“Do you think so?” said my uncle, his face falling. “My purpose in coming here was really most harmless, sir.”
Mr. Sant looked puzzled; then went on, with a dry smack of his lips:
“I am afraid that my predecessor lacked a little the apostolic fervour. He was old, and liked his ease, good man. Perhaps long association with the place had blunted his prejudices. I must not play the Pharisee to him, however. No doubt so circumstanced I should have failed no less to sow the seed. Heaven sent me at a fruitful moment: to Heaven be the credit and the glory! This little boy now—nephew Dicky? He knows his catechism?”
“Ah!” said Uncle Jenico, with a cunning look; “does he?”
“Chit-chit!” protested the clergyman. “I hope not altogether ignorant of it?”
He was decently shocked, and won an easy promise from my uncle that I should come up to him for an hour’s instruction every day. Then he rose to go.
“You’ll excuse me,” he said, bending his brows, “but I trust you are satisfied with your quarters?”
“Well, yes,” answered my uncle, hesitating; “but—an inn, you see. It’s a little more than we can—than we ought to—eh?”
Mr. Sant brightened immediately. We came to know afterwards that he strongly disapproved of these flashy Miss Flemings, and had once expressed in public some surprise that they had not been impounded as skittish animals not under proper control.
“There’s the widow Puddephatt, ripe and ready for visitors,” he said, “and perfectly reasonable, I am sure. May I give you her address? It’s No. 3, the Playstow.”
My uncle thanked him warmly; and, smitten with a sudden idea, caught at his coat as he was leaving.
“O, by the way!” he said, “these coins to be picked up on the beach, now. There are enough left to make it profitable, I suppose?”
Mr. Sant stared at him.
“The coins, Roman and other,” persisted Uncle Jenico, anxiously scanning the clergyman’s face; “the antiques, which Morant tells us litter the beach like shells after storms?”
Mr. Sant shook his head.
“I have heard nothing of them duringmytime,” he said; “but I should hardly think smuggling would have got such a hold here if it were the Tom Tiddler’s ground your friend supposes it to be.”
Directly he was gone, Uncle Jenico turned to me, rubbing his hands, with a most roguish smile puckering his mouth.
“Richard,” he said, “we are in plenty of time. The obtuseness of the rustic is a thing astonishing beyond words! Here, with all Pactolus at his feet, he needs a stranger to come and show him his opportunities. But, mum, boy, mum! We’ll keep this little matter to ourselves.”
Thefollowing day my uncle was near himself again, and we left the Flask inn and took lodging with the widow Puddephatt. The Playstow was a little green, about half-way down the village, where the villagers reared their may-pole on May-day, and built their fires on Midsummer’s Eve, and caroused in September on the harvest-largesse won from passers-by. Round about, in a littlesquare, were cottages, detached and exclusive, theéliteof Dunberry; and to one side was the church—but now in process of completion—in whose porch the daring would seat themselves on St. Mark’s eve to see, at midnight, the wraiths of the year’s pre-doomed come and knock at the door. Mr. Sant had, however, limited that custom, as well as some others less reputable; and the fact that he was able to do so spoke volumes for his persuasiveness. At the present time the villagers, under his stimulus, were transferring, stone by stone, to the long unfinished fabric and its adjoining school-house, the less sacred parts of the ruined foundation on the hill.
Mrs. Puddephatt, though Dunberry-born, was a comparative acquisition to the village, to which she had been summoned, and to her natural succession in No. 3, the Playstow, through the death of an only sister without encumbrances. She had, in fact, gone very young, a great many years ago, into service in London, and had never set foot again in her native place until this inheritance, now two years old, had called her. She brought with her an ironic atmosphere of the great world, and a disdainful tolerance towards the little, in which her lot was now to vegetate. She had, in her high experience, “’tweenied,” “obliged,” scullery-maided, kitchen-maided, house-maided, parlour-maided, and old-maided; and she had somehow emerged from this five-fold chrysalis of virginity the widow Puddephatt—no one knew by what warrant, other than that of a sort of waspish charity-girl cap, with a knuckle-bone frill round her face. But then her knowledge of men was so matrimonial that it was admitted nothing but a husband could have inspired it. Her dictums, in respect to this mystic experience, weremerum salto the wives of Dunberry.
“Look in the pot for your new gownd,” and “The way to a man’s purse is through his mouth,” may be bracketed for utterances cryptic to the “general,” but not totheirdelighted understandings.
“A hopen ’and comes empty ’ome.”
“A man shuts his sweet’art’s mouth with a kiss, but his wife’s heyes.”
“Be careful of a Saturday morning to mend the ’ole in your man’s pocket.”
“When your ’usband talks of his hage, be sure he means yours.”
Such and the like shrewd axioms served the widow Puddephatt at least as well as marriage lines; and, if more were needed, her mastery of the exact science of nagging and of the conquering resource of hysterics supplied it. Sometimes, it was whispered, she was to be seen in her front garden viciously dusting a man’s coat with a stick; and on this moral implication alone, late tavern roysterers, lurching home after closing-time past the little wicket where she was often to be seen watching spectral and ironic, had been known to slink by, meanly conscious of deserting, and surrendering into her gloating hands a purely imaginary Puddephatt, their late boon companion.
This tremendous lady undertook the care of us with infinite condescension, and, hearing that we were Londoners bred, gathered us at once under the protection of her maternal and metropolitan wing.
“Lork, Fancy-Maria!” she would say, with an air of amused tolerance towards the little Suffolk rawbones who “generalled” for her; “we don’t breathe on the knives and polish ’em in our haprons inLondon!” Or, “That won’t do, Fancy-Maria! We know better in London than to dust the ’ot plates with our helbers.”
With this shibboleth of sarcastic comparison, she had won, not only Fancy-Maria, but all feminine Dunberry to a perspiring emulation of her gentility, so that in the course of her two years the social code had grown quite elevated, and it was no longer fashionable to dine in one’s shirt-sleeves.
Fancy-Maria was her adoring, but unable lieutenant. She tried hard, and breathedveryhard; yet her fervour led to frequent disaster. It was the management of trays that tested her most severely. If she rose with one from the depths, she invariably struck it against the lintel of the parlour door, and shot everything from it into the hall. If she descended with one from the heights, she tripped at the corner where the stairs turned, and tobogganed down on it the rest of the way, preceded by an avalanche of cups and dishes. She always did her best to keep the contents steady with her thumbs; but her thumbs, though large, were not universal, and were generally occupied in holding secure the bread and butter, for choice, on one side, and the fried fish on the other. Some people make a point of leaving a little piece on each dish “for manners.” We always cut out and left Fancy-Maria’s thumb-marks for that mysterious retainer of our childhood.
It was not long before Uncle Jenico questioned Mrs. Puddephatt about the earthquake. She turned up her nose at the first mention of it, and tittered the shrillest sarcasm.
“Lork, sir!” she said, “you’ve never abin took hin by that stuff!Andyou a Londoner!”
“Stuff, is it?” said Uncle Jenico, genially. “And why, now?”
She cocked her head and folded her arms across her chest, like a tricksy saint in an old woodcut.
“I wouldn’t a’ believed it of you,” she said; “no, not if you’d gone and took me by the ears and battered my ’ed on the table.”
