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A HERO OF ROMANCE
[Illustration: "Perhaps you don't know who I am?" (_Page_ 155.)]
_A Hero of Romance_.] [_Frontispiece_.
A HERO OF ROMANCE
BY
RICHARD MARSH
_Author of "The Datchel Diamonds," "The Crime and the Criminal_"
_etc., etc_.
ILLUSTRATED BY HAROLD COPPING
LONDON
WARD, LOCK & CO. LIMITED
NEW YORK AND MELBOURNE
Contents
CHAP.
I Punishment at Mecklemburg House.
II Tutor Baiting.
III At Mother Huffham's.
IV A Little Drive.
V An Evening at Washington Villa.
VI Afterwards.
VII The Return of the Wanderer.
VIII Preparing for Flight.
IX The Start.
X Another Little Drive.
XI The Original Badger.
XII A "Doss" House.
XIII In Petersham Park.
XIV In Trouble.
XV Out of the Frying-pan into the Fire.
XVI The Captain's Room.
XVII Two Men and a Boy.
XVIII The Boat-train.
XIX To Jersey with a Thief.
XX Exit Captain Tom.
XXI The Disadvantages of not Being Able to Speak French.
XXII The End of the Journey.
XXIII The Land of Golden Dreams.
Chapter I
PUNISHMENT AT MECKLEMBURG HOUSE
It was about as miserable an afternoon as one could wish to see. May
is the poet's month, but there was nothing of poetry about it then.
True, it was early in the month, but February never boasted weather of
more unmitigated misery. At half-past two it was so dark in the
schoolroom of Mecklemburg House that one could with difficulty see to
read. Outside a cold drizzling rain was falling, a shrieking east wind
was rattling the windows in their frames, and a sullen haze was hiding
the leaden sky. As unsatisfactory a specimen of the English spring as
one could very well desire.
To make things better, it was half-holiday. Not that it much mattered
to the young gentleman who was seated in the schoolroom; it was no
half-holiday to him. A rather tall lad, some fourteen years of age,
broad and strongly built. This was Bertie Bailey.
Master Bertie Bailey was kept in; and the outrage this was to his
feelings was altogether too deep for words. To keep him in!--no wonder
the heavens frowned at such a crime!
Master Bertie Bailey was seated at a desk very much the worse for
wear; a long desk, divided into separate compartments, which were
intended to accommodate about a dozen boys. He had his arms upon the
desk, his face rested on his hands, and he was staring into vacancy
with an air of tragic gloom.
At the raised desk which stood in front of him before the window was
seated Mr. Till. Mr. Till's general bearing and demeanour was not much
more jovial than Master Bertie Bailey's; he was the tyrant usher who
had kept the youthful victim in. It was with a certain grim pleasure
that Bertie realized that Mr. Till's enjoyment of the keeping-in was
perhaps not much more than his own.
Mr. Till had a newspaper in his hand, and had apparently read it
through, advertisements and all. He looked over the top of it at
Bertie.
"Don't you think you'd better get on with those lines?" he asked.
Bertie had a hundred lines of _Paradise Lost_ to copy out. He paid no
attention to the inquiry; he did not even give a sign that he was
aware he had been spoken to, but continued to sit with his eyes fixed
on nothing, with the same air of mysterious gloom.
"How many have you done?" Mr. Till came down to see. There was a torn
copy of Milton's poems lying unopened beside Bertie on the desk; in
front of him a slate which was quite clean, and no visible signs of a
slate pencil. Mr. Till took up the slate and carefully examined it for
anything in the shape of lines.
"So you haven't begun?--why haven't you begun?" No answer. "Do you
hear me? why haven't you begun?"
Without troubling himself to alter in any way his picturesque posture,
Bertie made reply,--
"I haven't got a slate pencil."
"You haven't got a slate pencil? Do you mean to tell me you've sat
there for a whole hour without asking for a slate pencil? I'll soon
get you one."
Mr. Till went to his desk and produced a piece about as long as his
little finger, placing it in front of Bertie. Bertie eyed it from a
corner of his eye.
"It isn't long enough."
"Don't tell me; take your arms off the desk and begin those lines at
once."
