He was very much at home;—far more so than were his hosts, and infinitely more pleased than they with the situation general. He had an infinite genius for getting into trouble. Not in the delightfully normal fashion of the average growing boy; but in furtively crafty ways that did not belong to healthy childhood.
Day by day, Cyril impressed his odd personality more and more on everything around him. The atmosphere of sweet peace which had brooded, like a blessing, over the whole Place, was dispersed.
The cook,—a marvel of culinary skill and of long service,—gave tearful warning, and departed. This when she found the insides of all her cooking utensils neatly soaped; and the sheaf of home-letters in her work-box replaced by cigar-coupons.
One of the workmen threw over his job with noisy blasphemy; when his room above the stables was invaded by stealth and a comic-paper picture of a goat’s head substituted for his dead mother’s photograph in the well-polished little bronze frame on his bureau.
And so on, all along the line.
The worst and most continuous sufferer from Cyril’s loathed presence on the Place was the massive collie, Lad.
The child learned, on the first day of his visit, that it would be well-nigh as safe to play with a handful of dynamite as with Lad’s gold-and-white mate, Lady. Lady did not care for liberties from any one. And she took no pains to mask her snappish first-sight aversion to the lanky Cyril. Her fiery little son, Wolf, was scarce less formidable than she, when it came to being teased by an outsider. But gallant old Lad was safe game.
He was safe game for Cyril, because Lad’s mighty heart and soul were miles above the possibility of resenting anything from so pitifully weak and defenceless a creature as this child. He seemed to realise, at a glance, that Cyril was an invalid and helpless and at a physical disadvantage. And, as ever toward the feeble, his big nature went out in friendly protection to this gangling wisp of impishness.
Which was all the good it did him.
In fact, it laid the huge collie open to an endless succession of torment. For the dog’s size and patience seemed to awaken every atom of bullying cruelty in the small visitor’s nature.