Part 2 (1/2)

”You must be what father calls a wicked Radical,” said G.o.dfrey staring at her, ”one of those people who want to disestablish the Church.”

”I daresay,” she replied, nodding her head. ”That is if you mean making clergymen work like other people, instead of spying and gossiping and playing games as they do about here.”

G.o.dfrey did not pursue the argument, but remarked immorally:

”It's a pity you don't come to our cla.s.s, for then I could do your history papers and you could do my sums.”

She started, but all she said was:

”This would be a good place to learn history. Now I must be going.

Don't forget to give the note. I shall have to say that I waited a long while before I found anyone. Goodbye, G.o.dfrey.”

”Goodbye, Isobel,” he answered, but she was gone.

”I hope he did dream that it was his mother who kissed him,” Isobel reflected to herself, for now the full enormity of her performance came home to her. Young as she was, a mere child with no knowledge of the great animating forces of life and of the mysteries behind them, she wondered why she had done this thing; what it was that forced her to do it. For she knew well that something had forced her, something outside of herself, as she understood herself. It was as though another ent.i.ty that was in her and yet not herself had taken possession of her and made her act as uninfluenced, she never would have acted. Thus she pondered in her calm fas.h.i.+on, then, being able to make nothing of the business, shrugged her shoulders and let it go by. After all it mattered nothing since G.o.dfrey had dreamed that the ghost of his mother had visited him and would not suspect her of being that ghost, and she was certain that never would she do such a thing again. The trouble was that she had done it once and that the deed signified some change in her which her childish mind could not understand.

On reaching the Hall, or rather shortly afterwards, she saw her father who was waiting for the carriage in which to go to the station to meet some particularly important week-end guest. He asked if she had brought any answer to his note to Mr. Knight, and she told him that she had left it in the schoolroom, as she called the refectory, because he was out.

”I hope he will get it,” grumbled Mr. Blake. ”One of my friends who is coming down to-night thinks he understands architecture and I want the parson to show him over the Abbey House. Indeed that's why he has come, for you see he is an American who thinks a lot of such old things.”

”Well, it is beautiful, isn't it, Father?” she said. ”Even I felt that it would be easy to learn in that big old room with a roof like that of a church.”

An idea struck him.

”Would you like to go to school there, Isobel?”

”I think so, Father, as I must go to school somewhere and I hate those horrible governesses.”

”Well,” he replied, ”you couldn't throw inkpots at the holy Knight, as you did at Miss Hook. Lord! what a rage she was in,” he added with a chuckle. ”I had to pay her 5 for a new dress. But it was better to do that than to risk a County Court action.”

Then the carriage came and he departed.

The upshot of it all was that Isobel became another of Mr. Knight's pupils. When Mr. Blake suggested the arrangement to his wife, she raised certain objections, among them that a.s.sociating with these little lads might make a tomboy of the girl, adding that she had been taught with children of her own s.e.x. He retorted in his rough marital fas.h.i.+on, that if it made something different of Isobel to what she, the mother, was, he would be glad. Indeed, as usual, Lady Jane's opposition settled the matter.

Now for the next few years of Isobel's life there is little to be told.

Mr. Knight was an able man and a good teacher, and being a clever girl she learned a great deal from him, especially in the way of mathematics, for which, as has been said, she had a natural leaning.

Indeed very soon she outstripped G.o.dfrey and the other lads in this and sundry other branches of study, sitting at a table by herself on what once had been the dais of the old hall. In the intervals of lessons, however, it was their custom to take walks together and then it was that she always found herself at the side of G.o.dfrey. Indeed they became inseparable, at any rate in mind. A strange and most uncommon intimacy existed between these young creatures, almost might it have been called a friends.h.i.+p of the spirit. Yet, and this was the curious part of it, they were dissimilar in almost everything that goes to make up a human being. Even in childhood there was scarcely a subject on which they thought alike, scarcely a point upon which they would not argue.

G.o.dfrey was fond of poetry; it bored Isobel. His tendencies were towards religion though of a very different type from that preached and practised by his father; hers were anti-religious. In fact she would have been inclined to endorse the saying of that other schoolgirl who defined faith as ”the art of believing those things which we know to be untrue,” while to him on the other hand they were profoundly true, though often enough not in the way that they are generally accepted.

Had he possessed any powers of definition at that age, probably he would have described our accepted beliefs as shadows of the Truth, distorted and fantastically shaped, like those thrown by changeful, ragged clouds behind which the eternal sun is s.h.i.+ning, shadows that vary in length and character according to the hour and weather of the mortal day.

Isobel for her part took little heed of shadows. Her clear, scientific stamp of mind searched for ascertainable facts, and on these she built up her philosophy of life and of the death that ends it. Of course all such contradictions may often be found in a single mind which believes at one time and rejects at another and sees two, or twenty sides of everything with a painful and bewildering clearness.

Such a character is apt to end in profound dissatisfaction with the self from which it cannot be free. Much more then would one have imagined that these two must have been dissatisfied with each other and sought the opportunities of escape which were open to them. But it was not so in the least. They argued and contradicted until they had nothing more to say, and then lapsed into long periods of weary but good-natured silence. In a sense each completed each by the addition of its opposite, as the darkness completes the light, thus making the round of the perfect day.

As yet this deep affection and remarkable oneness showed no signs of the end to which obviously it was drifting. That kiss which the girl had given to the boy was pure sisterly, or one might almost say, motherly, and indeed this quality inspired their relations.h.i.+p for much longer than might have been expected. So much was this so that no one connected with them on either side ever had the slightest suspicion that they cared for each other in any way except as friends and fellow pupils.

So the years went by till the pair were seventeen, young man and young woman, though still called boy and girl. They were good-looking in their respective ways though yet unformed; tall and straight, too, both of them, but singularly dissimilar in appearance as well as in mind.