CHAPTER XVI

MR. MUSTARD'S FIRST a.s.sISTANT

Yes, I was surprised. But there were several other and greater surprises waiting me. I got one the very next day.

I met Dan McConchie on his way home from school, at the dinner hour.

He was kicking his bag before him in the way that was popular at our school, where all self-respecting boys brought their books in a strap.

Girls had green baize bags and always swung them like pendulums as they talked. But boys, if they had to have bags, used them as footb.a.l.l.s.

This was what Dan was doing now.

He said, "Halloo, Joe Yarrow, your girl's gone and been made a teacher.

You had better come back. Old Mustard is as sweet to her as sugar candy. She is teaching the babies in the little cla.s.sroom--'A b--ab!

B a--baa!'"

He imitated the singsong of the lowest forms.

Now I put no faith in Dan or any other McConchie. But I clumped him hard and sound for presuming to talk about Elsie at all or call her "my girl."

Then I met little Kit Seymour, a girl from the south, who had reddish hair, all crimpy, and spoke soft, soft English as if she were breathing what she said at you. She lisped a little, too, was good-looking (though I did not care for that), and did not tell lies--had not been long enough in Breckonside to learn, I expect.

At any rate she told me in other words what I had just clouted Dan for.

Early the morning before, the school had been astonished to find Mr.

Mustard giving Elsie a lesson--when they came to spend a half hour in the playground at marbles and steal-the-bonnets. Their wonder grew greater when, as the bell rang, Elsie was found installed in the little schoolroom, which hitherto had been used chiefly for punishments and doing copybook writing. She was given the infant cla.s.ses, and had been there all day, so I was told, with Mr. Mustard popping in and out giving her instructions, and smiling like a fusty old hawk that has caught a goldfinch which he fears some one will take away from him.

Of course I did not care a b.u.t.ton for Mr. Mustard. But he had always been the Enemy of Youth so far as we were concerned. And it gave me a queer feeling, I can tell you, to think of Elsie--my Elsie--teaching alongside that snuffy old badger. He was neither snuffy nor yet very old, but that is the way I felt toward him. Elsie, too--at least she used to. But I could bet it was all the doing of that hook-nosed sister of his--Betty Martin Mustard, we called her, though her name was only Elizabeth, and not Martin at all.

Little Kit Seymour kept on lingering. She was smiling mischievously, too, which she had no business to do. And she wouldn't have done it long if she had been a boy. It got sort of irritating after a while, though I wasn't donkey enough to let her see it. I knew better.

I just said that I hoped she, Elsie, would like school-teaching, and that my father had always said that was what she should go in for. But Kit went on swinging her green baize bag, like I've seen them do the incense pot in Mr. Ablethorpe's church up at Breckonton. Father would have skinned me alive if he knew I had gone there. He was a Churchman, was father, but death on incense pots, confessions, and all apostolic thingummies, such as Mr. Ablethorpe was just nuts on. He had even stopped going to church at home because our old vicar had said that the Anglican Church was a church catholic. I bet he didn't mean any harm.

He was a first-rate old fellow. But my father waited behind and told him out loud that the Church of England is a Protestant church, and "whoever says it isn't is a liar!"

That caused a coolness, of course. Yet I believe they both meant the same thing. For our vicar wasn't one of Mr. Ablethorpe's sort, but just wanted to let people alone, and was content if people left him alone. But all things about churches made our Breckonside folk easily mad--being, as I said before, actually on the border-line, or at least very near to it.

Little Kit Seymour, with her lisp and soft south country English, was a smart girl. I knew very well she was seeing how I would take the news about Elsie. However, she did not get much change out of me.

"You aren't coming back to school again?" she said next, looking at the toe of her boot.

"Oh, I don't know that," I told her; "old Mustard is well up in mathematics and mensuration----"

"What's mensuration?" She said "men_th_uration," and curiously enough it sounded rather nice. But if a boy had done it everybody would have laughed. Some things are all in favour of girls--others again not.

