The Rovers Secret | Page 3

by any means. She was fairly well
educated, having "seen better days," so she was possessed of a
sufficiency of knowledge for her purpose had she but known how to
impart it. Unfortunately, however, for me she did not; she was entirely
destitute of that tact which is the great secret of successful instruction;
she had not the faintest conception of the desirability of investing my
studies with the smallest particle of interest; and they were in
consequence dry as the driest of dry bones and unattractive in the
extreme. She never dreamed that it might be advantageous to explain or
point out the ultimate purpose of my lessons to me, or to illustrate them
by those apposite remarks which are often found to be of such material
assistance to the youthful student; if I succeeded in repeating them
perfectly "out of book" the good woman was quite satisfied; she never
attempted to ascertain whether I understood them or not.
Under such circumstances it is probable that I should have derived little
or no advantage from my studies had not my preceptress possessed a
valuable ally in my own inclinations. Writing I was fond of; reading I
had an especial desire to master, for reasons which will shortly become
apparent; but arithmetic I at first found difficult, and utterly
detested--until I had mastered its rules, after which I soon reached a
point where the whole became clear as the noonday light; and then I
fell under the magical influence of that fascination which figures for
some minds is found to possess. But geography was my favourite study.
There was an old terrestrial globe in the nursery, the use of which my
father had taught me in one of his rare genial moments; and over this

globe I used to stand for hours, with my geography in my hand and a
gazetteer on a chair by my side, finding out the positions of the various
places as they occurred in the books.
It sometimes happened that Mrs Wilson went out to spend the evening
with a married daughter who resided somewhere within visiting
distance; and, when this was the case, my studies were of course
interrupted, and other means of employing my time had to be found.
Thanks, chiefly, to the fact that these occasions afforded Mary, my
particular attendant, an opportunity of escape from the somewhat
dismal lonesomeness of the nursery, these evenings were very
frequently spent in the servants' hall, where I had an opportunity of
enjoying the conversation of the housemaid Jane, the cook, and Tim,
the presiding genius of the knife- board and boot-brushes. I always
greatly enjoyed these visits to the lower regions, for two reasons; the
first of which was that they were surreptitious, and much caution was
needed, or supposed to be needed, in order that my journey down-stairs
might be accomplished without "master's" knowledge; the remaining
reason for my enjoyment being that I generally heard something which
interested me. Whether the interest excited was or was not of a healthy
character the reader shall judge.
The cook, of course, reigned supreme in the servants' hall, the other
occupants taking their cue from her, and regulating their tastes and
occupations in accordance with hers. Now this woman--an obese, red-
armed, and red-visaged person of about forty years of age--was
possessed by a morbid and consuming curiosity concerning all those
horrors and criminal mysteries which appear from time to time in the
public prints; and the more horrible they were, the greater was her
interest in them. The evening, after all the work was done and there was
opportunity to give her whole attention to the subject, was the time
selected by her for the satisfaction of this curiosity; and it thus
happened very frequently that, when I made my appearance among the
servants, they were deep in the discussion of some murder, or
mysterious disappearance, or kindred matter. If the item under
discussion happened to be fresh, the boy Tim was delegated to search
the newspaper and read therefrom every paragraph bearing upon it, the

remainder of the party listening intently and open-mouthed as they sat
in a semicircle before the blazing fire. And if the item happened to be
so stale as to have passed out of the notice of the papers, the cook
would recapitulate for our benefit its leading features, together with any
similar events or singular coincidences connected with the case which
might occur to her memory at the moment. From the discussion of
murders to the relation of ghost stories is a natural and easy transition,
and here Jane, the housemaid, shone pre-eminent. She would sit there
and discourse by the hour of lonely and deserted houses, long silent
galleries, down which misty shapes had been seen to glide in the