The flood-gates of his pride and reserve opened at last, all the trials and actual sufferings the untaught lad had experienced during his brief experiment of farming tumbled over Roland’s lips in a torrent of words. He felt perfectly secure in making these confidences, for whatever her faults might be, Beatrice “never blabbed,” and she loved him so dearly that all he felt was shared by her in almost a stronger degree. When he had finished there were tears in her bright eyes; and she forced Roland to take a portion of the sharp-edged seat she occupied, so that she might “cuddle to him” with her warm sympathy.
“I’ll tell you what it is, Laureate! Brother Dolloway is right! ‘Life isn’t all catnip! They’s consid’able burdock an’ puss’ley mixed through it.’ But we’ve got to get along with it the best we can; and all the matter with us is we’re too ‘all-fired’ smart!”
“Bon! don’t laugh!”
“If I don’t I shall cry; and I’m only copying my respected mother when I say I’d ‘ruther laugh.’ But I mean it. We’re smart. We’re dangerously clever, and we know it; that’s all the trouble. You are a seventeen-year-older and you’ve been attempting to do and to be a grown-up man,—I mean, to do what a man long trained to hard work would do; and that has made you feel as if you were a man in every respect. If you can just get back to be Roland the lad, you’ll be all right. And I’m not a-preachin’ no sermons what I isn’t willin’ ter take home to myself. No, sir. I’ve been that conceited an’ ‘sot up’ that I actually felt as if there could nobody take my place at home; yet at the same time there was nobody could take my place abroad, so to speak, and abroad being Mr. Brook’s study. But I’ve been a dunce. All I have to do for Mr. Brook anybody with a reasonable amount of intelligence—not so much as mine, of course! but an ordinary capacity, like anybody’s not a Beckwith—could do. I made heaps of blunders when we really set to work this afternoon, and my blessed old gentleman came mighty near losing his temper. He didn’t quite lose it, however, though he danced around on the edge of the precipice for a few minutes, and it would have gone over, I think, if Miss Joanna hadn’t appeared. It all came from my self-conceit, every bit of it. I read a few rules for the orthography and then I thought I knew it all; and off I dashed, hot foot, and had three whole pages to rewrite, besides the annoyance to my employer of the wasted time. But that won’t happen again. I’ve put on the brakes and I mean to go slow next time, probably too slow; but—”
Roland knew that the only way to stem the current of Beatrice’s talk was to interrupt, which he did without ceremony. “Do you suppose my mother would come out here to me?”
“I suppose she would walk on her head if we asked her; but I shouldn’t think it a manly thing to do.”
“Why not? I hate to make a talk before Belle and—everybody.”
“Roland, don’t think I’m hateful, but you didn’t hesitate to speak horridly to Mother before ‘everybody,’ did you?”
“I was mad then.”
“And you’re sad now. No, a King Arthur kind of a fellow would go just as manfully to make his apologies as he did to commit his error. It will make Mother happy to hear your regret, no matter how you express it; but it will make her proud as well if you do so openly. Besides, what a shining example you will be to Bob-o’-Lincoln!”