No More Learning

I am
not an object for charity. I require neither your money, your food,
nor your cast-off raiment. I am that rare animal, a self-supporting
drunkard. If you choose, I will smoke with you, for the tobacco of the
bazars does not, I admit, suit my palate; and I will borrow any books
which you may not specially value. It is more than likely that I shall
sell them for bottles of excessively filthy country-liquors. In return,
you shall share such hospitality as my house affords. Here is a charpoy
on which two can sit, and it is possible that there may, from time to
time, be food in that platter. Drink, unfortunately, you will find on
the premises at any hour: and thus I make you welcome to all my poor
establishments. "

I was admitted to the McIntosh household--I and my good tobacco.

But nothing else. Unluckily, one cannot visit a loafer in the Serai by
day. Friends buying horses would not understand it.

Consequently, I was obliged to see McIntosh after dark. He laughed
at this, and said simply:--"You are perfectly right. When I enjoyed
a position in society, rather higher than yours, I should have done
exactly the same thing, Good Heavens! I was once"--he spoke as though
he had fallen from the Command of a Regiment--"an Oxford Man! " This
accounted for the reference to Charley Symonds' stable.

"You," said McIntosh, slowly, "have not had that advantage; but, to
outward appearance, you do not seem possessed of a craving for strong
drinks. On the whole, I fancy that you are the luckier of the two. Yet
I am not certain. You are--forgive my saying so even while I am smoking
your excellent tobacco--painfully ignorant of many things. "

We were sitting together on the edge of his bedstead, for he owned
no chairs, watching the horses being watered for the night, while the
native woman was preparing dinner. I did not like being patronized by a
loafer, but I was his guest for the time being, though he owned only one
very torn alpaca-coat and a pair of trousers made out of gunny-bags.
He took the pipe out of his mouth, and went on judicially:--"All things
considered, I doubt whether you are the luckier. I do not refer to
your extremely limited classical attainments, or your excruciating
quantities, but to your gross ignorance of matters more immediately
under your notice. That for instance. "--He pointed to a woman cleaning
a samovar near the well in the centre of the Serai. She was flicking the
water out of the spout in regular cadenced jerks.

"There are ways and ways of cleaning samovars. If you knew why she
was doing her work in that particular fashion, you would know what the
Spanish Monk meant when he said--

'I the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange-pulp--
In three sips the Aryan frustrate,
While he drains his at one gulp. --'

and many other things which now are hidden from your eyes. However, Mrs.
McIntosh has prepared dinner. Let us come and eat after the fashion of
the people of the country--of whom, by the way, you know nothing. "

The native woman dipped her hand in the dish with us. This was wrong.
The wife should always wait until the husband has eaten.

McIntosh Jellaludin apologized, saying:--

"It is an English prejudice which I have not been able to overcome; and
she loves me. Why, I have never been able to understand. I fore-gathered
with her at Jullundur, three years ago, and she has remained with me
ever since. I believe her to be moral, and know her to be skilled in
cookery. "

He patted the woman's head as he spoke, and she cooed softly. She was
not pretty to look at.

McIntosh never told me what position he had held before his fall.

He was, when sober, a scholar and a gentleman. When drunk, he was rather
more of the first than the second. He used to get drunk about once a
week for two days. On those occasions the native woman tended him
while he raved in all tongues except his own. One day, indeed, he began
reciting Atalanta in Calydon, and went through it to the end, beating
time to the swing of the verse with a bedstead-leg. But he did most of
his ravings in Greek or German. The man's mind was a perfect rag-bag
of useless things. Once, when he was beginning to get sober, he told
me that I was the only rational being in the Inferno into which he had
descended--a Virgil in the Shades, he said--and that, in return for
my tobacco, he would, before he died, give me the materials of a new
Inferno that should make me greater than Dante. Then he fell asleep on a
horse-blanket and woke up quite calm.

"Man," said he, "when you have reached the uttermost depths of
degradation, little incidents which would vex a higher life, are to you
of no consequence. Last night, my soul was among the gods; but I make no
doubt that my bestial body was writhing down here in the garbage. "

"You were abominably drunk if that's what you mean," I said.

