Hide and Seek | Page 6

for I shall never again speak to you on the
subject of my grandson's education. If, in consideration of this
assurance, you will now permit me, in my turn--not to rebuke--but to
offer you one word of advice, I would recommend you not to be too
ready in future, lightly and cruelly to accuse a man of infidelity because
his religious opinions happen to differ on some subjects from yours. To
infer a serious motive for your opponent's convictions, however wrong
you may think them, can do you no harm: to infer a scoffing motive can
do him no good. We will say nothing more about this, if you please. Let

us shake hands, and never again revive a subject about which we
disagree too widely ever to discuss it with advantage."
At this moment the servant came in with lunch. Mr. Goodworth poured
himself out a glass of sherry, made a remark on the weather, and soon
resumed his cheerful, everyday manner. But he did not forget the
pledge that he had given to Mr. Thorpe. From that time forth, he never
by word or deed interfered again in his grandson's education.
-----------
While the theory of Mr. Thorpe's system of juvenile instruction was
being discussed in the free air of the parlor, the practical working of
that theory, so far as regarded the case of Master Zack, was being
exemplified in anything but a satisfactory manner, in the prison-region
of the dressing-room.
While she ascended the first flight of stairs, Mrs. Thorpe's ears
informed her that her son was firing off one uninterrupted volley of
kicks against the door of his place of confinement. As this was by no
means an unusual circumstance, whenever the boy happened to be
locked up for bad behavior, she felt distressed, but not at all surprised
at what she heard; and went into the drawing-room, on her way up
stairs, to deposit her Bible and Prayerbook (kept in a morocco case,
with gold clasps) on the little side-table, upon which they were always
placed during week-days. Possibly, she was so much agitated that her
hand trembled; possibly, she was in too great a hurry; possibly, the
household imp who rules the brittle destinies of domestic glass and
china, had marked her out as his destroying angel for that day; but
however it was, in placing the morocco case on the table, she knocked
down and broke an ornament standing near it--a little ivory model of a
church steeple in the florid style, enshrined in a glass case. Picking up
the fragments, and mourning over the catastrophe, occupied some little
time, more than she was aware of, before she at last left the
drawing-room, to proceed on her way to the upper regions.
As she laid her hand on the banisters, it struck her suddenly and
significantly, that the noises in the dressing-room above had entirely

ceased.
The instant she satisfied herself of this, her maternal imagination,
uninfluenced by what Mr. Thorpe had said below stairs, conjured up an
appalling vision of Zack before his father's looking-glass, with his chin
well lathered, and a bare razor at his naked throat. The child had indeed
a singular aptitude for amusing himself with purely adult occupations.
Having once been incautiously taken into church by his nurse, to see a
female friend of hers married, Zack had, the very next day, insisted on
solemnizing the nuptial ceremony from recollection, before a bride and
bridegroom of his own age, selected from his playfellows in the garden
of the square. Another time, when the gardener had incautiously left his
lighted pipe on a bench while he went to gather a flower for one of the
local nursery-maids, whom he was accustomed to favor horticulturally
in this way, Zack contrived, undetected, to take three greedy whiffs of
pigtail in close succession; was discovered reeling about the grass like
a little drunkard; and had to be smuggled home (deadly pale, and
bathed in cold perspiration) to recover, out of his mother's sight, in the
congenial gloom of the back kitchen. Although the precise infantine
achievements here cited were unknown to Mrs. Thorpe, there were
plenty more, like them, which she had discovered; and the warning
remembrance of which now hurried the poor lady up the second flight
of stairs in a state of breathless agitation and alarm.
Zack, however, had not got at the razors; for they were all locked up, as
Mr. Thorpe had declared. But he had, nevertheless, discovered in the
dressing-room a means of perpetrating domestic mischief, which his
father had never thought of providing against. Finding that kicking,
screaming, stamping, sobbing, and knocking down chairs, were quite
powerless as methods of enforcing his liberation, he suddenly
suspended his proceedings; looked all round the room; observed the
cock which