Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “You have got one!”

  “Yes, quite unexpectedly, at the beginning of this week.”

  The girl looked both glad and sorry, but her father’s nose was twitching with amusement and his eyes twinkling in their gold frames.

  “You did well to take what you could get,” said he, lowering his voice so that nothing could be heard across the road. “Writing for your living means writing for your life, and that’s no catch; but by Jove, Ringrose, you ought to get off some good things with such a capital safety-valve as boys always on hand! When you can’t think of a rhyme, run round and box their ears till one comes. When you get a rejected manuscript, try hammering their knuckles with the ruler! Where’s the school, Ringrose, and who keeps it?”

  Harry hung his head.

  “I am almost ashamed to tell you. It’s a dame’s school — at Teddington.”

  “A dame’s school at Teddington! Not Mrs. Bickersteth’s?”

  “Yes — do you know it?”

  Harry had looked up in time to catch the other’s expression, and it was a very singular one. The lad had never seen such a look on any other face, but on this face he had seen it once before. He had seen it in the train, during the journey back to London, on the day that he could never forget. It was the look that had afterwards struck him as a guilty look, though, to be sure, he had never thought about it from the moment when he took up his father’s letter, and saw at a glance that it was genuine, until this one.

  “Do I know it?” echoed Lowndes, recovering himself. “Only by repute — only by repute. So you have gone there!” he added below his breath, strangely off his guard again in a moment.

  “Come,” said Harry, “do you know something against the school, or what?”

  “Oh, dear, no; nothing against it, and very little about it,” replied Lowndes. “Only the school is known in these parts — people in Richmond send their boys there — that is all. I have heard very good accounts of it. Are you the only master?”

  “No, there’s a daily pedagogue, named Scrafton, who seems to be something of a character, but I haven’t seen him yet. Do you know anything about him?”

  The question was innocently asked, for Harry’s curiosity had been aroused by the repeated necessity of preventing the boys from opening their hearts to him about Mr. Scrafton. If he had stopped to think, he would have seen that he had the answer already — and Lowndes would not have lost his temper.

  “How should I know anything about him?” he cried. “Haven’t I just asked you if you were the only master? Either your wits are deserting you, Ringrose, or you wish to insult me, my good fellow. In any case we must be pushing on, and so, I have no doubt, must you.”

  Harry could not understand this ebullition, which was uttered with every sign of personal offence, from the ridiculously stiff tones to the remarkably red face. He simply replied that he had spoken without thinking and had evidently been misunderstood, and he turned without more ado to shake hands with Miss Lowndes. The father’s goodwill had long ceased to be a matter of vital importance to him; but it went to his heart to see how pale Miss Fanny had turned during this exchange of words, and to feel the trembling pressure of that true friend’s hand. It was as though she were asking him to forgive her father, at whose side she walked so dejectedly away that it was not pure selfishness which made Harry Ringrose long just then to change places with Gordon Lowndes.

  The whole colloquy had not lasted more than two or three minutes; yet it had ended in the most distinct rupture that had occurred, so far, between Harry and his parents’ friend; and that about the most minute and seemingly insignificant point which had ever been at issue between them.

  The boys found their new master poor company after this. He finished his story in perfunctory fashion, nor would he tell another. He not only became absent-minded and unsociable, but displayed an unsuspected capacity for strictness which was really irritability. More than one young wiseacre whispered a romantic explanation, but the majority remembered that it was to the gentleman old Ring-o’-ring-o’-roses had chiefly addressed himself; and the general and correct impression was that the former had been “waxy” with old Ring-in-the-nose. Harry’s nickname was not yet fixed.

  Those, however, with whom he had been “waxy” in his turn had a satisfaction in store for them at the school, where Mrs. Bickersteth awaited them, watch in hand, and with an angry spot on each fresh-coloured cheek. She ordered the boys downstairs to take their boots off, and in the same breath requested Mr. Ringrose to speak to her in the study, in a tone whose significance the boys knew better than Harry.