"I WAS drunk--filthy drunk. I who am the son of a man with whom you have
no concern--I who was once Fellow of a College whose buttery-hatch you
have not seen. I was loathsomely drunk. But consider how lightly I am
touched. It is nothing to me. Less than nothing; for I do not even feel
the headache which should be my portion. Now, in a higher life, how
ghastly would have been my punishment, how bitter my repentance! Believe
me, my friend with the neglected education, the highest is as the
lowest--always supposing each degree extreme. "

He turned round on the blanket, put his head between his fists and
continued:--

"On the Soul which I have lost and on the Conscience which I have
killed, I tell you that I CANNOT feel! I am as the gods, knowing good
and evil, but untouched by either. Is this enviable or is it not? "

When a man has lost the warning of "next morning's head," he must be in
a bad state, I answered, looking at McIntosh on the blanket, with his
hair over his eyes and his lips blue-white, that I did not think the
insensibility good enough.

"For pity's sake, don't say that! I tell you, it IS good and most
enviable. Think of my consolations! "

"Have you so many, then, McIntosh? "

"Certainly; your attempts at sarcasm which is essentially the weapon
of a cultured man, are crude. First, my attainments, my classical and
literary knowledge, blurred, perhaps, by immoderate drinking--which
reminds me that before my soul went to the Gods last night, I sold the
Pickering Horace you so kindly lent me. Ditta Mull the Clothesman has
it. It fetched ten annas, and may be redeemed for a rupee--but still
infinitely superior to yours. Secondly, the abiding affection of Mrs.
McIntosh, best of wives. Thirdly, a monument, more enduring than brass,
which I have built up in the seven years of my degradation. "

He stopped here, and crawled across the room for a drink of water.

He was very shaky and sick.

He referred several times to his "treasure"--some great possession that
he owned--but I held this to be the raving of drink. He was as poor and
as proud as he could be. His manner was not pleasant, but he knew enough
about the natives, among whom seven years of his life had been spent,
to make his acquaintance worth having. He used actually to laugh at
Strickland as an ignorant man--"ignorant West and East"--he said. His
boast was, first, that he was an Oxford Man of rare and shining parts,
which may or may not have been true--I did not know enough to check his
statements--and, secondly, that he "had his hand on the pulse of native
life"--which was a fact. As an Oxford man, he struck me as a prig: he
was always throwing his education about. As a Mahommedan faquir--as
McIntosh Jellaludin--he was all that I wanted for my own ends. He smoked
several pounds of my tobacco, and taught me several ounces of things
worth knowing; but he would never accept any gifts, not even when the
cold weather came, and gripped the poor thin chest under the poor thin
alpaca-coat. He grew very angry, and said that I had insulted him, and
that he was not going into hospital. He had lived like a beast and he
would die rationally, like a man.

As a matter of fact, he died of pneumonia; and on the night of his death
sent over a grubby note asking me to come and help him to die.

The native woman was weeping by the side of the bed. McIntosh, wrapped
in a cotton cloth, was too weak to resent a fur coat being thrown over
him. He was very active as far as his mind was concerned, and his eyes
were blazing. When he had abused the Doctor who came with me so foully
that the indignant old fellow left, he cursed me for a few minutes and
calmed down.

Then he told his wife to fetch out "The Book" from a hole in the wall.
She brought out a big bundle, wrapped in the tail of a petticoat, of old
sheets of miscellaneous note-paper, all numbered and covered with fine
cramped writing. McIntosh ploughed his hand through the rubbish and
stirred it up lovingly.

"This," he said, "is my work--the Book of McIntosh Jellaludin, showing
what he saw and how he lived, and what befell him and others; being also
an account of the life and sins and death of Mother Maturin. What Mirza
Murad Ali Beg's book is to all other books on native life, will my work
be to Mirza Murad Ali Beg's! "

This, as will be conceded by any one who knows Mirza Ali Beg's book, was
a sweeping statement. The papers did not look specially valuable; but
McIntosh handled them as if they were currency-notes.

Then he said slowly:--"In despite the many weaknesses of your education,
you have been good to me. I will speak of your tobacco when I reach the
Gods. I owe you much thanks for many kindnesses.

"But I abominate indebtedness. For this reason I bequeath to you now the
monument more enduring than brass--my one book--rude and imperfect in
parts, but oh, how rare in others! I wonder if you will understand it.
It is a gift more honorable than. . . Bah! where is my brain rambling
to? You will mutilate it horribly. You will knock out the gems you call
'Latin quotations,' you Philistine, and you will butcher the style to
carve into your own jerky jargon; but you cannot destroy the whole of
it. I bequeath it to you.

