The tone, the expression of hatred and vindictiveness in the young fellow’s face, almost startled the other. As a master, ought he not to administer a stern rebuke; as a clergyman, was it not his duty to reason with him? But Mr Sefton, no part of an ass himself, decided that this was not the time for doing anything of the sort.
“You talk about not caring if you were expelled, Haviland,” he went on. “How about looking at it from your father’s point of view? How would he feel, d’you think, if you ended up your school life with expulsion? Eh?”
He had struck the right chord there, for in the course of their conversations he had gathered that the young fellow was devotedly attached to his father, whom he regarded as about a hundred times too good for the barren, ungrateful, and ill-requited service to which he had devoted his life—at any rate, looking at it from the unregenerate and worldly point of view. And, with a consciousness of having said just the right thing at the right time, Mr Sefton wisely decided to say no more.
“Think it over, Haviland. Think it over. D’you hear?” and with a friendly nod of farewell, he went his way.
A few minutes later he was walking along a field-path, his hat on the back of his head as usual, and swinging his stick. With him was Mr Williams.
“I’ve just been talking to that fellow Haviland,” he was saying. “Of course, I didn’t tell him so, but Nick has made a blunder this time. He’s piled it on to him too thick.”
The Doctor’s sobriquet, you see, had got among the assistant masters. It was short and handy, and so among themselves they used it—some of them, at any rate.
“I think he’s been most infernally rough on him, if you ask me,” replied Mr Williams, who, by the way, was not in orders, but an athletic Oxford graduate of sporting tastes, and who was generally to be met when off the grounds surrounded by three or four dogs, and puffing at a briar-root pipe. This he was even now engaged in relighting. “One would think it’d be enough to kick the poor devil out of his prefectship without gating him for the rest of the term into the bargain. I promptly let him off the lines I’d given him when I heard of it.”
“That’s just my opinion, Williams. And it’s the gating that’s making him desperate. And he is getting desperate, too. I shouldn’t be surprised if he did something reckless.”
“Then he’ll get the chuck. That’ll be the last straw. Why has Nick got such a down on him, eh, Sefton?”