Bertie very leisurely took his arms off the desk, and delicately
lifted the piece of slate pencil.
"It wants sharpening," he said. He began to look for his knife,
standing up to facilitate the search. He hunted in all his pockets,
turning out the contents of each upon the desk; finally, from the
labyrinthine depths of some mysterious depository in the lining of his
waistcoat, he produced the ghost of an ancient pocket-knife. As though
they were fragile treasures of the most priceless kind, he carefully
replaced the contents of his pockets. Then, at his ease, he commenced
to give an artistic point to his two-inch piece of slate pencil. Mr.
Till, who had taken up a position in front of the window with his
hands under his coat tails, watched the proceedings with anything but
a gratified countenance.
"That will do," he grimly remarked, when Bertie had considerably
reduced the original size of his piece of pencil by attempting to
produce a point of needlelike fineness. Bertie wiped his knife upon
his coat-sleeve, removed the pencil dust with his pocket-handkerchief,
and commenced to write. Before he had got half-way through the first
line a catastrophe occurred.
"I've broken the point," he observed, looking up at Mr. Till with
innocence in his eyes.
"I tell you what it is," said Mr. Till, "if you don't let me have
those lines in less than no time I'll double them. Do you think I'm
going to stop here all the afternoon?"
"You needn't stop," suggested Bertie, looking at his broken pencil.
"I daresay!" snorted Mr. Till. The last time Bertie had been left
alone in the schoolroom on the occasion of his being kept in, he had
perpetrated atrocities which had made Mr. Fletcher's hair stand up on
end. Mr. Fletcher was the head-master. Orders had been given that
whenever Bertie was punished, somebody was to stay in with him. "Now,
none of your nonsense; you go on with those lines."
Bertie bent his head with a studious air. A hideous scratching noise
arose from the slate. Mr. Till clapped his hands to his ears.
"Stop that noise!"
"If you please, sir, I think this pencil scratches," Bertie said.
Considering that he was holding the pencil perpendicularly, the
circumstance was not surprising.
"Take my advice, Bailey, and do those lines." Advancing with an
inflamed countenance, Mr. Till stood over the offending pupil.
Resuming his studious posture Bertie recommenced to write. He wrote
two lines, not too quickly, nor by any means too well, but still he
wrote them. In the middle of the third line another catastrophe
happened.
"Please, sir, I've broken the pencil right in two." It was quite
unnecessary for him to say so, the fact was self-evident, though with
so small a piece it had required no slight exertion of strength and
some dexterous manipulation to accomplish the feat. The answer was a
box on the ears.
"What did you do that for?" asked Bertie, rising from his seat, and
rubbing the injured portion with his hand.
Now it was distinctly understood that Mecklemburg House Collegiate
School was conducted on the principle of no corporal punishment. It
was a prominent line in the prospectus. "_Under no circumstances is
corporal punishment administered_." As a rule the principle was
consistently carried out to its legitimate conclusion, not with the
completest satisfaction to every one concerned. Yet Mr. Fletcher, one
of the most longsuffering of men, and by no means the strictest
disciplinarian conceivable, had been more than once roused into
administering short and sharp justice upon refractory youth. But what
was excusable in Mr. Fletcher was not to be dreamed of in the
philosophy of anybody else. For an assistant-master to strike a pupil
was a crime; and Mr. Till knew it, and Master Bertie Bailey knew it
too.
"What did you do that for?" repeated Bertie.
Mr. Till was crimson. He was not a hasty tempered man, but to-day
Master Bertie Bailey had been a burden greater than he could bear. Yet
he had very literally made a false stroke, and Bertie was just the
young gentleman to make the most of it.
"If I were to tell Mr. Fletcher, he'd turn you off," said Bertie. "He
turned Mr. Knox off for hitting Harry Goddard."
Harry Goddard's only relation was a maiden aunt, and this maiden aunt
had peculiar opinions. In her opinion for anybody to lay a punitory
hand upon her nephew was to commit an act tantamount to sacrilege.