"Ethel. . . My brain again! . . Mrs. McIntosh, bear witness that I give
the sahib all these papers. They would be of no use to you, Heart of my
heart; and I lay it upon you," he turned to me here, "that you do not
let my book die in its present form. It is yours unconditionally--the
story of McIntosh Jellaludin, which is NOT the story of McIntosh
Jellaludin, but of a greater man than he, and of a far greater woman.
Listen now! I am neither mad nor drunk! That book will make you famous. "

I said, "thank you," as the native woman put the bundle into my arms.

"My only baby! " said McIntosh with a smile. He was sinking fast, but
he continued to talk as long as breath remained. I waited for the
end: knowing that, in six cases out of ten the dying man calls for his
mother. He turned on his side and said:--

"Say how it came into your possession. No one will believe you, but my
name, at least, will live. You will treat it brutally, I know you will.
Some of it must go; the public are fools and prudish fools. I was their
servant once. But do your mangling gently--very gently. It is a great
work, and I have paid for it in seven years' damnation. "

His voice stopped for ten or twelve breaths, and then he began mumbling
a prayer of some kind in Greek. The native woman cried very bitterly.
Lastly, he rose in bed and said, as loudly as slowly:--"Not guilty, my
Lord! "

Then he fell back, and the stupor held him till he died. The native
woman ran into the Serai among the horses and screamed and beat her
breasts; for she had loved him.

Perhaps his last sentence in life told what McIntosh had once gone
through; but, saving the big bundle of old sheets in the cloth, there
was nothing in his room to say who or what he had been.

The papers were in a hopeless muddle.

Strickland helped me to sort them, and he said that the writer was
either an extreme liar or a most wonderful person. He thought the
former. One of these days, you may be able to judge for yourself.

The bundle needed much expurgation and was full of Greek nonsense, at
the head of the chapters, which has all been cut out.

If the things are ever published some one may perhaps remember this
story, now printed as a safeguard to prove that McIntosh Jellaludin and
not I myself wrote the Book of Mother Maturin.

I don't want the Giant's Robe to come true in my case.





VOLUME VI THE LIGHT THAT FAILED




THE LIGHT THAT FAILED



CHAPTER I

So we settled it all when the storm was done
As comf'y as comf'y could be;
And I was to wait in the barn, my dears,
Because I was only three;
And Teddy would run to the rainbow's foot,
Because he was five and a man;
And that's how it all began, my dears,
And that's how it all began.
--Big Barn Stories.

"WHAT do you think she'd do if she caught us? We oughtn't to have it,
you know," said Maisie.

"Beat me, and lock you up in your bedroom," Dick answered, without
hesitation. "Have you got the cartridges? "

"Yes; they're in my pocket, but they are joggling horribly. Do pin-fire
cartridges go off of their own accord? "

"Don't know. Take the revolver, if you are afraid, and let me carry
them. "

"I'm not afraid. " Maisie strode forward swiftly, a hand in her pocket
and her chin in the air. Dick followed with a small pin-fire revolver.

The children had discovered that their lives would be unendurable
without pistol-practice. After much forethought and self-denial, Dick
had saved seven shillings and sixpence, the price of a badly constructed
Belgian revolver. Maisie could only contribute half a crown to the
syndicate for the purchase of a hundred cartridges. "You can save better
than I can, Dick," she explained; "I like nice things to eat, and it
doesn't matter to you. Besides, boys ought to do these things. "

Dick grumbled a little at the arrangement, but went out and made the
purchase, which the children were then on their way to test. Revolvers
did not lie in the scheme of their daily life as decreed for them by the
guardian who was incorrectly supposed to stand in the place of a mother
to these two orphans. Dick had been under her care for six years, during
which time she had made her profit of the allowances supposed to be
expended on his clothes, and, partly through thoughtlessness, partly
through a natural desire to pain,--she was a widow of some years anxious
to marry again,--had made his days burdensome on his young shoulders.

Where he had looked for love, she gave him first aversion and then hate.

Where he growing older had sought a little sympathy, she gave him
ridicule. The many hours that she could spare from the ordering of her
small house she devoted to what she called the home-training of Dick
Heldar. Her religion, manufactured in the main by her own intelligence
and a keen study of the Scriptures, was an aid to her in this matter. At
such times as she herself was not personally displeased with Dick, she
left him to understand that he had a heavy account to settle with his
Creator; wherefore Dick learned to loathe his God as intensely as he
loathed Mrs. Jennett; and this is not a wholesome frame of mind for the
young. Since she chose to regard him as a hopeless liar, when dread of
pain drove him to his first untruth he naturally developed into a liar,
but an economical and self-contained one, never throwing away the least
unnecessary fib, and never hesitating at the blackest, were it only
plausible, that might make his life a little easier. The treatment
taught him at least the power of living alone,--a power that was of
service to him when he went to a public school and the boys laughed at
his clothes, which were poor in quality and much mended. In the holidays
he returned to the teachings of Mrs. Jennett, and, that the chain of
discipline might not be weakened by association with the world, was
generally beaten, on one account or another, before he had been twelve
hours under her roof.

