“So ye’re obstinate, are ye?” it screamed, with startling suddenness. At the same instant something shining flew through the air, and, whizzing past Matt’s ear, sent back a little thud from behind. Matt turned his head in astonishment, and saw a penknife quivering in the wall. He turned back in fresh surprise, and saw that McTavit’s face had changed, lobster-like, from black to red, as its owner realized how near had been Matt’s (and his own) escape.
“Eh, awake at last, sleepy-head,” he blustered. “There’s na gettin’ your attention. Well, what are ye starin’ at? Are ye na goin’ to fetch me my knife?”
“I’m not a dog,” answered Matt, sullenly.
“Then dinna bark! Ye think because ye’ve lost your father ye’re preevileged—to lose your manners,” he added, with an epigrammatic afterthought that mollified him more than an apology. “I’m verra obleeged to you,” he concluded, with elaborate emphasis, as Simon the Sneak handed him the knife.
“Now, then, sleepy-head,” he said again, “p’r’aps ye’ll read your paragraph—that’s richt, Simon; show him the place.”
McTavit hailed from Cape Breton Isle, and was popularly supposed to soliloquize in Gaelic. This hurt him when he proposed to the postmistress, who had been to boarding-school in Truro. She declared she would not have a man who did not speak good English.
“I do speak guid English,” he protested, passionately. “Mebbe not in the school-room, when I’m talkin’ only to my pupils, and it dinna matter, but in private and in society I’m most parteecular.”
McTavit was still a bachelor, and still spoke guid English. When the reading-lesson had come to an end, Matt was left again to his own thoughts, for while poor McTavit gave the juniors an exercise in grammar which they alleviated by gum-chewing, Matt and a few other pupils were allotted the tranquillizing task of multiplying in copy-books £3949 17s. 11¾d. by 7958. The sums were so colossal that Matt wondered whether they existed in the world; and if so, how many pictures it would be necessary to make to obtain them. An awful silence brooded over the room, for when written exercises were on, the pupils took care to do their talking silently, lest they should be suspected of copying, this being what they were doing. There was a little museum case behind McTavit’s desk, containing stuffed skunks and other animals and local minerals lovingly collected by him—stilbite and heulandite and quartz and amethyst and spar and bits of jasper and curiously clouded agate, picked up near Cape Blomidon amid the débris of crumbling cliffs. At such times McTavit would stand absorbed in the contemplation of his treasures, his rod carelessly tucked under his arm, as one “the world forgetting, by the world forgot.” Then the tension of silence became positively painful, for the school-room had long since discovered that the museum case was a reflector, and McTavit, though he prided himself on the secret of his Argus eye, never caught any but novices not yet initiated into the traditions. Imagine, therefore, the shock both to him and the room, when to-day the acute stillness was broken by a loud cry of “Bang! bang! bang!” An irresistible guffaw swept over the school, and under cover of the laughter the cute and ready collogued as to “answers.”
“Silence!” thundered McTavit. “Who was that?”
In the even more poignant silence of reaction a small still voice was heard.