“But, my good woman,” began my uncle, “Mr. Sant——”
“Bless ’im for a hinnercent suckling-dove o’cooing among the sarpints!” she interrupted, with a tight little laugh.
We looked at her quite bewildered, and Uncle Jenico was evidently at a loss for an answer.
“What ’e wants, that ’e believes,” said Mrs. Puddephatt, nodding her head many times. “Butheain’t a Londoner, andhi ham!”
The advantage, one would have thought, lay with the untainted clergyman.
“Herthquake, indeed!” exclaimed Mrs. Puddephatt, with withering contempt. “And grace took hout of it? No, sir; not more than what Elijah looked to find in his’n, and was deceived in the Almighty. A fine show convert we’ve got in our Mr. Rampick, haven’t we? Ho, yes! Tee-hee! And I ’opes as he makes it pay, sinst the loss of his liveli’ood by theherthquake.”
The amount of scorn she got each time into the word was simply blasting.
“He lost——” began my uncle, surprised.
“Ah! what would he lose, now?” interrupted the lady, acridly humorous. “That’s justhit, sir. Talked of the wicked smugglers to Master Bowen here, didn’t he? Well, supposin’ he were hisself the most howtdacious of the lot? I don’t say he was, you know. I wouldn’t so commit myself. I merely states as a curious fact that this Rampick, as was formerly as warm and dangerous a man as the best in the place, is, sinst theherthquake, become a loafer, without any visible means of substance. Ho, yes! A pretty convert, Idon’tthink!”
“You believe him to be at heart a smuggler still?” said my uncle. “Now, now, Mrs. Puddephatt!”
“Sir,” she answered, with dignity, “I thank you for the himplication; but whatever my apperient greenness, I wasn’t born yesterday. We may have our faults in London, but to be Suffolk paunches isn’t among them. Once a smuggler, sir, is halways a smuggler.”
“Indeed?” said Uncle Jenico, much abashed.
“Yes, sir,” said Mrs. Puddephatt; “just as to be born a gipsy is to laugh at the rates. A ’ottentot, sir, isn’t ashamed of his own nekkedness, nor a smuggler of his smugness. Reform, hindeed!”
“Well, well,” said Uncle Jenico. “But what makes you suppose itwasn’tan earthquake?”
The landlady laughed sarcastic.
“In London, sir,” she said, “herthquakes—as is p’raps beknownst to you—sends out sulfurious perfumes, and not the heffluvium of brandy.”
“Good heavens!” exclaimed my uncle. “But what——?”
“I reveal nothing, Mr. Paxton,” she interrupted him, “but what my nose tells me. You may smell it yet, sir, begging your pardon, about the Mitre.”
“But——”
“I’ve ’eard tell, sir, of ile wells, but never of brandy. I may be wrong; and halso I may be wrong in doubting that gunpowder forms of itself in the ’oller places of the herth,” and with these enigmatic words she left us.
But it must be said that, for all her withering gentility, she made us an excellent landlady, as we had full opportunity of proving. For—I may as well out with it at once—we had come to Dunberry to stay.
I think, perhaps, Uncle Jenico foresaw it no more than I. Without doubt, at first, he would have laughed to scorn the idea of sinking all his eager interests in this little Suffolk fishing village, whose communications with any town of even fifth-rate importance, such as Yokestone, were by seven miles at least of villainous roads. Our settlement was gradual; our departure postponed, in the beginning, week by week, probably like that of the man who went to Venice for a fortnight and stayed for thirty years. The initiatory step towards our continued residence was certainly my uncle’s acceptance of Mr. Sant’s offer to instruct me. That was, as the French say,le premier pas qui coûte. Afterwards, the offer—being extended, with infinite consideration for our means, to one for my general tuition by the clergyman—grew to confirm our attachment to the place, until it came to be tacitly understood that Dunberry was to see me through my education.
But there was another reason. Uncle Jenico seemed neverquiteto recover from the stun inflicted upon him at his landing. His affection, his geniality, his inventiveness were no whit impaired; yet somehow the last, one could have thought, had relapsed from the practical upon the theoretic. He was a trifle less restless; a trifle more inert. He appeared to bask in a sort of luminous placidity, and more and more his concern in his patents diminished. I do not mean by this to imply that his schemes for our enrichment were all forgotten. On the contrary, they concentrated to an intensity as pathetic as it was single in its object. I know at this date that Uncle Jenico was a lovable failure. I recognize, moreover, as I hardly recognized then, that a wistful realization of this fact—minus its qualifying adjective—was beginning to dawn upon him, and that he was inclining to consider his “lame and impotent conclusions” a right judgment upon him for his self-seeking. God bless him, I say! He thought to atone for this, his egotism, dear charitable soul, by devoting all his remaining energies to the task of making the fortune of the little trust committed to his care. He wrought, in fact, that he might die content, leaving me rich; and, in the furtherance of this object, his schemes were not, as I say, forgotten, but transferred. They were consolidated, in short, into one, which in the end was to become an obsession. But of that I will treat in its place.
As soon as we were settled, I began at once to go to Mr. Sant’s for my daily lesson, the scope of which imperceptibly enlarged itself from Catechism to the Classics. The rectory stood inland beyond the Playstow, in a rather lonely position under the drop of the hill. It was a dark, mossy old building, shrouded in trees, and a by-road went past its gates up to the woods beyond, in the depths of whose shadows lay the Court Manor-house and its bed-ridden old squire.
Mr. Sant was a bachelor, a tough militant Churchman and Church reformer. He taught me the uses of my fists as well as of the Decalogue. No doubt it was this constitution of his which made such way with the villagers, for Englishmen respect piety the better for its being knocked into them. I took my share of his excellent influence, and I trust it helped to make a man of me. You shall hear by-and-by about the first practical use to which I put it.
He had the motto from Cicero framed and hung over the mantelpiece in his study. I will quote it to you, because it speaks the man more perfectly than I can do.Quidquid agas, agere pro viribus! Whatever you do, to do with your whole strength—that was it. It was a maxim very apt to one whose own strength, both of will and body, was of tempered steel.
One among his many characteristic innovations was “The Feast of Lanterns,” as he called it. A lecture, to combine instruction with amusement, would be called for delivery in the church after dark. Whosoever listed might, on a single condition, attend this. He would find set up, spectrally discernible in the chancel, which, like the rest of the building, would be unlighted, a screen of white linen, on which had been roughly sketched in crayon, by the courageous lecturer himself, a number of objects—to become, in their turn, subjects—which might range, say, from a leg of mutton to the dome of St. Paul’s. The condition of attendance was simply that each comer should bring his or her own lantern, with the natural consequence that the greater the company the brighter the illumination. Now, with the first arrival began hymns, and were so continued until sufficient lights were congregated to reveal the drawings on the screen, a right identification of any one of which, by any member of the audience, at the close of any verse, put a period to the singing and started a disquisition on the object named. It must be said that the identification was not always accurate, in which case the singing was continued. For religious and artistic fervour are not necessarily associated, and the splendid daring which Mr. Sant put into his work sometimes obscured its intentions, as when his bellows, designed to introduce a dissertation on pulmonics, were taken for a ham. But the vigour and resourcefulness of the lecturer neither allowed animpasse, nor, while he was always quite ready to join in the laughter over his own artistic shortcomings, permitted criticism to degenerate into fooling. He did not object to laughter; on the contrary (I am afraid it will scandalize some people), he credited the Almighty with an almighty sense of humour, only he insisted upon its being tempered to the sacredness of the place in which it was evoked. And, for the rest, he had a fund of bright and ready information at his constant disposal.
