Chapter Three Tom Moore entertains Teacher and Pupils
Moore held the boys at arm’s length, thus frustrating their desperate attempts to continue the battle, and glancing up at Bessie, who was still perched on the desk, favored her with a look of mingled astonishment and admiration.
“What a nice quiet time you have been having! Quite like a baby Donnybrook,” he remarked cheerfully. “Are you trying to fly, Bessie, that you are up so high?”
“Oh, Tom, you came just in time.”
“That is a habit of mine,” replied Moore, and then, turning his attention to his prisoners, he continued:
“Now, my bully gladiators, what is the cause of this gentle argument?”
“Misther Moore, he said I looked like a monkey the other day,” answered Micky, harking back to an insult that had long rankled in his memory.
“He kicked me, he did,” said Patsy, “and I gave him a oner in the neck for it, I did.”
“Red-head!” ejaculated Micky in tones of scorn. “He wanted Milly to kiss him, the puckorn!”
“Which is Milly?” inquired Moore, scanning the other scholars interrogatively.
“I am,” answered that young lady, delightfully free from embarrassment.
“I don’t blame you at all, Patsy,” observed the poet regarding the youthful belle with approval. “Are you desperately fond of her?”
“To be sure,” responded Patsy, valiantly. “I ’m going to marry her.”
“As though I ’d marry that,” remarked Milly, in accents by no means admiring.
“Never mind that, Miss Milly! An honest man’s love is not to be scorned even when it’s in short breeches,” said Moore, reprovingly. “So it is jealousy that is at the bottom of this quarrel? Faith, I ’ll settle it right here. Neither of you lads shall have Milly. I ’ll marry her myself.”
“All right,” said Milly, cocking her eye at Bessie, “if teacher has no objection, I haven’t.”
“What an idea!” ejaculated the schoolmistress, descending from her desk. “Tom, how can you talk such nonsense?”
“Don’t mind her, Milly. It’s only jealousy,” said Moore. “Boys, this fight is postponed till after hours.” Then he added, in a whisper, “I ’ll referee it myself. Go to your seats.”
“Each of you boys will remain in an hour after school is dismissed,” said Bessie, severely.
Moore stepped quickly to the desk where she had seated herself preparatory to continuing the session.
“Oh murder, no!” he expostulated in an undertone. “How can I talk to you, Bessie, if they are here?”
“Do you wish to talk to me, Mr. Moore?” asked the guileless maiden, as though surprised.
“I am dying to, Bessie,” said he.
“On second thoughts, boys,” she announced, “since Mr. Moore has interceded for you, you need not stay in, but there is to be no more fighting after school. I don’t like quarrelling.”
“Then you have made up your mind to be an old maid, have you?” murmured Moore.
Bessie tossed her head disdainfully.
“Are you sure the mouse is gone?” she asked, evading the question.
“I think I see it there,” exclaimed Moore. “Look out, Bessie!”
“Oh!” cried the girl, relapsing into fright and seizing hold of her companion for safety’s sake. “Don’t let the horrid thing come near me!”
Moore chuckled and released himself from her appealing grasp.
“Please be more respectful, Mistress Dyke,” he said reprovingly. “I ’ll not have you seizing hold of me like this. It is entirely too familiar treatment for a young unmarried man to submit to at such short notice and unchaperoned. Have you no bringing up at all? What do you suppose my mother would say if she thought I permitted you to take such liberties?”
“Oh, never mind your mother,” said Bessie pettishly, deciding that she was in no particular danger at the present moment.
“That is nice advice to give a young lad,” commented Moore, drawing a rose from his button-hole. “See, Bessie, I have brought you a posey, the last blossom on the bush. Some day, if I have the time, I shall write a poem on the subject.”
“Thank you, Tom.”
As she spoke, Bessie put the flower in a glass of water on the desk that already held a bunch of clover plucked for her by the grimy fingers of one of her pupils.
Dicky stood up and raised his hand.
