up and turned her back upon him, apparently busying herself with some trifles that lay on a side table; she had an inward conviction that her news would not be palatable.
“Laura, I say, I suppose you inherit ten or twenty thousand pounds? The countess dowager was good to you for ten, I should think.”
“I was deliberating how I should soften things to you, and I can’t do it. I’ll tell you the worst at once,” she cried, flashing round and meeting him face to face. “I am disinherited, Lewis.”
He made no reply: he only looked at her with eager, questioning eyes.
“Papa has not left me a shilling—save a trifle for mourning; it stated in the will that he bequeathed me his forgiveness. My aunt has given ten thousand pounds between Jane and Lucy; nothing to me.”
A bitter word all but escaped the lips of Mr. Carlton; he managed to suppress it before it was spoken.
“Left you nothing?” he repeated. “Neither of them?”
“Seventy-five pounds for mourning—and the ‘forgiveness!’ Oh, Lewis, it is shameful; it is an awful disappointment; a disgraceful injustice; and I feel it more for you than for myself.”
“And Jane?” he asked, after a pause.
“Jane has five hundred a year for life, and five thousand pounds absolutely. And other moneys contingent upon deaths. What shall we do, Lewis?”
“Make the best of it,” replied Mr. Carlton. “There is an old saying, Laura, ‘What can’t be cured must be endured;’ you and I must exemplify it.”
She snatched up her bonnet and quitted the room hastily, as if to avoid saying more, leaving Mr. Carlton alone. A change came over his features then, and a livid look, whether called up by anger, or by memory, or by physical pain, appeared on them. The fire played on his face, rendering it quite clear, although there was no other light in the room. This apartment, if you remember, had two large windows; one looking to the front, one to the side, near the surgery entrance. The front window had been closed for the night; the other had not; possibly Mr. Carlton had a mind to see what patients came at that dusk hour. He stood in one position, opposite this window, buried in thoughts called up by the communication of his wife. His eyes were bent on the ground, his hands fell listlessly on either side of him; he had trusted to this inheritance of Laura’s to clear them from their imprudently contracted debts. Mr. Carlton so stood for some minutes, and then he lifted his eyes.
Lifted his eyes to rest upon—what? Peering into the fire-lighted room, its nose pressed flat against a pane of the window, was that never-forgotten face. The awful face, whether human or hobgoblin, which had so scared him the night of Mrs. Crane’s death, and again the second night in Captain Chesney’s garden.
It scared him still. And Mr. Carlton staggered against the wall, as if he would be out of its sight, his suppressed cry of terror resounding through the room.
THE SILVER ARROW:
ANOTHER CHAPTER IN ARCHERY.
In our last number we treated at some length of archery as practised in England in the merry olden time, and in our own more practical, if less picturesque, days. But we desire to supply a missing chapter, which will supplement what we then said with some interesting matter of an antiquarian character, connected with one of our great public schools.
The “muscular Christian,” it would seem, is an animal which, as it has its peculiar habitat in our public schools, so also dates from an era long prior to Messrs. Kingsley and Maurice and Tom Hughes. Such at least would appear to be the case from reading the life of one John Lyon, an honest yeoman, who lived at Harrow-on-the-Hill, in the days of “Good Queen Bess.” This worthy person founded Harrow School: after settling in his “Orders and Statutes for the Government of the School,” what books are to be used, what hours devoted to work and what to play, and what holidays allowed, he expressly declares his wish that the boys’ amusements shall be, “driving a top, tossing a handball, and running and shooting.” The latter accomplishment seems to have held in good Master Lyon’s estimate the same place which, if we believe Herodotus, it held among the Persians of old, who taught their children three things and three only, viz.—“to ride on horseback, to speak the truth, and to shoot with the bow.” (Clio., ch. 136.) It is certain that he considered archery a most necessary part of what the old Greek philosophers styled the ‘gymnastic’ part of education; for he required all parents who sent their sons to his school to supply them, not only with books, with pens and paper, but also with "bow-strings, shafts, and braces, to exercise shooting."[1]
At Harrow then, at all events, the practice
- ↑ You shall find your child sufficient paper, ink, pens, books, candles for winter, and all other things at any time necessary for the maintenance of his study. You shall allow your child at all times (of the year) bow-shafts, bow-strings, and a bracer. —“Orders and Statutes of John Lyon.”