Such is an example of his methods, and, if any pious reactionaries object, I can only say that in the result it was educational; that it won tavern-loafers to at least one wholesome evening in the week; that, in short, it attained such popularity, that any dissipated seceder attempting to sneak out of the church, and thereby obscure the light by so much as the loss of a taper, would be roughly grabbed back by his fellows, and forced, willy-nilly, to hear the lecture out.
Mr. Sant, to sum him up, was a zealot without being a bigot, and a devoted servant to his Master without prejudice to human nature. He was also a capable boxer. I came to love as much as to respect him.
Fora fortnight succeeding our arrival the weather remained calm and bright, so that Uncle Jenico and I were able to explore the locality with great comfort and satisfaction. The coast, which we followed up both north and south for miles, was extremely desolate and unvisited, though bearing at intervals all along it the traces of former settlements. It would seem to have been quite thickly populated once, during a period which dated probably from the incursions, first, of the Roman legions, and, after, of those salt sea-wolves who preferred squatting round the fringes of their conquered island—with the open door of the sea beside them, and its smell in their briny nostrils—to penetrating into the traps of the close-shut valleys. Later, Christianity had come to fret these windy, foam-whipped settlements with pinnacles, and monastic walls, and stone fanes with jewelled windows and airy bell-towers, so that church might peal to church all down this long front line of the position it had won. But corruption creeping in with prosperity, and lawlessness with the tides, God had withdrawn His countenance from the temples that abused His service, and had permitted the ocean to break in their defences and one by one devour them. The priest who had evaded his vows had ages ago tucked up his cassock and fled; the parson who succeeded him, and to the reversion of his benefices, could not so hoodwink Heaven by taking his tithes of smuggled tobacco and brandy, as to stay for one season the hunger of the gluttonous waters. Year by year, century by century, the storms had fed on these devoted sand-built coasts, and were still feeding when we came to know them. Towns and once-flourishing colonies had disappeared as utterly as if they had never existed. Not only they, but the very soil on which they had been planted, paved the floor of the ocean for miles out. There were legends of foundered bells rung by unseen mermen at incredible distances from shore. There were stories of treasure chests and sculptured marbles revealed to storm-belated fishermen in the deep troughs of monstrous, bottom-scouring waves. So far away as the Weary Sands themselves, it was said, traces of the ancient Dunberry could be spelt out, in calm seasons, by those who gazed intently enough and long enough into the green, deep waters. It was a fable, probably, in a land of fables; yet it served to emphasize the wreck of time, and will show upon what a haunted border-land of ghosts we had come to make our home. The modern village itself was old. How ancient, then, those grey ruins on the cliff, which had survived to see the last of the glory, of which they had once been a part, claimed by the deep, and their own hoary traditions engulfed into the pettier traditions of a little clan!
These same ruins consisted of the great tower of the abbey, with a mass of tumbled and complicated masonry at its foot; of the line of the nave, picked out in an avenue of shattered arches which ran seawards until stopped by the upward and outward sweep of the cliff; and, finally, of a maze of huge fragments, mostly on the inland side, which marked the sites of monastic buildings, lazar house, boundary walls, and so forth. Elsewhere were traces of aisles, cloisters and supernumerary offices uncountable, the whole buttressed with ivy. But the most significant ruin of all, to my thinking, was one which stood under the cliff, and for three-fourths of its depth apart from it. This was no other than the abbey well, which generations of storms had gnawed out of its deep bed in the ground without being able to crunch and devour the sturdy relic itself. There it stood, a Titan of the vanished race, sprouting stubborn from the littered sand below, cemented, as it seemed, by the very drift which was yearly flung upon it to destroy. Exposed and isolated, choked with parching rubbish as it was, how thrilling was the thought of the monks who had once drunk from it; of the waters it had drained from the hill; of the hill itself with its one-time springs lying under the salt sea! It was the very gaunt dead monument to the desolation of this land, and as such, it seemed, would endure when all else was vanished. The storms which took the rest stone by stone, could do no more than stone by stone reveal this; the earthquake, which at a blow had rent the massive tower and tumbled half the remaining walls, had left this unshaken. It was a wonderful and impressive relic.
The first time I had entered among the ruins was by myself. I climbed the slope early on the morning before breakfast, and stood in the midst of them, thrilled and awestricken. A little grassy valley divided me from the hill which concealed the village, of which not so much as a roof was visible from where I stood. I seemed entirely cut off and alone, a pigmy in the stupendous shadows of these “ruined choirs.” The ground swept in a steepish curve to the cliff edge, and again, inland, in one slightly shallower. These were the “Old and New Testaments” of the Mitre; and in the “Valley of Knowledge” that lay between, was built the abbey, its monastery, chapter-house, refectory and other buildings taking and topping the western slope, which, on its further side, went shelving down to theCemeterium Fratrum, and the confines of the old grounds.
I poked about among the shattered stones with a feeling between fear and curiosity. I could tell by the fresh edges of the rents, and the way in which little avalanches of mortar were constantly falling with a whispering sound, that much of the devastation was recent. The tower had been breached by the earthquake all down its seaward front, opening a monstrous gap from which a cataract of stones had thundered, and piled themselves in foam, as it were, at the foot. In one place, near the cliff slope, a mighty plinth had been heaved on to its side, and I saw the mould on the under surface of it yet grooved with the tracks of slugs and beetles. It had sunk, with the mass of masonry cemented to it, two-thirds of its breadth into the earth, and all about the ground was strangely wryed, and distorted, and cracked, and bubbled up into mounds, as if here the underheaval had made itself peculiarly felt. I was gazing on it half-fascinated, when, happening to raise my eyes, I started to see other regarding me fixedly from a face which seemed to have sprouted from the earth.
I gave a little cry and uttered Mr. Rampick’s name. At the word, the man himself rose to his height, from the position in which it appeared he had been crouching, and ascended the last steps of a cliff pathway, of the existence of which I had not known. He came up to me, rubbing the back of his bony hand across his mouth.
“Come to seefuryourself, sir?” he said, in his breathless, fawning way.
“Yes,” I answered. “It was here, wasn’t it?”
He stamped with his great foot.
“Here, or hereabouts,” he said, “they lays under—assupposed—each with his brace o’ runlets.”
It was a fearful but thrilling thought.
“Why don’t they dig for them?” I whispered.
He gazed at me a moment, breathing hard. His eyes seemed blacker, the rims round them more livid than I had yet noticed.
“What!” he cried, so hoarsely that his voice cracked. “Displace these here sacred ruinsfurthe likes of they! The Lord, sir—beggingyourpardon—set His own trap for theminHis own way; and it been’t fur us to rise His dead.MayI make so bold to axeifyour uncle knows you’re out?”
I felt the insolence of the question, but was too young to resent it.
“No!” I exclaimed, surprised.
“Ah!” he said. “I lay he won’t be best pleased, sir,withhumility. This here hill, sir,ifall what’s said is Gospel true—is risky ground to walk fur them as knows it not, nor its toppling stones, sir,norits hidden abscesses. I’d go home, sir,ifI was you, with favour, sir.”
