CHAPTER XVIII
DECLARATION OF WAR
As soon as Winefred had eaten something, had changed her dress, and cleaned her face and hands of the soil that had adhered to them, Mrs. Marley despatched her to Bindon to inform Mrs. Jose of what had occurred. The farmer's wife was so kind-hearted that Jane knew that she might calculate on receiving prompt assistance from her.
When the girl had departed on her errand, Jane sat brooding with her eyes on the floor. Occasionally she looked at the man extended in the bed, but his eyes were now shut, and he seemed to be asleep; consequently her services were not in immediate requisition, and she was free to think over what had taken place. But her mind was in a turmoil, and she was incapable of arresting the successive pictures, fancies that whirled around in her head, to consider one apart from the rest.
To think clearly is not given to all. By some it is acquired through education, but to others education aggravates the confusion. A totally ignorant person with a limited range of ideas is accordingly often a far more valuable member of the community than one whose head is a ragbag stuffed with odds and ends, new and old, unco-ordinated. Nature has not furnished every brain with nests of boxes into which to sort its ideas; but education of a proper sort should be directed to the inculcation of mental tidiness, and not to the accumulation of articles which serve only to make the confusion worse confounded.
Herein is the radical defect of our national educational system. We stuff our children's brains with facts more or less valuable, many of no importance whatever—the height of Chimborazo, the number of gallons of water rolled down by the Mississippi, the population of Timbuctoo, but make no attempt to cultivate observation, and develop the reasoning powers. A Scots child's mind is made to digest what is put into it, that of an English child only to gorge facts. Therefore, in the race of life, he is left behind; he lies his length sleeping off his surfeit, whilst the Scotsman steps into and walks off in his shoes.
Jane was uneducated; a woman of strong feelings and few ideas, who was accustomed to be governed by one thought at a time. Now her contracted mind was in a turmoil with the crowding in of many and diverse thoughts—the reappearance of her husband or betrayer, whichever he was; the wrong done to her by the captain, as shown by Olver Dench; the peril of life in which her child had been placed; the discovery of Rattenbury's hoarded gains; the stroke that had cast him speechless and powerless before her, at the moment of discovery; all these matters mingled and entangled themselves in her mind inextricably. She strove hard to fix her attention on one subject only, but at once another started up to claim consideration.
As she thus sat, the door opened and the ferryman entered.
'Hey, Jane! So the captain is down. Just heard the tidings from his son. How came that about? Had a brush with the sharks? They have been about in the night, I hear. Where is he?'