“Where’s the boy?” was his first question. “Where’s Kenyon?”
“Kenyon? In bed.”
“Since when?”
“The beginning of last month.”
Forrester looked horrified; his manner seemed to irritate Mr. Harwood.
“Surely I wrote and told you; have you forgotten? I wrote to say he couldn’t come last term, that he had fallen off during the winter, and was limping badly. Didn’t you get the letter? But you did; you answered it.”
“Yes, yes. I know all that,” said Forrester, still bewildered. “I answered, and you never answered me. Then the term came on, and you don’t know what it was. I had all my time taken up, every moment. And I have been playing cricket ever since we broke up. But — the truth is, I’ve been having the most cheerful letters from Kenyon all the time!”
“That’s it; he is cheerful.”
“He never said he was in bed.”
“You weren’t to know of it on any account. But I thought you would be prepared for it.”
“Not with those letters. I can hardly believe it. Will he — won’t he be able — —”
“No, never; but you will find him as keen about it as ever, and as mad on cricket. He tells me, by the way, you’ve been doing great things yesterday — in fact I read him the report — and he’s wild with delight about it. Come up and see him. You’ll get another ovation.”
Forrester nodded, setting his teeth. While they were conversing Ethel had entered the hall, shaken hands with him, and vanished up the shallow stairs, leaving the hall more gloomy than before. He remembered this presently; also that Ethel, in a single year, seemed changed from a child to a woman. But at the time he could see one thing only, a vision, a memory. The peculiar sadness in Mr. Harwood’s tones, the tenderness which was still untender, though very different from last year’s note, was yet to strike him. He could think only of Kenyon as he best remembered him, playing cricket with a sunburnt face, ardent, triumphant, angry, penitent, ashamed — and of Kenyon as he dreaded to look upon him now.
Mr. Harwood stopped on the stairs.
“I wish you could help me in one thing, Charlie. He is still counting on your school, and now he can never go. He needn’t know this; but could you — I do so wish you could make him think less about it!”
Forrester coloured a little. “I wish I could,” he said, thoughtfully; “and perhaps I can, for somehow I myself am less anxious to have him than I was last year. I have often been thankful he wasn’t one of the boys this last term. I couldn’t have borne to pitch into him as I have had to pitch into most of them. When I was here before I only looked on the pleasant side of it all.... Yes, I can tell him there’s another side.”
Kenyon looked a great length as he lay stretched out in bed; he seemed to have grown a good deal. His thin face was flushed with anticipation; his fine eyes burnt eagerly; he had heard the wheels in the wet gravel under his window, and C. J.’s voice in the hall and on the stairs. A thin white arm lay over the counterpane, the fingers clasping a newspaper. As Forrester entered, with a trepidation of which he was ashamed, the thin arm flourished the newspaper wildly.
“Well played, sir!” thundered Kenyon from his pillow, “Your score won the match; come and shake hands on it!”
Forrester, who had certainly troubled the Nottingham bowlers this time, was more taken aback than he had ever been on the cricket-field where astonishing things do happen. He went to the bedside and sat down there, and pressed the small boy’s slender hands; but he had not a thing to say.
“The Sportsman,” continued Kenyon, beating the bed with that paper, “says it was a fine display of cricket, and that you’re in splendid form just now. So you are. Look what you did against Surrey! Do you remember how that match came after Notts last year, and you left here to play in it? I’m glad it was the other way round this season; and oh, I say, how glad I am you’ve come!”
“Dear old boy! But — look here — don’t you think you might have told me you were like this, old fellow?”
Kenyon tossed his head on the pillow.
“I couldn’t. It was too sickening. Besides, I thought — —”
“Well?”
“You mightn’t be awfully keen to come, you know.”
“You needn’t have thought that, Kenyon. I can’t believe you did think it.”
“Well, I won’t swear that I did. Anyhow I didn’t want you to know before you must — for lots of reasons.”