I was offended, but a little frightened also. Blushing scarlet, I turned away, without a word, and ran down the slope homewards.
I told Uncle Jenico of my adventure and encounter. To my further surprise he commended Mr. Rampick’s warning.
“What should I do, if anything happened to you, Richard, when I was not by?” he pleaded.
There was a note of emotion in his voice which touched me, and I promised I would never seek the Mitre again out of his company. I meant it when I said it; but, alas! the venturesomeness of youth led me later on, I am ashamed to confess, to disregard my promise.
That was not till long after, however; and in the meanwhile the weather remaining fine, as I have said, we had plenty of opportunity for exploring the district. Not a day was allowed to pass, moreover, without our investigating at least once in the twelve hours, a section of the coast. Uncle Jenico would prod all the way, with his thick stick, into the moraine of shingle which ran along the shore above the high tide mark. At these times he would be very absent-minded, answering my questions at random, and I knew that he had Morant and his golden bushels in his thoughts. He never found anything, however, and each evening would look up at the sky and predict stormy weather with a sham deprecation of the inconvenience it would be to us.
But at last the weather really did break, and dark evening settled in, with a high wind and rising sea. It blew a gale all night and throughout the following day, and Uncle Jenico bemoaned our detention in the house with a gratified face.
It was not until the second morning that it had cleared sufficiently to enable us to go out, which we did immediately after breakfast. The sun was blinking waterily, and the surf pounding yellow as we came down to the beach; but the wind had fallen and the rain ceased, which was enough for us.
Uncle Jenico, with his blue coat fastened tightly across his chest, was looking extraordinarily swollen, I thought, until the reason was explained to me. We had not gone far, when—first glancing all about him with an air of twinkling mystery—he cautiously unbuttoned, and revealed, neatly folded upon his chest, a little bushel sack such as they use for potatoes.
“Hush!” he whispered, though not a soul was in sight; “the difficulty will be to avoid observation when we bring it back full. I dare say they’re honest here, Richard; but it’s a wrong business principle to presume upon a sentiment. We must dine and sup out—I’ve brought some sandwiches with me, and Mr. Sant will excuse you for once—and return with our booty after dark.”
“Do you expect to fillthat, Uncle?” I said, aghast for all my infancy.
“Well,” he answered, laughing joyously but privately, “I hope notquite, or it would puzzle us to carry it. But, in common wisdom we must make the best we can of this rare opportunity.”
He hung the sack over his arm, and we started off. The storm had certainly overturned the shingle, and scattered much of it abroad in a tangle of seaweed and dead dog-fish. For hours we hunted on, groping sedulously among the litter; and at last, late in the afternoon, we found a penny. At least,Iwas convinced it was one, being intimately acquainted, like most boys, with the coin. But Uncle Jenico would not hear of it. He was shaking with excitement as he examined it. It was so rubbed by the action of the waves as to exhibit nothing but a near-obliterated bust, which I was sure was that of our late lamented King. My uncle, however, pointed out to me distinct traces, though I could not see them, of a Latin inscription, and was jubilant over the find. It did not make much impression on the sack, it is true; but he was careful to point out to me that the value of a nugget, such as it would take two men to carry, might all be contained in a diamond which one could slip into one’s waistcoat pocket. It was not so much quantity we needed, he said, as quality; and he was quite satisfied, entirely so, with the result of our day’s exploration.
I was glad of this, at least, being dog-tired long before the sun-setting, as it justified us in going home to supper. But my faith in Morant, I am afraid, was already sadly shaken.
Itwas that obnoxious penny, I believe, which was responsible for my uncle’s continued pursuit of his new Lobby, until the hobby itself became an obsession. If we had come home that first day empty-handed, I have little doubt but that his baulked imagination would have found itself some other and more practical outlet. As it was, the discovery was held by him to justify every proverb which values itself upon small beginnings. He was so little cast down by its meagreness, that there was no limit to the golden dreams of which he made it the basis. Most crazes, I fancy, are so built upon a pennyworth of fact.
He did not take out the sack again, but replaced it by a sponge-bag, and the bag, later, by a stout leathern purse. Finally, he decided that his trouser-pockets would serve all our needs, with the additional advantage that our hands would be freer thereby, and the risk of comment on our proceedings avoided. It may have been, for it had certainly little to feed upon. During those early weeks, beyond some scraps of old iron, we found nothing.
At first, it must be said, Uncle Jenico was not so entirely possessed by his infatuation, but he found time to experiment in other directions. For days he made our lodgings almost uninhabitable by boiling and decomposing seaweed, until Mrs. Puddephatt complained that her reputation was suffering by the incessant “hodour of ’ot putrid fish” which emanated from her premises.
The patent, upon which he had expected to realize, turned out, after all, a disappointment, and had never, it appeared, been regarded as other than a joke by the man who, he had supposed, had been going to buy it. He was a little disconsolate at first, but soon brightened up when he thought of the potential riches lying under the shingle.
“We’lllaugh at ’em all by-and-by, Richard,” he said. “What a joke it’ll be when we’ve got our own capital to work upon, and these ninnies find out the good things they’ve missed. But we won’t be relentless, my boy, and disinherit the honest labourer because of the shortsightedness of his employer. Work for the good of mankind, remember, and you work for your own.”
Fine weather, at this time, made him thoughtful and restless. It was only when the wind blew and the waves rose that he cheered up and became excited like a seagull. Then he would laugh aloud, and button up his coat and, telling me to follow him when my lesson was over, limp off to the beach, and there untiringly weave his ropes of sand, growing more and more absorbed in his task the faster it melted beneath his hands. The coins were there, he was convinced; and it only needed patience and luck (and he plumed himself upon his being rather a spoilt child of the latter) to hit upon the deposits.
In the meanwhile I was going to my daily lesson, and getting absorbed in my own way. Mr. Sant was a delectable tutor, inspiring and invigorating, and by-and-by, unconsciously to me, my hour extended itself to two, and sometimes more. So months passed, and then a year, and I was nine.
One morning I was on my way to the rectory when I made a notable acquaintance. I had to pass, on my setting out, the new school, which was now in full activity, and battling its first successful steps in the moral and intellectual reformation of infant Dunberry. The children were generally trooping to the bell-call as I started, and I have no doubt that the sense of superiority my consciousness of private tuition gave me made itself apparent to some of them in my air and demeanour.
A little beyond the Playstow the road to the rectory, and to the Court on the hill, ran up obliquely through the village side, passing very soon into privacy and loneliness. I had almost reached the rectory palings when I saw a boy start out, at sight of me, from the shadow of them and come swiftly on, as if to accost me while yet short of shelter. He was about my own age or a little older, and had a round, freckled face, with dark red hair curled as tight as astrakhan, and a very fat little pug-nose. He was dressed in a brown velveteen jacket and strong corduroy breeches and leathern gaiters, and he looked what, in fact, he was, a miniature gamekeeper. I knew him well enough by sight, having passed him for the last two or three weeks near the school-house, and always, I verily believe, with an odd little tremor of foreboding in my inside. He had proved, on inquiry, to be the only child of Harrier, the squire’s gamekeeper, from whom, and that only on his master’s initiative, a scowling consent to his son’s attending the new school had been wrung by Mr. Sant. But the boy came, though near as rebellious as his father, and had even, until this morning, arrived punctual.
