Oh! better than the world of dress,
And pompous dining-out;
Better than simpering and finesse,
Is all this stir and rout.--_Ionica._
It was a proud day for Tim when his tutor announced that he considered
him sufficiently well grounded to take Fourth Form at Eton. Tim was now
twelve years old, and had adopted a more virile costume than the holland
blouse of his youth. But for that and his little learning, he was quite
unchanged from what we have known him. It is circumstances and events
that make people young or old, not the years that pass over their heads.
Some few happy people never grow up, but are boys and girls at heart
all their lives. Few of us can have reached maturity without remembering
periods when we have felt very old, and the pleasant shock of getting
younger again; and even in the oldest people’s lives, little patches of
youth blossom out now and then. But in boys the differences are even
more marked. Some are little men from the time they can walk, with all a
man’s self-reliance and self-conceit; others ripen very slowly; some
hardly at all.
Carol, who had been to school, and lived among older people, had fancied
himself quite grown up at twelve. He dined downstairs and went out
shooting, and talked of Tim, as I have said, as ‘poor child.’ But Tim at
the same age was as much a child as he had been at nine or eight or
seven. Any one less fitted to be put down suddenly in all the stir and
hubbub and seeming heartlessness of a big public school, it would be
hard to find. But then Tim knew nothing of public school life; to him
going to Eton meant only reunion with Carol. Mr. Ebbesley was
astonished at the boy’s eagerness; he knew him to be shy and rather
nervous, and could not conceive what made him desire a way of life so
unlike anything which might naturally have been supposed to be congenial
to him. He set it down with characteristic morbidness partly to a desire
to get away from him; but on the whole he was pleased at the wish, as
manifesting a spirit more like other boys than he was wont to find in
his small son. Mr. Darley had recommended his grandson’s tutor to his
neighbour; so, to Tim’s great joy, he found himself one bright May
morning actually an Eton boy, and an inmate of the same house as Carol.
That youth was sixteen now, and in Middle Division; and any one more
versed than Tim in the manners and customs of the strange world into
which he had been transported, could have told him that whatever hopes
he might cherish of companionship were doomed to disappointment.
Between a white-tied young man in Carol’s position, and a little scug in
Fourth Form there is a great gulf fixed.
That first day at school seemed interminable in its dreary emptiness to
the new boy. He had a shadowy feeling that something fearful would
happen if he were a minute late for the time at which he was told to
present himself in school, and dared settle to no employment, for fear
that hour should come, and pass unheeded; and in the meanwhile the long
unemployed interval stretched away dismally before him. A hundred times
he pulled out the new silver watch his father had bought for him, to
find that just five minutes had elapsed since he last consulted it. He
ventured a little way up town, and then came back and started afresh,
but the sense of his costume, so new to him, so familiar to the
passers-by, made him feel as if every eye must be upon him, and he again
sought refuge in his bare little chamber. He felt so terribly alone and
uncared-for. He heard voices and hurrying steps in the echoing wooden
passages, and then a silence succeeded, which filled him with terror
lest some school was going on which he ought to be attending. He crept
along the passage and peeped into one or two open doors; there were
boots lying about, and little heaps of clothes: the boys had gone to
their games and a noontide stillness reigned through the big house. Down
in the yard under his window the shoeblack was singing a cheerful vulgar
song as he cleaned the knives, sometimes interrupted by calling to a
brother menial, invisible in the inner regions of pantry, scraps of
light badinage or local gossip. Tim would have liked to descend and chat
with them,--anything to break the sense of being dead and forgotten that
weighed upon his soul.
