Her popularity and her influence were widespread. The figure of Miss Tighe in her red fishing-cloak, with nets, hooks, jars, boxes, bottles, overflowing from her village cart, was familiar throughout every nook and corner of the island. If she had not had the sunniest of human hearts you might have been tempted to dub her a gossip. That good old English word, however, is associated in these days with a more than doubtful spice of malice. And men and women who had known Cassandra Tighe for thirty years averred that they had never heard an unkindly judgment from her lips. She was simply a raconteuse—we lack the English equivalent—a sympathiser in all the vivid varying doings that constitute the lives of young and wholesomely happy people; a chronicler of news; a delighter in love affairs.
Simply this. And yet, not unfrequently, Cassandra Tighe made mischief. Truthful, as far as conscious veracity went, to a fault, this excellent lady’s memory was in a chronic state of jumble; so stored, it may be, with polysyllabic names of plants, grubs, and fishes, that subsidiary human details had to be packed in pell-mell, and take their chance of coming out again untwisted. And, depend upon it, these tangled well-meaners, not your deliberate villains, are the cause of half the loves marred, the heartburnings, the jealousies, that make up the actual dramas, the unwritten three-volume novels of this work-a-day world!
‘You are going to study with a tutor, Marjorie Bartrand! With a Cambridge B.A.! With a MAN! What does your grandfather say?’
‘I have not told him the news, Miss Tighe. I grudge giving the Seigneur such intense pleasure. “If you insist on learning Latin and Greek,” grandpapa has always said, “learn them decently. Send these trashy governesses to the winds. Be taught by a competent master.” Yes,’ cried Marjorie, bringing down a very small hand with very great energy on her knee, ‘I grudge grandpapa his triumph, but the truth must be told. Now that I have caught him, I shall begin coaching with my B.A., my Cantab, forthwith.’
Cassandra shook her head, mournfully incredulous. She was of an age and of a disposition to which revolutionary ideas do not come with ease. There was really no place in her mental fabric for the picture of Marjorie Bartrand, here, inside the sacred walls of Tintajeux, reading classics and mathematics with a University coach.
‘I think it more than likely the plan will fall through. We have no Cambridge tutors in the island, unless, indeed, you mean good old Mr. Winkworth from the High Street Academy?’
‘I mean no one belonging to Guernsey. I mean a person who—ah, Miss Tighe,’ the girl broke off, ‘I see that I must make full confession. No knowing, as grandpapa says, when you once begin to speak the truth, where the truth may land you. My B.A. is coming to arrange about terms and hours this evening.’
‘And how did he—how did any stranger man hear of you?’
‘I put an advertisement in the Chronique Guernésiaise, three days ago.’