Now he advanced, swaggering and whistling, with his hands in his breeches’ pockets, and a fine air of abstraction. I tried to dodge him, but for all that, in spite of his pretended preoccupation, he brought his shoulder smack against mine with a force that knocked me sprawling, and, from the mere pain of it, drove the angry tears to my eyes.
He wheeled round at once, as I gathered myself up, with a mock apology so impudent that I longed to hit him, but was deterred by the front he showed me. He stood square, balancing on his heels, as tight-knit a young mischief as health and muscle could produce.
“Mighty!” he said, with a pretence of being scared. “What I done, Lor? Blest if I ain’t knocked into the dirt the young gen’leman what treats we for sich!”
Then my uneasy consciousness understood the nature of this retaliation.
“You did it on purpose,” I said sullenly, trying not to whimper as I dusted myself.
“Me!” he cried, in beautiful astonishment. “Why, howsomever can you charge it to me, master, walking with your nose in the air?”
“It’s you that has your nose in the air,” I retaliated malevolently.
He flushed through his tan, and squared up to me.
“Say that agen!” he hissed, lifting his lip like a weasel.
“Once is enough,” I answered.
He danced about me, making play in the air with his fists.
“Is it!” he gasped, spasmodic. “O yus, o’ course!—I’ll larn you—you dursen’t—foonk!—private poople—yah!—take your lickun, then!”
Something must have stirred in the garden at the moment, for he suddenly flounced round and off, his mouth drawn down contemptuous, and his chin stuck out. But I had not done with him by any means.
Mr. Sant received me that morning, I thought, oddly, and made no allusion to my battered appearance. Neither did I, at which, perhaps, he cleared a little.
The next morning Harry Harrier—for such was the young sportsman’s name—met me as before. I gave him the path, though with anger in my heart; and he openly jeered at me as he went by. The following day it was the same, and for many days after. He would have risked, I believe, ten times the punishment he deserved, and got, for being late, rather than baulk himself of this recurrent treat. Presently he altered his tactics in such a way as to eat his cake and have it, so to speak. He did not pass me one day at the usual hour, and I confess I breathed relief, for all my own inefficiency was gall to me. Mr. Sant’s manner, as was usual now, was chilling almost to repulsion. I was very unhappy. I had grown to brood on my grievance until it almost choked me. Dunberry was becoming to me a miserable Siberia, and I longed to be out of it, and hinted as much to my uncle. But, to my dejection, he would not understand—could not, perhaps, as pride had always prevented me from revealing my difficulty to him or to any of my real friends. Moreover, the picking-up of some trumpery oddments on the beach had by now established him unshakably in his craze, which had been further confirmed by the action of certain unscrupulous Dunberryites in palming off on him some faked-up coins, which I could have sworn had never been minted out of my own generation.
The relief I enjoyed on this particular morning was, however, delusive. The cunning little gamekeeper had got himself credited with punctuality, only that he might descend upon me on his return journey as I left the rectory. Nor was this the worst; for he came reinforced by half a dozen schoolfellows, the dirty little parasites of his corduroy lordship. I found them awaiting me at a quiet turn of the road, and, before I knew it, was being hustled and insulted. I pushed my way through, however, with a lump swelling in my throat, and was trying to stifle the inclination to run, when a cry from Harrier brought me to the roundabout with a scarlet face.
“Cowardy-cowardy-custard! Dursen’t peach to old Crazy, what broke his leg a-kicking of yer!”
I rushed back and faced him.
“He broke his leg falling from a parryshoot. He isn’t crazy. I’m not such a coward as you!” I blazed out in a breath. I was bristling and tingling all over. The worm had turned at last.
Harry Harrier, whistling softly, took his hands from his pockets.
“Yus?” he said. “Anythink else?”
“You’re a liar!” I answered, boiling; “you’re a coward and liar!”
I was down and up again in a moment, and rushing blindly at him with a cut lip and bloody mouth. He kept quite cool, and met me over and over again with stunning blows. I didn’t care. I hardly felt them in my rage; my long pent-up feelings had burst their bonds and I was quite beside myself. In the midst I was caught in the leash of a sinewy hand and torn away. For some moments I fought and screamed in my madness; then suddenly desisted, gasping and trembling all over. Red seemed to clear from my eyes, and I saw. The parasites were fled; Harry Harrier stood opposite me, hanging his head and his twitching hands; and in possession of us both was Mr. Sant.
A little silence followed; then suddenly the clergyman released me and stepped aside.
“You’re a strong boy, Harrier,” he said, quietly. “You’ve had the advantage of some training, too. This was hardly brave.”
“He called me a coward, sir,” muttered the boy.
“You’ve got to prove he was wrong, then.”
Harrier twitched his shoulders, and gave a defiant upward look.
“What!” said Mr. Sant. “Do you call it proving it to attack him six to one?”
“I takes no count of that raff, sir,” said the boy. “’Twas him and me fought.”
“But you used them to provoke him—not content with insulting him yourself day by day as he came to his lesson. Yes; I know.”
I looked up amazed, and then down again. Certain tell-tale rustlings that had reached my ears occasionally from the back of the rectory palings occurred to me, so that I hung my head with shame.
“Well, your reverence,” said the boy, rather insolently, “pay me, and get it over. I takes my capers with my mutton.”
“I shall pay you, sir,” said Mr. Sant, with, I could have thought, the ghost of a grin, “as one gentleman pays another. You think, perhaps, that Master Bowen here has told of your bullying him. He has not breathed a word about it to anybody. Now that, I think, shows him to be the better man of the two.”
The surprise, the gratification were so great, I could have cried out to him like a silly girl.
The young gamekeeper grinned, incredulous and sarcastic.
“You think not?” said Mr. Sant. “Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do—I’m going to backmyman to whop you by-and-by.”
The boy looked up at him, breathless now.
“You’ve all the advantage at present, you know,” went on the clergyman. “You’ve got constitution, muscle, and a little of the science—not so much as you think, but still a little. Now Master Bowen isn’t your equal in any of these, as I suspect you knew, or you wouldn’t have attacked him.”
“I would!” said the boy, furiously.
“Well,” said Mr. Sant, smiling, “I’ll take your word for it, because I believe, after all, it’s an honest word. But the point is this. Muscle and constitution are slow growers, and while my man was training to improve his, you could be improving yours. Science, on the other hand, can be taught, and I mean to teach him science until I consider he’s your equal and better. When that comes about you shall fight again, and I’ll umpire. Do you agree?”
“Don’tI!” said the boy.
“Very well. Only I must have an understanding. You must leave him unmolested in the mean time.”
“I’ll do it!” cried the lad. “I’ll do more. I’ll fight any one as putts a finger on un.”
“The right spirit, that,” said Mr. Sant, with an approving face. “We’ll agree to decide it, then—in a month’s time, say? I’d keep it to myself if I were you. Good morning!”
The boy pulled his forelock, hesitated, mumbled with a blush and grin, “You’re a gen’leman, sir,” and casting a saucy, triumphant glance at me, retreated. Simultaneously, Mr. Sant took me by the shoulder, and, hurrying me back to the rectory study, procured cold water and a sponge, and shut himself in with me.