The autumn of one year brought him a companion in bondage, a
long-haired, gray-eyed little atom, as self-contained as himself, who
moved about the house silently and for the first few weeks spoke only
to the goat that was her chiefest friend on earth and lived in the
back-garden. Mrs. Jennett objected to the goat on the grounds that
he was un-Christian,--which he certainly was. "Then," said the
atom, choosing her words very deliberately, "I shall write to my
lawyer-peoples and tell them that you are a very bad woman. Amomma
is mine, mine, mine! " Mrs. Jennett made a movement to the hall, where
certain umbrellas and canes stood in a rack. The atom understood as
clearly as Dick what this meant. "I have been beaten before," she said,
still in the same passionless voice; "I have been beaten worse than you
can ever beat me. If you beat me I shall write to my lawyer-peoples
and tell them that you do not give me enough to eat. I am not afraid of
you. " Mrs. Jennett did not go into the hall, and the atom, after a pause
to assure herself that all danger of war was past, went out, to weep
bitterly on Amomma's neck.

Dick learned to know her as Maisie, and at first mistrusted her
profoundly, for he feared that she might interfere with the small
liberty of action left to him.
She did not, however; and she volunteered
no friendliness until Dick had taken the first steps. Long before the
holidays were over, the stress of punishment shared in common drove the
children together, if it were only to play into each other's hands as
they prepared lies for Mrs. Jennett's use. When Dick returned to school,
Maisie whispered, "Now I shall be all alone to take care of myself;
but," and she nodded her head bravely, "I can do it. You promised to
send Amomma a grass collar. Send it soon. " A week later she asked for
that collar by return of post, and was not pleased when she learned that
it took time to make. When at last Dick forwarded the gift, she forgot
to thank him for it.

Many holidays had come and gone since that day, and Dick had grown into
a lanky hobbledehoy more than ever conscious of his bad clothes. Not
for a moment had Mrs. Jennett relaxed her tender care of him, but the
average canings of a public school--Dick fell under punishment about
three times a month--filled him with contempt for her powers. "She
doesn't hurt," he explained to Maisie, who urged him to rebellion, "and
she is kinder to you after she has whacked me. " Dick shambled through
the days unkempt in body and savage in soul, as the smaller boys of the
school learned to know, for when the spirit moved him he would hit them,
cunningly and with science. The same spirit made him more than once try
to tease Maisie, but the girl refused to be made unhappy. "We are both
miserable as it is," said she. "What is the use of trying to make things
worse? Let's find things to do, and forget things. "

The pistol was the outcome of that search. It could only be used on the
muddiest foreshore of the beach, far away from the bathing-machines and
pierheads, below the grassy slopes of Fort Keeling. The tide ran out
nearly two miles on that coast, and the many-coloured mud-banks, touched
by the sun, sent up a lamentable smell of dead weed. It was late in the
afternoon when Dick and Maisie arrived on their ground, Amomma trotting
patiently behind them.

"Mf! " said Maisie, sniffing the air. "I wonder what makes the sea so
smelly? I don'tlike it! "

"You never like anything that isn't made just for you," said Dick
bluntly. "Give me the cartridges, and I'll try first shot. How far does
one of these little revolvers carry? "

"Oh, half a mile," said Maisie, promptly. "At least it makes an awful
noise. Be careful with the cartridges; I don't like those jagged
stick-up things on the rim. Dick, do be careful. "

"All right. I know how to load. I'll fire at the breakwater out there. "

He fired, and Amomma ran away bleating. The bullet threw up a spurt of
mud to the right of the wood-wreathed piles.

"Throws high and to the right. You try, Maisie. Mind, it's loaded all
round. "

Maisie took the pistol and stepped delicately to the verge of the mud,
her hand firmly closed on the butt, her mouth and left eye screwed up.

Dick sat down on a tuft of bank and laughed. Amomma returned very
cautiously. He was accustomed to strange experiences in his afternoon
walks, and, finding the cartridge-box unguarded, made investigations
with his nose. Maisie fired, but could not see where the bullet went.