Forrester let the reasons alone: he could divine one of them: the boy had hoped to be up and well before he came. Forrester wondered whether that hope held yet, and if it did, whether he honestly could share it any longer. He looked at Kenyon as he confronted this question: the flush of pleasure and excitement had subsided from the young wan face, which had now an unhealthy pallor. His face had been the best thing about Kenyon last year, the thing that inspired confidence and faith. Forrester strove to talk more cricket. Kenyon had a hundred pet cricketers, his favourites and friends on paper, whom he spoke of by their initials and knew intimately on the cricket-fields of his fancy, as formerly he had known and spoken of C. J. himself. C. J. tried to tell him of those he had met lately; but the young fellow was all distraught, he could not think of the right men, and took the newspaper to his assistance.
“So John still gets you the Sportsman!”
“No, John doesn’t.”
“You don’t mean that he’s left?”
“Rather not! He comes up to see me every day; the governor fetches him; and it’s the governor who brings me the Sportsman.”
“Really?”
“Yes, and Cricket and the Field, and all the other papers that you see all over the shop.”
“It’s too dark to see all over the shop,” said Forrester, throwing the Sportsman aside. “I call it very good of your father, though.”
“He is good. He’s awfully good to me since I’ve been lying-up, the governor. He sits with me a lot, and reads and talks to me; he reads awfully well. But he doesn’t understand much about cricket, doesn’t care for it. He reads me the full account of the play when I’ve looked at the score; but I’d as soon read them to myself if it wasn’t for offending him. You see, he can’t be interested, though he says he is. I should think he’d be very glad if you did it for him — if you would.”
Forrester was thinking. Mr. Harwood had left him alone with Kenyon, hardly entering the room himself; he had turned away with a look which Forrester happened to see, but failed to understand. Now he had a clue: perhaps Kenyon had greeted him as he never greeted his father, that father who by the boy’s own showing was trying at the last to be his friend. The thought troubled Forrester. He had been touched by a something in Mr. Harwood’s manner, in the hall, on the stairs, and still more by what Kenyon had just told him; he was pleased with Kenyon’s evident appreciation of his father’s kindness; but — there were more buts than he could sort or separate now and here. What he did feel instantly, and acutely, was a premonition of involuntary intervention, on his own part, between father and child. In his difficulty he pushed the long brown hair from Kenyon’s forehead, and looked gently into the eager eyes.
“We’ll see, old fellow,” he said at last; “your father mightn’t quite like it, I think; and of course, as you say, you must take care not to offend him. Stick to that, Kenyon; always be good to your father and Ethel.”
“They’re awfully good to me, certainly,” said Kenyon, with a sigh. “Dear old Ethel! Have you seen her with her hair up, C. J.?”
“I just saw her in the hall; she is quite grown up.”
“She’s a brick.... Do you really think the governor would mind — you reading the cricket, I mean? It must bore him, no matter what he says; how can it help doing?”
“It might bore him to read it to himself; it may delight him to read it to you.”
Kenyon turned his cheek to the pillow, and stared at the dismal evening sky. No doubt he was wondering, in his small way, if he was a very un
grateful, unnatural son; and trying to account for it, if it was so; and wishing he were comfortably certain it was not so.
“Besides,” added Forrester, “I shall not be able to stay many days, you know.” Indeed it seemed to him that he had better not stay; but Kenyon’s eyes were on him in a twinkling.
“How many?” he asked, almost with a gasp.
“A week at the outside; it’s the Lancashire match the week after next.”
Again Kenyon turned, and his sharp profile looked sharper than before against the pillow. “Of course you must play against Lancashire — and make your century,” he said, with such a hollow heartiness that, first-class cricketer as he was, and few as were his present opportunities for first-class cricket, C. J. instantly resolved to cancel all remaining engagements.
