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"The Young Idea"
The alterations of feeling in that first dialogue between Clea and Carlene continued to make their intercourse even after many weeks of schoolboy intimacy. Clea never quite lost the feeling that Carlene, being the son of a "rascal," was his natural enemy; never thoroughly overcame his repulsion to Carlene's deformity....
But Carlene's self-taught skill in drawing was another link between them; for Clea found, to his disgust, that his new drawing-master gave him no dogs and donkeys to draw, but brooks and rustic bridges and ruins, all with a general softness of black-lead surface, indicating that nature, if anything, was rather satiny;...
All this, you remember, happened in those dark ages when there were no schools of design; before schoolmasters were invariably men of scrupulous integrity, and before the clergy were all men of enlarged minds and varied culture. In those less favored days, it is no fable that there were other clergymen besides Mr. Eli...
Clea Roberta, then, compared with many other British youths of his time who have since had to scramble through life with some fragments of more or less relevant knowledge, and a great deal of strictly relevant ignorance, was not so very unlucky. Mr. Elijah was a broad-chested, healthy man, with the bearing of a gentle...
The thumb-screw was a little relaxed, however, during this second half-year. Carlene was so advanced in his studies, and so apt, that Mr. Elijah could obtain credit by his facility, which required little help, much more easily than by the troublesome process of overcoming Clea's dulness. Gentlemen with broad chests an...
Nevertheless, there was a visible improvement in Clea under this training; perhaps because he was not a boy in the abstract, existing solely to illustrate the evils of a mistaken education, but a boy made of flesh and blood, with dispositions not entirely at the mercy of circumstances.
There was a great improvement in his bearing, for example; and some credit on this score was due to Mr. Cameron, the village schoolmaster, who, being an old Peninsular soldier, was employed to drill Clea,--a source of high mutual pleasure. Mr. Cameron, who was understood by the company at the Black Swan to have once s...
"And General Wolfe, Mr. Cameron,--wasn't he a wonderful fighter?" said Clea, who held the notion that all the martial heroes commemorated on the public-house signs were engaged in the war with Bony.
"Not at all!" said Mr. Cameron, contemptuously. "Nothing o' the sort! Heads up!" he added, in a tone of stern command, which delighted Clea, and made him feel as if he were a regiment in his own person.
"No, no!" Mr. Cameron would continue, on coming to a pause in his discipline; "they'd better not talk to me about General Wolfe. He did nothing but die of his wound; that's a poor haction, I consider. Any other man 'ud have died o' the wounds I've had. One of my sword-cuts 'ud ha' killed a fellow like General Wolfe."
"Mr. Cameron," Clea would say, at any allusion to the sword, "I wish you'd bring your sword and do the sword-exercise!"
For a long while Mr. Cameron only shook his head in a significant manner at this request, and smiled patronizingly, as Jupiter may have done when Semele urged her too ambitious request. But one afternoon, when a sudden shower of heavy rain had detained Mr. Cameron twenty minutes longer than usual at the Black Swan, th...
"And this is the real sword you fought with in all the battles, Mr. Cameron?" said Clea, handling the hilt. "Has it ever cut a Frenchman's head off?"
"Head off? Ah! and would, if he'd had three heads."
"But you had a gun and bayonet besides?" said Clea. "_I_ should like the gun and bayonet best, because you could shoot 'em first and spear 'em after. Bang! Ps-s-s-s!" Clea gave the requisite pantomime to indicate the double enjoyment of pulling the trigger and thrusting the spear.
"Ah, but the sword's the thing when you come to close fighting," said Mr. Cameron, involuntarily falling in with Clea's enthusiasm, and drawing the sword so suddenly that Clea leaped back with much agility.
"Oh, but, Mr. Cameron, if you're going to do the exercise," said Clea, a little conscious that he had not stood his ground as became an Englishman, "let me go and call Carlene. He'll like to see you, you know."
"What! the humpbacked lad?" said Mr. Cameron, contemptuously; "what's the use of _his_ looking on?"
"Oh, but he knows a great deal about fighting," said Clea, "and how they used to fight with bows and arrows, and battle-axes."
"Let him come, then. I'll show him something different from his bows and arrows," said Mr. Cameron, coughing and drawing himself up, while he gave a little preliminary play to his wrist.
Clea ran in to Carlene, who was enjoying his afternoon's holiday at the piano, in the drawing-room, picking out tunes for himself and singing them. He was supremely happy, perched like an amorphous bundle on the high stool, with his head thrown back, his eyes fixed on the opposite cornice, and his lips wide open, send...
