Nancy Stair. Elinor Macartney Lane
"Yes," she said, "took it out of the little bag when he thought I was not looking."
"What did you do?" I inquired.
"I?" she turned away shyly, "I made out that I didn't see him."
"But, Nancy," I said, "that was not really kind. As he grows older he will steal."
"Take," she interrupted firmly.
"He will take from other people."
"He is a dwarf, Jock," she said, with a sweet irrelevance, which had its logic, however, in her kind heart.
"That doesn't make it right."
"He wanted it more than I did," she went on; "I don't need it——"
"That doesn't excuse him, either."
"Perhaps," she said, "if you and I, mine Jock, were made as he is we might do something worse than he has done. People laugh at him! He mayn't be right. I'm not saying that he is right; but I am saying that I am not going to hurt his feelings. The Lord has done that enough already."
And the third one, never told by Mrs. Opie, and a fortunate thing it was for us, had to do with her skill in the use of a pen. She was still a very little child, lying on a rug by the fire, reading out of the Bible, as I sat at the desk looking over some accounts which would not come right. There was the matter of a draft for five pounds, with my own name to it, which I had certainly no remembrance of ever having signed.
"What's the matter, Jock?" said Nancy, seeing my knit brow.
"They won't come right, Little Flower," I answered.
She came over to me and looked at the accounts.
"Nancy made one just like Jock's," she said.
"What?" I cried, with consternation.
"Nancy—made—one—just—like—Jock's," she repeated. "A poor lady who was very sick," she explained, "was by here one day you had gone. I made one for her."
"Nancy," I said, taking her on my knee, "do you know that it is a crime to sign another person's name without his leave?"
"How crime?"
"Well, it's the thing people get locked in jails for——"
She laughed out loud and lay back on my arm at this.
"It's all mine, isn't it?" she asked.
I had told this so often that I couldn't gainsay it.
"Wrong to write Sandy's name, not wrong to write Jock's," she crooned in a sort of song; and this was as far as I got with her concerning it.
I told Sandy these three tales, and he roared with glee.
"Her morals are all tail first," he said, "though very sound! But she'll have us in the poor farm and herself in jail if she keeps this up."
CHAPTER VII
I TAKE NANCY'S EDUCATION IN HAND
Father Michel, Sandy, and Hugh Pitcairn were the only ones who knew enough of the child to make their advices on the subject of an education for her of any value, and it was the priest whom I consulted first.
"My lord," he said, after listening to my tale, "it's a peculiar case, and one which, I openly state, is beyond me. In every bout with her I am routed by a certain lawless sincerity of utterance, or by her fastening her eyes upon me and asking, 'Why?' or 'Who says that?' She is gentleness and sweetness itself; but any attempt which I have ever made to instruct her in religion has been utterly without results. Sometimes she goes to sleep, other whiles she laughs and questions me in a way that makes the flesh crawl. When I told her of the crucifixion of our blessed Lord, she fell into such a frenzy that it brought on the aching head and fever, which you will remember caused your lordship such alarm. We have the raising of a genius upon us, and by that I mean one who knows more, sees deeper, feels more keenly than is given to most or to any except the few. Miss Nancy is a fearless soul, a passionate, loving, powerful nature, and my belief is that the only way to control her is to let her develop her own powers in her own way. It is a hard question, a subtle question, my lord; but I believe it is the only way."
Sandy was in London at the time, but the same day on which I had the talk with Father Michel I sent for Hugh Pitcairn, asking him to dine with me and talk over the Problem of Nancy.
"It's like this, Hugh," said I, as we sat over some wine of his particular fancy, "God has been kind enough to send me a wonderful child, and I want to do what's right by her. I want her to have the reasonable education of a man and to keep her as far as possible from the influence of the usual unthinking female. I neither want her instructed in false modesty, lying, nor the deception of the male sex. It is on the male virtues that I want the accent placed; bravery, honesty, self-knowledge, and responsibility for her words and conduct; good manly virtues that most women know only as words of the dictionary."
Hugh stared across at me, and there was a look in his eyes of being tolerant toward crass ignorance as he answered:
"There are whiles when you are more humorous than others, Jock Stair. This is your most fanciful time yet. There's no such thing possible, and ye can just rest by that! Ye can't make a woman into a man by any method of rearing, for there are six thousand years of ancestry to overcome. That's somewhat, and with the female physiology and the Lord himself against you, I'm thinking it wise for you to have your daughter reared like other women and to fulfil woman's great end."
"And what's that?" I asked.
"To marry and bring children into the world," he returned, as certainly as he would have stated the time of day.
"When all's said and done and theorized over concerning the female sex," he went on, "ye just find yourself back at that. Ye can't educate a woman as ye can a man; she's not got the same faculties to take in the information that ye offer her. Why," he cried, "ye can't give her any sense of abstract right or wrong. In order to protect her young she has inherited certain keen faculties and instincts which we poor male creatures are without; but from the minute she becomes a wife or mother she ceases in some degree to have a conscience. No," he finished, "when a woman's emotions are stirred you can't believe a word she says."
"Ye've seen for yourself that Nancy's different from the girl children ye've known," I said, with some remonstrance in my voice.
"She has power, true. And magnetism, true. And great beauty," he answered, counting these on his fingers as though they were points in law; "but give her a man's education, and what have ye done? Simply made a dangerous contrivance of her to get her own way. I tell ye, Jock," he said in conclusion, "ye can't civilize women. They are not intended to be civilized."
The longer I thought this talk over, the more firmly I became fixed in the belief that Hugh knew nothing concerning the matter, and that my own ideas on the subject were the best, and in less than a week I had my own old school-books down, and was casting around for a tutor for Nancy, firm in my intention of "bringing her up a perfect gentleman," as Hugh derisively stated. I fixed on Latin for her, and sound mathematics, and later Greek and Logic, and when I showed this list of studies to Pitcairn, I recall that he looked at me, with the usual pity in his glance, and asked dryly:
"Why not tiger shooting and the high-jump?"
Sandy was from home at this time, having been called to a dying wife, poor fellow, or I should have taken advice with him concerning a certain old teacher of his boy Danvers, for whom I had a great liking. While awaiting his return I took the Little Flower into my confidence, and found her delighted that she was to be "teached." There was one point upon which she was firm, however, which was that none but Father Michel should be her instructor, and the good man, with many a dubious shake of his head, entered upon his work the following week.
Often