Kenyon went on:
“I’m hoping to get up, you know, before long. Surely I’ve been here long enough? It’s all rot, I say, keeping you in bed like this; you get as weak as a cat. I believe the governor thinks so too. I know they’re going to have a doctor down from London to see me. If he lets me get up, and you come back after you’ve made that century, we might have some more cricket, mightn’t we? I’d give anything to have some before the term begins. I want another of those leg-hits! I say, they think I might be able to go to St. Crispin’s next term, don’t they?”
Forrester remembered. “I don’t know. You might be able, perhaps.”
“Why do you say it like that?”
“Shall I tell you, old fellow? I’m not quite so keen on having you as I was a year ago. Stop! I’ll tell you why. I didn’t realise what it would be like. I rather fancied I should have a dozen Kenyons, and that Kenyon at school would be a saint: which was absurd, old fellow. I thought I should never, never, never lose my temper with you. Absurd again! We talked, you and I, of what we knew nothing about; I know something now; and it isn’t all skittles and beer, Kenyon. Listen: there wasn’t a fellow in the school I didn’t punish time after time. Punish is a jolly word, isn’t it? It would have been nice for us both, wouldn’t it, my punishing you? Kenyon, there were two fellows I had to swish! You understand? I felt thankful you weren’t there. I don’t any longer feel that I want you there. I’d rather some other man kept you in, Kenyon, and licked you, old fellow, when you needed it.” The truth is, Forrester had long had all this on his mind; as he uttered the last of it, he almost forgot why he had spoken now, and what Mr. Harwood had said on the stairs.
Kenyon lay very still, watching the darkling sky split in two by the window-sashes. He had dreamed of that school so often, he had looked forward to it so long. It was hard suddenly to stop looking forward, to have no more happy imaginary school-days from this moment forth; but if the real ones could never have been so happy, then he should feel thankful; and in any case there was less immediate necessity to be up and well, which in itself was a relief. It was sensibly darker, however, when Kenyon spoke, and once more his tone was a little forced.
“I suppose you’re right. I’m glad you’ve told me this, C. J. I’m not so keen now, though I have been counting.... I suppose I couldn’t even have called you C. J., eh?”
“No, you’d have had to ‘sir’ me.”
“Indeed, sir! Then I’m thankful I’m not going, sir! There’s the gong, sir, yes, sir, you must go and dress, sir! The governor’ll bring you up with him to say good-night. And to-morrow — I’ve heaps of things to tell you to-morrow, C. J. I’ll think of ‘em all night — sir!”
There were tears on his eyelashes, nevertheless; but the room was now really dark; his friend could not see.
IV
Forrester’s disquieting apprehension of intrusion on his part, of that cruel intervention from which he shrank, was not for long a vague sensation. Mr. Harwood himself defined it, and with startling candour, that very evening after dinner.
Forrester had described the latter part of his chat with Kenyon, the part arising from something Mr. Harwood had said on the stairs, and from that other thing which had long been in his own mind. “I wouldn’t have Kenyon, now I know what it is like,” he had averred, with all the earnestness he had employed upstairs.
“You wouldn’t get him,” said Mr. Harwood, in sad irony. “He will never be well enough, Bodley is sure, to go to school.”
“Is Dr. Bodley a very good man?”
“He is a very good doctor in ordinary, so to speak; but Kenyon’s case is not exactly ordinary. Bodley is getting down a London man, a specialist, for a consultation. Kenyon knows about it.”
“Yes, he thought it was to see whether he might get up.”
“Whether there is the least chance of his ever getting up, as a matter of fact. I don’t myself think he ever will. There is some hopeless disease of the hip. An operation is the only chance, and you know what a faint one.”
“I’m glad I’m here!” Forrester involuntarily exclaimed; and it was at this that Mr. Harwood had pierced him with his eye and spoken his mind.
“I am glad too,” said he, slowly; “yet I am sore — God knows how sore!”
The young man moved in his chair, but did not rise. Mr. Harwood held him with his eye. Forrester leant his elbow on the table, his head against his palm, and met that bitter, pitiable, yearning gaze.
