Miss Primrose: A Novel. Gilson Roy Rolfe

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СКАЧАТЬ uttered, they felt that glow which comes sometimes to boys who read and dream. Then Bertram loved the touch of Peter's shoulder, and, with the memory of another doctor and another school-boy, he loved his Rugby, little and meagre and vineless though it was upon its threadbare hill. When he had left it he would return some day, he thought; he would stand like Tom in the last chapter; he would sit again at his old brown desk, alone, musing – missing his mate, and finding silence where happy whisperings and secret play had been – but still in the pine before him he would trace the letters he had cut, and, seeing them, he would be again the boy who cut them there.

      One morning, such was the fervor of the Professor's voice, there was some such dream, and when it ended, prayer and dream together —

      "After these exercises – "

      It was the Professor's voice.

      " – I wish to see in my office Bertram Weatherby and Peter Wynne."

      They heard aghast. The whole school turned to them. The Past rose dreadfully before their startled vision, yet for once, it seems, they could find no blemish there.

      Down-stairs, quaking, they slipped together through the office door. The Professor had not arrived. They took their stations farthest from his chair, and leaned, wondering, for support against the wall. There was a murmur of assembling classes overhead, a hurry of belated feet, and then – that well-known, awful tread. Peter gulped; Bertram shifted his feet, his heart thumping against his ribs, but they squared their shoulders as the door flew open and the Professor, his face grave, his eyes flashing, swooped down upon them in the little room.

      "Bertram!"

      "Yes, sir."

      "Peter!"

      "Yes, sir."

      "I have sent for you to answer a most serious charge – most serious, indeed. I am surprised. I am astonished. Two of my best pupils, two whom I have praised, not once but many times, here in this very room – two, I may say, of my favorite boys found violating, wilfully violating, the rules of this school. I could not believe the charge till I saw the evidence with my own eyes. I could not believe that boys like you – boys of good families, boys with minds far above the average of their age, would despoil, openly despoil – yes, I may say, ruthlessly despoil – the property of this school, descending – "

      "Why, sir, what prop – "

      "Descending," cried the Professor, "to vandalism – to a vandalism which I have again and again proscribed. Over and over I have said, and within your hearing, that I would not countenance the defacing of desks!"

      Bertram Weatherby glanced furtively at Peter Wynne. Peter had sighed.

      "Over and over," said the Professor, "I have told you that they were not your property or mine, but the property of the people whose representative I am. Yet here I find you marring their tops with jack-knives, carving great, sprawling letters – "

      "But, sir, at Rug – "

      "Great, ugly letters, I say, sprawling and slashed so deeply that the polished surface can never be restored."

      "At Rug – "

      "What will visitors say? What will your parents say if they come, as parents should, to see the property for which they pay a tribute to the state?"

      "But, sir, at Rug – "

      "Bertram, I am grieved. I am grieved, Peter, that boys reared to care for the neatness of their persons should prove so slovenly in the matter of the property a great republic intrusts to their use and care."

      "But, sir, at Rug – "

      "I am astonished."

      "At Rug – "

      "I am astounded."

      "At Rug – "

      "Astounded, I repeat."

      "At Rugby, sir – "

      "Rugby!" thundered the Professor. "Rugby! And what of Rugby?"

      "Why, at Rugby, sir – "

      "And what, pray, has Rugby, or a thousand Rugbys, to do with your wilful disobedience?"

      "They cut, sir – "

      "Cut, sir!" repeated the Professor. "Cut, sir!"

      "Yes, sir – their desks, sir."

      "And if they do – what then?"

      "Well, sir, you said, you know – ".

      "Said? What did I say? I asked you to imitate the manliness of Rugby cricketers. I did not ask you to carve your desks like the totem-poles of savage tribes!"

      His face was pale, his eyes dark, his words ground fine.

      "Young gentlemen, I will have you know that rules must be obeyed. I will have you know that I am here not only as a teacher, but as a guardian of the public property intrusted to my care. Under the rules which I am placed here to enforce, I can suspend you both – dismiss you from the privileges of the school. This once I will act with lenience. This once, young gentlemen, you may think yourselves lucky to escape with demerit marks, but if I hear again of conduct so unbecoming, so disgraceful, of vandalism so ruthless and absurd, I shall punish you as you deserve. Now go."

      Softly they shut the office door behind them. Arm in arm they went together, tiptoe, down the empty hall.

      "Well?"

      The gloom of a great disappointment was in their voices.

      "He's not an Arnold, after all," they said.

      III

      A POET OF GRASSY FORD

      The lesser Primrose was a poet. It was believed in Grassy Ford, though the grounds seem vague enough now that I come to think of them, that he published widely in the literary journals of the day. Letitia was seen to post large envelopes, and anon to draw large envelopes from the post-office and hasten home with them. The former were supposed to contain poems; the latter, checks. Be that as it may, I never saw the Primrose name in print save in our Grassy Ford Weekly Gazette. There, when gossip lagged, you would find it frequently in a quiet upper corner, set "solid," under the caption "Gems" – a terse distinction from the other bright matters with which our journal shone, and further emphasized by the Gothic capitals set in a scroll of stars. Thus modestly, I believe, were published for the first time – and I fear the last – David Buckleton Primrose's "Agamemnon," "Ode to Jupiter," "Ulysses's Farewell," "Lines on Rereading Dante," "November: an Elegy Written in the Autumn of Life," as well as those stirring bugle-calls, "To Arms!" "John Brown," and "The Guns of Sumter," and those souvenirs of more playful tender moods, "To a Lady," "When I was a Rugby Lad," "Thanksgiving Pies," and "Lines Written in a Young Lady's Album on her Fifteenth Birthday." Now that young lady was Letitia, I chance to know, for I have seen the verses in her school-girl album, a little leathern Christmas thing stamped with forget-me-nots now faded, and there they stand just opposite some school-mate's doggerel of "roses red and violets blue" signed Johnny Gray. The lines begin, I remember:

"Virtue is in thy modest glance, sweet child,"

      and they are written in a flourished, old-fashioned hand. These and every other line her father dreamed there in his chair Letitia СКАЧАТЬ