‘As for book learning,’ cried the widow, ‘I don’t think there’s one in a thousand—no, not even among the gentlefolks—has read as much as my Emmanuel.’
‘A wide range of reading would hardly be required, though every teacher must be the better for it,’ said Cyril, smiling. ‘But I know that Emmanuel has been well grounded in a plain English education, and that he now thinks rightly upon religious questions, so I fancy he might teach well in our parish school. Of course, the first thing to be done is to get a better place for the present man, who is a very good master.’
Cyril did not add, as he might have done, that the present schoolmaster’s merits were chiefly his work. He had taken infinite pains to teach the teacher as well as the pupils.
Before Cyril had been at Little Yafford a month he contrived to get the schoolmaster transferred to a more profitable situation forty miles away, and to get Emmanuel Joyce accepted as master upon probation. He was to do the work for a quarter without remuneration; and if he succeeded in pleasing the Vicar and churchwardens, was to be engaged at the end of that time at the handsome stipend of five-and-thirty pounds a year, with a cottage adjoining the school, and an allowance of coals and candles. This, in Yorkshire twenty years ago was to be passing rich.
It is hardly possible to conceive greater happiness than that of Mrs. Joyce and her son when they came to take possession of their cottage at Little Yafford. The rustic beauty of the village, the grandeur of the moor, the blue river winding capriciously through the valley, the dark pine branches gently swaying in the April breeze, the gardens bright with spring flowers, the silvery blackthorn in the hedges, the primroses and dog-violets, the scattered houses, all more or less picturesque of aspect, the sloping meadows, and orchards full of pear blossom—all these things, to people who had lived in one of the most loathsome corners of a manufacturing town, were as a revelation of an earthly paradise. Could heaven itself be sweeter or fairer? Could death ever enter here? Mrs. Joyce wondered. Was there any coffin-maker in that peaceful village? The thread of life, spun gently in this fair tranquillity, must surely run on for ever. What should snap it?
The four-roomed cottage seemed to the Joyces the most luxurious mansion. Four rooms! What could they two possibly do with such a world of space? There would be room enough for ghosts in the unused chambers. And then Mrs. Joyce reminded her son how, before illness crippled his father, and brought poverty and trouble, they had lived in a four-roomed house just like this, with a scullery at the back of the kitchen, which might be accounted a fifth room, and a little yard where they were able to grow scarlet runners.
‘It is like old times, Emmanuel, when your father was earning his five-and-thirty shillings a week,’ said Mrs. Joyce, ‘and my house was the neatest and brightest in Saville’s Buildings.’
‘Wherever you lived, mother, the place would be neat and bright,’ said her son, admiringly.
They went out to explore the garden, enraptured with everything. It was quite an extensive garden, nearly a quarter of an acre. There were potatoes, and apple trees, and gooseberry and currant bushes, and roses in abundance. And there was room for scarlet runners, as Mrs. Joyce exclaimed delightedly.
The scarlet runner is the chief of vegetables in the estimation of the poor. That homely, useful bean will grow anywhere, and is a thing of beauty wherever it grows.