“I am glad because Kenyon wanted you so much; sore, because he wanted you so much. Look at the reception he gave you, ill as he is! I never make him like that. I might have left him for weeks, alone with Ethel and the servants, and he wouldn’t have welcomed me so. Yet I am always with the boy. I do everything for him. I have been another man to him, Charlie, since you were here last year. You taught me a lesson. I don’t know whether to like you or hate you for it. You taught me to be my boy’s friend — at any rate to try. It wasn’t easy. We tired each other — we always did — we always may. We irritate each other too: he will seem frightened and fight shy of me. I suppose I deserve it — God knows! We have understood each other better, we have tired each other less — I am sure — since he has been up yonder. But all the time, mark you, he has been looking forward to your coming — to going to your school in the end. About that he has talked incessantly — as if it were the one thing to get better for — and about you. You’re his hero, he worships you; I am only his father. You are everything to him....”
Forrester was inexpressibly shocked and moved. “You are mistaken, believe me you are!” he cried earnestly. “He has been telling me already how good you are to him, of all you do for him.”
“Ah! he is a good boy; he is very grateful. He always says ‘Thank you’ — to me! Heaven, how I wish he’d forget that sometimes! But no; it was in those little things that I was continually finding fault with him, and now it’s his turn. He has a special manner for me. He thinks before he speaks when he speaks to me. And I see it all! Why, I stand outside the door, and hear him talking to Ethel, and when I open it his very key changes. With you it’s a hundred times worse. With you — God help me!” cried Harwood, with a harsh laugh, “I’m like a child myself ... jealous of you ... for winning what I never tried nor deserved to win.”
He wiped the moisture from his face, and sat cold and still.
“I’ll go to-morrow!” said Forrester, hoarsely.
“You will do nothing of the kind,” retorted the other in his normal voice. “You will stay as long as you like — and Kenyon needs you.”
V
C. J. was early abroad next morning — as once before. The weather had cleared up in the night. Sunlight and dew did just what they had done that other morning of yester-year. Sounds and scents were the same now as then. So Forrester tried to imagine it was then, and to conjure Kenyon to his side. But Kenyon lay in bed behind yonder blind on the sunny side of the house, and his friend wandered desolate over last year’s ground. He looked into the flagged yard where painted wickets still disfigured a certain buttress: he was sorry he had thrown cold water on “snob.” On the lawn he saw other wickets, which no man had pitched, and worn places that had long been green
. There was the peach-house, with the sun gleaming where once the rain had beaten an accompaniment to “Willow the King.” He could hear the song — he can hear it still. Then he met John, who was visibly inconvenienced; and returning to the house, he found Ethel on the steps. She looked very fresh and beautiful, but the young man’s heart was in the room upstairs, where her heart was also. A common bond of sadness drew them insensibly together. They remained there, very silent, till the gong sounded within.
Something that Mr. Harwood told him, a letter in his hand, as they sat down to breakfast, caused Forrester to run upstairs the moment they rose. Kenyon received him with grateful eyes, but with a very slight salute this morning. Sunshine flooded the room, even to the edge of the bed. Things invisible in the dusk of the previous evening caught the strong light and the eye now — the bottles, the graduated glasses, the bed-table, the framed photograph of Kenyon’s mother hanging on the screen. And Kenyon himself, with the sun clasping his long brown hair, and filling the hollows of his pinched face, was a more distinct and a much more pitiful figure this morning.
“You know what’s going to happen to-day, C. J.?”
“The doctors are coming — the one from London. Your father told me just before breakfast.”
“Call them the umpires,” said Kenyon in a queer tone. “Say they’re going to give me in or out!”
Forrester made no remark. Kenyon lay watching him.
“You’re perfectly right, C. J. I thought of that before. I thought of it in the night. I had time to think plenty, last night!”
“Couldn’t you sleep?”
“Not a wink in the night. I’ve slept a little since daylight.”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 414
