was scant opportunity to spend money at Great Oaks Plantation,
forty miles distant from any town larger than a hamlet or a railroad
way-station.
“Where do you reckon?”—with temper. Then with a gush of pride, “From the
trading-boat,—that’s where!”
Desmond could not understand why the two elder boys stared at each other
for a moment, then collapsed into inextinguishable laughter, scarlet in
the face, nerveless, well-nigh helpless. Even Mr. Stanlett laughed with
merry relish, and Chub looked from one to another, pitiably crestfallen.
A “shanty-boat,” that had been tied up at the landing, was not of the
usual type of trading-boat, offering provender and provisions and
assortments of merchandise in localities remote from railway and packet
connection, but a mere travesty on this mercantile craft, hardly more,
indeed, than a raft, drifting with the current, bearing a little cabin
in which the owner lived, and from which he sold a medley of
stock,—pins, needles, stale candies, tobacco, whiskey, snuff, ribbons,
plated jewelry,—such as might meet the needs or strike the taste of the
humbler dwellers about the river-side, or the backwoods population among
the bayous, along the sluggish current of which it was sometimes poled.
“Oh,—oh, mamma,—the _trading-boat_!” cried Reginald, barely recovering
the power of speech.
But Horace was altogether beyond words.
“It _is_ a trading-boat!” Chub protested. “Anyhow, they have lots of
things to sell. They pole and row along the bayous and lakes, and they
get towed by a steamboat once in a while, and go up any of the rivers
they like. Then they drift down again. They have been selling along all
the rivers in the State of Mississippi,—they _told_ me so.”
“They must have been well able, then, to pay the considerable privilege
tax to the State,” Mr. Stanlett commented dryly.
“Did it occur to you to inquire into that question, Chubby?” asked
Reginald, still gasping with merriment.
“Ha! I’ll engage that the very word ‘license’ would make that boat’s
crew cast off in a trice!” exclaimed Mr. Stanlett, with a significant
nod. “That ‘trading-boat’ would be swallowed up from sight in the
twinkling of an eye.”
“But we have no right to take that for granted, Uncle Clarence,” Mrs.
Faurie remonstrated. “Their trade along the bayous and bogues and lakes,
where no other boats come, may be considerable and aggregate enough to
justify the tax. The swampers in such out-of-the-way places have no
other way to buy goods.”
“Ah, well,—perhaps so,—I’m not a collector. We will be charitable and
hope for the best. And they may have some exemption from the tax.”
The proud Chub, suddenly brought down, was near to tears.
Mrs. Faurie, all unmindful of the ridicule, was looking at him with eyes
aglow. “With your money, Chubby,—your own little money?—and you always
so hard up,—you dear little spendthrift! And you really remembered my
birthday, and bled your precious nickels to commemorate it! Where is my
present? I can’t wait to see it! I’ll value it above everything I have
in the world. I’ll always treasure it as beyond price,—my lovely
Chubby’s gift.”
And then it developed that “lovely Chubby,” intent on surprise, had been
seated throughout the meal with the present in a paper bag poised on his
knee under his napkin. He was reassured in some sort by the cessation of
the laughter of the fraternal torments. He was too young and too
ingenuous to realize that it was only a momentary respite that they
might better view the pomp of the presentation. Their physical condition
might have alarmed one unused to view the ecstasies of adolescent mirth
when the paper bag parted to disclose a large, round, wooden apple,
highly tinted with the colors of nature, the upper section of which
opened to reveal within an assortment of needles, pins, a cake of wax, a
brass thimble, a bodkin, and an emery masquerading as a realistic
strawberry.
“An apple,—oh, ye gods and little fishes!” cried Horace.
“An apple,—presented to mamma,—my prophetic soul! Didn’t I say it must
be a souvenir of Paris,—to the fairest?” exclaimed Reginald, convulsed.
“Ah, ha,—very good,—classical allusion,” said Mr. Stanlett,
appreciatively. He cast a glance of pride at the tutor, as if calling
his attention to this point of precocity.
