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Cormorant Crag; A Tale of the Smuggling Days, a fiction by George Manville Fenn |
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Chapter 9. Study Versus Discovery |
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_ CHAPTER NINE. STUDY VERSUS DISCOVERY "Dear, dear, dear, dear!" in a tone full of reproach, and then a series of those peculiar sounds made by the tongue, and generally written "tut-tut-tut-tut!" for want of a better way--for it is like trying to express on paper the sound of a Bosjesman's _click cluck_ or the crowing of a cock. The speaker was Mr Humphrey Deane--a tall, pale, gentlemanly-looking young university man, who, for reasons connected with his health, had arranged with Sir Francis Ladelle and the Doctor to come and stay at the Mount, where he was to have a comfortable home and the Doctor's attendance, a moderate stipend, and, in exchange, to help on the two lads in their studies every morning, the rest of the day being his own. The plan had worked admirably; for Mr Deane was an earnest, able man, with a great love of learning, and always ready to display a warm friendship for boy or man who possessed similar tastes. The lads liked him: he was always firm, but kindly; and he possessed that wonderful power of imparting the knowledge he possessed, never seeming at a loss for means to explain some puzzling expression in classic lore, or mathematical problem, so as to impress it strongly upon his pupil's mind. The morning he uttered the words at the beginning of this chapter he was seated with the two boys in the long, low library at the Mount, whose heavy windows looked out upon a great, thick, closely-cropped yew hedge, which made the room dark and gloomy, for it completely shut off all view of the western sea, though at the same time it sheltered the house from the tremendous gales which swept over the island from time to time. It was the morning after the discovery in so unpleasant a manner of the hole at the foot of the slope, and their projected visit of investigation in the afternoon so filled the lads' heads that there did not seem to be any room for study; and, in consequence, after patiently bearing the absence of mind and inattention of his pupils for a long time, the tutor began to be fidgety and, in spite of his placid nature, annoyed. The Latin reading and rendering went on horribly, and the mathematics worse. Vince tried hard; but as soon as he began to write down _a_ + _b_--_c_ = the square root of _x_, his mind wandered away to the rocks over the Black Scraw. For that root of _x_ was so suggestive: _x_ represented the unknown quantity, and the Black Scraw was the unknown quantity of which he wanted to get to the root; and, over and over again, when the tutor turned to him, it was to find the boy, pen in hand, but with the ink in it dried up, while he sat gazing straight before him at imaginary grottoes and caverns, lit up by lanthorns which cast the black shadows of two explorers behind them on the water-smoothed granite floor. But this did not apply only to Vince, for Mike was acting in a similar way; and at the end of an hour Mr Deane could bear it no longer, for it had happened at a time when he was not so well as usual, and it required a strong effort of will to be patient with the inattentive lads when suffering pain. And so it was that at last he uttered the "dear dears" and "tut tuts," and roused the two boys from their dreams about what they would see in the afternoon. "Are you unwell, Vincent Burnet?" he said. "Unwell, sir?--oh no!" said the lad, colouring a little. "You seem so strange in your manner this morning; and Michael Ladelle here is the same. I hope you are not both sickening for something." "Oh, I'm quite well, sir," said Mike hurriedly. "Perhaps it's the weather." "Perhaps it is," said Mr Deane drily. "Now, pray get on with those problems." "Yes, of course," cried Vince; and he began to work away most industriously, till, as the tutor was resting his head upon his hand and looking down at the paper upon which he was himself working out the problem he had set the boys, so as to be able to show them, step by step, how it was best done, Mike scribbled something on a scrap, shut it in a book, and passed it to Vince, after glancing across the table and then giving him a nudge. Vince glanced across too; but Mr Deane was apparently intent upon the problem, his delicate right-hand guiding the new quill pen, and forming a long series of beautifully formed characters which were always looked upon by the boys with envy and surprise. Vince opened the book at the scrap of paper and read: "I say: let's tell old Deane, and make him go with us." Vince turned the paper over and wrote: "What for? He'd spoil it all. Want to knock all the fun out of our discovery?" The scrap was shut up in the book and pushed back to the sender; the work continued, and then came another nudge and the book once more, with a fresh scrap of paper stuck in. "I say, I can't get on a bit for thinking about the Black Scraw." Vince wrote on the back: "More can I. Get on with your work, and don't bother." This was forwarded by library table post, and then there was nothing heard but the scratching of the tutor's pen. But Mike's restlessness increased: he fidgeted and shuffled about in his chair, shook the table, and tried all kinds of positions to help him in solving his algebraic problem, but without avail. Scrub oaks, ravens and red-legged choughs danced before his eyes; great dark holes opened in the rocks, and the desire to finish work, get out in the bright sunshine, and run and shout, seemed more than he could bear. At last, to relieve his feelings a little, he took a fresh piece of paper, laid it over his pluses and minuses and squares and cubes, and then wrote enigmatically: "Lanthorn and rope." This he blotted, glanced at the hard-working student across the table, and then thrust it sidewise to Vince, who took it, read it, and, turning it over, wrote: "You be hanged!" He was in the act of blotting it when the pen dropped from Mr Deane's fingers; he sat