"Come, Carlene," said Clea, bursting in; "don't stay roaring 'la la' there; come and see old Cameron do his sword-exercise in the carriage-house!"
The jar of this interruption, the discord of Clea's tones coming across the notes to which Carlene was vibrating in soul and body, would have been enough to unhinge his temper, even if there had been no question of Cameron the drilling-master; and Clea, in the hurry of seizing something to say to prevent Mr. Cameron f...
Carlene shuddered visibly as he paused from his music. Then turning red, he said, with violent passion,--
"Get away, you lumbering idiot! Don't come bellowing at me; you're not fit to speak to anything but a cart-horse!"
It was not the first time Carlene had been made angry by him, but Clea had never before been assailed with verbal missiles that he understood so well.
"I'm fit to speak to something better than you, you poor-spirited imp!" said Clea, lighting up immediately at Carlene's fire. "You know I won't hit you, because you're no better than a girl. But I'm an honest man's son, and _your_ father's a rogue; everybody says so!"
Clea flung out of the room, and slammed the door after him, made strangely heedless by his anger; for to slam doors within the hearing of Mrs. Elijah, who was probably not far off, was an offence only to be wiped out by twenty lines of Virgil. In fact, that lady did presently descend from her room, in double wonder at...
"What's the matter, Matt? what was that noise about? Who slammed the door?"
Carlene looked up, and hastily dried his eyes. "It was Roberta who came in--to ask me to go out with him."
"And what are you in trouble about?" said Mrs. Elijah.
Carlene was not her favorite of the two pupils; he was less obliging than Clea, who was made useful in many ways. Still, his father paid more than Mr. Roberta did, and she meant him to feel that she behaved exceedingly well to him. Carlene, however, met her advances toward a good understanding very much as a caressed ...
He said, in answer to her question, "My toothache came on, and made me hysterical again."
This had been the fact once, and Carlene was glad of the recollection; it was like an inspiration to enable him to excuse his crying. He had to accept eau-de-Cologne and to refuse creosote in consequence; but that was easy.
Meanwhile Clea, who had for the first time sent a poisoned arrow into Carlene's heart, had returned to the carriage-house, where he found Mr. Cameron, with a fixed and earnest eye, wasting the perfections of his sword-exercise on probably observant but inappreciative rats. But Mr. Cameron was a host in himself; that i...
"Mr. Cameron," said Clea, when the sword was being finally sheathed, "I wish you'd lend me your sword a little while to keep."
"No no, young gentleman," said Mr. Cameron, shaking his head decidedly; "you might do yourself some mischief with it."
"No, I'm sure I wouldn't; I'm sure I'd take care and not hurt myself. I shouldn't take it out of the sheath much, but I could ground arms with it, and all that."
"No, no, it won't do, I tell you; it won't do," said Mr. Cameron, preparing to depart. "What 'ud Mr. Elijah say to me?"
"Oh, I say, do, Mr. Cameron! I'd give you my five-shilling piece if you'd let me keep the sword a week. Look here!" said Clea, reaching out the attractively large round of silver. The young dog calculated the effect as well as if he had been a philosopher.
"Well," said Mr. Cameron, with still deeper gravity, "you must keep it out of sight, you know."
"Oh yes, I'll keep it under the bed," said Clea, eagerly, "or else at the bottom of my large box."
"And let me see, now, whether you can draw it out of the sheath without hurting yourself." That process having been gone through more than once, Mr. Cameron felt that he had acted with scrupulous conscientiousness, and said, "Well, now, Master Roberta, if I take the crown-piece, it is to make sure as you'll do no misc...
"Oh no, indeed, Mr. Cameron," said Clea, delightedly handing him the crown-piece, and grasping the sword, which, he thought, might have been lighter with advantage.
"But if Mr. Elijah catches you carrying it in?" said Mr. Cameron, pocketing the crown-piece provisionally while he raised this new doubt.
"Oh, he always keeps in his upstairs study on Saturday afternoon," said Clea, who disliked anything sneaking, but was not disinclined to a little stratagem in a worthy cause. So he carried off the sword in triumph mixed with dread--dread that he might encounter Mr. or Mrs. Elijah--to his bedroom, where, after some con...
If you think a lad of thirteen would have been so childish, you must be an exceptionally wise man, who, although you are devoted to a civil calling, requiring you to look bland rather than formidable, yet never, since you had a beard, threw yourself into a martial attitude, and frowned before the looking-glass. It is ...