  “I was under the impression, Mr. Ringrose, that I said an hour and a half?” began the lady, with much bitter-sweetness of voice and manner.

  Harry pulled out his own watch, and began apologising freely; he was some twenty minutes late.

  “When I say an hour and a half,” continued the schoolmistress, “I do not mean two hours. I beg you will remember that in future. May I ask where you have been?”

  Harry said they had been to Richmond Park. The lady’s eyes literally blazed.

  “You have walked my boys to Richmond Park and back? Really, Mr. Ringrose, I should have thought you would know better. The distance is much too great. I am excessively angry to hear they have been so far.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Harry, with humility, “but I don’t think the distance was quite so great as you imagine. Though we have walked back through Kingston, we made a short cut in going, for I took the liberty of taking the boys across the river in the ferry-boat.”

  This was the last straw, and for some moments Mrs. Bickersteth was practically speechless with indignation. Then with a portentous inclination of her yellow head, “It was a liberty,” said she; “a very great liberty indeed, I call it! I requested you to take them for a walk. I never dreamt of your risking their lives on the river. Have the goodness to understand in future, Mr. Ringrose, that I strongly disapprove of the boys going near the river. It is a most undesirable place for them — most unsootable in every way. Excessively angry I am!”

  This speech might have been heard over half the house, and by the end Harry was fairly angry himself. But for his mother, and for a resolution he had made not to take Mrs. Bickersteth seriously, but to put up with all he possibly could, it is highly probable that the Hollies, Teddington, would have known Harry Ringrose for twenty-four hours only. As it was he maintained a sarcastic silence, and, when the wrathful lady had quite finished, left her with a bow and the assurance that what had happened should not occur again; he merely permitted himself to put some slight irony into his tone.

  And, indeed, the insulting character of a reprimand which was not, however, altogether unmerited, worried him far less in early retrospect than the inexplicable manner of Gordon Lowndes on Ham Common. What did he know about the school? What could have brought that odd look back to his face? And why in the world should the master of an excellent temper have lost it on provocation so ludicrously slight? These were the questions that kept Harry Ringrose awake and restless in the still small hours of the Sabbath morning.

  CHAPTER XVIII.

  MR. SCRAFTON.

  In the basement was a good-sized but ill-lighted room where three long tables, resting on trestles, were sufficiently crowded on the four days of the week when the day-boys stayed to dinner. On the two half-holidays only one table was in use, and the boarders scarcely filled it, with Miss Maudsley and Mr. Ringrose in state at either end. But on Sundays all meals were in the big schoolroom, and were graced by the presence of Mrs. Bickersteth’s City sons, who brought with them a refreshing whiff of the outside world, besides contributing to Harry’s enjoyment in other ways. He never forgot those Sunday meals. He was fond of describing them to his friends in after years.

  At breakfast on his first Sunday he was quite sure that Mrs. Bickersteth had heard of the death of a near relative. Her face and voice were those of a chief mourner, and she appeared to be shedding tears as she heard the boy
s their Collect at the breakfast table, rewarding those who knew it with half a cold sausage apiece. The boys were by no means badly fed, but that half-sausage was their one weekly variant from porridge and bread-and-butter for breakfast, and they used to make pathetically small bites of it. Mrs. Bickersteth, however, scarcely broke her fast, but would suffer all day, and every Sabbath, from what Harry came to consider some acute though intermittent form of religious melancholia. Towards the end of breakfast the sons would come down in wool-work slippers, a little heavy after “sleeping in,” and it was not at this meal that they were most entertaining.

  The next hour was one of the few which Harry had entirely to himself. Most days he was on duty from eight in the morning to half-past eight at night, but the hour between Sunday breakfast and morning service was the new master’s very own, and he spent it in a way which surely would have made Mrs. Bickersteth’s remarkable hair stand straight on end. Even Sunday letter-writing was forbidden in her Sabbatarian household, and yet Harry had the temerity to spend this hour in composing vulgar verses for the Tiddler. He had discovered that contributions for the Saturday’s issue must reach the office on the Monday, and it is to be feared that the consequent urgency of the enterprise led him into still more reprehensible excesses. What he could not finish in his bedroom he would mentally continue in church, whither it was his duty to take the majority of the boys, while the rest accompanied the Bickersteths to chapel.

