"Just so, that's just it, Martin," said the vicar. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Corkam has got a little knowledge—a smattering of facts about many countries; but he is like a parrot—he repeats what he has been told, and has never gone into the subject himself,—not had the chance, most likely."
"You're right, sir; that's about the size on it! And them chaps on the bridge of an evenin', they'll swaller anythin' he like tue tell 'em. That there young Lummis—-"
"Oh, George Lummis! Yes, poor fellow, it's heartbreaking to see him idling away his whole life like that. But somehow I fancy George will break loose one of these days. One day Master Corkam will tell him something he can't swallow, or offend his sense of right and wrong, for there's nothing really bad about Geo—at present, at any rate. I still have hopes of Geo, and I hear he is making an excellent nurse to his mother."
In speaking thus the vicar was not talking at random. He had for some time past been unaccountably interested in Geo. To his keen sight—lazy, good-for-nothing as he appeared—Geo was full of possibilities. There came into the young fellow's sleepy, handsome face a look sometimes that made you fancy that under certain circumstances he might rise even to some great height of heroism.
The vicar had been fortunate enough, as long ago as last summer, to catch that expression one day when he came accidentally upon him lying on the bank in the flowery meadow, lazily dropping leaves into the stream and watching them float way. Mr. Rutland was one of those very rare philanthropists who can resist the temptation of improving the occasion. He saw a whole sermon in the picture before him, and could have drawn half a dozen lessons from the vagaries of the leaves—some of which spun round and round and disappeared rapidly into the flowing water, others that caught in weeds and remained prisoners or drifted under the bank—but he did not. Geo had looked up as he caught the sound of his footstep, and there was a look in his face that took the vicar by surprise. It was, he thought (and he almost felt ashamed of being so imaginative) an expression that might have been on the face of a hero of the middle ages—a look, brave, clear, determined, as of a man braced for some great deed, and yet he was idling away his time on the grass, tipping leaves in the stream. A man of less tact and less human sympathy than the vicar would have stopped and made some remark, or at any rate have given him the customary greeting; but Mr. Rutland refrained, and passed on as if he had not noticed him. There was something fermenting in Geo's brain, he saw, and he felt certain it was, whatever it might be, for good.
Nothing, as far as Mr. Rutland knew, ever came of this. Geo worked hard at the "haysel" and the harvest that had followed, it is true, and he took on occasional jobs at various farms in the neighbourhood, but for the most part he idled away his days, as we have already seen. His latent heroism, if he possessed any, remained dormant. But the vicar always remembered the look when people meted out to Geo their not unjust strictures on his useless life.
In the meantime Geo was growing daily in the good graces of Nurse Blunt. No patient of hers, she often told Milly, was more carefully tended than Mrs. Lummis. Geo was a born nurse, and was as gentle and dexterous as a woman, and even old Jimmy's grunts of disapproval failed to convince her that there was "nothin' in him."
CHAPTER XIII.
RAIN AT LAST
On the following day the heat became almost intolerable. People went about their work, and got through it somehow, but everything in nature appeared to be at its last gasp. The farmers had given up any further hope of a hay crop, and had begun to feel anxious about the harvest. When night fell the tiny cool breeze that had sprung up most evenings to refresh the earth a little was absent—a dead weight was over everything. The Chapman children were unusually restless, and Tom, tired with his work, grumbled fretfully as his wife moved about, first consoling one child and then the other, and rocking the restless infant to and fro. On such nights as this sleep is well-nigh impossible; and it was well for Annie that she had the children to attend to, for her heart was heavy with a terrible foreboding. Merry, careless Annie was smitten with an unaccountable miserable feeling of coming calamity. It had been growing and growing ever since Tom had "taken on" at the well, and to-night it seemed to have reached its height, and Annie longed most intensely for morning. Never had a night seemed so long and unbearable.