“You are a silly boy,” she said; “but after all, you are but a boy. You will learn that I do not say one thing one day and another the next. There—I promised you a guerdon, did I not? That is the picture of my mother. You can open the back if you like!”
I set my thumb-nail to it, and there, freshly cut and tied with a piece of the very blue ribbon she was wearing, lay a lock of her hair, a curl curiously and as it seemed wilfully twisted back upon itself, as if it had refused to be so imprisoned—just, in fact, like Irma herself.
I should have kissed her hand if I had known how, but instead I kissed the lock of hair. When I looked up I am afraid that there was most unknightly water in my eyes.
“Come,” she said, “this will never do. There must be none of that if you are to carry Irma Sobieski’s pledge. Stand up—smile—ah, that is better. Look at me as if I were Lalor Maitland himself, rather than cry about it. You have my pledge, have you not—signed, sealed, and delivered? There!”
But how the legal formula was carried out by Miss Irma is nobody’s business except our own—hers and mine, I mean. But at all events I went forth from the lilac clump by the well, and picked up my full water cans with a heart wondrously strengthened, and so up the path to Heathknowes with a back straight as a ramrod, because of the eyes that I knew were watching me through the chinks in the wall of summer blossom.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE COLLEGE OF KING JAMES
I arrived at Edinburgh with the most astonishing ache in my heart (or, at least, in the parts adjoining), and had I met with the least pitifulness I think I should have broken down entirely. But I found a very necessary stimulus in the details of the examination for the bursary. I had no doubt as to being nominated, but when the results were posted I felt shame to be whole three places in front of Freddie Esquillant, my master in all real scholarship, almost as much as my father was—but who, on the day of trial, had spent his time in answering thoroughly half-a-dozen questions without attempting the others.