  The dinner that followed was what Harry enjoyed. It was an excellent dinner, and all but Mrs. Bickersteth were invariably in the best of spirits. This lady used to stand at the head of her table and carve the hissing round of secular beef with an air of Christian martyrdom quite painful to watch. Not that it affected her play with the carving-knife, which was so skilful that Harry Ringrose used to wonder why the schoolmistress must needs lap a serviette round either forearm, and a third about her ample waist, for the better protection of her Sunday silk. This, however, was a trick of the whole family, who might have formed the nucleus of a Society for the Preservation of Sunday Clothes. Thus Reggie, the younger and more dapper son, used to appear on these occasions in a brown velvet coat and waistcoat, with his monogram on every button, but would mar the effect by tucking his table-napkin well in at the neck and spreading it out so as to cover as much as possible of his person. Lennie, the elder and more sedate, though he had no such grandeur to protect, nevertheless took similar precautions; while the good-natured Baby used to pull off a pair of immensely long cuffs, the height of a recent fashion, and solemnly place them on the table beside her tumbler, before running any risks.

  Water was the beverage of one and all, yet the spirits of the majority would rise with the progress of the meal. Reggie, who was a very facetious person, would begin to say things nicely calculated to make the boys titter; the elder brother would air a grumpy wit of his own; and Mrs. Bickersteth would shake the cap awry on her yellow head and beg them both to desist. The good-hearted Baby would add her word in vindication of the harmless character of her brothers’ jokes, and at the foot of the table the governess would trim her sails with great dexterity, looking duly depressed when she caught Mrs. Bickersteth’s eye and coyly tickled on encountering those of the gentlemen. Harry sat between Leonard Bickersteth and a line of little boys, and facing the flaxen-haired Baby, who gave him several kindly, reassuring smiles for which he liked her. The young men also treated him in a friendly fashion; but he was quite as careful as his fair colleague not to commit himself to too open an appreciation of their sallies.

  The boys were in Harry’s charge for the afternoon, but it seemed that on Sundays they never went for a walk for walking’s sake. Occasionally, as it turned out, he would be requested to take them to some children’s service; but on that first Sunday, and as a rule, they spent the afternoon in the smaller school-room upstairs, where some strictly Sabbatarian periodicals were given out for the day’s use, and only such books as Sunday Echoes in Week-day Hours, and the stories of Miss Hesba Stretton, permitted to be read. Harry used to feel sorry for little Woodman on these occasions. He would catch the small boy’s great eyes wandering wistfully to the shelf in which his Mangnall’s Questions and The Red Eric showed side by side; or the eyes would stare into vacancy by the hour together, seeing doubtless his Devonshire home, and all that his “very superior people” would be doing there at the moment. Harry liked Woodman the best of the boys, partly because he had a variety of complaints but never uttered one. The new master was much too human, and perhaps as much too unsuited by temperament for his work, not to have favourites from the first, and Woodman and Gifford were their names.

  After tea they all went off to evening service, and after that came a peaceful half-hour in the pretty drawing-room, where the boys sang hymns till bed-time. There was something sympathetic in this proceeding, the conduct of which was in Baby Bickersteth’s kindly hands. The young lady presided at the piano, which she played admirably, and the boys stood round her in a semicircle, and each boy chose his favourite hymn. Lennie and Reggie joined in from their chairs, and Mrs. Bickersteth’s lips would move as she followed the words in a hymn-book. When the last hymn had been sung, the schoolmistress read prayers; and when the boys said good-night she kissed each of them in a way that quite touched Harry on the Sunday evening after his arrival. He saw the boys to bed in a less captious frame of mind than had been his all day, and when he turned in himself he was rather ashamed of some of his previous sentiments towards the schoolmistress. He had seen the pathos of her pious depression, and he was beginning to divine the hourly irritants of keeping school at Mrs. Bickersteth’s time of life. Instead of his cynical resolve not to take her seriously, he lay down chivalrously vowing to resent nothing from a woman who was also old. He seemed to have seen a new side of the schoolmistress, and henceforth she had his sympathy.

