Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  Some minutes later, when the whistles began to blow, the man they blew for just heard them from the heights of the hill; but he had had the presence of mind to walk up to the park gates, and through them at a pace almost leisurely; and long before ten o’clock he was sitting over little Woodman’s fire in his room at the Hollies, Teddington, and wondering whether it was he or another who had been through the adventures of the evening.

  He had decided to remain at the school, and Mrs. Bickersteth had accepted his decision without comment. The schoolmistress little dreamt to whom a paragraph referred which caught her eye in the next issue of the Surrey Comet: —

  RICHMOND BURGLARS.

  ASSAULT ON THE POLICE.

  As Constable John Tinsley, Richmond division, Metropolitan Police, was on his rounds on Monday evening last, he noticed a man lurking in the garden of an empty house on the hill, and, on demanding an explanation, was savagely assaulted and left senseless in the road. There can be little doubt, from the bruises on Tinsley’s body, that the ruffian felled him with some blunt instrument, and afterwards kicked him as he lay insensible. Tinsley is now on duty again, but considers he has had a lucky escape. He describes his assailant as a thick-set and powerful young fellow of the working class, and has little doubt that he was one of the brutal and impudent thieves who are at present a pest of the neighbourhood.

  Harry Ringrose would not have recognised himself had he not been on the look-out for some such item: when he did, he breathed more freely, though not freely enough to show himself unnecessarily on Richmond Hill. The paragraph he cut out and treasured for many years.

  CHAPTER XX.

  BIDING HIS TIME.

  When Scrafton’s knock thundered through the house on the morning after Harry’s adventure, Mrs. Bickersteth again rose hastily and bustled from the schoolroom; and for the next five minutes the ears of the junior master had some cause to tingle. When the schoolmistress returned she would not look at Harry, who was well aware that she had secretly wished him to resign, and that conscience alone forbade her to send him away in obedience to Scrafton’s demands. That such demands had been made the day before, and reiterated this morning, Harry was as certain as though he had heard them; but the certainty only cemented his resolve to stay where he was, to give not the smallest pretext for his dismissal, and to watch Scrafton, patiently, steadily, day after day, for some explanation of his animus against himself and of his mysterious relations with Gordon Lowndes.

  It chanced that the middle of that September was as warm as midsummer, and on the first Wednesday of the term a whisper of cricket went round the school. It appeared that on Wednesday and Friday afternoons, throughout the summer, the boys played cricket in Bushey Park, and as it was still summer weather they were to do so this afternoon.

  “Are you going to take us, sir?” asked Gifford, as they were changing into flannels, under Harry’s supervision, in their dormitory, after dinner.

  “Not that I know of,” said Harry. “Who generally does?”

  “Mr. Scrafton, and he doesn’t know the rules — —”

  “Read ‘em through once, years ago — —”

  “And thinks he understands the game — —”

  “And scores and umpires — —”

  “And gives two men out at once!”

  Here, duty compelled Harry to administer a general snub; but he determined to go to Bushey Park and see the cricket for himself; and when the day-boys had assembled in flannels also, and Mr. Scrafton, flourishing a long blackthorn, had marched them all off in double file, the junior master had his chance. Little Woodman was left behind. He was not allowed to play cricket. Harry was requested to take him for a walk instead; and, on inquiring whether there would be any objection to their going to Bushey Park to watch the game, received permission to do so on the understanding that Woodman was not to sit on the grass or to stand about too long.

  The wickets had just been pitched when they arrived, and Scrafton and the biggest boy, kneeling behind either middle stump, were taking sights for a common block-hole which Scrafton proceeded to dig at great depth at either end. When the game began no player was allowed to take an independent guard; but meanwhile Scrafton had caught sight of Harry and his charge, and had borne down upon them with his blue eyes flashing suspicion and animosity.

  “What have you come for?” he thundered in Harry’s face.

  “To — watch you,” replied Harry, watching him very calmly as he spoke.

  “Who gave you leave?”

  “Mrs. Bickersteth. Do you dislike being watched?”

  So mild was the look, so bland the tone, that it was impossible to tell whether the ambiguity was intentional or accidental. Scrafton glared at Harry for one eloquent moment; then his blue eyes fell and fastened furiously upon the little fellow at Harry’s side.

  “And you,” he roared, flourishing his blackthorn over the small boy’s head, “what right have you here? A blockhead who can’t say his first declension has no right idling out o’ doors. Take care, Master Woodman — take very great care to-morrow!”

  And with the grin of an ogre behind the lifted blackthorn, Mr. Scrafton turned on the heels of the shoes he wore next his skin, and rushed back to the pitch.

  “I expect Mr. Scrafton’s bark is worse than his bite,” Harry could not help saying to the trembling child at his side. “The brute!” he cried in the same breath. He could not help that either. The blackthorn had fallen heavily across the shoulders of a boy who had been throwing catches without leave. Little Woodman never said a word.

  After this Harry could not trust himself to remain without interfering, and he knew only too well what the result of such interference would be. So Woodman and he walked to the far side of the ground, and only watched the game for a few minutes, from a safe distance; yet it left as vivid an impression in Harry’s mind as the finest cricket he had ever seen at Lord’s. There stood Scrafton in his rusty suit, the murderous blackthorn tucked under an arm, his pocket-book and snuff-box in one hand, the pencil with which he scored in the other. Never was game played in more sombre earnest, for neither side had the temerity to applaud, and the umpire and scorer was also judge and flagellator of the fielders, who pursued the ball slowly at the risk of being themselves pursued with the blackthorn. Just before Harry went he saw his friend Gifford given out because the ball had rolled against the stumps without removing the bails. The boy had been making runs, and he seemed dissatisfied. Scrafton took a pinch of snuff, put his pencil in his pocket, and advanced flourishing his blackthorn in a manner that made Harry turn his back on the game for good. But that night, when the boarders undressed, there was a long, lean bruise across Gifford’s shoulders.

  The blackthorn remained in the umbrella-stand while Scrafton roared and blustered in the upper schoolroom. But when it was he who took the boys for their walk, the blackthorn went too — and was busy. And on the chimney-piece upstairs there used to lie a long black ruler which was said to hurt even more, which Harry yearned to pitch into the middle of the Thames.

  During the first half of the term he never saw the inside of that room under Scrafton’s terrific rule; but his roaring voice could be heard all over the house; and now and then, when Harry had occasion to pass the door, he would pause to listen to the words.

  “Look at the sweat on my hand,” was what he once heard. “Look at the sweat on my hand! It’s sweating to give Master Murray what he deserves!”

  With that Scrafton could be heard taking a tremendous pinch of snuff; but Harry was still on the stairs when a couple of resounding smacks, followed by a storm of sobs, announced that Master Murray (aetat. 11) had received his alleged deserts. The boy’s ears were red and swollen for the rest of that day.

  At first Harry could not understand how a religious woman like Mrs. Bickersteth could countenance and keep such a flagrant bully, since what he heard at odd times must be heard morning after morning by some member of the household. The explanation dawned upon him by degrees. Scrafto
n had been there so many years that he had gained an almost complete ascendency over every adult in the establishment. The one instance in which Harry knew Mrs. Bickersteth to stand firm was that of his own continuance in the school. The one member of the Bickersteth family whom he ever heard breathe a syllable against Scrafton was the good-hearted, golden-haired Baby. Harry once met her face to face on the stairs when a roaring and a thumping and a sobbing were going on behind that terrible closed door. Harry looked at her grimly. Miss Bickersteth reddened to the roots of her yellow hair.

  “It does sound dreadful,” she admitted. “But — but Mr. Scrafton’s kinder than you think; he sounds worse than he is. And he teaches them so well; and — and he has been here so many years!”

  Harry thought there was a catch in her voice as she brushed past him; for one thump had sounded louder than the rest; and first a slate had fallen, and then a boy. Indeed it was a common thing to hear the boys whispering that so-and-so had been knocked down that day. But the fiend was clever enough to keep his fist for their bodies, his flat hand for their faces; the wretched little victims were never actually disfigured.

  That he was a clever teacher Harry did not doubt. With quick receptive material he was probably something more, and there were one or two boys whom that baleful face, that ready hand, and that roaring voice did not instantly daze and stupefy, and who were consequently getting on remarkably well under Mr. Scrafton. With his repulsive personality, and his more repulsive practices, the man had yet a touch of genius. He wrote the boys’ names in their Latin Grammars in the most perfect and beautiful copperplate hand that Harry had ever seen. And those quicker boys would show him sums worked out by no recognised rule, but with half the figures expended in the “key”: for Scrafton had a shorter and better rule of his own for every rule in arithmetic.

  Weeks went by before Harry and this man exchanged another word; but daily they met and looked each other in the face, and daily the younger man became surer and surer that the look those blue eyes shot at him was instinct with a special venom, a peculiar malice, only to be explained by the unravelment of that mystery which he was as far as ever from unravelling. And every night of all these weeks he lay awake wondering, wondering; yet every day the daily duties claimed and absorbed his whole attention; and he took no step because he had found no clue, and was still determined to find one; also because there were certain cogent reasons for his keeping this mastership, for its own sake, for one term at least. Mrs. Ringrose was still at the seaside with the Walthews. She wrote to tell Harry how kind they were to her; when they returned she was to remain with them until he rejoined her. Meanwhile the flat was costing nothing but its rent, and Harry was not only earning his board, lodgings, and ten pounds for the term, but from ten to fifteen shillings a week from the excellent and munificent Tiddler. If he chose to throw up the mastership at Christmas, they would be able to start the New Year on a much sounder financial basis than would have been possible had he never obtained it.

  So October wore into November, and the autumn tints became warmer and richer in Bushey Park, and Harry grew fond of his walks with the boys, and very fond of the boys themselves. Somehow his discovery on Richmond Hill came to seem less significant than it had appeared at the time. The idea grew upon Harry Ringrose (who was fully alive to the defects of his own imaginative quality) that very likely there was a much simpler explanation of Lowndes’s lie than he had suspected at the time: and though he loathed Scrafton for his brutality to the boys, and never failed to meet that baleful eye as though he saw through its bloodshot blue into the brain beyond, the look became a mechanical part of his day’s routine, and it was only in the long nights that the old suspicions haunted him. So it was when the clash came between Harry Ringrose and “I, Jeremiah Scrafton” (as the harpy loved to call himself to the boys); and with the clash, not suspicion any more, but the dire conviction of some rank and nameless, yet undiscovered, villainy.

  CHAPTER XXI.

  HAND TO HAND.

  It all came of the junior master’s clandestine connection with the Tiddler.

  Harry Ringrose used many precautions in the matter of his little journalistic skeleton. He imagined it safe enough in the locked drawer in which he treasured such copies of the lively periodical as contained his stealthy contributions. But, just as the most cautious criminal is often guilty of the greatest carelessness, so Harry committed one gross blunder every week; and, again like so many malefactors, his own vanity was the cause of his undoing. He must see himself in print each week at the earliest possible opportunity.

  The boys began by wondering why they always passed Teddington Station on the Saturday walk, and why they were invariably left outside for at least a minute. Then they wondered what paper it was the master bought. He never let them see it. Yet he habitually took a good look at it before rejoining them, which he nearly always did in the best of tempers, though once or twice it was just the opposite. At last one sophisticated boy bet another that it was a sporting paper, and the other boy stole into the station at Harry’s heels and with great gallantry discovered what it was. The same Saturday Harry was observed scribbling things (probably puns) on his shirt cuff, and referring to these that evening when he said he had to write a letter, and writing the letter in irregular short lines. It is to be feared that a few of the boys then turned unscrupulous detectives, and the discovery of an envelope addressed to the editor of Tommy Tiddler proved a mere question of time.

  The next thing was to find out what he wrote, and about this time Harry had a shock. A day-boy was convicted of bringing a Tiddler to lessons at the instigation of a boarder, and the whole school heard of it after Bible-reading, when the incriminating pennyworth was taken between the tongs and publicly cremated for a “low, pernicious, disreputable paper, which I hope never to see in my school again.” Harry was not present at the time, but these were Mrs. Bickersteth’s words when she told him what she had done, and begged him to be good enough to keep a sharp look-out for future numbers of the “degrading thing.” He had the new one in his pocket as he bowed.

  About this time young Woodman was laid up in the bedroom at the top of the house, and Harry had to keep the fire in and the kettle steaming all night. The little fellow had grown upon him more and more, and yet for a child he was extraordinarily reserved. Harry could never tell whether Scrafton knocked him about or not; and once when Woodman attributed a set of bruised knuckles to his having struck another boy (a thing he was never known to do), Harry could have laughed at the pious lie if he had not been too angry at the thought of anybody ill-treating such a shadow of a boy. Yet nobody was especially good to little Woodman: for Baby Bickersteth was good to all.

  Once or twice the boy’s parents came to see him, young, wealthy people, against whom Harry formed a possibly unwarrantable prejudice; and on these occasions, before being sent downstairs to see them, the child was first taken upstairs and his light hair made lank and rank with pomatum, and his pale face burnished with much soap. While he was ill, however, the Woodmans ran down from their hotel in town one Sunday morning and spent an hour in the sick-room before hurrying back. Harry was present when Mrs. Bickersteth came in from chapel and heard of it. He followed the irate lady upstairs (to put away his Sunday hat), and he heard her tell the invalid what she thought of his father for coming up into her bedrooms in her absence. Gentlemen in her bedrooms she did not allow; it was a most ungentlemanly liberty to take; and so on and so on, until Harry saw such tears in the boy’s eyes as Scrafton himself could not have wrung. A new book was lying on the bed when Harry quitted this painful scene. He saw it next under Mrs. Bickersteth’s arm; and he had to go upstairs again to say a word to the boy, though it should cost him his beggarly place fifty times over.

  “I don’t mind what they say to me,” whimpered Woodman. “I only mind what they say about my people.”

  Harry found it possible to take the other side without unkindness. Mrs. Bickersteth had said more than she meant. Most people did w
hen they were angry. Ladies were always sensitive about untidiness, and, of course, the room was untidy. She had not meant to hurt Woodman’s feelings.

  “But my mater brought me a new Ballantyne, sir,” said the boy. “It was the one that’s just come out, and Bick — Mrs. Bickersteth — has taken it away from me.”

  His tears ran again.

  “Well, I’ll lend you something instead,” said Harry.

  “Thanks awfully, sir.”

  “I’ll lend you anything you like!” quoth Harry recklessly.

  He was thinking of some novels in the locked drawer.

  “Honest Injun, sir?”

  Harry laughed. The boy had a quaint way with him that never went too far, he was the one fellow with whom it was quite safe to joke, and it was delightful to see his dark eyes drying beneath the bright look that only left them when Woodman was really miserable.