“I dunno,” he said, hesitating, and with a curious husky sound in his voice, “as—if it had been—I could a-brought myself to it. Now——”
He held out his hand quickly, and his eyes were shining.
“Ef you’ll let me be your friend, master, I’ll swear to be yours—till death do me part—and so help me God!”
We shook hands firmly on it. “Only,” I said, “I’m Dick to you, you know, just as you are Harry to me.”
“I’ll get used to it in time,” he answered; and so the compact was made, and I am sure we had none of us reason to regret it.
He was a pretty untamed colt at first, with a little of the savage lingering about him. But he was wonderfully sensitive and intelligent, and soon got, under Mr. Sant’s vigorous and manful tuition, not only to cultivate the graces of a scholar and the muscles of an athlete, but to understand those right principles of a gentleman, which are to temper natural combativeness with consideration for others. In this respect, no doubt, his misfortunes had helped to shape him; but I am not going to moralise over the result, which I dare say not one boy in a thousand, coming from such a stock, would have effected. Harry seemed to have inherited all the hardihood, with none of the brutality, of his father; and, for the rest, we became inseparable chums, who, so combined, were a match for any puling forces the village could bring against us.
Mischief? Of course, we were always in it. One of our first escapades was to make a parachute out of Uncle Jenico’s big sun umbrella, and, having beguiled Derrick to the cliff edge by the Gap, tie his wrists to the handle and push him over. We might have killed him; only we didn’t. He fell into a snow-drift, with no more hurt than to rasp his nose on the broken ice. But he smashed the umbrella, for which Mr. Sant made us pay with extra lines.
We scoured the coast together, and were for ever, forgetting my embargo, prowling about the Mitre, dislodging bits of the ruin and imperilling our precious necks. On such occasions Rampick was always our self-elected policeman, watching us and warning us away. Singly, I think, we had an awe of this great sinister hulk of a creature, though, together, we flouted him a good deal, resenting his interference. But he was a pet of Mr. Sant’s, which made any open affront from us difficult.
Harry, by virtue of his training, knew a heap about animals. I am afraid we snared, in our time, more than one of the Squire’s rabbits, fixing loops of copper wire in the runs under the hedgerows. The “kill” went to Mrs. Harrier, whose poverty I used for salve to my conscience, and whose rather weak fondness accepted the tribute with some nervous deprecation. But it was not long before our mighty reverence for Mr. Sant, both as a gentleman and a sportsman, cured us of this temporary obliquity. A poacher gives no “law” to the game he kills; a gentleman does; we gave no “law”; ergo we were poachers, ergo we were not gentlemen. The revelation came upon us one day when our tutor was illustrating some forgotten parable. “The man of honour,” said he, “the God’s gentleman, don’t bet on a certainty, or run his fox with a line tied to his tail, or kill a disarmed enemy, or shoot his pheasant sitting. He sports for the glory of the battle, the test between skill and skill.”
Harry and I looked at one another, and then down. After lessons he addressed me rather resentfully—