I felt half stupefied between the blows I had received and the prospect of others yet to come, in the matter of which, it appeared, I was to be allowed no choice. But there I was wrong. Mr. Sant, as he sponged with great consideration my swollen places, took up the tale at once.
“Now, Richard,” he said, “this is going to be, I think, the first great test of your life. You can refuse it if you like, without any loss of honour. You were bullied by a stronger boy, and you endured your ill-treatment without telling tales. That was to be a gentleman. You suffered insult—a little too long, perhaps—and only resented it when directed against some one whom you very rightly love and respect. Well, that was again to be a gentleman.”
I flushed crimson with pleasure, and he mopped hard away, talking all the time.
“You heard the engagement I made for you? Well, I tell you, you can decline quite honourably to stand by it. If you do, don’t think I shall blame you. On the contrary, I will see that an effective end is put to this tyranny. You have proved yourself, and that is enough. Now, if you would like me to state the facts to your uncle, I will do so at once.”
“Yes, please,” I stuttered through the sponge.
“Very well,” he answered, but dryly, I thought. “I could have trained you, perhaps, to stand up to this young bruiser; but without doubt you choose the Christian part. I will speak to Mr. Paxton.”
“Please, sir,” I said, “I don’t think he’d understand why I’vegotto fight, unless you told him.”
His hand quite bumped my poor nose with the start he gave.
“You want it to come off, then, Richard? This is a little shocking, I’m afraid; but perhaps I can’t altogether blame you. He’s a young Samson, mind.”
“You said, sir, that science——” I began, but he plugged my mouth hastily, and gave me no opportunity to speak more till he had cleaned my wounds to his satisfaction. Then he put me up between his knees and, while dabbing my face spasmodically with a towel, recited to me the fable of the brass and the earthenware pots.
“The brass pot, you see, was the gentleman,” he said. “He illustrated the Christian science of self-defence. He didn’t invite an encounter; but, when it was forced upon him, his art got the better of the coarser clay.”
He stretched out my arms and pinched their muscles.
“Well enough,” he said; “but that little Antaeus owes his to his mother earth. He could lick you with one hand, Dicky—easy, he could. Aren’t you afraid?”
“Yes, I am,” I said, honestly.
He nodded approvingly.
“Real courage, Dicky, doesn’t mean not being afraid. We must all be afraid sometimes, when we are called upon to fight men or animals who are much stronger and fiercer than we are. But when we know that wrong or unjust things are being done to us by people who do these things justbecausethey are stronger, then, if we fight them in spite of our being afraid, that is therealcourage. On the other hand, it isn’t brave to force people to fight who we know are much weaker than we are. But when God has given us good health and strong arms, it is noble to use them to help people who are weaker than we are, and to punish the bullies who would take advantage of their weakness. That’s what it is makes a true gentleman—not riches, nor titles, nor having a tutor instead of a public teacher. The little boy who is just, and very truthful, and who never does anything that he would be ashamed of good people knowing, is on the way to be a gentleman, whether he lives in a palace or a cottage. But if, added to these, he trains all his faculties to oblige other people to repay him the truth and justice and honour which he gives them, then he is a complete gentleman already.”
He broke off to feel me all up and down.
“There’s good material here,” he said; “very good. We’ll use it to counterbalance brute strength. That’s the fine moral of boxing, little man—to see that the weak don’t go to the wall. Now, shall I confess a secret? I love Harry Harrier pretty equal with you, sir. He’s got the makings of a gentleman—my sort—in him; only no amount of persuasion from me will educate him like a scientific licking from one less than his own size. You don’t see that, perhaps; but, all the same, I look to you to knock him into my fold for me. You are the Church’s champion, Richard, and you shall gain me a new convert, or I’ll never put faith in the gloves again. Now come along with me home.”
Uncle Jenico received us with surprise, and some consternation over my appearance; nor did the recital of the affray much reassure him. Still more was he confounded by the rector’s frank avowal of his object in approaching him.
“He is a mere child, sir,” said my uncle.
“‘The childhood shows the man,’” quoted the other.
“To be sure. But, as he isn’t going to be a prize-fighter——”
“Every true Christian, sir, is a prize-fighter. He champions the right in order to win heaven.”
“Well, where was the right here?”
“I regret to have to confess, sir, in an insulting expression about you, which he very properly resented.”
“Me!” cried my uncle, amazed. Then suddenly he stumped across to where I stood, and patted my shoulder rather tremulously. “Well, well,” he said; “no doubt I’m a funny old fellow. So you stood up for old Uncle Jenico, Dicky?”
His voice shook a little. I wriggled and flushed up crimson.
“It was a lie!” I cried, choking; “and I’m going to fight him and lick him for it.”
Mr. Sant struck in.
“Broughton rules, sir, I pledge my word.”
“Eh?” said my uncle. “Who’s Broughton, and what does he rule?”
“I mean,” said Mr. Sant, “this little affair shall be conducted strictly according to the regulations of Broughton, the famous boxer.”
“O!” exclaimed Uncle Jenico, palpably misled by the last word, and proportionately relieved. “O, to be sure! ‘Mufflers,’ you call ’em, I think?”
“Yes, yes!” said Mr. Sant, hastily. “A contest of science, sir; no vulgar hammering;” and he repeated, with warm conviction, his little dissertation on the true moral courage.
“If Richard, sir, don’t assert himself at the outset,” he ended with, “I won’t answer for his life here remaining endurable.”
Perhaps this prospect of our moral banishment clinched the matter with Uncle Jenico, whose attachment to the place was becoming quite morbid. He stipulated only that the umpire should stop the fight the moment it might appear I was getting the worst of it. More or less satisfied on this point, he rubbed his hands, and rallied me on being the young gamecock I was.
“I’ve given some thought, myself, to a new boxing-glove,” he confessed; “one with a little gong inside to record the hits, you know.”
Mr. Sant lost no time in taking me in hand. He fashioned me a little pair of gloves out of some old ones of his own, and gave me half an hour’s exercise with them every day after lessons. I am not going to record the process. The result was the important thing.
During all this interval, with the single exception of the morning following that of my encounter with Harry Harrier, I was left in peace by the village boys. On that morning, however, I again found myself in the midst of a little mob of them, who, emboldened by yesterday’s sport, were come to waylay me after school hours. I was not yet so proficient as to regard the situation with equanimity; when, behold! my enemy resolved it for me. He appeared suddenly in the midst, his knees and elbows in a lively state of agitation. One or two fell away, protesting, their hands caressing their injured parts.
“Where be a coomen, ’ar-ree!” expostulated one boy, holding his palm to his ear.
“Mighty!” exclaimed the young ruffler; “bain’t the road free to none but yourself, Jarge? Here be a yoong gen’lman waiting to pass, now.”
They took it as aimed at me, and hedged in again. He clawed two by the napes of their necks, and cracking their heads comfortably together, flung both aside. His intentions were quite unmistakable, and his strength a thing to regard. I was painfully conscious of it as I went through the sullen lane the others, discomfited, made for me; but I plucked up courage, as I passed, to express my gratitude.
“Thank you, Harry!” I said.
He was after me in a moment.
“It’s not a’going to make no differ’,” he whispered fiercely. “You onderstand that?”