Mrs. Faurie silently examined every detail with deliberate gravity,
while the two elder sons went from one spasm into another of mute
laughter, deeming the episode too funny for words, and the breathless
Chub looked seriously and expectantly at her.
“Very useful, no doubt,” said Mr. Stanlett, taking his cue from the
gravity of her manner. “Valuable,—always ready,—needle-case.”
But when Mrs. Faurie lifted her eyes, Desmond could but note how
brilliant they were with unshed tears.
“Come here, Chubby,” she said, with a break in her voice. “I can’t wait
to hug you!”
He was a big boy for ten years of age, and looked bigger in his mother’s
lap. She had pushed her chair a trifle back from the table, and as he
sat enthroned and cherished beyond his fellows, some qualm of jealousy
terminated their convulsions of mirth.
“You have not touched your plate, mamma,” said one. “I have heard of
people living on bread and cheese and kisses, but I never saw its
demonstration before. Sweet Chub,—lovely breakfast food!”
“You two must quit that thing of calling Rufus ‘Chub,’” remonstrated Mr.
Stanlett.
“Yes,” said Chub, whisking around in his mother’s lap, and facing the
party from behind the silver service; “makes me feel like a fish,—chub
and dace always mentioned together.”
“Chub is a first-rate item on a bill of fare; serve him out, mamma,”
suggested Horace.
“I am coming down myself,” said Chub, with a final exasperating hug and
kiss.
“And—quite a coincidence!—the waffles are coming in,” jeered Horace.
“And now,” said Chub, once more settled in his place at table, and
feeling in fine fettle and high favor, “I move that, being mamma’s
birthday, we have a holiday.”
Desmond was altogether unused to being so set aside and passed over and
made of scant account. He was aware that he could not expect aught else
in a family life in which he had no part; nevertheless, he felt all the
uneasiness incident to a false position and a new experience. He had
scarcely spoken a word since he had entered the room. He could not
expect the conversation to be guided with a special consideration of him
in this circle of family privacy, and he had submitted to eat his
breakfast among them, but not of them, with what grace he might. Chub’s
last remark, however, trenched upon his own peculiar province, and he
spoke uninvited and to the point: “And I move that we have no holiday.”
Chub glanced up, his eyes both grieved and indignant. “Oh, why?” he
said,—a phrase that is in more frequent use in remonstrance than any
other in the English language by all American youth under twenty years
of age,—a plea to which Desmond then and there resolved that he would
never reply. There ensued a moment of awkward silence.
Horace suddenly answered for him. “Because, Chub, we have to be
classified, you know. Mr. Desmond might be expecting you to read Greek,
if he started you without examination, you know.”
“Don’t look so downcast, Chubby,” said Mrs. Faurie, with a caressing
intonation; and Desmond was aware that, but for the pose of supporting
his authority, the coveted holiday would have been granted without
another moment’s consideration. “Mr. Desmond is not such an ogre.”
Chubby wagged his head with a sorrowful monition of experience and
forecast. “Tutors are all alike—when it comes to ogreing.”
Despite her partiality, Mrs. Faurie evidently thought this hardly civil.
She came hastily to the rescue. “And we have all the preliminaries to
arrange; this must be a busy day.” Then, obviously with a lingering hope
for Chubby’s release, for his appealing look was very touching, “But
perhaps it might be best to begin to-morrow. I should think it would be
well for you to look about you a little before going to work, Mr.
Desmond,—familiarize yourself with your surroundings.” She ended with a
rising inflection that required an answer, and her evident bias would
seem to dictate its import. It was short, succinct.
“Nothing whatever is gained, Mrs. Faurie, by the waste of time,” he
said, “and much is lost by the bad precedent.”
