Part 23 (2/2)
She was stooping to raise the pump handle, but straightened herself up again at the sound--as it seemed to her--of a m.u.f.fled sob.
She looked behind her and around. The playground was empty, the air across its gravelled surface quivering under the noonday heat.
She listened.
Two long minutes pa.s.sed before the sound was repeated; and this time she knew it for the sob of a child. It came from behind an angle of the building which hid a strip of the playground from view. She ran thither at once, and as she turned the corner her eyes fell on little Clem.
She had missed him from his place when the children returned to the schoolroom. His sister, she supposed, had taken him home.
He stood sentry now in the shade under the north wall of the building.
He stood there so resolutely that, for the instant, Hester could scarcely believe the sobs had come from him. But he had heard her coming; and the face he turned to her, though tearless, was woefully twisted and twitching.
”My poor child!”
He stretched out both hands.
”Where is Myra? I want Myra, please!”
CHAPTER XV.
MYRA IN DISGRACE.
Myra was in her bedroom, under lock and key; and this is how it had happened.
”What put it into your head to make that speech?” asked Mrs. Purchase, as she and Mr. Sam wended their way back to Hall. In form the question was addressed to her nephew; in tone, to herself.
Mr. Sam paused as if for breath, and plucking down a wisp of honeysuckle from the hedgerow, sniffed at it to gain time.
”I don't like talking about such things,” he answered; ”but it came into my head to do my Master's bidding: 'Bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.'”
”Fiddlestick-end!” said Mrs. Purchase.
”I a.s.sure you--”
”If you don't mean to get upsides with Tom Trevarthen, I'm a Dutchman.
'Forgive your enemies' may be gospel teaching, but I never knew a Rosewarne to practise it. You're a clever fellow, nephew Sam, and that speech saved your face, as the Yankees say; but somehow I've a notion its cleverness didn't end there. I saw the schoolmistress watching you--did she put you up to it?”
”I don't mind telling you that she had interceded with me.”
”I like the cut of that girl's jib,” Mrs. Purchase announced after a pause. ”She's good-looking, and she has pluck. But I don't take back what I said, that it's a wrong you're doing to Clem and Myra, putting them to school with all the riff-raff of the parish.”
”That's the kind of objection one learns to expect from a Radical,” her nephew answered drily.
”'Tis a queer thing, now,” she mused, ”that ever since I married 'Siah the family will have me to be a Radical; and 'tis the queerer, because ne'er one of 'ee knows what a Radical is or ought to be. S'pose I do hold that all mankind and all womankind has equal rights under the Lord--that don't mean they're all alike, do it? or that I can't tell a man from a woman, or my lord from a scavenger? D'ee reckon that we'm all-fellows-to-football aboard the _Virtuous Lady_, and the fo'c'sle hands mess aft?”
”They would if you were consistent,” answered Mr. Sam, with positiveness.
She sighed impatiently. ”There's times you make me long to wring your stiff neck. But I'll take your own consistency, as you call it.
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