“A state of grace, I hope,” said the clergyman, smiling. “But it’s a very proper reflection, sir, and one which, I am sure, Richard will take to heart.”
The reminder, nevertheless, was not out of place. It is well at the feast of triumph to remember who pays the cost. I had been self-glorifying a little overmuch; and here, of a sudden, was the picture before me of my beaten enemy slinking away to hide his battered face, at the very moment that I was crowing to everybody to come and look at mine. Uncle Jenico was the true gentleman among us all; and it was he who had been insulted.
I soon mended of my knocks, and the very next day was ruffling it to my lessons with a new self-confidence that made nothing of possessing the world. Dunberry was no longer a Siberia to me, but a conquered country full of breezy possibilities. I should have welcomed the prospect of an attack; but no one interfered with me. On the contrary, awed and covert glances greeted me on my way past the school. I dropped a book. An obsequious little courtier scurried to pick it up for me. The news of the fight had got abroad, it was evident, and Harry was no longer the cock of the walk. From this moment, with other than the youth of Dunberry, I am afraid, my position was secured.
I hope I took no base advantage of the knowledge; yet I won’t say but I might have if Mr. Sant had not been at my back to prevent it.
“Don’t forget you fought for a principle,” he would remind me. “It’s no manner of Christian use to turn out a bully that you may usurp his place.”
To prove to me that boxing was not the whole duty of a gentleman, and to school me from presuming on any idea of indulgence because of my victory, he rather put the screw on in my education, and for a time was something of a martinet on questions of study and discipline. I was hurt, and a little bit rebellious at first; but soon, having a fair reason of my own, came to recognize his consistency.
During this time, and for some weeks after the fight, I saw next to nothing of Harry Harrier. He kept out of my way, sulking and grieving, though he attended school—with phenomenal punctuality, too, I believe—regularly. His father, I heard from old Jacob, had been very savage over his beating, and had dressed him well for it. I was furious when I was told, and wanted Mr. Sant to complain to the Squire; but, before he could do so, something happened which made any complaint futile. A new steward, a Draco of a man, was appointed to the Court, and one day, shortly after his arrival, lo and behold! there was the gamekeeper handcuffed, and being carried off to Ipswich gaol in a tax-cart by the officers of the law. It had been discovered that for years he had been in collusion with a gang of poachers, and in the end he had been watched, and caught in flagranti delicto. His wife followed him to the county town, and devoted most of her savings, poor woman, to his defence, but without avail. He was convicted and transported, and I may as well say at once that that was the end of him so far as his family was concerned, for he never turned up again. While the trial was pending, Harry—it is not, under all the circumstances, to be wondered at—gave the schoolhouse a wide berth; but, after his father had been sentenced and their home broken up, to the surprise of every one he put in an appearance there again, coming dogged and punctual to a task which must have grown nothing less than a perpetual ordeal to him. We did not, in truth, know the strength of will of the desperate humbled little spirit—not any of us, that is to say, but Mr. Sant. He had gauged it, I am sure; and, having set his heart on the boy’s reclamation, was watching with an anxious interest the development of the odd little drama which he had helped to engineer. He visited, of course, in virtue of his office, the gamekeeper’s unhappy wife, who had been forced to betake herself to a mean little tenement in the village, where she eked out the small means remaining to her by washing for the rectory; and though, as yet, the son would hardly notice or be civil to him, the mother did not fail to acquaint him, with many fond tears, of her poor, wild little fellow’s real love and resolution, and of the courage which was determining him to train himself to take the place of the breadwinner they had lost. All of which, I knew, made Mr. Sant the more eager to have the lad recognize him for a friend; only pride stood in the way. For, the truth is, poor Harry’s prestige was gone down to zero. Always owing in some part to the local reputation of his father for a bully and rowdy, the removal of that gentleman had finished what my victory had begun. And now it was the case of the sick lion. The cowardly little jackals who had formerly cringed to him, egged on by their more cowardly elders taunted him with his disgrace. If he retaliated, they overwhelmed him with numbers, or ran, squealing injured righteousness, to appeal against him to their parents. His heart, swelling in his plucky little breast, must often have had a business of it not to let loose the tears; but he had an indomitable soul, and only time and tact could find the way into it.
One day Mr. Sant and I, when walking together, came unnoticed upon the rear of such a scene. The victim moved on in front, his head hanging a little, though he would not force his pace an inch to accommodate his tormentors, who followed behind, at a safe distance, hooting and jeering at him.
“OO stole the pawtridges! When did ’ee last ’ear from the ’ulks! Why don’t ’ee git your mawther to wash your dirty linen, ’ar-ree?” and such-like insults they bawled.
I burned with indignation, and was running to retaliate on my enemy by helping him as he had once helped me, when Mr. Sant seized me with a determined hand, and bent to whisper in my ear—