The patent, upon which he had expected to realize, turned out, after all, a disappointment, and had never, it appeared, been regarded as other than a joke by the man who, he had supposed, had been going to buy it. He was a little disconsolate at first, but soon brightened up when he thought of the potential riches lying under the shingle.
“We’ll laugh at ’em all by-and-by, Richard,” he said. “What a joke it’ll be when we’ve got our own capital to work upon, and these ninnies find out the good things they’ve missed. But we won’t be relentless, my boy, and disinherit the honest labourer because of the shortsightedness of his employer. Work for the good of mankind, remember, and you work for your own.”
Fine weather, at this time, made him thoughtful and restless. It was only when the wind blew and the waves rose that he cheered up and became excited like a seagull. Then he would laugh aloud, and button up his coat and, telling me to follow him when my lesson was over, limp off to the beach, and there untiringly weave his ropes of sand, growing more and more absorbed in his task the faster it melted beneath his hands. The coins were there, he was convinced; and it only needed patience and luck (and he plumed himself upon his being rather a spoilt child of the latter) to hit upon the deposits.
In the meanwhile I was going to my daily lesson, and getting absorbed in my own way. Mr. Sant was a delectable tutor, inspiring and invigorating, and by-and-by, unconsciously to me, my hour extended itself to two, and sometimes more. So months passed, and then a year, and I was nine.
One morning I was on my way to the rectory when I made a notable acquaintance. I had to pass, on my setting out, the new school, which was now in full activity, and battling its first successful steps in the moral and intellectual reformation of infant Dunberry. The children were generally trooping to the bell-call as I started, and I have no doubt that the sense of superiority my consciousness of private tuition gave me made itself apparent to some of them in my air and demeanour.
A little beyond the Playstow the road to the rectory, and to the Court on the hill, ran up obliquely through the village side, passing very soon into privacy and loneliness. I had almost reached the rectory palings when I saw a boy start out, at sight of me, from the shadow of them and come swiftly on, as if to accost me while yet short of shelter. He was about my own age or a little older, and had a round, freckled face, with dark red hair curled as tight as astrakhan, and a very fat little pug-nose. He was dressed in a brown velveteen jacket and strong corduroy breeches and leathern gaiters, and he looked what, in fact, he was, a miniature gamekeeper. I knew him well enough by sight, having passed him for the last two or three weeks near the school-house, and always, I verily believe, with an odd little tremor of foreboding in my inside. He had proved, on inquiry, to be the only child of Harrier, the squire’s gamekeeper, from whom, and that only on his master’s initiative, a scowling consent to his son’s attending the new school had been wrung by Mr. Sant. But the boy came, though near as rebellious as his father, and had even, until this morning, arrived punctual.
Now he advanced, swaggering and whistling, with his hands in his breeches’ pockets, and a fine air of abstraction. I tried to dodge him, but for all that, in spite of his pretended preoccupation, he brought his shoulder smack against mine with a force that knocked me sprawling, and, from the mere pain of it, drove the angry tears to my eyes.
He wheeled round at once, as I gathered myself up, with a mock apology so impudent that I longed to hit him, but was deterred by the front he showed me. He stood square, balancing on his heels, as tight-knit a young mischief as health and muscle could produce.
“Mighty!” he said, with a pretence of being scared. “What I done, Lor? Blest if I ain’t knocked into the dirt the young gen’leman what treats we for sich!”
Then my uneasy consciousness understood the nature of this retaliation.