The Keepers of the People

659“You talk very strangely; but they are pretty names,” said Althea gently. “Beautiful child! Beautiful child! Beautiful child!” said the young man; and Althea was pleased again.

660“Let me be your poet, beautiful child,” he went on.

661“Oh, you are a poet!” said Althea, awakening quite from her drowsiness.

662“Yes,” said the young man with a sigh.

663“I suppose I ought to have known it,” said Althea politely. “But I have never seen a poet before. Are you Mr. Tennyson?”

664“No; Tennyson is dead,” said the young man.

665“Oh, I didn’t know,” said Althea. “But I have no doubt you are quite as good. My cousin has read a great deal of Tennyson to me.”

666“You shall read my poetry yourself!” he cried with a sudden exaltation. “With such a theme, who could not write?” His face suddenly fell to the bitterest dejection; and he groaned, “But who am I to write of you, child of the fresh morning? I who have soiled my soul, trying to escape from life — hideous — awful life! How shall I sing of innocence again?”

667He rose slowly and clumsily to his feet, and saying, “Goodbye, wonderful child; goodbye,” he hurried away.

668Althea watched him till he was lost to sight, and sauntered home, pondering the strange encounter. After taking Alrasch to the stables, she went into the kitchen, and ordered the cook to send her a better breakfast than bread and milk; and the cook obeyed: the servants had talked of her, and decided that she was shamefully neglected. At ten o’clock Miss Blayne came to her room; and after scolding her at length for the fright she had given them the night before scolded her at greater length for her insensibility to the scolding. Then she said that they would spend the whole morning on lessons. Althea worked carefully, now and again asking a question which Miss Blayne was at a loss to answer, and listening to her bungling attempts to explain with a docile patience. In the middle of a history lesson, she said, “What kind of people are poets, Miss Blayne?”

669“Why do you ask?” said Miss Blayne.

670“Because it would save me the trouble of hunting out a book in the library to tell me,” said the ingenuous Althea.

671Miss Blayne was again at a loss. “Poets,” she said, “may be divided into two classes, the good and the bad. Good poets lead the most respectable lives; they are models of the domestic—”