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His Big Opportunity

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<h2>VI</h2> ROB Roy was not allowed to go to the Rectory the next morning as it was rather damp, and nurse was carefully trying to ward off a bronchial attack, but he was permitted to see Rob, and the latter came in looking rather sheepish and as if he did not know what to do with his hands and his feet. "What are you going to do, Rob?" asked Roy, eagerly, after their first greetings had been exchanged; "you aren't going home again?" "I'd sooner be shot," was the short reply. "I've been talking to Aunt Judy about you again this morning, and she says if you would like to help our old gardener in the garden and could get a character from some one, she'd try you. I don't quite know what she means about the character. I thought that belonged to you and not to any one else. She says she doesn't know what you're like, but I told her I'd find out. I say, take a chair, won't you. Now then, you don't mind my asking you a few questions, do you? Are you a thief?" Rob took the chair that was offered him, squared his shoulders, and looked up with a pleasant smile at this blunt question. "No, I ain't that." "Have you ever killed anybody?" "No." "Are you a drunkard?" "I hate the stuff!" "Are you a fighter?" "Well, no, not a reg'lar one. I can't say I've never knocked a feller down, or squared up with him a bit, but I don't fight till I'm driven to it." "Are you a liar?" "No." Roy drew a sigh of relief, then continued: "Well, if you aren't any of those, I'm sure Aunt Judy will have you, I told her I knew you weren't wicked." "But I ain't no scholar," said Rob, doubtfully; "I can't write nor read, and that's against a feller!" "Oh, well, you won't have to read and write much in the garden. Old Hal can't read either, and he makes a cross for his name when he has to write it. But I suppose you can learn, can't you?" Rob nodded. "You see I played truant mostly when I was sent to school, and then I began to mind the cattle soon after I were eight year old, but if any body would start me, I believe I could pick it up." "I'll teach you myself when I've nothing else to do," said Roy, grandly; "for I want you to be clever. I want you to come with me, when I'm grown up, to my big house. You shall be my head servant, and live with me always. Would you like that?" Rob grinned, and seemed to think it a great joke. Roy continued: "Of course I shall want you more when Dudley goes away. He has got a stepfather, so when he grows up he will go out to India, I expect, to live with him, but we don't talk of it, and we pretend we're never going to leave each other. Did you find Dudley very much heavier to carry than me?" "Well, yes, he were a bit heavier." "I'm afraid I shall never catch him up, he is nearly a head taller, and he seems to grow quicker every month. I grow so slowly. I think it is because I lie in bed so much more than he does, I'm always having to go to bed in the daytime when I'm ill, and that must keep you from growing, don't you think so?" The conversation was here interrupted by Miss Bertram's entrance. She had a long talk with Rob, and in the end took him for a month on trial, as she had known his father. The boys were delighted, but Roy still persisted in regarding him as his special protégé, and more than once this had occasioned a heated argument between the two cousins. "He doesn't belong to you. You order him about as if he were your servant," said Dudley, impatiently, one afternoon after Roy had sent Rob on more than one errand to the house for him. "Well, so he will be one day," returned Roy, flushing up. They were seated again in their favorite corner on the wall, some ripe plums having just been handed up to them by the obliging Rob, and Dudley having put an extra big one in his mouth was speechless for a moment. "I suppose you'll get so fond of Rob, that you won't want me any longer," he said, after some consideration. "Rob is my servant, but you're a friend and relation," asserted Roy. "He is an opportunity, and a pretty big one, isn't he?" "Why, yes; I never thought of that! How splendid!" Roy's large eyes were shining, and he gazed with tender pride at Rob who was now sweeping the lawn. "We have done him good already, haven't we?" pursued Dudley, reflectively; "only he started by doing us good. I tell you what we might do for him. Teach him to read." Roy looked very doubtful. "It is so difficult, and he seems so stupid. I did try the other day, for he asked me to; but I never thought any body could be so stupid! I told him we would have to give it up, for it made me lose my temper so. I thought perhaps he could go to old Principle. You see he is too big for school, but old Principle is always saying he likes to teach people things." "Well, that is awfully funny," said Dudley, pointing down to the pine woods opposite them. "Talk of him and there he is! Isn't that him walking along over there? Look—now he's stooping down to look at something. I'm sure it's old Principle; we'll call him!" Two shrill boyish voices rang out, "Old Principle! Hi! We want you! Old Principle!" Soon after old Principle was standing beneath the wall, having obeyed the summons. He stood looking up at them with his straw hat pushed to the back of his head, and his keen, piercing eyes twinkling kindly under his thick, shaggy eyebrows. "Well, laddies, you're above me now. 'Tisn't often you can look down at old Principle from such a superior height." "We want to ask you if we may send Rob down to you for you to teach him to read," said Roy, eagerly. "And why have not two idle boys more time than a busy shopkeeper to do such a thing?" demanded the old man. "Oh, well, you see," explained Roy, confusedly; "grown-up people know how to teach, and boys don't. Besides, we aren't idle, we work hard at lessons all the morning, and we have half an hour's prep after tea." Old Principle shook his head. "And you're the lad for making people better, and doing good to all. 