II.
"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown"—
The picture in the Sunday At Home showed the old King in bed and Prince Hal trying on his crown. But the words were not the Sunday At Home; they were taken out of Shakespeare. Mark showed her the place.
Mark was in the schoolroom chanting his home-lessons:
"'Yet once more, oh ye laurels, and once more,
Ye myrtles brown with ivy never sere'"—
That sounded nice. "Say it again, Mark, say it again." Mark said it again. He also said:
"'Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing!'"
The three books stood on the bookshelf in the schoolroom, the thin Shakespeare in diamond print, the small brown leather Milton, the very small fat Pope's Iliad in the red cover. Mark gave them to her for her own.
She made Catty put her bed between the two windows, and Mark made a bookshelf out of a piece of wood and some picture cord, and hung it within reach. She had a happy, excited feeling when she thought of the three books; it made her wake early. She read from five o'clock till Catty called her at seven, and again after Catty had tucked her up and left her, till the white light in the room was grey.
She learnt Lycidas by heart, and
"I thought I saw my late espoused wife
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,"—
and the bits about Satan in Paradise Lost. The sound of the lines gave her the same nice feeling that she had when Mrs. Propart played the March in Scipio after Evening Service. She tried to make lines of her own that went the same way as the lines in Milton and Shakespeare and Pope's Iliad. She found out that there was nothing she liked so much as making these lines. It was nicer even than playing the Hungarian March. She thought it was funny that the lines like Pope's Iliad came easiest, though they had to rhyme.
"Silent he wandered by the sounding sea," was good, but the Greek line that Mark showed her went: "Be d'akeon para thina poluphloisboio thalasses"; that was better. "Don't you think so, Mark?"
"Clever Minx. Much better."
"Mark—if God knew how happy I am writing poetry he'd make the earth open and swallow me up."
Mark only said, "You mustn't say that to Mamma. Play 'Violetta.'"
Of all hateful and disgusting tunes the most disgusting and the most hateful was "Violetta," which Mr. Sippett's sister taught her. But if Mark would promise to make Mamma let her learn Greek she would play it to him twenty times running.
When Mark went to Chelmsted that autumn he left her his brown Greek Accidence and Smith's Classical Dictionary, besides Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. She taught herself Greek in the hour after breakfast before Miss Sippett came to give her her music lesson. She was always careful to leave the Accidence open where Miss Sippett could see it and realise that she was not a stupid little girl.
But whether Miss Sippett saw the Accidence or not she always behaved as if it wasn't there.