Only the little boys were back as yet. Carol was coming that evening,
Tim told himself, and then he would lose this strange feeling of
isolation; he had a vague notion that Carol would devote at least the
first day to taking him about and showing him the place. ‘It’s a pity we
couldn’t have come back together,’ he thought; but Carol had explained
to him that it was unheard-of for any boy to return before his proper
time. The weary day wore itself out at last, but still Carol had not
arrived. Supper-time, prayer-time, bedtime, so the boys’ maid announced
to Tim who was sitting up, though it was hard work to keep the heavy
eyelids from closing. ‘What, not in bed yet, sir? why, it’s past ten. I
must take your light in another five minutes. Now make ‘aste and get to
bed; you’re as sleepy as ever you can be; we can’t ‘ave you little ones
sitting up like this; there’s trouble enough to get the lights from the
big gentlemen without that.’ Subsequent angry altercations in the
passage proved to Tim the truth of the good lady’s assertion. He obeyed,
not having courage to question the mandate of this peremptory person,
but it was sorely against his will. Carol would think it so unkind of
him, he was afraid, not to have sat up for him. But perhaps he would
come to see _him_, just to say he had come, and good-night. So he forced
himself to keep awake; he knew there was a train in about half-past ten,
and it was almost that before his light was taken. Between sleeping and
waking he was conscious of the sound of wheels, of voices and laughter
under his window, then luggage was dragged with many thumps along the
passage. Tim was wide awake again now, listening with all ears. Three or
four boys just come were going to their rooms, full of talk, loth to
separate, having many things to say. Suddenly,--yes, that was Carol’s
voice, talking eagerly, questioning, answering, laughing. Tim sat up
ready to call out that he was awake, though the room was dark, the
moment the door opened; he never doubted it _would_ open. The talkers
seemed to pause just outside his room. ‘I swear you’ve got fat; hasn’t
he?’ ‘What have you been doing with yourself?’ Then a shout. ‘Why, if
it isn’t the hyena! Come to my arms, hyena; how’s your old self? Oh! I
say, come to my room; I’ve got something to show you, if I can find it.
Never mind, Martha; it’s the first night, you know, and we shan’t be
long.’ Then the voices, still talking, turned the corner and grew
fainter as the boys retreated. Tim sat up in the dark, still waiting,
still hoping. The house wasn’t quiet yet; little bursts of merriment
reached him yet occasionally, and Martha’s voice raised in bitter
expostulation. Then more steps, renewed hope, fresh disappointment, and
silence and blackness once more. I am much afraid that amid the renewing
of so many interrupted interests, and meeting of so many former friends,
Carol had forgotten the existence of his little new schoolfellow. He
remembered him next morning though, and went in search of him.
‘Hulloa, well, here you are,’ he said not unkindly, but with some
embarrassment, after he had shaken hands, and while he wandered round
the little room examining everything minutely, as a cover for his want
of conversation. ‘I suppose you’ll soon shake in, you know, and make
friends. Come to me if you want to know anything, and if any one bullies
you--badly--just you let me know; but no one will: this isn’t the sort
of house. Nothing I can do for you?’ The truth was he was debating
uneasily what he _could_ do for Tim. He had often been asked to ‘look
after’ boys before, with whose parents he had some acquaintance, and in
such cases he had always asked the boy to breakfast, and having been
bored for half an hour, considered his duty done, and thought no more
about him. But Tim was different; and then you couldn’t ask a lower boy
in your own house to breakfast, especially if he was going to be your
fag by and by.
So that Tim rather weighed on Carol’s soul with a sense of ill-defined
responsibility. He wondered whether he oughtn’t to explain things to
him, but didn’t know how to begin; he felt it would be absurd to preach
him a sort of little sermon.
‘I suppose you know pretty well about things,’ he said vaguely, with a
rather doubtful glance.
‘Yes, I think so, thank you, Carol.’
‘Oh! and I say, you know,’ the elder lad rejoined carelessly, ‘you won’t
think it unkind, you know; but you’ll have to call me Darley here, you
know; of course it won’t make any difference in the holidays; but it
wouldn’t do, don’t you see.’
Tim promised to remember, and Carol departed feeling relieved, after a
parting injunction not to ‘sock away all his money.’
‘What is one to do,’ he asked of his chief friend and crony Villidge
minor, as they strolled together arm in arm towards chapel, ‘with a
small boy in one’s own house that one knows at home?’