Harry had had a little difference with Emmett minor, and had borne
away the blushing honours of a bloody nose and a black eye with
considerable _sang-froid_; but when Mr. Knox resented his filling his
best hat with half-melted snow by presenting him with two or three
smart taps upon a particular portion of his frame, Harry wrote home to
his aunt to complain of the indignity he had endured. The result was
that the ancient spinster at once removed the outraged youth from the
sanguinary precincts of Mecklemburg House, and that Mr. Fletcher
dismissed the offending usher.
As Mr. Till stood eyeing his refractory pupil, all this came forcibly
to his mind. He knew something more than Bertie did; he knew that when
Mr. Fletcher, smarting at the loss of a remunerative pupil, had made
short work of his unfortunate assistant, he had also taken advantage
of the occasion to call Mr. Till into his magisterial presence, and to
then and there inform him, that should he at any time lay his hand
upon a pupil, under any provocation of any kind whatever, the result
would be that Mr. Knox's case would be taken as a precedent, and he
would be instantaneously dismissed.
And now he had struck Bertie, and here was Bertie threatening to
inform his employer of what he had done.
"If you don't let me off these lines," said Bertie, pursuing his
advantage, "I'll tell Mr. Fletcher as soon as he comes home, you see
if I don't."
Mecklemburg House Collegiate School was not a scholastic establishment
of any particular eminence; indeed, whatever eminence it possessed was
of an unsavoury kind. Nor was the position of its assistant-master at
all an enviable one. There was the senior assistant, Mr. Till, and
there was the junior, Mr. Shane. Mr. Till received L30 a year, and Mr.
Shane, a meek, melancholy youth of about seventeen, received sixteen.
Nor could the duties of either of these gentlemen be considered light.
But if the pay was small and the work large, the intellectual
qualifications required were by no means of an unreasonable kind.
Establishments of the Mecklemburg House type are fading fast away.
English private schools are improving every day. Mr. Till, conscious
of his deficiencies, was only too well aware that if he lost his
present situation, another would be hard to find. So, in the face of
Bertie's threat, he temporized.
"I didn't mean to hit you! You shouldn't exasperate me!"
Bertie looked him up and down. If ever there was a young gentleman who
needed the guidance of a strong hand, Bertie was he. He was not a
naturally bad boy,--few boys are,--but he hated work, and he scorned
authority. All means were justifiable which enabled him to shirk the
one and defy the other. He was just one of those boys who might become
bad if he was not brought to realize the difference between good and
evil, right and wrong. And it would need sharp discipline to bring him
to such knowledge.
He had a supreme contempt for Mr. Till. All the boys had. The only
person they despised more was Mr. Shane. It was the natural result of
the system pursued at Mecklemburg House that the masters were looked
upon by their pupils as quite unworthy their serious attention.
Bertie had had about a dozen impositions inflicted on him even within
the last days. He had not done one of them. He never did do them. None
of the boys ever did do impositions set them by anybody but Mr.
Fletcher. They did not by any means make a point of doing his.
"You will do me fifty lines," Mr. Till would say to half a dozen boys
half a dozen times over in the course of a single morning. He spoke to
the wind; no one ever did them, no one would have been so much
surprised as Mr. Till if they had been done.
On the present occasion Mr. Fletcher had gone to town on business, and
Mr. Till had been left in supreme authority. Bailey had signalised the
occasion by behaving in a manner so outrageous that, if any semblance
of authority was to be kept at all, it was altogether impossible to
let him go scot free. As it was a half-holiday, Mr. Till had announced
his unalterable resolve that Bertie should copy out a hundred lines of
_Paradise Lost_, and that he should not leave the schoolroom till he
had written them.
The result so far had not been satisfactory. He had been in the
schoolroom considerably over an hour; he had written not quite three
lines, and here he was telling Mr. Till that if he did not let him off
entirely he would turn the tables on his master, and make matters
unpleasant for him. It looked as though Bertie would win the game.
Having taken the tutor's mental measure, he thrust his hands into his
trousers pockets, and coolly seated himself upon the desk. Then he
made the following observation,--
"I tell you what it is, old Till, I don't care a snap for you."