She was rising from the table. “Then we will at once consider the choice
of a schoolroom,” she said, as she preceded the party out of the
dining-room. At the intersection of the entry with the main hall she
paused; here was an outer door which opened on a broad veranda, from
which the glittering Mississippi could be seen through the vistas of the
trees. This veranda ran quite around the front portion of the house, and
passed through it, dividing the main building from the two wings. At one
point this airy structure widened, the flooring extending into a
roofless circular space, built around the great trunk of a live oak,
that made a dense canopy of evergreen boughs above it, and let fall
drooping shady branches all about it. The balustrade of the veranda was
fitted with a circular bench, and one could scarcely imagine a more
attractive bower.
“This would make a fine schoolroom,” suggested Chub, and Desmond was
irritated to observe that Mrs. Faurie actually seemed to consider it.
“The less there is to distract the attention, the better,” he said
promptly.
“The passing of a steamboat,—or a squirrel, would put Chub out of the
game for the day, I suppose,” she conceded, with evident reluctance.
“We could come in if it rained,” persisted Chub.
“We could if we had enough sense,” said Horace; “I have always
understood that it required sense to know enough to come in out of the
rain.”
Desmond was feeling more interest in his unwelcome vocation as he
followed Mrs. Faurie into the main hall. He was apprehensive lest some
puerile folly of his pupils and the facile leniency of their mother
jeopardize the practicability of his mission, and his vocation be riven
from him when he had come to depend solely upon it. He looked about the
place critically, noting facts that might have escaped him otherwise in
a cursory, uninterested survey. The house bore little or indeed no token
of the extensive wanderings of its inmates in foreign lands. There were
a few good paintings on the walls, but their frames were old and
tarnished and in several instances marred, and he fancied they were
trophies of the travels of previous generations. Other canvases were
devoted to the portraits of the family, some evidently painted by
brushes of distinction, and others only redeemed from the imputation of
being daubs by the facility and freedom with which the likeness had been
caught, the art subordinate to the lifelike portrayal. The ornaments,
clocks, vases, were rich and represented the expenditure of money, but
were obviously the haphazard aggregations of years and successive
owners, and with no system of collection or interest of suggestion. He
divined that Mrs. Faurie cared too little for life in the mansion house
of the hated plantation to spend time, or thought, or money on its
decoration. Hence, in lieu of rich oriental rugs and polished floors,
the old velvet carpets still did service, being of good quality,
seemingly imperishable, covering every inch of the wood; the old satin
damask curtains, with lace beneath, draped the windows as of yore. The
furniture of carved rosewood, and especially that of ponderous mahogany,
was better in countenance in view of the modern craze for ancient
relics, but its owner valued it no whit more for the fashion. There was
nowhere the museum-like effect to be seen so often in the home of a
traveled proprietor. Except for a casual mention, no one could imagine
that any of the household had sojourned in Japan, or journeyed on camels
in remote deserts, or voyaged on the Nile and the Ganges. It was an old
house, distinctly of its locality, in a fat, luxurious country, replete
with the suggestions of decorous antecedents; and one might seem
ungrateful to be so loath to come to it, and so eager to be gone again,
as was Mrs. Faurie. The sons had evidently lost all sense of preference,
small citizens of the world. Home was with each other and their mother;
and it hardly mattered if it were in Rome, or in the light of the
midnight sun, or on the banks of the great Mississippi.
Desmond had felt himself somewhat expatriated in surroundings so foreign
to the world of letters, of art, of public interest, of intellectual
activity, until he came into the library. Unconsciously he drew a long
breath of relief. On every hand he knew were friends. He was not sorry
to see that the books were old and evidently long undisturbed. They bore
the marks of some previous owner’s loving care. They were all under
glass, the shelves built into the walls; below, extending up three feet
from the floor, were solid doors betokening cabinets, fitted with locks,
and doubtless containing treasures of old files of newspapers,
pamphlets, magazines. These were all collections of elder members of the
house of Faurie, and little troubled by the present generation. Two big
globes, one terrestrial, the other celestial, could indeed give to the
experienced young travelers of to-day only the information how very
little was known of the world at the time of the construction of these
microcosms.
