The schoolmaster smiled still. “It is not Master Sandy’s,” said he. “Did you never teach the facture of it to your daughter Nan? She made it yesterday before my very eyes that she thought were not on her at the time, and she had it done in time to pipe Amen to my morning prayer.”
“Ah! the witch!” cried the General, his face showing affection and annoyance. “That’s the most hoyden jade I’m sure you ever gave the ferule to.”
“I never did that,” said the schoolmaster.
“Well, at least she’s the worst that ever deserved it. The wind is not more variable, nor the sea less careless of constraint She takes it off her mother, no doubt, who was the dearest madcap, the most darling wretch ever kept a sergeant’s section of lovers at her skirts. I wish you could do something with her, Mr. Brooks. I do not ask high schooling, though there you have every qualification. I only ask some sobriety put in her so that she may not always be the filly on the meadow.”
Old Brooks sighed. He took the whistle from the General and thought a moment, and put it to his lips and piped upon it once or twice as the moor-fowl pipes in spring. “Do you hear that?” he asked. “It is all, my General, we get from life and knowledge—a very thin and apparently meaningless and altogether monotonous squeak upon a sappy stem. Some of us make it out and some of us do not, because, as it happens, we are not so happily constituted. You would have your daughter a patient Martha of the household, and she will be playing in spite of you upon a wooden whistle of her own contrivance. What you want of me, I think, General, is that I should make her like her neighbours to pleasure you and earn my fees and Queen Anne’s Bounty. I might try, yet I am not sure but what your girl will become by her sunny nature what I could not make her by my craft as a teacher. And this, sir, I would tell you: there is one mischief I am loth to punish in my school, and that’s the music that may be inopportune, even when it takes the poor form of a shrill with an ashen stick made by the performer during the morning’s sacred exercise.”
The whistle had brought two or three of the company back to see what old Brooks was doing, and among them was the Paymaster. He was redder in the face than ever, and his wig was almost off his head, it was so slewed aside.
“Giving the General a lesson?” he asked with some show at geniality. He leaned a hand upon a desk, and remembered that just on that corner he leaned on he had placed many a shilling as Candlemas and Han’sel Monday offerings when he was a schoolboy, before the farming, before the army and India, and those long years at home on the upper flat of the house up the street where Miss Mary sat the lee-lone homester among her wanderers returned.
“I was but showing him the handiwork of his daughter Miss Nan,” said Old Brooks pleasantly. “A somewhat healthy and boisterous lady, I assure you.”
“Oh! I have heard of her,” said the Paymaster, taking a pinch of maccabaw from his pocket, and leisurely lifting it to his nostril with the indifference of one with little interest in the subject. There was insult in the contempt of the action. The General saw it and flamed very hotly.
“And you have heard of a very handsome little lady,” said he, “remarkably like her handsome mother, and a very good large-hearted daughter.”