“It shan’t, anyhow, till after the fight,” I answered back in his ear, and nodded and ran on.
At last the great day came. Mr. Sant, in order that my uncle might be saved anxiety, and me the necessity of deception, had given me no warning until the very moment was on me. He had manœuvred to hold me a little longer than usual over my lessons; and suddenly returned to me after a short absence from the room.
“Dick,” he said, “Harrier’s waiting for you in the garden.”
My heart gave a twist, and for a moment pulled the blood out of my cheeks. Then I saw Mr. Sant looking at me, and was suddenly glowing all over, as if after a cold douche.
“For the right, Dicky!” he said. “To win your spurs in Christendom! Remember what I’ve taught you, and keep your head.”
It was all very well to say so, with that part of me like a bladder full of hot air. But I followed him stoutly, trusting to the occasion to inspire me with all the science which, for the moment, had clean deserted me.
There was a little plat of lawn at the back, very snug and private behind some trees; and here we found my adversary waiting, in charge of Jacob, the gardener, a grizzled, comfortable old fellow in complete Christian subjection to his master. Jacob was to second Harry, and Mr. Sant me. The old fellow grinned and ducked as we appeared. There were no other witnesses.
“Now,” said Mr. Sant, “when I say ‘Go!’ go; when I call ‘Time!’ stop.”
He fell back with the words, and we stood facing one another. I was utterly bemused, at that instant, as to the processes by which I had reached this situation. I could only grasp the one fact that I was put up to batter, if I could (which seemed ridiculous), this confident, taut little figure in the shirt and corduroy smalls and gaiters, who held out, as if for my inspection, two bare brown arms, made all of bone and whipcord; and that I must proceed totryto do this, without any present quarrel—but rather the reverse—to stimulate me. It was so different to the circumstances of that other mad contest. I could have laughed; I——
“Go!” said Mr. Sant.
Something cracked on my forehead, and I fell.
“Time!” cried Mr. Sant.
He pulled me to my feet.
“Get your wits, Dicky,” he said.
I had got them. The bladder seemed to have burst, and let out all the hot air. I was quite cool, now, and pretty savage over this treatment.
“All right, sir,” I said; and I think he understood. He kept me simmering, however, for the regulation three minutes.
I came up to time now, Broughton’s commendable pupil. The first round had been, what we call in cricket, a trial ball. This that followed was the game—muscle and a little science against science and a little muscle. The brass pot, I am happy to say, prevailed, and sent the earthenware spinning with a crack on its stubborn little nose. Jacob mopped the vanquished, who could hardly be kept still to endure it. As for me, I was cockahoop, crowing inside and out. My second laughed, and let me go on, warning me only that the battle wasn’t won.
It was not, indeed. Our bloods were up, and the next round was a hot test of our qualities. It was give and take, and take and give; until, lunging under a loose defence, Harry hit me in the wind, and, while I was gasping and staggering, levelled me to the ground with a blow on my mouth. He was mad by now, and was rushing to pummel me, prostrate as I was, when Jacob, with a howl, clutched him and bore him struggling away.
“Law, ye little warmint!” cried the old man.
“No more of that, Harrier!” said Mr. Sant, from where he was kneeling, nursing and reviving me; “or I take my man away. To hit one that’s down, sir! That’s neither Christian nor professional.”
Then he whispered in my ear, “Three minutes, Dicky! Can you do it? else I’m bound in honour to throw up the sponge.”
There was an agitation in his voice which he tried vainly to control. I made a desperate effort, and rose as he began to count. I felt a little sick and wild; but the lesson of over-confidence had gone home. This time I played warily, tiring out my adversary. At last the moment came. He struck out furiously, missed, and, as he recovered his guard, I hit him with all my strength between the eyes. He staggered, gave a little cry, and, quite blinded for the moment, began to grope aimlessly with his fists.
“Noo, sir!” howled old Jacob, excited (I am afraid he was an unsympathetic second); “noo, sir’s your time. Walk in and finish en!”
“I won’t,” I cried. “It isn’t fair. He can’t see.”
Trying to mark me by my voice, the boy let out a furious blow, and, as his fist whizzed near me, I caught and clutched it in my own.
“Harry!” I said hurriedly, “let’s be friends!”
He tore his hand away, stood with his face quivering a moment, then all of a sudden fell upon his knees, and, putting his arm across his eyes, began to sob as if his heart were broken.
A silence and embarrassment fell upon us all. Then Mr. Sant walked over to the boy and addressed some words to him. He turned a deaf ear, repulsing him.
“You have fought like a man,” said the clergyman. “Come, take your beating like one.”
The lad started and looked up. He could see again now, but glimmeringly.
“Be the three minnuts past?” he said.
“I’m afraid so,” said the other.
The boy got to his feet, sniffing, and, without uttering a word, began rolling down and buttoning his shirt sleeves.
“There’s a good hot dinner waiting for you inside,” said Mr. Sant. “Come now, and do the man’s part by it and by us!”
Still he would not speak; but shook his head sullenly, and, fetching his coat and cap, walked off.
“Humoursome, humoursome!” said old Jacob. “Let en go for a warmint.”
“No,” said Mr. Sant, rather wistfully. “He’s got the stuff in him. We’ll have him on our side yet, Richard.”
WhenI had been washed, and my cuts and bruises salved, Mr. Sant took me in to dinner, having already sent a message to my uncle that I should be late. I was horribly stiff, with blubber lips, and knobs and swellings everywhere; yet I would not for the world have missed one pang which my jaws suffered in eating. For was not each twinge an earnest to me that I was redeemed in my own eyes? The penance was as gratifying as, I think, a Catholic’s must be after confession and absolution given.
Before we were well finished Uncle Jenico came in, a little flurried and apologetic over his intrusion. He had guessed pretty well the reason of my detention, and his anxiety would not let him rest. His hands trembled as he adjusted his spectacles to look at me, and removed and wiped them, and put them on again for a second scrutiny.
“So you have conquered?” he said, “My poor boy; my poor, dear boy! Why I had no idea boxing punished so. You should not have minded what they said about me, Richard—a tough old rascal, and ready to take it all in the day’s luck.”
“I don’t think Richard will agree with you, sir,” said Mr. Sant. “He has won his spurs, and a convert, I hope. He has fought like a gentleman and a Christian—by George, sir, it was poor Broughton and the Norwich butcher over again—and you, I am sure, are as proud of him as I am.”
“Eh?” said my uncle, half laughing and half crying; and then falling suddenly grave. “If it’s to inculcate respect—the stitch in time, you know—certainly. But I can’t help wondering, if this is the victor, what is the state of the vanquished?”
“A state of grace, I hope,” said the clergyman, smiling. “But it’s a very proper reflection, sir, and one which, I am sure, Richard will take to heart.”
The reminder, nevertheless, was not out of place. It is well at the feast of triumph to remember who pays the cost. I had been self-glorifying a little overmuch; and here, of a sudden, was the picture before me of my beaten enemy slinking away to hide his battered face, at the very moment that I was crowing to everybody to come and look at mine. Uncle Jenico was the true gentleman among us all; and it was he who had been insulted.