There was a great fireplace, vacant now, the room being out of use, with
the usual glittering brasses of andirons and fender. The sun streamed in
at the tall windows at the eastern side; on the other,—for the apartment
was in one of the wings separated from the main building by the
veranda,—one could look out through the vistas of gigantic trees at the
great embankment of the levee in the foreground, the splendid scroll of
the Mississippi emblazoning the middle distance, and far, far away the
low line of the forests at the horizon meeting the blue sky. The windows
were draped only by some old-time lambrequins, short and of a
grape-blue, and below were suspended the slatted shades called Venetian
blinds. A heavy mahogany desk, with innumerable pigeon-holes, and a wide
writing-shelf, covered with grape-blue leather, looked tempting and
scholarly. A long table with drawers was in the centre of the floor, and
on each side some chance hand had arranged chairs high and stiff and
ready for writing or reading.
“This seems made for us. Could you spare this room?” Desmond asked,
feeling nevertheless the assurance of the demand.
She hesitated. Though she cared little for Great Oaks, the incongruity
struck her. This was indeed a fine room to devote to the uses of pupils
and pedagogue, and it might be that all that Chub would ever learn would
not be worth the wear and tear that his acquisitions here would cost it.
“But why not?” she asked in turn. “Certainly the parlors are ample for
so little company as we see here.”
“And we shall keep regular hours; the room can be at the service of the
family in the evenings”; he rather pressed the point. “The library is
separate from the rest of the building, and less liable to interruption,
out of earshot of anything that may be going forward in the household;
the books are all at hand; the atmosphere is inspiring.”
“By all means, then,” she assented.
But later, when she mentioned the decision to her uncle, he looked
dismayed, and she half regretted her compliance.
“He selected the library as a schoolroom!” exclaimed Mr. Stanlett.
“Well, he _is_ moderate!”
“He showed the first vestige of emotion that I think it is possible for
him to entertain when he saw the books,” she said. “I want him to be
satisfied at Great Oaks,—if anybody _can_ be satisfied in the
Mississippi swamp.”
“What sort of impression does he make upon your mind?” asked Mr.
Stanlett, solicitously.
“I think he is an iceberg; he lowers the temperature whenever he
approaches.”
But the value of the library as an educational influence was not
immediately apparent, and Desmond, who had never taught, was destined to
find that there is far more requisite for success than the equipment for
instruction. The poignancy of the relinquishment of his dear ambitions,
his sensitive appreciation of his reduction to an unsuitable, subsidiary
position in the esteem of the world, the tingling sense of personal
isolation, of humiliation in a sort, as of an unwelcome, disregarded,
yet necessary supernumerary in the family circle, so apart themselves as
to render his presence always felt,—he thought these elements of his
poverty a sufficient handicap on satisfaction in the present and hope
for the future. He might have been still further dismayed at the outset
to realize that education is a cooperative function, and the receptivity
of the student is as essential as the radiation of the professor. He had
been himself so eager in the acquisition of knowledge, so earnest, so
alertly intelligent, his mind assimilating as by an involuntary process
the pabulum that the curriculum set forth in courses, that he did not
readily grasp the idea of a different point of view. He was totally
unaware of the luxury of mental inaction, the atrophy of the industrial
muscles, the dead levels of the lack of ambition, of supine content with
the least achievement compatible with the least exertion. He had given
his instructors no occasion to seek to stimulate his aspirations to the
goal of his best possibilities, and he had not even turned the eye of
casual contemplation upon their labors as they herded their unwilling
and loitering flocks along the dusty approaches to learning, fain to be
content with such progress as their charges could be prevailed upon to
make.
Even in the preliminaries for instruction in the big, luxurious room,
friction supervened. A fresh fire blazed on the hearth, the places at
the table were assigned, the box of schoolbooks was unpacked, and the
stationery deposited in appropriate drawers. Chub’s joy in the
acquisition of a fountain pen it was necessary to moderate, and his plea
to inaugurate his scholastic labors by experimenting with a writing
lesson was tabooed.
“You are not here to do what you wish, but what is best for you,”
Desmond said finally, and Chub cast the pen from him on the table with
an air of permanent repudiation and a sullen pout of disaffection.