“Please, teacher,” he lisped, “is Mr. Moore going to sing for us?”
“Sure as life,” said Moore, his vanity tickled.
A murmur of approval came from the children. The young Irishman had amused them with his fine voice more than once, extracting in return from their evident enjoyment quite as much pleasure as his music afforded them.
“What shall it be, teacher?” he asked, turning to Bessie.
“Oh, anything but one of those odes from Anacreon, Tom. They are simply terrible.”
“But you read them all.”
“I blush to admit it,” answered the girl, frowning at his lack of tact in recalling such an indiscreet proceeding.
“Ah, Bessie,” he murmured tenderly, “I’d admit anything for the sake of seeing the roses steal in and out of your dear cheeks. Why, it is like watching the sunset sweeping over the clouds in the west on a summer evening.”
“Sing, Thomas Moore,” commanded the girl, but a softer look came into her eyes as she settled comfortably back in her chair to listen.
“I ’d like to pass my life singing to you, Bessie.”
“That’s all very well, Tom, but the notes from your throat are not taken at the bank.”
“Well,” retorted he, cheerily, “to get even, it is not many bank-notes I take.”
Moore, after fetching a high stool from a distant corner of the room, perched himself upon it and began to sing, the school-room echoing with the clear ringing voice that was destined in after years to be the delight of the most fashionable circle in Europe. He had selected an old ballad setting forth the emotions felt by a world-worn traveller as he threaded the streets of his native village after years of wandering abroad, and, as the chorus was composed of the various song-game rhymes sung by the children in their play, it was quite familiar to the pupils of Mistress Dyke, who joined in heartily.
“Ready,” cried Moore, beckoning the children from their places. “Now, all together.
“‘I came to see Miss Jenny O’Jones,
Jenny O’Jones, Jenny O’Jones,
I came to see Miss Jenny O’Jones,
And how is she to-day?’”
Hand in hand the children, their shrill voices raised tunefully under the leadership of Moore, marched gayly forward and back, the poet prancing as joyously as any of them, as he beat time with a ruler.
“Second verse,” he said, and, enjoying every note, sang it through to the huge delight of his audience, who, when the chorus was reached a second time, danced around him in a circle, their pleasure proving so infectious that Bessie herself deserted her desk to take part in the wind-up, which was both uproarious and prolonged.
“That will do you,” said Moore, mopping his face with his handkerchief. “Faith, it is great fun we have been having, Bessie.”
“So it appears,” she replied, rapping on the desk for order.
“You have a fine lot of pupils, Bessie. I ’d like to be father of them all.”
“Mr. Moore!” exclaimed the girl, horrified at such a wish.
“I mean I ’d like to have a family as smart as they look,” explained Moore, helping himself to a chair.
“That would not require much effort,” replied the girl, coldly.
“But it would take time,” suggested the graceless young joker. Then he continued, as Bessie gave him a freezing glance, “I mean, never having been married, I don’t know, so I will have to take your word for it.”
“You deserve to be punished for your impudence, Tom Moore.”
“Since I ’m a bachelor, that is easy brought about, Bessie.”
“Who would marry such a rogue as you?”
“I ‘m not going to betray the ladies’ confidence in my honor by giving you a list of their names,” replied Moore, virtuously. Then he added softly:
“I know something—I mean some one—I deserve, whom I am afraid I won’t get.”
“Sooner or later we all get our deserts,” said Bessie, wisely.
“I want her for more than dessert,” he answered. “For three meals of love a day and a light lunch in the evening.”
“It is time to dismiss school.”
“I am not sorry for that; send the darlings home.”
“And another thing, Tom Moore, you must never come here again during school hours. It is impossible to control the children when you are around.”
Moore laughed.
“You had them nicely controlled when I arrived, didn’t you?” said he. “Oh, well, I’ll come later and stay longer. Dismiss them.”
Bessie rang the bell, and school broke up for the day immediately.