I soon mended of my knocks, and the very next day was ruffling it to my lessons with a new self-confidence that made nothing of possessing the world. Dunberry was no longer a Siberia to me, but a conquered country full of breezy possibilities. I should have welcomed the prospect of an attack; but no one interfered with me. On the contrary, awed and covert glances greeted me on my way past the school. I dropped a book. An obsequious little courtier scurried to pick it up for me. The news of the fight had got abroad, it was evident, and Harry was no longer the cock of the walk. From this moment, with other than the youth of Dunberry, I am afraid, my position was secured.
I hope I took no base advantage of the knowledge; yet I won’t say but I might have if Mr. Sant had not been at my back to prevent it.
“Don’t forget you fought for a principle,” he would remind me. “It’s no manner of Christian use to turn out a bully that you may usurp his place.”
To prove to me that boxing was not the whole duty of a gentleman, and to school me from presuming on any idea of indulgence because of my victory, he rather put the screw on in my education, and for a time was something of a martinet on questions of study and discipline. I was hurt, and a little bit rebellious at first; but soon, having a fair reason of my own, came to recognize his consistency.
During this time, and for some weeks after the fight, I saw next to nothing of Harry Harrier. He kept out of my way, sulking and grieving, though he attended school—with phenomenal punctuality, too, I believe—regularly. His father, I heard from old Jacob, had been very savage over his beating, and had dressed him well for it. I was furious when I was told, and wanted Mr. Sant to complain to the Squire; but, before he could do so, something happened which made any complaint futile. A new steward, a Draco of a man, was appointed to the Court, and one day, shortly after his arrival, lo and behold! there was the gamekeeper handcuffed, and being carried off to Ipswich gaol in a tax-cart by the officers of the law. It had been discovered that for years he had been in collusion with a gang of poachers, and in the end he had been watched, and caughtin flagranti delicto. His wife followed him to the county town, and devoted most of her savings, poor woman, to his defence, but without avail. He was convicted and transported, and I may as well say at once that that was the end of him so far as his family was concerned, for he never turned up again. While the trial was pending, Harry—it is not, under all the circumstances, to be wondered at—gave the schoolhouse a wide berth; but, after his father had been sentenced and their home broken up, to the surprise of every one he put in an appearance there again, coming dogged and punctual to a task which must have grown nothing less than a perpetual ordeal to him. We did not, in truth, know the strength of will of the desperate humbled little spirit—not any of us, that is to say, but Mr. Sant.Hehad gauged it, I am sure; and, having set his heart on the boy’s reclamation, was watching with an anxious interest the development of the odd little drama which he had helped to engineer. He visited, of course, in virtue of his office, the gamekeeper’s unhappy wife, who had been forced to betake herself to a mean little tenement in the village, where she eked out the small means remaining to her by washing for the rectory; and though, as yet, the son would hardly notice or be civil to him, the mother did not fail to acquaint him, with many fond tears, of her poor, wild little fellow’s real love and resolution, and of the courage which was determining him to train himself to take the place of the breadwinner they had lost. All of which, I knew, made Mr. Sant the more eager to have the lad recognize him for a friend; only pride stood in the way. For, the truth is, poor Harry’s prestige was gone down to zero. Always owing in some part to the local reputation of his father for a bully and rowdy, the removal of that gentleman had finished what my victory had begun. And now it was the case of the sick lion. The cowardly little jackals who had formerly cringed to him, egged on by their more cowardly elders taunted him with his disgrace. If he retaliated, they overwhelmed him with numbers, or ran, squealing injured righteousness, to appeal against him to their parents. His heart, swelling in his plucky little breast, must often have had a business of it not to let loose the tears; but he had an indomitable soul, and only time and tact could find the way into it.
One day Mr. Sant and I, when walking together, came unnoticed upon the rear of such a scene. The victim moved on in front, his head hanging a little, though he would not force his pace an inch to accommodate his tormentors, who followed behind, at a safe distance, hooting and jeering at him.
“OO stole the pawtridges! When did ’ee last ’ear from the ’ulks! Why don’t ’ee git your mawther to wash your dirty linen, ’ar-ree?” and such-like insults they bawled.
I burned with indignation, and was running to retaliate on my enemy by helping him as he had once helped me, when Mr. Sant seized me with a determined hand, and bent to whisper in my ear—
“He will hate you, if you do. Leave him to fight his own battles.”
As he spoke the little wretches let fly a shower of small missiles, and a stone struck the boy smartly on the neck. He leapt about at once, and came rushing back with clenched fists and a blazing face. The mob dispersed before his onset; but he cut off one panic-stricken unit of it, and smote the lubberly coward with a thorny crash into the hedge. His eyes looked red, his breast was heaving stormily; he would have done some evil, I think, had not Mr. Sant run and put himself between. Then he backed away, without a word; but his cheeks were quite white now, and the wings of his nostrils going like a little winded horse’s.
Consternation held the scattered enemy. They stood each where he had been halted by the unexpected vision of their rector and me. The assaulted one, sitting on spikes, stuffed his face into his elbow and boo-hoo’d from stentorian lungs. Mr. Sant smiled with rather an ugly look.
“Blubber away, Derrick,” he said. “You’ve been well served for a dirty act.” Then he scowled abroad. “Are you English boys, to kick a downed one! Not one of you, cowards, but if he passed this Harrier alone would hug his fists in his pockets! It is no shame of his, but yours. To bait him ten to one—O! what fine courageous fellows! But I’ll have no more of it; d’ye hear? I’ll have no more of it!”
He stamped, in a little access of passion, and again turned sharply on the fallen.
“Get up!” he said.
His tone was so peremptory that the boy rose, snuffling and wiping his eyes with his cuff.
“It was you threw the stone,” said Mr. Sant. “I saw you. Very well, then, it’s got to be one of two things: fight, or put your tail between your legs and run. Quick now! Which is it to be?”
Derrick did not move, but raised his wail to a pitch so artificially dismal that I had to laugh.
“Ah!” exclaimed Mr. Sant, still very grim for his part, and snapped himself round. “He means fight, Harrier.”
If he did, the battle he contemplated was a Battle of the Spurs. Clapping his hand to the thorns in him, and too frightened now to remember to cry, he took to his heels and, turning a corner, was out of sight in a moment. His answer to the resolution claimed for him was so ludicrous that even his little abettors were set off chuckling.
I was looking across at Harry, and saw his face, too, relax and lighten. Drawn by its expression, I walked up to him, with my hand held out.
“Why won’t you, Harry?” I said.
He stared at me, but made no response.
“We knew you could look after yourself,” I went on, “and—and I wasn’t going to interfere; at least—I mean—why won’t you let us stand up for one another, Harry?” I ended, with a burst and a blush.
His face, too, was very red again, and I could see his lips were trembling. Pride and gratitude were fighting within him for mastery; but the former—still too hot with recent suffering to surrender—remained the more stubborn of the two. While my hand was yet held out, he turned his back on me, on us all, and walked off erect.
I was bitterly hurt and chagrined. I felt that I had done the handsome thing by a boor, and had been meetly rebuffed for my condescension. I came back to Mr. Sant, swelling with indignation. He understood at a glance.
“Give him time, Dick,” he said quietly; “give him time.”
“He shall have all the time he likes, sir,” I said, “beforeImeddle with him again.”
He did not answer, which was perhaps wise; and we continued our walk. But thenceforth my heart was darkened to my unchivalrous foe, and when we passed in the street I ignored him.