“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 w
as; 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.
CHAPTER XXII.
MAN TO MAN.
The flat was in utter darkness when Harry arrived between nine and ten. He was disappointed, and yet not surprised. He knew that his mother was to have returned from the sea by this time, but that was all he did know. He found the porter, and asked him how he was redirecting the letters.
The man gave Mr. Walthew’s address. Harry groaned.
“Mrs. Ringrose has never been back since she first went away?”
“No, sir.”
“You have the key of the flat?”
“Yes, sir; my wife goes up there every day.”
“Then get her to go up now and light the gas stove and lay the table. I’ll bring in the provisions if she’ll do that and make my bed for me. Tell her I know it’s late, but — —”
“That’s all right, sir,” interrupted the porter, a familiar but obliging soul; and when Harry returned in ten minutes, with his slices of pressed beef and his French rolls and butter, from the delightful shop round a couple of corners, the flat was lighted like a public-house, and you lost sight of your breath in the minute dining-room where the asbestos was reddening in the grate.
Yet it was a sorry home-coming, that put Harry painfully in mind of his last, and he felt very wistful and lonely when he had finished his supper and written a few lines to his mother. He came in from posting them with an ounce of birdseye, and dragged an easy chair from under its dust-sheet in the other room, and so arranged himself comfortably enough in front of the gas stove. But his first pipe for several weeks did no more for him than Weber’s Last Waltz, which duly welcomed him through the ceiling. He was unused to solitude, and the morrow’s interview with Lowndes sat heavily on his nerves. His one consolation was that it would take place before his mother’s return. She must know nothing until he knew all. And he had begged her not to hurry back on his account.
In the sideboard that was so many sizes too large for the room — the schoolroom sideboard of the old home — he at last laid hands upon some whisky, and in his loneliness and suppressed excitement he certainly drank more than was good for him before going to bed. Immense and immediate confidence accrued, only to evaporate before it was wanted; and morning found him nervous, depressed, and dearly wishing that he had gone hot from Scrafton to Lowndes the day before. But the bravest man is he who goes trembling and yet smiling into action, and, after all, it was a sufficiently determined face that Harry Ringrose carried through the sloppy City streets that foggy forenoon.
In the outer office the same small clerk was perched on the same tall stool: but Bacchus sat solitary, in his top-coat and with a redder nose than ever, at the desk in the inner office, the door of which was standing open.
“Good-morning, Mr. Backhouse,” said Harry entering. “Mr. Lowndes is out?”
“Very much out.”
“Doesn’t he come here now?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry to trouble you, Mr. Backhouse, but can you tell me where I can find him?”
“Offices of the Crofter Fisheries.”
“Where are they?”
“Hartington House, Cornhill.”
So brusque was his manner, so different from Harry’s recollection of the red-nosed man, that the young fellow thanked him for his information with marked stiffness, whereupon the other sprang up and clapped on his hat.
“I don’t mean to be rude to you, Mr. Ringrose, but I’m sick of that man
’s name,” cried he: “it gives me a thirst every time I hear it. Didn’t you know about the Company? It comes out next week — they’re going to have a solid page in every morning paper on Monday — capital one million, and everything but Royalty on the board! Lowndes has made himself General Manager with God knows how many thousand a year, and I was to be Secretary with five hundred. He promised it to me again and again — he had the use of these offices rent free for months — and used to borrow from the housekeeper when I had nothing — and now he gives it over my head to one of his aristocratic pals. I tell you, Mr. Ringrose, it makes me dry to think of it! Come and let me buy you a drink.”
Harry thanked him but declined, and, on the way downstairs, asked whether Lowndes still lived at Richmond.
“He may be there still,” said Bacchus, “but I hear he’s going to move into an abbey or castle — I forget which — as soon as the Company comes out. He’s renting it furnished from one of these belted blokes he’s got in with. So you won’t have the least little split? Well, good-bye then, Mr. Ringrose, and may Gordon Lowndes prove a better friend to you than he has to me!”
Harry could not help smiling grimly as he headed for Cornhill. The grievance of Bacchus was as much his own. Most heartily he wished he had no worse.
Hartington House proved to be a modern pile with a lift worked by a smart boy in buttons; and the offices of the Crofter Fisheries, Limited, occupied the whole of one floor. If Harry had felt nervous when climbing the familiar stairs in Leadenhall Street, he might well have been overpowered by the palatial character of the new premises. A commissionaire with as many medals as a Field-Marshal handed his card to one gentleman, who passed it on to another gentleman, who carried it through a ground-glass door. Harry was then conducted into a luxurious waiting-room in which two or three busy-looking men were glancing alternately at their watches and at the illustrated papers which strewed the table. A single gigantic salmon occupied a glass case running the length of the mantelpiece, while several new oil paintings hung upon the walls. Harry noticed that the subjects were exclusively Scottish, and that one at least was by a distinguished Academician, of whose name the most was made in black letters on a gilt tablet.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 146
