Boy Woodburn Part 13

Monkey Brand rounded on him.

"If you'd 'alf her 'eart," he said, "you might be mistook for a man."

For three weeks thereafter Putnam's knew the girl no more; and it seemed that the soul had died out of the place. Monkey Brand moped, and swore the horses moped, too.

"When I goes round my 'orses in the mornin' they look at me like so many bull-oxes askin' to be slaughtered," he said. "Never see sich a sight.

Never!"

Old Mat for once was glum. His eye lost its twinkle, and his walk its famous lilt. Mr. Haggard was genuinely sorry for the old man.

"Miss her, Mr. Woodburn?" he asked, stopping the trainer in the village street.

"Miss her!" cried the other. "Mr. Haggard, there's nothing about h.e.l.l you can teach _me_. I knows it all." He waved a significant hand and walked away, his heart in his boots.

Of all the party at Putnam's, Mrs. Woodburn only seemed undisturbed.

Unmoved by the gloom of those about her, glum looks, short answers, and the atmosphere of a November fog, she went about her business as before.

Boy's history during those weeks has never been written, and never will be. What she did, said, thought, and suffered during that time--and what others did, said, thought, and suffered because of her--none but the Recording Angel knows. The girl herself never referred to the point; but were reference made to it, she winced like a foal at the touch of the branding-iron.

The episode happily lasted but three weeks.

At the end of that time, on a Sat.u.r.day morning, one of the lads had ridden the Fly-away filly over to Lewes. There in the High Street the girl swooped on him.

"Get off!" she ordered.

The lad, who feared Miss Boy as he did the devil, obeyed with alacrity.

"Put me up!" Boy ordered.

Again the lad obeyed, and the next thing he was aware of was the swish of the filly's thoroughbred tail as she disappeared round the corner of the street.

An hour later the girl clattered into the yard at Putnam's, the filly in a foam.

Monkey Brand, a chamois leather in his hand, came running out.

"Miss Boy!" he cried.

There was an extraordinary air of suppressed excitement about the girl.

She was white-hot and sparkling, yet cold. Indeed, she gave the impression of a sea of emotions battling beneath a floor of ice.

"I've got out," she said.

Panting, but fearless eyed, she went in to face her mother.

Mrs. Woodburn did not seem surprised.

She met her daughter's resistance with disarming quiet.

"Well, Boy," she said, kissing the truant.

"I'm not going back," panted the girl. Her spirit fluttered furiously as that of an escaped bird who fears recapture.

"I'm not going to send you back, my dear," replied the mother.

The girl put her arms about her mother's neck in a moment of rare impulse.

"Oh, mother!" she sighed.

She did not cry: Boy Woodburn was never known to cry. She did not faint.

She very rarely fainted. But she trembled through and through.

Mrs. Woodburn paid the necessary fees. The schoolmistress didn't ask to have the girl back. She admitted that she could make nothing of her.

"Stuck her toes in," said Old Mat. "And I don't blame her. Can't see Boy walkin' out two be two, and hand in hand." He shook his head. "Mustn't put a blood filly in the cart, Mar," he said. "She'll only kick the caboodlum to pieces."

Mrs. Woodburn made one more effort to educate her daughter on conventional lines. She introduced a governess to Putnam's. But after the girl had taken her mistress for a ride, the poor woman came to Mrs.

Woodburn in tears and asked to leave.

"I can't teach her the irregular verbs on horseback," she said. "And she won't learn any other way. Directly I begin on them, she starts to gallop."

Mrs. Woodburn accepted the governess's notice, and tried nothing further.

"She must go her own way now," she said to Mat.

"It's the right way, Mar," replied the old man comfortably.

"I hope so," answered his wife.

"She can read, and she can write, and she can 'rithmetik,'" continued the other. "What more d'you want with this 'ere education?" He went out, shaking his head. "I sha'n't wep no tear," he said. "That I sha'n't, even if she don't get round them wriggle-regular French worms Mamsel talks of. Roast beef o' old England for me."

Mrs. Woodburn announced her decision to her daughter.

"Thank you, mother," said the girl quietly, and added: "It's no good--not for me."

Mrs. Woodburn eyed her daughter.

"You're a good maid, Boy," she said. "That's the main."

A month later the girl asked her mother if she might help with the lads'

Bible Cla.s.s.

Mrs. Woodburn consented.

A year later, when the girl was sixteen, Mrs. Woodburn asked her daughter if she would take the cla.s.s alone.

The girl thought it over for a month.

Then she said yes.