Girls can't go into the army or the navy. Most boys can't, either.

But they think they can for a year or two, and that does just as well.

They can talk big about it till the fit goes off.

Well, I got rid of Kit Seymour. She went on to school, and as she parted from me she said: "Well, I thuppose we shall be theeing you down there by and by!"

She meant at the school--because Elsie was there. But I had something else in my mind. I was keen to find out whether Elsie had gone there because of our quarrel about Harriet Caw. The fault, of course, in any other girl, would have been Elsie's. For she would not listen to any justification--not even to the truth. But I never blamed Elsie. I only thought she had been led into it by old Betty Martin--Mr.

Mustard's sister--who is so ugly that it gives you a gumboil only to look at her.

Now the school of Breckonside--Mr. Mustard's, that is--lies right up against the woods on a sloping piece of land, from which the gra.s.s has long been worn off by generations of children playing. There is another little yard with some gra.s.s at the back. That is where the girls play, and across it with its gable to the big schoolhouse is the little cla.s.s-room where Elsie was teaching.

It was right bang in the woods. So I knew very well I could lie hidden along the branch of a tree and look in at the window.

Mean, you say! Not a sc.r.a.p. Elsie and I had always been such friends, like brother and sister, that surely I had a right to look after her a bit. Of course, if she had known she would have let out at me--scolded I mean. But all the same she would have found it quite natural.

So I went and got hold of a ripping good place in a kind of sunk fence.

Here I found, not a beech, but the trunk of an old willow that had bent itself down into the dry ditch as if feeling for the water. It was just the shape, too, and when I lay down on my face it fitted me better than my bed. There was even a rising bit at the bank for me to hook my feet round. You never saw anything so well arranged. The hazel bushes hid me from above, too, and unless you fairly stepped on me there was nothing to be seen. I had only to put aside some leafy shoots to rake the whole three windows of the little infant school.

Mean? I tell you not a bit. Why, I was really the only protector Elsie had got, and though she was mad with me just at that moment, it made no difference. Besides I had got an idea--I did not get them often, and so hung on the tighter to those I did find. And this one had really been forced upon me. It was that somehow Elsie was the key to all the mysteries, and that through her would come the solution of everything we had been trying to find out. Also--though this I would not for the life of me have mentioned to Elsie herself--that some peril hung imminent over her, and of this I should soon have proof if I wanted any.

Now it is curious how different both things and people look when you are watching them--as it were unbeknown. It is something like looking through between your legs at a landscape. You see the colours brighter, naturally, and as for the people--none of them do anything unless as if with some horrid secret purpose. When Mr. Mustard wiped his brow with a spotted handkerchief, or knocked a fly off the end of his nose, I was lost in wonderment what he meant by it. When he called Elsie to come down for her own private lessons in the big school-house, I watched carefully to see that he had not a weapon concealed under his rusty coat tails. I suppose policemen and detectives get used to this sort of thing, but certainly I never did.

Then I had always thought that we all started for school together. We seemed to. But Mr. Mustard's scholars certainly didn't--and I suppose schools all over the world are the same. n.o.body came alone. If they started from home by themselves, they yelled and signalled till they were joined by somebody else. Only a few groups arrived by the road, generally hand-in-hand if they were girls, and the boys with their arms about each other's waists. Most, however, ducked through hedges, clambered over stone d.y.k.es, crossed ditches by planks, and so finally got to school over broken-down pieces of wire fencing, or by edging themselves between the gate post and the wall. I remember now that I had generally done the same thing myself. But I never knew it till that day I lay on the old willow, watching Mr. Mustard's school gathering for morning lessons.

Seen from a distance Mr. Mustard was a youngish-looking man, getting bald, however, except about his ears. He wore a perfect delta of wrinkles at the corner of each eye. He was teaching Elsie about half an hour, and during this time, his sister looked in twice from the master's cottage, just to see how things were going. I lay still and waited. From the big school-house there came the sound of a hymn sung all together, with Elsie leading. I could distinguish her voice quite well. And then Mr. Mustard said a prayer. It was always the same prayer, and had been written by some bishop or other for the purpose.