  Indeed there was a something human in all these people; they had kind hearts, when all was said; and Harry Ringrose began to feel that for a time at any rate, he need not be unhappy in their midst. He had still to encounter the master spirit of the place.

  When all the boys were standing round the long dining-table next morning, having taken turns in reading a Chapter aloud, Mrs. Bickersteth made an announcement as she closed her Testament.

  “This term,” said she, “Mr. Scrafton is coming at half-past ten instead of at eleven, and those boys who are to go to him will be in their places in the upper schoolroom at twenty-five minutes past ten each morning.”

  A list followed of the boys who were promoted to go to Mr. Scrafton that term; it ended with the name of little Woodman. Harry happened to be engaged in the background in the intellectual task of teaching a tiny child his alphabet. He could not help seeing some ruddy cheeks turn pale as the list was read; but Woodman, with a fine regardlessness, was reading a letter from Devonshire behind another boy’s back.

  Punctually at ten-thirty a thunderous knock resounded from the front door, and Harry was sorry that he had not been looking out of the window. He saw Mrs. Bickersteth jump up and bustle from the room with a most solicitous expression, and he heard a loud voice greeting her heartily in the hall. Heavy feet ran creaking up the stairs a few minutes later, and Mrs. Bickersteth returned to her task of hearing tables and setting sums.

  Meanwhile Harry was devoting himself to the very smallest boys in the school, mites of five and six, whose nurses brought them in the morning and came back for them at one o’clock. About eleven, however, Mrs. Bickersteth suggested that these little men would be the better for a breath of air, and would Mr. Ringrose kindly take them into the back-garden for ten minutes, and see that they did not run on the grass? Now, Harry’s pocket was still loaded with a missive addressed to the editor of Tommy Tiddler, which obviously must be posted by his own hand, and might even now be too late. He therefore asked permission to go as far as the pillar-box at the corner, in order to post a letter; and Mrs. Bickersteth, who was luckily in the best of tempers, not only nodded blandly, but added that
she would be excessively obliged if Mr. Ringrose would also post some letters of hers which he would find upon the hall-table. So Harry sallied forth, with an infant in sailor-clothes holding each of his hands, and whom should he find loitering at the corner but Gordon Lowndes?

  “Why, Ringrose,” cried he, “this is well met indeed! I was just on my way to have a word with you. I was looking for the house.”

  The hearty manner and the genial tone would have been enough for Harry at an earlier stage of his acquaintance with this man; but now instinctively he knew them for a cloak, and he would not relinquish the small boys’ hands for the one which he felt was awaiting his, though his eyes had never fallen from Lowndes’s spectacles.

  “I am not sure that you would have been able to see me,” was his reply. “I am on duty even now. What was the point?”

  “Is it impossible for me to have a word with you alone?”

  Harry told the little boys to walk on slowly to the pillar. “It will literally have to be a word,” he added pointedly. Yet his curiosity was whetted. What could the man want with him here and now?

  “Very well — very well,” said Lowndes briskly. “I merely desire to apologise for my — my hastiness when we met on Saturday. I fear — that is, my daughter tells me — but indeed I am conscious myself — that I quite misunderstood your meaning, Ringrose, on a point in itself too trifling to be worth naming. You may remember, however, that you asked me if I knew anything about a person of whose very existence I had just exposed my ignorance?”

  “I remember,” said Harry. “A mere slip of the tongue, due to my curiosity about the man.”

  “And is your curiosity satisfied?” inquired Lowndes, becoming suddenly preoccupied in wiping the dust from his eye-glasses.

  “Well, I haven’t seen him yet, though he is in the house.”