'Tis a bad principle, my boy, to wait for great opportunities, and let the small ones go!" "Do you think we ought to teach him?" questioned Dudley. "If he wants to learn, and you have the time, you will be letting the opportunity slip, that's all. And moreover old Principle isn't going to be the one to help you do it." The old man turned his back upon them and walked into the pine wood again, leaving the two boys gazing after him with perturbed faces. "He's rather cross this afternoon," observed Dudley. "I s'pose he thinks it's for our good. Shall we try again? Could you teach him one day, and me the next? That wouldn't be quite so tiring." Rob was called upon and consulted, and it was finally arranged that every afternoon from two to three he should have a reading lesson on the top of the garden wall. "We shan't feel sleepy here, and it's the time everybody else is taking a nap," said Roy, trying to take a cheerful view of it. "I'm going to try and be very patient and not be cross once, for you're our opportunity, or one of them, isn't he, Dudley?" Dudley nodded. "The biggest we've had yet," he said. Rob grinned and went away delighted. He was a steady, honest lad, devoted to both boys; but especially to Roy, who, without Dudley's constant remonstrance, would have tyrannized over him to his heart's content. Miss Bertram left them alone; she exercised a certain supervision over Rob's work, but never objected to his joining her little nephews' amusements. "They will not learn any harm from him," she told her mother; "and he may teach them many things that are good." So it came to pass that reading lessons took place regularly every day on the top of the wall, and Rob's eagerness to master all hard words, and his humble diffidence, when his little teachers waxed wrath with him, was touching to witness. Sometimes conversation would bear a large part in the lessons, especially when Roy was the teacher. And Dudley would always insist on having a break for refreshments. "You will be able to write letters for me, Rob, when I grow up," said Roy, one afternoon, pausing in the lesson. "I don't like writing letters, and I'm thinking of travelling round the world and discovering countries, so I shall have to write home sometimes. You will come with me, won't you?" "For certain I will," was the emphatic reply. "I've been thinking," pursued Roy, thoughtfully, as he let his gaze wander from the book between them to the top of the dark pines swaying gently in the summer breeze; "that I may be quite strong enough when I grow up to be a discoverer. You see I can't be a soldier or sailor, but I haven't anything the matter with me but a weak chest, and doctors say sea voyages and travelling do weak chests good sometimes. Do you think I'm a very poor body to look at, Rob? That's what some of the villagers say I am, but my head and legs and arms are all right. I'm not a cripple or a hunchback, or blind, or deaf, or dumb, so I must be very glad of that. What do you think?" "You're just as straight and plucky as Master Dudley, and you'll grow up a big, strong man, I dare say," said Hob, sympathetically. "Old Principle says you may be a maker, a mender, or a breaker in your life. I want to be a maker. And I should like to find a country and make it into a nice big town. I want to do something big. I ask God every day to let me find something to do." "Do you believe in—in God?" asked Rob, rather sheepishly. "Of course I do; what do you mean? Don't you?" "I don't know. I don't know much about Him, only you often talk as if you're—well quite friends with Him, and I've wondered at it." Roy brought down his gaze from the hilltops to his companion's face with grave interest. "I've known God since I was a baby," he said. "I don't remember when I didn't know Him. Nurse used to talk to me when I was very small, and when my father was dying he called me to him, and said,—'Fitz Roy! Serve God first, then your Queen, and then your fellow men!' I've always remembered it, only you know we don't talk about these things, and I've only told Dudley. I'm trying to serve God—you don't want to be very strong to do that; but I'm longing to serve the Queen, and when Mr. Selby talked to us of opportunities for doing good to all men I've been longing to find them ever since. Don't you know much about God, Rob?" Rob shook his head. "I used to larn He made the world and me, and I know He'll punish the wicked, but I've never tried to serve Him, and—and I don't think as how I care about it." "P'raps you don't know about Jesus Christ?" asked Roy, solemnly. "Well, yes, I used to larn about Him when I was a kid at the Sunday-school. I know He came into the world to save people, but I never rightly understood why, nor what difference it makes." "I'll be able to tell you that. If He hadn't died, I suppose I shouldn't have cared about serving God because it would have been no use—nothing would have been any use, for we should all have had to go to hell when we died, to punish us for our sins. We could never have got to heaven at all." "If we had been very good I reckon we could," put in Rob, knitting his brows with this aspect of the subject. "But you see the Bible says we can't be good, not one of us—the devil won't let us." "But there are good people in the world." "You interrupt so," said Roy, a little impatiently. "I was going to tell you. Jesus died to let God be able to forgive us and take us to heaven. It's rather difficult to explain, but God punished Him instead of us, do you see? So now we can all go to heaven, and the reason we try to be good is to please Jesus because He has loved us, and the reason we are able to be good is because Jesus helps us to be, and He can fight the devil better than we can. There, I think I've told you it right. Now shall we go on with the reading?" Rob said no more till after the lesson was over, then he said slowly, "It's rather strange, that what you were a tellin' me, but I don't see it quite. P'raps another day you'll tell me again." "If you make haste and read, I'll give you a Bible, and then you'll be able to read about it yourself. Of course you ought to be serving God just as much as anybody else, and you'd better begin at once!" Saying which Roy scrambled down from his high perch and raced across the garden to the stables where he had settled to meet Dudley; whilst Rob descended more slowly, muttering to himself, "'Tis a good thing not to be afraid of God like Master Roy, but I doubt if I should ever get to serve Him!" <hr style="width: 65%;"> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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