‘If it’s a riddle I give it up; if not, I should say kick him,’ answered
Villidge cheerfully.
‘No, but seriously, you know,’ persisted Carol, anxious to do his duty.
‘Why, seriously, what _can_ you do? Nothing. Wholesome neglect, my
friend, is the one valid principle of education.’
So Carol laughed and determined to act on the one valid principle, the
advice being thoroughly in accordance with his own views of the subject.
‘That’s what old Blow-hard (by which name he designated one of his
preceptors) would call the great “Layssy fair” of Political Economists,’
he said. ‘What a mercy we’re not up to him this half!’ and so the talk
drifted into other channels.
Tim saw him at dinner sitting far off at another table, but when Carol
looked round to the corner where the new boys sat, and nodded
encouragingly, the attention thus attracted to him made him so shy, that
he almost wished he had remained undistinguished. When the meal was
over, and he was retreating once more, he found himself the centre of
an unoccupied and inquisitive group of lower boys, who were giving
themselves airs in the passage, in the temporary absence of their social
superiors.
‘Hulloa, new fellow, what’s your name?’
‘Where have you taken?’
‘Where do you board?’ added a wag, affecting ignorance of the house he
was in.
At this they all laughed, and some one added--
‘Do you know Darley at home?’
‘Yes.’
‘Happy Darley.’
‘Shut up, Carter; you’re a deal too clever; some day you’ll do yourself
an injury if you don’t look out.’
‘Come and look at the papers, Weston,’ returned Carter hastily, who was
nervous when Weston began to chaff him, and proud of taking an interest
in public affairs in advance of most of his contemporaries. ‘The big
fellows choke up the library all day, and look thunder if a lower boy
comes in.’
‘They are very welcome,’ said Weston, who liked shocking Carter. ‘I’m
not going to waste a precious after-two so early in the half when I’ve
still got some tin; it don’t hold out long. Besides, the _Times_ has
gone off; it used to be full of assizes, and now it’s all politics and
that sort of rot.’
‘The _Police News_ is Tommy’s favourite paper, isn’t it, Tommy? Never
mind, sock us an ice and I’ll come with you, and Carter shall do
politics for the lot of us.’
At this point the projects, literary and otherwise, of the party were
rudely broken in upon by the unwelcome sound of ‘Lower boy-hoy-hoy,’
roared lustily from the landing above in a fine fresh young bass before
which the trebles ceased to pipe, and six little pairs of legs went
scampering upstairs. Tim hesitated a minute, not daring to ask whether
he ought to go too, finally decided he had better, and went nervously
last.
‘Here the last shall go. Hulloa, stop a bit; you’re new, ain’t you? You
needn’t come, you know, for your first fortnight; when you’ve been here
longer you won’t be in such a hurry to fag,’ and Tim retired very red,
among the titters of the other little wretches. He gave a start as on
entering his room he perceived Weston apparently glued to the wall
behind the door. ‘Hush! hold your tongue, Skinny,’ said that young
gentleman in a hoarse whisper; then having peeped through the crack of
the door, he added in his usual tones, ‘It’s all right; he’s sent
Sawnders; rough luck on the beggar, but he’s rather a scalliwag, so I
don’t care; besides he’s fat, and the exercise will do him good; he’d
take the prize over you any day,’ and with a valedictory punch in the
ribs to his host, delivered apparently with a view to ascertaining the
amount of flesh there, and followed by an elaborate pantomime of having
hurt his knuckles, he slid down the banisters and vanished.
