Noughts and Crosses | Page 4

A crowd of boys and even many grown men and women would
assemble and stare into the glass-house while we worked; but Fortunio
(he gave no other name) seemed rather to like it than not. Only when
some wiseacres approached my parents with hints that my studies with
a ragged man who lived on snails and garden-stuff were uncommonly
like traffic with the devil, Fortunio, hearing the matter, walked over one
morning to our home and had an interview with my mother. I don't
know what was said; but I know that afterwards no resistance was
made to my visits to the glass-house.
They came to an end in the saddest and most natural way. One
September afternoon I sat construing to Fortunio out of the first book of
Virgil's "Aeneid"--so far was I advanced; and coming to the passage--
"Tum breviter Dido, vultum demissa, profatur". . .
I had just rendered vultum demissa "with downcast eyes," when the
book was snatched from me and hurled to the far end of the glass-house.
Looking up, I saw Fortunio in a transport of passion.
"Fool--little fool! Will you be like all the commentators? Will you
forget what Virgil has said and put your own nonsense into his golden
mouth?"
He stepped across, picked up the book, found the passage, and then
turning back a page or so, read out--

"Saepta armis solioque alte subnixa resedit."
"Alte! Alte!" he screamed: "Dido sat on high: Aeneas stood at the foot
of her throne. Listen to this:--'Then Dido, bending down her gaze . . . '"
He went on translating. A rapture took him, and the sun beat in through
the glass roof, and lit up his eyes. He was transfigured; his voice
swelled and sank with passion, swelled again, and then, at the words--
"Quae te tam laeta tulerunt Saecula? Qui tanti talem genuere parentes?"
It broke, the Virgil dropped from his hand, and sinking down on his
stool he broke into a wild fit of sobbing.
"Oh, why did I read it? Why did I read this sorrowful book?" And then
checking his sobs, he put a handkerchief to his mouth, took it away,
and looked up at me with dry eyes.
"Go away, little one, Don't come again: I am going to die very soon
now."
I stole out, awed and silent, and went home. But the picture of him kept
me awake that night, and early in the morning I dressed and ran off to
the glass-house.
He was still sitting as I had left him.
"Why have you come?" he asked, harshly. "I have been coughing. I am
going to die."
"Then I'll fetch a doctor."
"No."
"A clergyman?"
"No."
But I ran for the doctor.

Fortunio lived on for a week after this, and at length consented to see a
clergyman. I brought the vicar, and was told to leave them alone
together and come back in an hour's time.
When I returned, Fortunio was stretched quietly on the rough bed we
had found for him, and the Vicar, who knelt beside it, was speaking
softly in his ear.
As I entered on tiptoe, I heard--
". . . in that kingdom shall be no weeping--"
"Oh, Parson," interrupted Fortunio, "that's bad. I'm so bored with
laughing that the good God might surely allow a few tears."
The parish buried him, and his books went to pay for the funeral. But I
kept the Virgil; and this, with the few memories that I impart to you, is
all that remains to me of Fortunio.

THE OUTLANDISH LADIES.
A mile beyond the fishing village, as you follow the road that climbs
inland towards Tregarrick, the two tall hills to right and left of the
coombe diverge to make room for a third, set like a wedge in the throat
of the vale. Here the road branches into two, with a sign-post at the
angle; and between the sign-post and the grey scarp of the hill there lies
an acre of waste ground that the streams have turned into a marsh. This
is Loose-heels. Long before I learnt the name's meaning, in the days
when I trod the lower road with slate and satchel, this spot was a
favourite of mine--but chiefly in July, when the monkey-flower was out,
and the marsh aflame with it.
There was a spell in that yellow blossom with the wicked blood-red
spots, that held me its mere slave. Also the finest grew in desperate
places. So that, day after day, when July came round, my mother would
cry shame on my small-clothes, and my father take exercise upon them;
and all the month I went tingling. They were pledged to "break me of

it"; but they never did. Now they are dead, and the flowers--the flowers