Kitabı oku: «The Broom-Squire», sayfa 26
CHAPTER LII
THE ROSE-CLOUD
Joe Filmer, driving old Clutch, drew up at the door of the Ship
Inn. Iver Verstage came out and welcomed him.
"I've had a trouble with Clutch," said the ostler. "He lay down as we got out of Gorlmyn, and neither whip nor kicks 'ud make him stir. I tried ticklin', but t'wern't no good neither. How long this 'ud have gone on I dun know; I took him out o' th' shafts, and got him back to Gorlmyn, because some men helped me wi' him, and pulled at his tail, and twisted his carcass about till his nose pointed to the stable of the Angel. Then he condescended to get up and go to the inn. I shouldn't ha' got him away at all but that a notion came into my head as helped. I got the ostler to saddle and bride the gray mare, and mount her afore old Clutch's naked eyes. And I told the ostler to ride ahead a little way. Then, my word! what airs and jinks there were in Clutch; he gambolled and trotted like a colt. It was all a show-off afore the gray mare. The ostler – I knew him very well, he's called Tom Tansom, and it's a coorious thing now, he only cut his wise teeth about three months afore, and suffered won'erful in cutting 'em. But that's neither here nor there. Tom Tansom, he rode ahead, and old Clutch went after as if he were runnin' with the hounds. But I must tell you, whilst I was in Gorlmyn, that Widow Chivers came with the carrier, and as she was wantin' a lift, I just took her up and brought her on. She's been ter'ible bad, she tells me, with a cold, but she's better now – got some new kind o' lozenges, very greatly recommended. There's a paper given along wi' 'em with printed letters from all sorts o' people as has benefited by these lozenges. They're a shillin' and a ha'penny a box. Betty sez they've done her a power of good."
"Go on with your account of old Clutch. You're almost as bad as he with your stoppages."
"I'm tellin' right along. Well, the ostler he trotted on till he came to a turn in the road, and then he went down a lane out o' sight. But old Clutch have been racin' on all the way, thinkin' the mare had got a distance ahead. I'd a mighty difficulty to make him stop at the corner to set down Betty Chivers, and again here. Though he's roarin' like the roarin' of the sea, he wants to be on again and ketch up the gray mare. It's a pleasure that I've dun the old vagabond. Has Matabel been here?"
"Yes, she has; and has gone."
"Where to?"
"Of course, home, to the Bowl."
"Not she. She's got that screwed into her head tight as a nut, that she'll never go there again. There was the sexton at the corner, and he helped Betty with her bag, he said he turned Matabel out of the church porch."
"Then she may be in the churchyard."
"Oh, no, he turned her out of the churchyard, and the last he seed of her was goin' down to the Pudmoor. If she's queer in her head, or driven distracted wi' trouble – she oughtn't to be allowed to go there."
"Gone to Pudmoor!" exclaimed Iver. "I shouldn't wonder if she has sought Thor's Stone. She did that once before."
"I'll clap old Clutch in the stable, then go and look for her. Will you come, Mr. Iver?"
"Well – yes – but she cannot be received in here."
"No, there is no need. Betty Chivers will take her in as before. Betty expects her. I told her as we comed along that Matabel were before us, and we almost expected every minute to take her up. Though how we should ha' managed three in the trap I don't know, and Clutch would have been in an outrageous temper. Do you hear him snortin' there? That's because he's angry – the Radical!"
Beside Thor's Stone Iver and Joe Filmer found Mehetabel rocking her child, she had bared her bosom and held the little corpse against her palpitating heart, in the desperate hope of communicating to it some of her own heat; and if love could have given life the baby would have revived.
Again, as when her husband died, her brain was for a while unhinged, but she had the same kind and suitable nurse, the widow, Betty Chivers.
And now this story is all but done. Little more remains to be told.
Never again did Mehetabel return to the Punch-Bowl – never revisit it. The little property was sold, and after the debts of Jonas were paid, what remained went for her sustenance, as well as the money bequeathed by Susanna Verstage and that laid aside by Simon.
Years passed. Betty Chivers was gathered to the dust and in her place Mehetabel kept the Dame's school. It was thought that Joe Filmer had his eye on her, and on more than one occasion he dressed himself in his Sunday best and walked towards the school, but his courage ebbed away before he reached it, and he never said that which he had resolved to say.
On the north side of the church, near the monument of the murdered sailor, was a tiny mound, ever adorned with flowers, or when flowers were unattainable, with sprigs of holly and butcher's broom set with scarlet berries. At the beginning of the present century the decoration of a grave was rarely if ever practised. It was looked on as so strange in Mehetabel, and it served to foster the notion that she was not quite right in her head.
But in nothing else did the village schoolmistress show strangeness: in school and out of school she was beloved by her children, and their love was returned by her.
We live in a new age – one removed from that of Dame schools. A few years has transformed the system of education in the land.
In one of the voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, he reached the island of Lagado, where the system of construction adopted by the natives in the erection of an edifice was to begin at the top, the apex of a spire or roof, and to build downwards, laying the foundations last of all, or leaving them out altogether.
This is precisely the system of primary education adopted in our land, and if rent and ruin result, it is possibly due to the method being an injudicious one.
The face of Mehetabel acquired a sweetness and repose that were new to it, and were superadded to her natural beauty. And she was happy, happy in the children she taught, happy in the method she pursued, and happy in the results.
Often did she recall that visit to Thor's Stone on the night when her child died, and she remembered her look up into the evening sky. "I thought all light was gone from me, when my star, my little feeble star, was eclipsed, but instead there spread over the sky a great shining, glorious canopy of rosy light, and it is so," – she looked after her dispersing school – "my light and life and joy are there."
The Vicar came up.
There had been a great change in the ecclesiastical arrangements of Thursley. It was no longer served occasionally and fitfully from the mother church. It had a parson of its own. Moreover a change had been effected in the church. It was no longer as a house left desolate.
"I have been thinking, Mrs. Kink," said the Vicar, "that I should much like to know your system of education. I hear from all quarters such good accounts of your children."
"System, sir!" she answered blushing, "oh, I have none."
"None, Mrs. Kink?"
"I mean," she answered, "I teach just what every child ought to know, as a matter of course."
"And that is?"
"To love and fear God."
"And next?"
With a timid smile:
"That C A T spells cat, and D O G spells dog."
"And next?"
"That two and two makes four, and three times four makes twelve."
"And next?"
She raised her modest dark eyes to the Vicar, and answered, smiling, "Mine is only a school for beginners. I lay the foundations. I do not profess to finish."
"You teach no more than these?"
"I lay the foundations on which all the rest can be raised," she answered.
"And you are happy?"
She smiled; it was as though the sun shone out of her face.
"Happy! Oh, so happy! I could not be happier." Then, after a pause, "Except when I and my own little one are together again, and that would be too much happiness for my heart now. But it will be able to bear the joy – then."
