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.