"I think it hit the post," she said, shading her eyes and looking out
across the sailless sea.

"I know it has gone out to the Marazion Bell-buoy," said Dick, with a
chuckle. "Fire low and to the left; then perhaps you'll get it. Oh, look
at Amomma! --he's eating the cartridges! "

Maisie turned, the revolver in her hand, just in time to see Amomma
scampering away from the pebbles Dick threw after him. Nothing is sacred
to a billy-goat. Being well fed and the adored of his mistress, Amomma
had naturally swallowed two loaded pin-fire cartridges. Maisie hurried
up to assure herself that Dick had not miscounted the tale.

"Yes, he's eaten two. "

"Horrid little beast! Then they'll joggle about inside him and blow up,
and serve him right. . . . Oh, Dick! have I killed you? "

Revolvers are tricky things for young hands to deal with. Maisie could
not explain how it had happened, but a veil of reeking smoke separated
her from Dick, and she was quite certain that the pistol had gone off in
his face. Then she heard him sputter, and dropped on her knees beside
him, crying, "Dick, you aren't hurt, are you? I didn't mean it. "

"Of course you didn't," said Dick, coming out of the smoke and wiping his
cheek. "But you nearly blinded me. That powder stuff stings awfully. "
A neat little splash of gray led on a stone showed where the bullet had
gone. Maisie began to whimper.

"Don't," said Dick, jumping to his feet and shaking himself. "I'm not a
bit hurt. "

"No, but I might have killed you," protested Maisie, the corners of her
mouth drooping. "What should I have done then? "

"Gone home and told Mrs. Jennett. " Dick grinned at the thought; then,
softening, "Please don't worry about it. Besides, we are wasting time.
We've got to get back to tea. I'll take the revolver for a bit. "

Maisie would have wept on the least encouragement, but Dick's
indifference, albeit his hand was shaking as he picked up the pistol,
restrained her. She lay panting on the beach while Dick methodically
bombarded the breakwater. "Got it at last! " he exclaimed, as a lock of
weed flew from the wood.

"Let me try," said Maisie, imperiously. "I'm all right now. "

They fired in turns till the rickety little revolver nearly shook itself
to pieces, and Amomma the outcast--because he might blow up at any
moment--browsed in the background and wondered why stones were thrown
at him. Then they found a balk of timber floating in a pool which
was commanded by the seaward slope of Fort Keeling, and they sat down
together before this new target.

"Next holidays," said Dick, as the now thoroughly fouled revolver kicked
wildly in his hand, "we'll get another pistol,--central fire,--that will
carry farther. "

"There won't be any next holidays for me," said Maisie. "I'm going away. "

"Where to? "

"I don't know. My lawyers have written to Mrs. Jennett, and I've got to
be educated somewhere,--in France, perhaps,--I don'tknow where; but I
shall be glad to go away. "

"I shan't like it a bit. I suppose I shall be left. Look here, Maisie,
is it really true you're going? Then these holidays will be the last I
shall see anything of you; and I go back to school next week. I wish----"

The young blood turned his cheeks scarlet. Maisie was picking
grass-tufts and throwing them down the slope at a yellow sea-poppy
nodding all by itself to the illimitable levels of the mud-flats and the
milk-white sea beyond.

"I wish," she said, after a pause, "that I could see you again sometime.
You wish that, too? "

"Yes, but it would have been better if--if--you had--shot straight over
there--down by the breakwater. "

Maisie looked with large eyes for a moment. And this was the boy
who only ten days before had decorated Amomma's horns with cut-paper
ham-frills and turned him out, a bearded derision, among the public
ways! Then she dropped her eyes: this was not the boy.

"Don't be stupid," she said reprovingly, and with swift instinct
attacked the side-issue. "How selfish you are! Just think what I should
have felt if that horrid thing had killed you! I'm quite miserable
enough already. "

"Why? Because you're going away from Mrs. Jennett? "

"No. "

"From me, then? "

No answer for a long time. Dick dared not look at her. He felt, though
he did not know, all that the past four years had been to him, and this
the more acutely since he had no knowledge to put his feelings in words.

"I don't know," she said. "I suppose it is. "

"Maisie, you must know. I'm not supposing. "

"Let's go home," said Maisie, weakly.

But Dick was not minded to retreat.

