CHAPTER XII

SOME AMBITIONS AND AN ANNOUNCEMENT

Hilaria read on till, though she held the page close to her eyes, she seemed to fumble over the words.  She was by then at the end of the instalment, and when she put the magazine down she pressed her fingers to her lids and complained that her eyes hurt her.  “They often do,” she said; “it’s a good thing I’m not going to be an artist like Bunny or the hero of this story, isn’t it?” She dropped her chin into her cupped palms and sat staring ahead, her eyes shining for all their smarting lids.  “Isn’t it, funny,” she went on, “that we’re all going to be something, some kind of a person, and don’t really know a bit what kind?  Yet I feel very much me already....”

“I’m going to be a soldier,” said Polkinghorne, serenely missing any metaphysical proposition.  He looked forward, on the strength of a Scottish mother, to joining a Highland regiment, and was known to shave his knees twice a week to make them of a manly hairiness against the donning of a kilt.

“I shall have to go into the City like my guv’nor, I suppose,” admitted little Moss, “but I don’t see why one shouldn’t be the kind of chap one wants all the same.  Your father’s in the city, too, isn’t he, Killigrew?”

“Yes, but that’s no reason why I should be, and I’m jolly well not going to.  I’m going to be an artist like Turner....”  And Killigrew’s voice unconsciously took on a singing inflection of rapture.

“There’s no doubt about old Carminow, anyway,” observed Polkinghorne, to be greeted with laughter.  For Carminow, though the gentlest of creatures, took an extraordinary delight in all the agonies of human nature.  Mine accidents had hardly occurred before Carminow, by some subtle agency, seemed aware of them, and had rushed to the scene, out of bounds or not.  It was with genuine simplicity that he once bewailed the fact that it had been “an awfully dull half—­no one had been killed for miles around.”  It was he, too, on the occasion of a terrible tragedy in the High Street, when Teague the baker had been killed by the lashing hoofs of his new horse, who had rushed out to superintend the removal of the body.  The widow, clamorous with her sudden grief, had seized his arm, exclaiming “Oh, Master Carminow, whatever shall I do; whatever shall I do?” and, in all good faith he, his soul still unsatisfied by the view of the corpse, had replied kindly:  “Do?  Why, Mrs. Teague, if I were you I should have him opened....”

The story had lived against Carminow, and when in doubt about any course of action he was always advised to “have it opened.”  He did not join now in the laugh, but said seriously, failing, as always, to pronounce the letter “r”: