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. Scrafton 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 when 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.
"Honest Injun, Woodman."
"Then lend me a Tiddler."
"A what?"
"A Tommy Tiddler, sir," said Woodman demurely.
"How on earth do you know I have one?" cried Harry aghast.
"Everybody knows you get it every Saturday from the station, sir."
"But how?"
"Oh, I don't know," said Woodman. "But – but I do wish you'd show me what you write in it, sir. I swear I won't tell the other fellows!"
Harry was temporarily dumb. Then he burst out in an excited whisper: how in the wide world did they know he wrote for the thing? Woodman would not say. A lot of them did know it, but they had agreed not to sneak – for which observation he apologised in the same breath. Woodman whispered too; never were two such conspirators.
And the immediate result was altogether inevitable. Harry loved a word of praise from anybody, like many a better man, and Woodman was as much above the average boy in sense of humour as he was below him in the ordinary endowments. That Sunday, before he went to sleep, he had read every false rhyme and every unblushing inversion of Harry's which had yet found their way into print. It may have been very demoralising – it has never been held that Harry had even the makings of an ideal pedagogue – but the small boy actually went to sleep with a T.T. under his pillow. And next day when he was permitted abroad in his room, and, after the doctor's visit, to go down to Mr. Scrafton for an hour, it was with T.T. stowed hastily in his jacket pocket that Woodman made his reappearance in the upper schoolroom.
Unaware that he had been allowed to leave his bed, Harry contrived to run upstairs during the morning with a boy's magazine which one of the other boarders had received from home that morning. Finding the room empty, Harry only hoped his convalescent was breaking the journey from bed to Scrafton in some more temperate zone, but on his way downstairs he could not help pausing at that sinister shut door, and this was what he heard.
"Where did you get it?" No answer – thud. "Where – did – you – get it?" No answer – thud – and so on some four or five times, with a dull thud after each fruitless reiteration.
Cold breath seemed to gather on Harry's forehead as on glass; an instinct told him what was happening.
"I am going on, you know," continued Scrafton, dropping his normal bluster for a snarl of subtler malice, "until – you – tell – me – where – you – got – "
A blow was falling between each word, and what Harry saw as he entered was Scrafton leaning across a corner of the table, with his ogre's face glaring into little Woodman's, and the unlucky Tiddler grasped in his left hand, while with his right fist he kept punching, punching, punching, with unvarying aim and precision, between the shoulder and the chest of the child. No single blow would have drawn a tear, nor might the series have left a mark, but the little white face was positively deathly with the cumulative pain, and, though his lips might have been sewn together, a tear dropped on Woodman's slate as Harry entered softly. Next instant Scrafton was seated on the floor, and Harry Ringrose standing over him, brandishing the chair that he had tugged from under the bully's body.
"You infernal villain!" cried the younger man. "I've a good mind to brain you where you sit!"
It was more easily said than done. Scrafton seized a leg of the chair in either hand, and, leaping up, began jabbing Harry with the back, while his yellow face worked hideously, and his blue eyes flamed with blood. Not a word was said as the two men stood swaying with the chair between them; and Mrs. Bickersteth, who had heard the fall and Harry's voice, was in time for this tableau, with its ring of small scared faces raised in horror.
"Mr. Scrafton!" she cried. "Mr. Ringrose! pray what are you doing here?"
"What am I doing?" shouted Harry. "Teaching this brute you keep to torture these children – teaching him what I ought to have taught him weeks ago. Oh, I had some idea of what went on, but none that it was so bad! I have seen these boys' bruises caused by this bully. I ought to have told you long ago. I tell you now, and I dare you to keep him in your school. If you do I call in the police!"
Poor Harry was quite beside himself. He had lost his head and his temper too completely to do justice to his case. His chest was heaving, his face flaming, and even now he looked at Scrafton as though about to tear that foul beard out by the roots. Scrafton grinned like a fiend, and took three tremendous pinches of snuff.
"Mr. Scrafton has been with me twenty-two years," said Mrs. Bickersteth. "I shall hear him first. Then I will deal with you once and for all. Meanwhile I shall be excessively obliged if you will retire to your room."
"I shall do nothing of the kind," retorted Harry Ringrose.
"Then you are no longer a master in my school."
"Thank God for that!"
Mrs. Bickersteth turned her back upon him, and through all his righteous heat the youth felt suddenly ashamed. In an instant he was cool.
Scrafton was telling his story. Mrs. Bickersteth had forbidden the low paper, Tommy Tiddler, to be brought into the school, and Master Woodman not only had a copy in his pocket, but stubbornly refused to say how he had come by it. A little persuasion was being used, when Mr. Ringrose rushed in, said Scrafton, and committed a murderous assault upon him with that chair.
"A little persuasion!" jeered Harry, breaking out again. "A little torture, you brute! Now I will tell you where he came by that paper. I lent it him."
"You – a paid master in my school – lend one of my boys that vulgar, vicious, abominable paper, after I have forbidden it in the school?"
"Yes – I did wrong. I beg your pardon, Mrs. Bickersteth, for that and for the way I spoke just now – to you – not to him," Harry took care to add, with a contemptuous jerk of the head towards Scrafton. "As for this unlucky rag," picking it up, "it may or may not be vulgar, but I deny that it is either vicious or abominable. I shouldn't write for it if it were."
"You write for it?"
"Have done ever since I was here."
"Then," cried Mrs. Bickersteth, "even if you had not behaved as you have behaved this morning – even if you had not spoken as you have spoken – in my presence – in the presence of the boys – you should leave my school this day. You are not fit for your position."
"And never was," roared Scrafton, taking another huge pinch and snapping the snuff from his fingers; "and perhaps, ma'am, you'll listen to. Jeremiah Scrafton another time. What did I tell you the first time I saw him. A common swindler's whelp – like father, like son."
So Scrafton took his chance, but now it was Harry's. He walked up to the other and stared him steadily in the face. It was the look Harry had given him five days out of the seven for many a week, but never had it been quite so steady or so cool.
"I won't strike you, Scrafton," said he; "no, thank you! But we're not done with each other yet. You've not heard the last of me – or of my father."
"There's plenty wish they hadn't heard the last of him," rejoined Scrafton brutally.
"Well, you haven't, any way; and when you hear of him again, you ruffian," continued Harry, under his breath, "it will be to some purpose. I know something – I mean to know all. And it surprises you! What do you suppose I stayed here for except to watch you? And I'll have you watched still, Scrafton. Trust me not to lose sight of you till I am at the bottom of your villainy."
Not a word of this was heard by Mrs. Bickersteth or by the boys; they merely saw Scrafton's face set in a grin that had suddenly become ghastly, and the snuff spilling from the box between his blue-nailed fingers, as Harry Ringrose turned upon his heel and strode from the room.
He took the stairs three at a time, in his eagerness to throw his things into his portmanteau and to go straight from the guilty man downstairs to the guilty man in Leadenhall Street or on Richmond Hill; he would find him wherever he was; he would tear the truth from that false friend's tongue. And this new and consuming excitement so lifted him outside of his present surroundings, that it was as though the school was not, as though the last two months had not been; and it was only when he rose perspiring from his strapped portmanteau that the glint of medicine bottles caught his eye, bringing the still lingering odours of the sick-room back to his nostrils, and to his heart a tumult of forgotten considerations.
Instead of hurrying downstairs he strode up and down his room until a note was brought to him from Mrs. Bickersteth. It begged him as a gentleman to go quietly and at once, and it enclosed a cheque for ten pounds, or his full salary for the unfinished term. Harry felt touched and troubled. The lady wrote a good bold hand, but her cheque was so tremulously signed that he wondered whether they would cash it at the bank. He had qualms, too, about accepting the full amount; but the thought of his mother overcame them, and that of the boys fortified him to send down a stamped receipt with a line in which he declined to go before Mrs. Bickersteth's sons returned from the City.
He remained upstairs all day, however, in order to cause no additional embarrassment before the boys, and, when his ears told him that afternoon school had begun, he was still further touched at the arrival of his dinner on a tray. On the strength of this he begged for an interview with Mrs. Bickersteth, and, when Baby Bickersteth came up to say her mother was quite unequal to seeing him, Harry apologised freely and from his heart for the violence to which he had given way in his indignation. But he said that he must see her brothers before he went, as nothing could alter his opinion of the ferocious Scrafton, or of the monstrosity of retaining such a man in such a position.
"And you," he cried, looking boldly into the doll-like eyes, "you agree with me! Then back me up this evening, and you will never, never, never regret it!"
The girl coloured as she left him without a word; but he thought the blue eyes were going to fill, and he hoped for the best in the evening. Alas! he was leaning on reeds, and putting his faith in a couple of sober, unimaginative citizens, who, seeing Harry excited, deducted some seventy per cent. from his indictment, and met his every charge with the same stolid answer.
"We were under him ourselves," they said, "and you see, we are none the worse."
"But you were Mrs. Bickersteth's sons. And I don't say these boys will be any the worse when they grow up. I only say it is a crime to let such little chaps be so foully used."
"You have said quite enough," replied Leonard, gruffly. "It's not the slightest use your saying any more."
"So I see!" cried Harry bitterly.
"You've upset my mother," put in Reggie, "but you don't bully us."
"No!" exclaimed Harry. "I'll leave that to Scrafton – since even the men of the house daren't stand up to him!"
This brought them to their feet.
"Will you have the goodness to go?" thundered Lennie.
"Or have we to make you?" drawled Reginald.
"You may try," said Harry, truculently. "I'm on to have it out with anybody, though I'd rather it were a brute like Scrafton than otherwise good fellows who refuse to see what a brute he is. But you will have to see. You haven't heard the last of this; you'll be sorry you didn't hear the last of it from me."
"You threaten us?" cried Lennie Bickersteth, throwing the drawing-room door open in a way that was in itself a threat. Harry stalked through with an eye that dared them to use their hands. He put on his hat and overcoat, flung open the front door, picked up his portmanteau and his hat-box, and so wheeled round on the threshold.
"I mean," he said, "to communicate with the parents of every boy who has been under Scrafton this term. They shall question the boys themselves."
He turned again, and went slowly down the steps; before he was at the bottom the big door had slammed behind him for ever. And yet again did he turn at the wooden gate between the stucco pillars. There was his window, the end window of the top row, the window with the warm red light behind the blind. Even as he watched, the blind was pulled back, and a little lean figure in white stood between it and the glass.
It was a moonlight night, made lighter yet by a fall of snow that afternoon, and Harry saw the little fellow so distinctly for the last time! He was alternately waving a handkerchief with all his might and digging at his eyes with it as though he meant to blacken them. It was Harry's first sight of Woodman since the scene in the schoolroom, and it was destined to be his last in life.