A Maid of the Silver Sea | Page 4

a day when Tom upset the usual course
of proceedings by snatching the stick out of his father's hands, and
would have belaboured him in turn if he had not been promptly
knocked down.
After that his father judged it best for all concerned that he should
flight his troublesome wings outside for a while. So he sent him off in a
trading-ship, in the somewhat forlorn hope that a knowledge of the
world would knock some of the devil out of him--a hope which, like
many another, fell short of accomplishment.
The world knocks a good deal out of a man, but it also knocks a good
deal in. Tom came back from his voyaging knowing a good many
things that he had not known when he started--a little English among
others--and most of the others things which had been more profitably
left unlearnt.

CHAPTER II
HOW NANCE CAME TO BE HERSELF
And little Nance?
The most persistent memories of Nance's childhood were her fear and
hatred of Tom, and her passionate love for her mother,--and Bernel
when he came.
"My own," she called these two, and regarded even her father as
somewhat outside that special pale; esteemed Grannie as an Olympian,
benevolently inclined, but dwelling on a remote and loftier plane; and
feared and detested Tom as an open enemy.
And she had reasons.
She was a high-strung child, too strong and healthy to be actually
nervous, but with every faculty always at its fullest--not only in active
working order but always actively at work--an admirable subject
therefore for the malevolence of an enemy whose constant proximity
offered him endless opportunity.
Much of his boyish persecution never reached the ears of the higher
powers. Nance very soon came to accept Tom's rough treatment as
natural from a big fellow of fourteen to a small girl of eight, and she
bore it stoically and hated him the harder.
Her mother taught her carefully to say her prayers, which included
petitions for the welfare of Grannie and father and brother Tom, and for
a time, with the perfunctoriness of childhood, which attaches more
weight to the act than to the meaning of it, she allowed that to pass with
a stickle and a slur. But very soon brother Tom was ruthlessly dropped
out of the ritual, and neither threats nor persuasion could induce her to
re-establish him.
Later on, and in private, she added to her acknowledged petitions an
appendix, unmistakably brief and to the point--"And, O God, please kill

brother Tom!"--and lived in hope.
She was an unusually pretty child, though her prettiness developed
afterwards--as childish prettiness does not always--into something finer
and more lasting.
She had, as a child, large dark blue eyes, which wore as a rule a look of
watchful anxiety--put there by brother Tom. To the end of her life she
carried the mark of a cut over her right eyebrow, which came within an
ace of losing her the sight of that eye. It was brother Tom did that.
She had an abundance of flowing brown hair, by which Tom delighted
to lift her clear off the ground, under threat of additional boxed ears if
she opened her mouth. The wide, firm little mouth always remained
closed, but the blue eyes burned fiercely, and the outraged little heart,
thumping furiously at its impotence, did its best to salve its wounds
with ceaseless repetition of its own private addition to the prescribed
form of morning and evening prayer.
Once, even Tom's dull wit caught something of meaning in the blaze of
the blue eyes.
"What are you saying, you little devil?" he growled, and released her so
suddenly that she fell on her knees in the mud.
And she put her hands together, as she was in the habit of doing, and
prayed, "O God, please kill brother Tom!"
"Little devil!" said brother Tom, with a startled red face, and made a
dash at her; but she had foreseen that and was gone like a flash.
One might have expected her childish comeliness to exercise
something of a mollifying effect on his brutality. On the contrary, it
seemed but to increase it. She was so sweet; he was so coarse. She was
so small and fragile; he was so big and strong. Her prettiness might
work on others. He would let her see and feel that he was not the kind
to be fooled by such things.

He had the elemental heartlessness of the savage, which recognises no
sufferings but its own, and refuses to be affected even by them.
When Nance's kitten, presented to her by their neighbour, Mrs. Helier
Baker, solved much speculation as to its sex by becoming a mother,
Tom gladly undertook the task of drowning the superfluous offspring.
He got so much amusement