Vivian's Lesson

by Elizabeth W. Grierson

He hesitated for a moment, and looked all round. Not a soul was in sight, and the house was quite hidden; no one could see him from the windows. The clock on the church tower at the top of the Heath rang out twelve, so he had a full half-hour before any one came out of church. Here was an opportunity for trying, for once, the toy for which he had forfeited so much.

For a moment the thought that it was Sunday held him back, but the temptation was too great. He slipped behind the summer-house, and swung himself into the branches of the oak-tree, and soon he stood on the path again with the parcel in his hand. He had never undone the paper and string in which the pistol and caps were rolled, but he did so now with fingers which trembled, partly through haste, partly through fear of discovery.

The wrappings were off at last, and he fingered the shining little toy lovingly, wondering if after all he dare not smuggle it into the portmanteau and take it home with him. If once he had it there, he thought to himself, there were plenty of places where he could hide it, and no one need know anything about it.

Then he opened the box of caps, and carefully loaded it. He knew the way—Fergus Strangeways had shown him that—and he remembered also that Fergus had told him that his father had said that the pistols were quite safe, for ‘the caps were made up of a pinch of powder and one or two pellets that wouldn’t hurt a baby.’ The thought reassured him as he raised the pistol to his eye, and cocked the trigger in a knowing way. All the same, he felt a little nervous in case there should be a very loud report.

Taking the best aim he could at the broken bottle, he drew the trigger, but a harmless click was all that followed. He tried again and again, but with no better result. Clearly the caps had become damp, in spite of the fact that the parcel had been wrapped in the old ragged cap which he had found in the summer-house. Taking it out, he proceeded to pick a fresh one from the very middle of the box, where it might be drier. Putting the fresh cap in the pistol, he drew the trigger carelessly, half expecting that it would not go off.

But this time the cap was all right, and there was a flash and a sharp report, and then a crash of broken glass.

Deceived by the failure of his first attempts, he had foolishly taken no proper aim, forgetting that the summer-house stood straight in front of him, and the pellets had gone through two of its windows, shivering the glass into a thousand fragments.

There were four panes of glass in the little house, representing, so Isobel had told him, the four seasons, for if one looked through them in order, everything took on a different tint, just as it did in the four seasons of the year. There was green for spring, and deep-red for summer, yellow for autumn, and blue for winter. The children were fond of playing here, and of choosing the colours they liked best, and claiming that window with the seat under it for their own; and Vivian had always chosen the amber yellow, which threw such a warm tint over everything, and made one dream of the mellow days of autumn. Now, however, there was nothing but a hideous gap where the autumn window had been, and Claude’s favourite, the bright green spring one, was utterly destroyed as well.

For a moment Vivian stood rooted to the spot, gazing at the havoc he had wrought with blanched face and great frightened eyes, and then he hastily picked up the piece of brown paper and the ragged cap which were lying at his feet, and crumpled them into a parcel anyhow with the pistol and the caps. If only he could get them hidden away again, he thought in his terror, and steal into the house, perhaps no one would know that he had been out.