For a time Horace, with the puerile mania to be stirring something, must
needs turn in his chair and with a meddlesome finger revolve again and
again the terrestrial globe that stood near by, contemplating not its
charted surface, but merely its pleasing semblance to a big ball, and
its satisfactory poise that so slight a touch would compass the
revolution of the earth. Twice Desmond politely requested him to desist.
Horace was still for a little while, but soon his careless mood had lost
the memory of the command, the world was briskly awhirl anew, and in his
lazy consciousness he was scarcely aware of his own agency in the fact.
Desmond hesitated. He gazed at the forgetful Horace for a moment, then
he commented: “I hope that you are fond of the study of geography. If
you turn that globe again, you shall map out every country on it and
chart every body of water, working all the afternoons while the others
are out of school till you practically own the earth and the boundaries
thereof. Are you a pretty expert cartographer?”
Horace, amazed and insulted, grew round-eyed and red. “Mamma would not
permit it,” he said stiffly.
“We shall see. This is _my_ schoolroom, and what I say here—goes!”
“Now, Horace, I hope that you have got it!” Reginald exclaimed in
reproach.
Horace was motionless, mutinous in dubitation. Then with a fling he
turned his back upon the allurements of the world and joined the silent
and pouting Chub in fixedly regarding the grape-blue leather cover
inlaid in the table, and spotted here and there with the ink of old-time
chirographers.
Desmond himself had his distractions. He was interested in the old
sand-box, full of metal filings, formerly used instead of blotters to
dry the ink on the page. He was surprised when a bronze bust on the
table revealed an inkstand, as the helmet of the head of Pallas was
lifted,—a series of inkstands, it contained, for different tints, and
his set and joyless face relaxed as he refilled them. “This is a quaint
fancy,—this inkstand,” he said.
Then he must needs be quick to check Reginald’s intention to throw into
the fire a bundle of carefully made quill pens of a bygone date. These
came from a small drawer, evidently long disused, that had a trick of
sticking. There were also some wafers here, for the sealing of letters,
and a stick of sealing-wax.
Desmond sought to inaugurate a more agreeable topic than had hitherto
distinguished the incidents of the morning. He took these relics of the
past as a suggestion. He said that it ought to be peculiarly pleasant to
them to work here, where those of their own blood had read, and written,
and thought out the problems of their day; and that this was home in the
truest sense, a oneness of mind and heart and effort. They should have a
sentiment to retain the inkstand, sand-box, and bunch of quills, these
tokens of the mental activity of their forbears, hallowed by their
usage; and the stiff, unnoticed, forgotten drawer of the table, where
these writing-materials had been found, might cause them to think how
yesterday always leaves a trace on to-day, and to take heed that it is
not a vain regret nor the disaster of the waste of time.
They listened in blank silence and unresponsiveness. Desmond, somewhat
taken aback, for he had had a purpose of talking to his pupils to mould
the form of their thought, to fashion their habit of phrasing, to direct
their outlook and give the values of viewpoint, to accomplish their
improvement insensibly even in their leisure hours, felt a disposition
to recur to the line and rule of the text-book. “Let them learn, then,
just what is set down for them,” he said, disappointed with the first
experiment.
But even thus his expectations were so suddenly dashed that he had a
sense of helplessness,—an incapacity to reach that volition of mind that
makes it a motive power. Words were all ineffective, argument thrown
away. Already he began to perceive that he might teach in vain if they
would not, and therefore could not, learn. His heart sank within him as
he noted the look of dull disinclination, desolation indeed, with which
Reginald turned the leaves of the Greek Reader.
“What is the use of the classics, Mr. Desmond?” he asked in a tone of
dreary protest. “Nobody speaks the languages any more. Why, when I was
in Greece last winter, even I could see that what I had learned of
ancient Greek was miles away from modern Hellenic. And I spoke Italian,
not Latin, in Rome. As to Greek literature,—why, we have the finest
translations,—better than any I can ever make. Now what gentleman ever
sits down to read Euripides in the original? Now, honestly, Mr. Desmond,
what good has Greek ever been to you?”