Thus Ebbesley, as he was now to be called, began to be aware of the fact
that Eton, besides being the dwelling-place of Carol, contained some
898 other boys, of ages varying from his own to twenty years, whose
existence he had in his day-dreams completely ignored, a course by no
means open to him when brought into actual contact with those young
gentlemen. Not that any one meant to be particularly unkind to him, but
he was such a forlorn-looking little creature, his high hat was so big
for him, and his fingers so inky, that it seemed somehow natural and
handy to launch a casual kick or slighting remark at him in
passing,--greetings bestowed almost unconsciously, and which would never
have affected a more robust temperament, but which the poor child took
as indications of a deep-seated ill-will towards him on the part of his
schoolfellows. It was all part of the tendency to take things hard,
predicted in old days by the wise old doctor at Stoke Ashton. He felt an
atmosphere of hostility, and froze under it, becoming very silent and
rather sulky, by no means a happy course for conciliating schoolboys.
Carol with frank boyish manners, good looks, an inborn knack of games,
and the experience of a private school, had soon found his level, and
having punched the head of Swamp minor for calling him ‘Miss Darling’ on
account of his fair skin, had established a footing in the
semi-barbarous community, to which only the strong can attain; whereas
Tim, unused to the society of boys, forbidden by the doctor to play
violent games on account of his health, too weak to withstand bullying,
yet too simple-minded to lie or cringe, the natural weapons of the
otherwise defenceless, was like a person who had been long kept in a
dark and silent room, suddenly exposed in some busy thoroughfare to the
full glare of the noonday sun; he was dazed by the fulness of life that
surged around him. That very quality which seems so full of beauty to
sentimental people like Mr. Gray (with whose works, containing the
celebrated ode to Eton College, the head-master presents the students
on their leaving), and which another poet of our own day has described
in the lines at the head of this chapter as ‘all this stir and rout,’
was sufficiently bewildering to our little country boy set suddenly down
in the midst of it. We who look back on school-life through the
softening haze of memory, forget that the boys so perfectly satisfactory
from an æsthetic point of view have ceased to have the power of
inflicting pain upon us, while they possess it in an astonishing degree
in the case of their schoolfellows. Luckily for our hero, active
corporeal bullying had gone out of fashion before his day, but small
boys possess the art of wounding by words and looks in a perfection
quite unknown to the other sex in any stage of development, and when
they give their minds to it can make a sensitive companion’s life as
thorough a burthen to him as need be wished. You, dear lady, who read
this, if you know any little boys at school near you who have left home
for the first time, ask leave for the poor little souls to come out and
spend the day with you. Don’t stop to think that they will find it dull,
that you are not used to boys and shan’t know how to amuse them; they
won’t need amusing. It will be happiness enough to get away from school
and into a home for an hour or two. Take the little red hands in your
delicate palm and ask kind questions about home and family; you will be
doing a really charitable thing, and will win a mother’s gratitude when
the next Sunday letter is written; or if your little visitor have no
mother, Heaven help him, he needs all your goodness ten times the more.
But don’t ask the elder boys; they would rather play cricket, and won’t
say thank you.
If Tim shed a few tears in his turn-up bedstead sometimes, in the
silence of the night, no one was aware of the fact but that remarkable
piece of furniture, whose venerable timbers must have absorbed too much
of that form of moisture, first and last, to have looked on it as a
novelty. He had no loving mother, poor soul, to whom to unburthen his
grief in long incoherent letters; he would not unnecessarily distress
Mrs. Quitchett, and of his father he was too much in awe to dare to
complain to him of anything at Eton, after his eagerness to be allowed
to go there. To the world at large--or rather at small, if the coining
of such an expression is permissible, for his public was a very limited
one--he was simply a specimen of a very common form of scug, whom
exclusion from the citizenship of games had degraded into a helotry,
which translated itself to the outward eye principally by ink and a
tendency to loaf up town and look into shop-windows, the High Street
being built in a straight line with the College, and to walk up it
requiring consequently less active volition than to go in any other
direction. It was this tendency to follow his nose, coupled with his
love of animals, that caused many of his walks to end in the back-yard
of a rather dingy little shop where ferrets, canary-birds, rabbits, and
such small game, formed the stock-in-trade of the dirtiest old man Tim
had ever seen. He was one day watching the attempts of six little birds
with red beaks to attain to freedom of action in a cage where one of
them would have been rather cramped for room, when the proprietor of the
establishment invited him in.
