Periwinkle
by
“Bring me that slate, Henriettar!”
Miss Tucker added a superfluous r to some words, but then she made amends by dropping the final r where it was preceded by a broad vowel. If she said idear, she compounded for it by saying waw. She said lor for law, and dror for draw, but then she said cah for car. Some of our Americans are as free with the final r as the cockney is with his initial h.
Miss Tucker was the schoolmistress at the new schoolhouse in West Easton. I am not quite sure, either, that I have the name of the place right. I think it may have been East Weston. Weston or Easton, whichever it is, is a country township east of the Hudson River, whose chief article of export is chestnuts; consequently it is not set down in the gazetteer. After all, it doesn’t matter. We’ll call it East Weston, if you please.
The schoolhouse was near a brook–a murmuring brook, of course. Its pleasant murmur could not be shut out. The school trustees had built the windows high, so that the children might not be diverted from their lessons by any sight of occasional passers-by. As though children could study better in a prison! As though you could shut in a child’s mind, traveling in its vagrant fancies like Prospero’s Ariel round about the earth in twenty minutes! The dull sound of a horse’s hoofs would come in now and then from the road, and the children, longing for some new sight, would spend the next half hour in mental debate whether it could have been a boy astride a bag of turnips, for instance, or the doctor in his gig, that had passed under the windows.
It was getting late in the afternoon. Miss Tucker had dominated her little flock faithfully all day, until even she grew tired of monotonous despotism. Perhaps the drowsy, distant sounds–the cawing of crows far away, the almost inaudible rattle of a mowing machine, and the unvarying gurgle of the brook near at hand–had softened Miss Tucker’s temper. More likely it had made her sleepy, for she relaxed her watchfulness so much that Rob Riley had time to look at the radiant face of Henrietta full two minutes without a rebuke. At last Miss Tucker actually yawned two or three times. Then she brought herself up with a guilty start. Full twenty minutes had passed in which she, Rebecca–or, as she pronounced it, Rebekker–Tucker, schoolmistress and intellectual drum-major, had scolded nobody and had scowled at nobody. She determined to make amends at once for this remissness. Her eye lighted on Henrietta. It was always safe to light on Henrietta. Miss Tucker might punish her at any time on general principles and not go far astray, especially when she sat, as now, bent over her slate.
Henrietta was a girl past sixteen, somewhat tallish, and a little awkward; her hair was light, her eyes blue, and her face not yet developed, but there were the crude elements of a possible beauty in her features. When her temper was aroused, and she gathered up the habitual slovenly expression of her face into a look of vigor and concentrated resolution, she was “splendid,” in the vocabulary of her schoolmates. She was one of those country girls who want only the trimmings to make a fine lady. Rob Riley, for his part, did not miss the trimmings. Fine lady she was to him, and his admiration for her was the only thing that interfered with his diligence. For Rob had actually learned a good deal in spite of the educational influences of the school. In fact, he had long since passed out of the possibility of Miss Tucker’s helping him. When he could not “do a sum” and referred it to her, she always told him that it would do him much more good to get it himself. Thus put upon his mettle, Rob was sure to come out of the struggle somehow with the “answer” in his teeth. Miss Tucker would have liked Rob if Rob had not loved Henrietta, who was Miss Tucker’s deadliest foe.