"I can't say things," he pleaded, "and I'm awfully sorry for teasing you
about Amomma the other day. It's all different now, Maisie, can't you
see? And you might have told me that you were going, instead of leaving
me to find out. "

"You didn't. I did tell. Oh, Dick, what's the use of worrying? "

"There isn't any; but we've been together years and years, and I didn't
know how much I cared. "

"I don't believe you ever did care. "

"No, I didn't; but I do,--I care awfully now, Maisie," he gulped,--"Maisie,
darling, say you care too, please. "

"I do, indeed I do; but it won't be any use. "

"Why? "

"Because I am going away. "

"Yes, but if you promise before you go. Only say--will you? " A second
"darling" came to his lips more easily than the first. There were
few endearments in Dick's home or school life; he had to find them by
instinct. Dick caught the little hand blackened with the escaped gas of
the revolver.

"I promise," she said solemnly; "but if I care there is no need for
promising. "

"And do you care? " For the first time in the past few minutes their eyes
met and spoke for them who had no skill in speech. . . .

"Oh, Dick, don't! Please don't! It was all right when we said
good-morning; but now it's all different! " Amomma looked on from afar.

He had seen his property quarrel frequently, but he had never seen
kisses exchanged before. The yellow sea-poppy was wiser, and nodded its
head approvingly. Considered as a kiss, that was a failure, but since it
was the first, other than those demanded by duty, in all the world that
either had ever given or taken, it opened to them new worlds, and every
one of them glorious, so that they were lifted above the consideration
of any worlds at all, especially those in which tea is necessary, and
sat still, holding each other's hands and saying not a word.

"You can't forget now," said Dick, at last. There was that on his cheek
that stung more than gunpowder.

"I shouldn't have forgotten anyhow," said Maisie, and they looked at
each other and saw that each was changed from the companion of an hour
ago to a wonder and a mystery they could not understand. The sun began
to set, and a night-wind thrashed along the bents of the foreshore.

"We shall be awfully late for tea," said Maisie. "Let's go home. "

"Let's use the rest of the cartridges first," said Dick; and he helped
Maisie down the slope of the fort to the sea,--a descent that she was
quite capable of covering at full speed. Equally gravely Maisie took the
grimy hand. Dick bent forward clumsily; Maisie drew the hand away, and
Dick blushed.

"It's very pretty," he said.

"Pooh! " said Maisie, with a little laugh of gratified vanity. She stood
close to Dick as he loaded the revolver for the last time and fired
over the sea with a vague notion at the back of his head that he was
protecting Maisie from all the evils in the world. A puddle far across
the mud caught the last rays of the sun and turned into a wrathful red
disc. The light held Dick's attention for a moment, and as he raised his
revolver there fell upon him a renewed sense of the miraculous, in
that he was standing by Maisie who had promised to care for him for an
indefinite length of time till such date as----A gust of the growing
wind drove the girl's long black hair across his face as she stood with
her hand on his shoulder calling Amomma "a little beast," and for a
moment he was in the dark,--a darkness that stung. The bullet went
singing out to the empty sea.

"Spoilt my aim," said he, shaking his head. "There aren't any more
cartridges; we shall have to run home. " But they did not run. They
walked very slowly, arm in arm. And it was a matter of indifference to
them whether the neglected Amomma with two pin-fire cartridges in his
inside blew up or trotted beside them; for they had come into a golden
heritage and were disposing of it with all the wisdom of all their
years.

"And I shall be----" quoth Dick, valiantly. Then he checked himself: "I
don't know what I shall be. I don't seem to be able to pass any exams,
but I can make awful caricatures of the masters. Ho! Ho! "

"Be an artist, then," said Maisie. "You're always laughing at my trying
to draw; and it will do you good. "

"I'll never laugh at anything you do," he answered. "I'll be an artist,
and I'll do things. "

"Artists always want money, don'tthey? "

"I've got a hundred and twenty pounds a year of my own. My guardians
tell me I'm to have it when I come of age. That will be enough to begin
with. "

"Ah, I'm rich," said Maisie. "I've got three hundred a year all my own
when I'm twenty-one. That's why Mrs. Jennett is kinder to me than she is
to you. I wish, though, that I had somebody that belonged to me,--just a
father or a mother. "

"You belong to me," said Dick, "for ever and ever. "

"Yes, we belong--for ever. It's very nice. " She squeezed his arm. The
kindly darkness hid them both, and, emboldened because he could only
just see the profile of Maisie's cheek with the long lashes veiling the
gray eyes, Dick at the front door delivered himself of the words he had
been boggling over for the last two hours.

"And I--love you, Maisie," he said, in a whisper that seemed to him to
ring across the world,--the world that he would tomorrow or the next day
set out to conquer.