Then Elsie came out followed by all the infant cla.s.s, most of them clinging to her skirts, the rest straggling behind, and pausing to pick up stray toddlers of three or four who had fallen on their faces. In Breckonside they send babies like that to school to be out of the way.

At first I did not get much out of my cramped position on the willow trunk. True, Elsie did turn and look twice toward the tall black paling of my father's storehouse yard. But even that I could not be too sure of, for the next moment Elsie had opened the door of the little cla.s.s-room and pa.s.sed within with all her tribe scuffling after her.

Then I could hear her begin with another hymn, very simple. Then she set the elder to learn the mysteries of "two and two make four," while she combined a little drill with the teaching of the alphabet to the most youthful of her flock behind a green rep curtain. After that came the turn of the slates, and at the first rasp Elsie, long unaccustomed to that music at close range, put her fingers to her ears. But when she had set the children to their task of drawing lopsided squares, drunken triangles, and wobbly circles, she left the infant cla.s.s to drone on in the heat of the morning. She arranged the windows, pulling them down to their utmost limit, and springing up on the sill she cleverly tacked bits of white netting over the open s.p.a.ces. Elsie knew that there is nothing so demoralizing to the average infant cla.s.s as a visiting wasp of active habits.

The drone of the infant department was behind her. I could see a soft perspiration bedewing the tender skins. Hair clung moist and clammy about bent necks. One or two slumbered openly, their brows on their slates, only to awake when Mr. Mustard came smiling in, satisfied with everything, and particularly commending the wasp protectors. Strange that in twenty years he had never thought of such a thing! He would get his sister to make some immediately.

No need of that! Elsie could tear the required size from her roll in a moment. Would he have them now? No, he would wait till the interval, and then she and Mr. Mustard would put them up together. There was no use troubling Elizabeth. She had her own domestic duties to attend to.

Of course, she, that is Elsie, would partake with them of their simple and frugal midday meal? It would be more convenient for all parties--better than going all the way back to the cottage at the Bridge End. Besides, Miss Edgar would doubtless be absent, and no dinner would be ready. Yes (concluded Mr. Mustard), on all accounts it would be much preferable to dine together. He had talked it over with his sister the night before.

I could see her hesitate. But the arrangement was really so much more convenient--indeed obvious, that Elsie, after provising that she would have to arrange terms with Miss Elizabeth, ended by accepting.

I began to hate Mr. Mustard.

What could he be after? It could not be love--fancy that red-nosed, blear-eyed, baldish old badger with the twitchy eyebrows in love! I laughed on my branch. But whatever it was his sister was in it. Yes, Betty Martin was a confederate--yet her brother's marriage would (conceiving for a moment such a thing to be possible) put her out of a place.

It was altogether beyond me. Only as I say, I did not love Mr. Mustard any the better for all this, and if I could have pinked him cheerfully with my catapult, without the risk of hitting Elsie, he would have got something particularly stinging for himself.

CHAPTER XVII

DREAR-NIGHTED DECEMBER

Then happened that event which in an hour, as it were, made a man out of a rather foolish boy. The postman comes twice to our doors during the day with letters--once for those from the neighbourhood of Breckonside, once for the mails that come in from London and all the countries of the world. Not that there were many of these, save now and then one or two for my father, about hams and flour. I used to annex the stamps, of course--generally from the United States they were, but once in a while from France.

One dullish December morning, in the early part of the month, my father got a letter which seemed to cause him some annoyance. He did not usually refer to his correspondence. But I was standing near him--for after all, on account of certain business reasons, I had not yet gone to Edinburgh--and I heard him mutter, "I suppose I had better go to Longtown Tryst, or I may never see my money. Still, it is a nuisance.

I wish old----"

Here he broke off suddenly, and turning round ordered our man Bob--Bob Kingsman, to saddle the mare. Then he called out to mother to put up something for him, for he had to ride to Longtown, and might be away all day.