‘Wouldn’t yer like to take a look round the premisses, sir? No need to
buy nothing yer don’t want. Alway glad of inspection. I’ve some
remarkable nice young rats, if they was at all in your line, and a
beautiful little terrier bitch I should like to show yer as a pictur,
not with any notion of selling.’
So Tim took a look round the ‘premisses,’ saw the baby rats like little
lumps of raw beef squeaking round their sharp-nosed, bright-eyed parent,
the wicked-looking lithe ferrets, the ridiculous fancy pigeons, the
stolidly munching lop-eared rabbits, and the ‘beautiful little terrier
bitch,’ a shivering, forlorn little mongrel, who was howling dismally
in a superannuated tub. A certain air of mouldy dejection seemed common
to all the denizens of this remarkable yard, in marked contrast to the
shop, where a dozen canaries were all piping and shrilling fit to burst
their swollen little yellow throats. Tim bought some rabbits, no doubt
at considerably more than their market value, but which were cheap to
him as giving him an interest in life, and a vested right to visit this
charming emporium at his own discretion. The owner of the establishment
made a handsome income out of the board and lodging of those rabbits,
but a really enterprising man is never content when on the track of a
good thing, and his efforts to dispose of other inmates of the yard to
his customer on similarly advantageous terms were as unflagging as they
were fruitless.
‘Yer see this ‘ere ferret, sir,’ he would say; ‘he _is_ a beauty now. I
shall sell ‘im to young Lord Ratisbane as boards at the Rev. ----’s;
‘is lordship ’ll give me whatever I like to ask ‘im for sich a ferret as
that, once he gets his eyes on ‘im,’ and so forth; but Tim remained
undazzled. He possessed a fund of quiet obstinacy, and he did not like
ferrets; fancy prices given by youthful members of the aristocracy had
little empire over his imagination. But temptation takes many forms, and
this old man was as subtile as the Scriptural serpent in his adjustment
of his lures to the special character with which he had to deal. Finding
Tim’s mind not set in the direction of sport, he plied him with pets of
a more domestic nature; a tortoise of the most fascinating ugliness was
offered him on terms which he was assured were exceptionally
advantageous.
‘I don’t want to over-persuade yer, sir, I’m sure, but if you fancies
tortoises, why yer couldn’t ‘ave a nicer one.’
The tortoise which the old man balanced on the palm of one extended
hand, while with the other he thoughtfully stroked a tame rat that was
ascending his shoulder, protruded its cross face and hissed at Tim with
deadly malignity, then it withdrew permanently into its shell.
‘I’m sure it’s a very nice tortoise, if one happened to want one,’ the
customer said, with his usual grave politeness; ‘but you see I have the
rabbits to come and see here, and I don’t think the tortoise would be
happy in my room----’
‘In yer room, is it?’ burst in the dirty old man; ‘if you’d ‘a mentioned
it sooner, I’d ‘a told yer as I ‘ad the very thing yer wanted. If it’s a
‘ouse pet ye’re in want of, what _can_ be nicer than a good canary?’
‘It wouldn’t do,’ said Tim; ‘some big fellows made Biggles get rid of
his; they said it disturbed them when they wanted to do their verses.’
‘Why, if _that’s_ all!’ cried the irrepressible, ‘as sure as my name’s
Skelton, the thing for you is dormice: _they_ don’t sing now, do they?’
he added, with engaging humour; ‘_they_ won’t disturb no one’s verses
now, _they_ won’t.’
There was no resisting the dormice. As Mr. Skelton fished the little
balls of soft fur out of the hay in an old cigar-box, barred across the
top with some bits of wire, Tim’s heart went out to them. There and then
the bargain was completed, and Mr. Skelton chuckled as he jingled the
coin transferred in the transaction, in his black and horny palm.