Mr. Till simply glared. He realized, not for the first time, that the
pupil was too much for the master. Bertie continued,--
"My father always pays regularly in advance. If I wrote home and told
him that you'd hit me, for nothing"--Bertie paused and fixed his stony
gaze on Mr. Till--"he'd take me home at once, and then what would
Fletcher say?" Bertie paused again, and pointed his thumb over his
left shoulder. "He'd say, 'Walk it'!"
This was one way of putting it. Though Mr. Bailey was by no means such
a foolish person as his son suggested. He was very much unlike Harry
Goddard's maiden aunt. Had Bertie written home any such letter of
complaint--which, by the way, he was far too wise to have dreamed of
doing--the consequences would in all probability have been the worse
for him. The father knew his son too well to be caught with chaff.
Unfortunately, Mr. Till did not know this; he had Mr. Knox's fate
before his eyes.
"You'd better let me off these lines," pursued the inexorable Bertie;
"you'd better, you know."
"You're an impudent young----" But Bertie interrupted him.
"Now don't call me names, or I'll tell Fletcher. He only said the
other day that all his pupils were to be treated like young
gentlemen."
"Young gentlemen!" snorted Mr. Till with scorn.
"Yes, young gentlemen. And don't you say we're not young gentlemen,
because Mecklemburg House Collegiate School is an establishment for
young gentlemen." And Bertie grinned. "You'd better let me off these
lines, you know."
"You know I never hurt you; you shouldn't exasperate me; you're the
most exasperating boy I ever knew; there's absolutely no bearing with
your insolence! You'd try the patience of a saint."
"I shouldn't be surprised if I was deaf for a week." He rubbed the
injured part reflectively. "I've heard Fletcher say it's dangerous to
hit a fellow on the ear. You'd better let me off those lines, you
know."
Mr. Till, fidgeting about the room, suddenly burst into eloquence. "I
wonder if it's any use appealing to your better nature? They say boys
have a better nature, though I never remember to have seen much of it.
What pleasure do you find in making my life unbearable? What have I
ever done to you that you should try to drive me mad? Are you
naturally cruel? My sole aim is for your future welfare! Your sole aim
is for my ruin!"
Bertie continued to rub his ear.
"Bailey, if I let you off these lines will you promise to try to give
me less cause to punish you?"
"You can't help letting me off them anyhow," said Bertie.
"Can't I? I suppose, young gentleman, you think you're getting the
best of me?"
"I know I am," said Bertie.
"Oh, you know you are! Then let me do my best to relieve you of that
delusion. Shall I tell you what you are doing? You're doing your best
to sow the seeds of a shameful manhood and a wasted life; if you don't
take care you'll reap the harvest by-and-by! It isn't only that you're
refusing to avail yourself of opportunities of education, you're doing
yourself much greater harm than that. You think you're getting the
best of me; but shall I tell you what's getting the best of you?--a
mean, cruel, cowardly spirit, which will be to you a sterner master
than ever I have been. You think yourself brave because you jeer and
mock at me, and flout all my commands! Why, my boy, were I better
circumstanced, and free to act upon my own discretion, you would
tremble in your shoes! The very fact of your permitting yourself to
threaten me, on account of punishment which you know was perfectly
well deserved, shows what sort of boy you are!"
Bertie's only comment was, "You had better let me off those lines."
"I will let you off the lines!"
Bertie sprang to his feet, and began to put slate and book away with
abundance of clatter.
"Stay one moment--leave those things alone! It is not the punishment
which degrades a man, Bailey; it is the thing of which he has been
guilty. I cannot degrade you; it is yourself you are degrading. Take
my advice, turn over a new leaf, learn not to take advantage of a man
whose only offence is that he does his best to do you good; don't
think yourself brave because you venture to attack where defence is
impossible; and, above all, don't pride yourself on taking your pigs
to a bad market. You are so foolish as to think yourself clever
because you throw away all your best chances, and get absolutely worse
than nothing in return. Bailey, get your Bible, and look for a verse
which runs something like this, 'Cast your bread upon the waters, and
you shall find it after many days.' Now you can go."
And Bertie went; and, being in the safe neighbourhood of the door, he
put his fingers to his nose; by which Mr. Till knew, not for the first
time, that he had spoken in vain.