up, and extended his hand as he looked sternly across the table. "Give me that piece of paper, Vincent," he said. Vince hesitated; but the tutor's eyes gazed firmly into his, and wrong yielded to right. He passed the paper across to Mr Deane, and then nearly jumped out of his chair, for Mike gave him a violent kick under the table. "To be paid with interest," thought Vince. "Oh! you jolly sneak, to give it up!" thought Mike, as the tutor read the paper on both sides. "I am very sorry," he said, after coughing to clear his voice--"very sorry to have to exercise my authority towards you two, who have been acting this morning like a pair of inattentive, idle schoolboys; but when I undertook to act as your tutor, it was with the full understanding that I was to have complete authority over you, and that you were both to treat me with proper respect." The boys sat silent and feeling horribly guilty. If Humphrey Deane had been an overbearing, blustering personage, they might have felt ready to resent his words; but the injured tone, the grave, gentle manner of the invalid went right home to both, and they listened, with their eyes upon their scanty display of work, as the tutor went on. "You both know," he said, "that my health will not permit of much strain, but so long as you both work with me and try your best, it is a pleasure to me, and no one could feel more gratification than I do when you get on." "Mr Deane," began Vince. "One moment, and I have done," continued the tutor. "You well know that I try to make your studies pleasant." "Yes, sir," said Mike. "And that when the morning's work is over I am only too glad to join you in any amusement or excursion. I ask you, then, is it fair, when you see I am unwell, to make my endeavours to help you a painful toil, from your carelessness and inattention?" "No, Mr Deane," said Vince quickly; "it's too bad, and I'm very sorry. There!" "Thank you, Burnet," said the tutor, smiling. "It's what I expected from your frank, manly nature." "Oh, and I'm sorry too," said Mike quickly; but he frowned slightly, for the speaker had not called him frank and manly. "I have no more to say," said the tutor, smiling at both in turn; "and I suppose I ought to apologise for insisting upon seeing that paper. I am glad to find that it was not of so trifling a nature as I thought for on Michael Ladelle's part, though I am sorry that you, Burnet, treated the note he passed you in so ribald a way. 'You be hanged!' is hardly a gentlemanly way of replying to a historical memorandum or query such as this: 'Lanthorn and rope.' Of course, I see the turn your thoughts had taken, Michael." The boys stared at him wonderingly. While they had been suspecting old Joe Daygo of watching them, had Mr Deane been quietly observing them unnoticed, and had he divined that they were going to take lanthorn and rope that afternoon? "Of course, history is a grand study," continued the tutor, "and I am glad to see that you have a leaning in that direction; but I like to be thorough. When we are having lessons on history let us give our minds to it, but when we are treating of algebra let us try to master that. There--we will say no more. I am glad, though, that you recall our reading; but try, Michael, to remember some of the other important parts of French history, and don't let your mind dwell too much upon the horrors of the Revolution. It is very terrible, all that about the excesses of the mob and their mad hatred of the nobility and gentry--_A bas les aristocrates_! and their cry, _A la lanterne_! Yes: very terrible those ruthless executions with the lanthorn and the rope. But now, please, I have finished that compound equation. Pray go on with yours." The two lads bent down now earnestly to their work, and with a little help mastered the puzzle which had seemed hopeless a short time before. Then the rest of the morning glided away rapidly, and Vince hurried off home to his midday dinner, after a word or two about meeting, which was to be at the side of the dwarf-oak wood, to which each was to make his way so as not to excite attention, and in case, as Vince still believed, Daygo really was keeping an eye upon their movements. "I thought as much," said Vince aloud, as he reached the appointed place, with a good-sized creel in his hand, the hammer and crowbar being in a belt under his jersey, like a pair of hidden weapons. "I'd go by myself if I had the rope." "And lanthorn," said Mike, raising his head from where he had been lying hidden in a clump of heather. "Hullo, then!" cried Vince joyously. "I didn't see you there. But, I say: lanthorn and rope! I felt as if I must burst out laughing." "Yes: wasn't it comic?" "I felt that I must tell him--poor old chap!--and as if I was trying to cheat him." "Oh no, it wasn't that! We couldn't help him taking the wrong idea. I'd have told him at once, only it seems to spoil the fun of the thing if everybody knows. But come on." "Wait a minute," said Vince, sitting on a stone. "I want to look all round first without seeming to. Perhaps old Joe's watching us." "If he is," said Mike sagely, "you won't see him, for he'll be squatted down by some block of stone, or in a furze bush. He's a regular old fox. Let's go on at once. But where's the lanthorn?" "Never you mind about the lanthorn: where's the rope?" "Lying on it. Now, where's the light?" "In the creel here," was the reply. Then without further parley they plunged into the wood, and, profiting by former experiences, made their way more easily through it into the rocky chaos beyond; threaded their way in and out among the blocks, till at last with very little difficulty they found their bearings, and, after one or two misses in a place where the similarity of the stones and tufts of furze and brambles were most confusing, they reached the end of the opening, noted how the old watercourse was completely covered in with bramble and fern, and then stepped down at once, after a glance upward along the slope and ridge, to stand the next minute sheltered from the wind and in the semi-darkness. _ |
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