‘That’s a rum little lot,’ he remarked reflectively, as he watched the
little figure balancing the big hat trotting down the sunny street with
its new possession. ‘Most on ’em, they comes in and they turns the place
upside down, and they lets out the rats, and pokes the ferrets; and it’s
“Skelton, what’s this?” and “Skelton, ‘ere,” and “Skelton, there,” and
“Quick, please, I’m in a ‘urry,”--they’re always in a ‘urry. But this
one, ‘e’s as sober and old-fashioned as a little judge, and ‘e argifies
and explains, and ‘e says “No, thank you,” and he pays ‘is money too:
ah! and ‘e won’t go on tick neither; ‘e ain’t like most on ’em.’
The subject of this character-study had meanwhile been visited by a
sudden thought, which he was inclined to regard almost as an
inspiration. He felt with painful acuteness the barrier that had sprung
up between himself and Carol. Their relations were as different from
what he had hoped as they well could be. The most elementary knowledge
of school-life would have shown him that this was inevitable. But
knowledge of life, school or otherwise, was just what Tim was farthest
from possessing. He remembered Carol’s fondness for his squirrel and for
all animals; he knew that they could not be companions and friends as he
had dreamed that they might, but surely it was in his power to make
Carol think of him sometimes. He thought over his plan carefully on all
sides, and by the time he reached his tutor’s, had come to the
conclusion that there could be nothing against it.
When Carol came in to change before dinner, he was not a little
astonished to find on his table a little cage fitted up with a sort of
treadmill, and containing two dormice fast asleep in a handful of hay.
He searched in vain for any superscription that might explain this
eccentric gift, and finally came to the conclusion it must be a joke of
some of his friends. Several of his intimates were summoned, but denied
all knowledge of the affair.
‘It must be that brute the hyena,’ said Villidge minor. ‘It’s just the
sort of thing he’d think funny.’
But the youth known to his associates as the hyena because, as the
matron expressed it, he was ‘prone to risibility,’ protested, on being
appealed to, that he was as innocent as the rest.
‘If Curly has an unknown admirer whose tribute takes the form of the
smaller varieties of mammalia, I don’t see why _I_ should be held
responsible.’
At dinner Darley’s mysterious present was the great topic and joke of
the top table. Carol bore all the bantering good-naturedly, but after a
good deal of it began to feel a little put out. To be the object of a
joke was a new position to him, and he didn’t like it. He had a perfect
gathering in his room after two, to look at the wretched little animals,
slumbering peacefully through all the disturbance they were creating. It
being apparently impossible to discover who had put this affront upon
him, the next question was how to get rid of the creatures. To keep
dormice like a scug of a lower boy was of course out of the question.
Meanwhile no echoes of the mirth in the upper circles of the house
penetrated as far down in the social scale as Tim, who was serenely
pluming himself on his tact and discretion. He had debated at first what
would be the right thing to write with this present, and had at last
solved the difficulty by depositing the offering anonymously. ‘He will
guess whom they are from,’ he thought; ‘no one else would think of such
a thing, or knows how he cares for animals; he will say something at
fagging-time.’ For Carol had fulfilled his promise of taking Tim for his
fag, explaining the apparent eccentricity of his choice to the
expostulating Villidge major, who was captain of the house, by saying
that he ‘knew him at home,’ and that fifteen minutes of bondage, at
which most of the small boys muttered and grumbled, became to ‘Ebbesley’
the happiest time of the day, for then he was sure of a smile and a kind
word, and each piece of toast made for his hero’s consumption became a
labour of love; he scorched his face and burnt his fingers with perfect
equanimity, and thought scorn of Biggles, whom he once detected doing
his master’s toast at the gas. On this particular evening, however, when
he appeared as usual, Carol seemed preoccupied, and rather sulky; he
only said, ‘Let’s see, have you made your three bits, and the tea? All
right, there’s nothing else; you can go.’