This was indeed a home-thrust,—the contrast of his splendid and complete
intellectual armament and the field of its employment.
“It has given me the distinguished opportunity of teaching you.”
There was dead silence for a few moments as the group sat around the
table. The two sullen youngsters, apprehending rather the tone of the
retort than its full significance, lifted their lowering eyes and looked
in blank wonder from one of the speakers to the other. Reginald
continued to turn the volume listlessly in his hand, but a scarlet flush
was suffusing his face, and stealing to the roots of his auburn hair.
Presently he said, with the air of venturing a suggestion, “It must be a
language particularly rich in satire; it must cultivate the faculties
for sarcasm, at all events.”
The work got under way at length, and perhaps progressed as
satisfactorily as if there had been a more genial understanding. Each
faction was cautious, being uncertain of the other, and hence
experiments were not in favor. There was much of the genuine gentleman
in Reginald; he was averse to occasioning needless inconvenience or
annoyance to others, and had he no further reason, he would have exerted
himself to curb the vagaries of his wandering attention, so little
accustomed to concentration. But he had, too, a proper pride. Without
the opportunity of cramming for the examination, the disadvantages of
his erratic training and the irregular development of his immature mind
were to be discerned without palliation. This, however, gave token how
solid an intellectual endowment he possessed. As he struggled with the
questions and bent every faculty to the endeavor to do himself as little
discredit as he might, Desmond felt somewhat encouraged. There was good
material here, if it could be disengaged from the tangle of puerile
folly, superficial observation, false standards, and a total lack of the
habit of application.
The other two promised less well, and Desmond had with them far less
sympathy and less patience. Horace, still swelling with wrath for the
indignity of the geographical threat, was merely biding his time, and
temporizing with his tyrant till the close of the diurnal session should
permit him to bear his tale of woe to his mother, who he doubted not
would avenge him summarily. But Chub had capitulated. He adopted
propitiatory tactics. Now and again he quitted his place and came around
and stood beside Desmond’s chair, with a plump and pleading hand on his
arm, and explained carefully that he could not really hope to master
fractions because they had a peculiar effect on his head. He thought it
would be much better to review long division, until his health was fully
confirmed,—he was a crackerjack at long division. He would like to show
Mr. Desmond what he could do; he could cover a slate with figures to
beat the band. And would Mr. Desmond make those two boys quit laughing
at him, and agree that he might skip fractions altogether. He had heard
people say that fractions were of no use,—upon his word of honor, he
had.
“Some small people like unto yourself, I dare say,” Desmond retorted.
Chub was always so disappointed and surprised when he was sent back to
his place, his errand fruitless, to bend the round integer of his head
over the tantalizing fractions on his slate, so eagerly abounding in
renewed hope as he came out again with his plump paw to be laid
persuasively on Desmond’s arm, as he stood by the tutor’s chair,
advancing his enlightened views,—all of which tended to eliminate study
from the scheme of things at Great Oaks mansion,—that it began to be
very obvious that this was the pupil most difficult to contend with and
for whose idiosyncrasies Desmond would have least toleration. For
scholastic attainment was a very large and noble endeavor in Desmond’s
mind, despite the reasons he had latterly perceived to minimize its
worldly utilities. And to this effect did Mrs. Faurie express herself
that evening at dinner when they were all grouped around the table.
“I should judge from the children’s report, Mr. Desmond, that you have
all had a rather serious time of it, to-day. And that is just what I
desire,—that you should maintain your authority,”—she cast her beautiful
coercive eyes on each of the youthful faces, shown in the candle-light
intently regarding her—“and that they should exert themselves to do
their duty.”
They seemed to accept the fiat as law according to their several
interpretations of duty,—Reginald with a sort of manly serenity, Horace
as reduced to order, and the little Chub as so distressful and helpless
and a-weary of the world that Mrs. Faurie could not refrain from
reaching out her long fan, and with its downy tip touching him playfully
under his chin to bring out his dimples and win from him once more a
smile.