“Ah, yes,” he meditated, “that is mostly the way. It is like heavenly grace. It comes to a man when he least expects it—the desire for learning. We seek it diligently with tears. It comes not. We wake in the morning and lo! it is there!”
It is characteristic of my father that even then he did not concern himself about ways and means. For at the colleges of our land are “bursaries” provided by pious patrons, once poor themselves, and often with a thirst for knowledge unquenched—boys put too early to the bench or the counter. Now my father had the way of winning these for his pupils. He did not teach them directly how to gain them, but he supplied the inspiration.
“Read much and well. Get the spirit. Learn the grammar, certainly. But read Latin—till you can speak Latin, think Latin. It is more difficult to think Greek. Our stiff-necked, stubborn Lowland nature, produce of half-a-score of conquering nations, has not the right suppleness. But if there is any poetry in you, it will find you out when you read Euripides.”
So though certainly I never got so far—the verbs irregular giving me a distaste for the business—at least I fell into line, and in due time—but there I am anticipating. I am writing of the day, the wonderful day when the sharp spur of Uncle Rob’s reproach entered into my soul and I resolved to be—I hardly knew what. A band of little boys, all eager to see the pirn-mill in the Marnhoul wood, volunteered to accompany Louis home. They went on ahead, gambolling and shouting. Agnes Anne would have come also, but I suggested to her that she had better stay and help her mother.
She gave me one look—not by any means of anger. Rather if Agnes Anne had ever permitted herself to make fun of me, I should have set it down to that. But I knew well that could not be. She stayed at home, contentedly enough, however.
I went home with Irma. I did so because I had the cloaks and hoods to carry. Also I had something to tell her. It seemed something so terrible, so mighty, so full of risk and danger that my heart failed me in the mere thinking of it. I was to go away and leave her, for many years, seeing her only at intervals. It seemed a thing more and more impossible to be thought upon.
At the least I resolved to make myself out a martyr. It would be a blow to Irma also, and the thought that she would feel it so almost made up to me for my own pain, an ache which at the first moment had been of the nature of a sudden and deadly fear.
Yet I might have saved myself the trouble. Irma looked upon the matter in a very different light. She was not moved in the least.
“Yes, of course,” she said, “you are only wasting your time here. Men must go out and see things in the world, that afterwards they may do things there. Here it is very well for us who have no friends and nowhere else to go. But as soon as Louis is at school or has to leave me—oh, it will happen in time, and I like looking forward—I shall go too.”
“But what could you do?” I cried in amazement, for such a thing as a girl of her rank finding a place for herself was not dreamed of then. Only such as my grandmother and Aunt Jen worked “in the sphere in which Providence had placed them,” as the minister said in his prayer.