Tim made some excuse to loiter a minute or two, apparently busy at the
cupboard, and hazarded a furtive glance round the room in search of his
present. The little cage was reposing on the top of the bed, jammed in
between a big Liddell and Scott and some fives gloves, where it had been
stuck by the maid when she cleared the table for tea. Just then Carol’s
messmate arrived, accompanied by his fag, and plunged anew into the
topic of the day.
‘Well, Curly; found out who sent the dormice?’
Carol answered with what was for him to display considerable irritation,
‘I wish to goodness I could; I’d give the fellow as good a kicking as
ever he had in his life.’
‘Well, I can dispose of ’em for you any way; here’s Weston will take ’em
off your hands and ask no questions.’ And giving the cage and its
inmates to his fag, he added, laughing, ‘There, it’s an ill wind that
blows no one good; I’m sure you’ve been dying for some dormice all the
half, haven’t you, Weston? and I know you never keep any money after the
first week.’
Tommy, astonished but nothing loth, carried off his booty grinning; and
Tim, who till then had not trusted himself to look round, got out of the
room as best he could. In the passage he found his brother fag pausing
to examine his treasures.
‘Hulloa, Skinny!’ he exclaimed, as Tim drew near, ‘here’s a queer go:
what on earth should make Darley give me a couple of dormice? I went in
expecting to get pulled for burning the toast, and see what I get
instead of a pitching into.’
Tim had got under a gas-lamp, so that his face was black and invisible,
but when he tried to speak, Tommy looked up suddenly.
‘Why, you’re blubbing,’ he said; ‘whatever’s the matter?’
For all answer Ebbesley darted into his own room, which was not far
distant, whither, with mingled curiosity and alarm, the other followed
him.
‘What’s up?’ he asked, not unsympathetically; and Tim, feeling he must
tell some one, sobbed out--
‘Oh! Weston, it was me who got the dormice, and I thought he’d like
them; you know I knew him at home, and he used to have a squirrel; I
forgot it was some time ago--and--and--’ but Tommy had collapsed into
the one chair and was shaking with laughter; the exquisite humour of the
whole affair was altogether too much for him.
‘Oh, don’t, please don’t!’ cried Tim, to whom the matter was deadly
serious. ‘If Carol should hear, he’d be angry with me; you heard what he
said, and I meant to please him.’
‘What did you call him?’ cried Weston. ‘“Carol”! What a name! Oh, don’t
I just wish I was a little bigger or he a little lower down; wouldn’t I
chaff him. We’ve always wanted to know his name; most fellows thought
it was only Charles or something, but I knew it was something
outlandish, because he always had “C. Darley” on his letters, and took
such pains never to let it out.’
‘Oh dear!’ said poor Tim, ‘I seem to be always doing the wrong thing;
please don’t say anything about it; he wouldn’t like it--and I couldn’t
bear him to be angry with me.’
‘What a baby it is,’ thought Weston, looking down at the tear-stained
imploring face before him.
‘But you’ll keep the secret,’ urged Tim despairingly; ‘never tell any
one about the dormice.’
Something in his utter childishness touched the softer side of Tommy’s
callous little-boy’s heart.
‘Yes, I promise,’ he said; and he kept his word.
‘I say, you know,’ he said next day to Tim, meeting him in one of the
passages, ‘I’ve been thinking, Skinny, those dormice are really yours,
you know; you ought to have them.’
‘Oh no, no!’ cried poor Skinny vehemently, ‘I never want to see them
again; and--and--thank you always for keeping the secret.’
So Tommy kept both the secret and the dormice until, once going home ill
for a week, and leaving no directions as to their nourishment, he found
on his return that one of them had succumbed to this prolonged fast,
which so distressed him that he made over the cage and the survivor to a
friend.
But the fates were busy with those dormice. His new possessor, thinking
that a little sunshine would be good for the shattered constitution of
the widower, left him on the window-sill when he went to school, and
whether it was the wind, the boys’ maid, or the matron’s cat, was never
known; but on his return the little cage lay broken in the street, and
the last of his race was embarked on a sleep such as even he had never
compassed in this world.