As long as his mother remained alive, Mark tried to make her happy by pretending that he enjoyed living at Haverton House, that he enjoyed his uncle's Preparatory School for the Sons of Gentlemen, that he enjoyed Slowbridge with its fogs and laburnums, its perambulators and tradesmen's carts and noise of whistling trains; but a year after they left Nancepean Mrs. Lidderdale died of pneumonia, and Mark was left alone with his uncle and aunt.
"He doesn't realize what death means," said Aunt Helen, when Mark on the very afternoon of the funeral without even waiting to change out of his best clothes began to play with soldiers instead of occupying himself with the preparation of lessons that must begin again on the morrow.
"I wonder if you will play with soldiers when Aunt Helen dies?" she pressed.
"No," said Mark quickly, "I shall work at my lessons when you die."
His uncle and aunt looked at him suspiciously. They could find no fault with the answer; yet something in the boy's tone, some dreadful suppressed exultation made them feel that they ought to find severe fault with the answer.
"Wouldn't it be kinder to your poor mother's memory," Aunt Helen suggested, "wouldn't it be more becoming now to work harder at your lessons when your mother is watching you from above?"
Mark would not condescend to explain why he was playing with soldiers, nor with what passionate sorrow he was recalling every fleeting expression on his mother's face, every slight intonation of her voice when she was able to share in his game; he hated his uncle and aunt so profoundly that he revelled in their incapacity to understand him, and he would have accounted it a desecration of her memory to share his grief with them.
Haverton House School was a depressing establishment; in after years when Mark looked back at it he used to wonder how it had managed to survive so long, for when he came to live at Slowbridge it had actually been in existence for twenty years, and his uncle was beginning to look forward to the time when Old Havertonians, as he called them, would be bringing their sons to be educated at the old place. There were about fifty pupils, most of them the sons of local tradesmen, who left when they were about fourteen, though a certain number lingered on until they were as much as sixteen in what was called the Modern Class, where they were supposed to receive at least as practical an education as they would have received behind the counter, and certainly a more genteel one. Fine fellows those were in the Modern Class at Haverton House, stalwart heroes who made up the cricket and football teams and strode about the playing fields of Haverton House with as keen a sense of their own importance as Etonians of comparable status in their playing fields not more than two miles away. Mark when everything else in his school life should be obliterated by time would remember their names and prowess. . . . Borrow, Tull, Yarde, Corke, Vincent, Macdougal, Skinner, they would keep throughout his life some of that magic which clings to Diomed and Deiphobus, to Hector and Achilles.
Apart from these heroic names the atmosphere of Haverton House was not inspiring. It reduced the world to the size and quality of one of those scratched globes with which Uncle Henry demonstrated geography. Every subject at Haverton House, no matter how interesting it promised to be, was ruined from an educative point of view by its impedimenta of dates, imports, exports, capitals, capes, and Kings of Israel and Judah. Neither Uncle Henry nor his assistants Mr. Spaull and Mr. Palmer believed in departing from the book. Whatever books were chosen for the term's curriculum were regarded as something for which money had been paid and from which the last drop of information must be squeezed to justify in the eyes of parents the expenditure. The teachers considered the notes more important than the text; genealogical tables were exalted above anything on the same page. Some books of history were adorned with illustrations; but no use was made of them by the masters, and for the pupils they merely served as outlines to which, were they the outlines of human beings, inky beards and moustaches had to be affixed, or were they landscapes, flights of birds.
Mr. Spaull was a fat flabby young man with a heavy fair moustache, who was reading for Holy Orders; Mr. Palmer was a stocky bow-legged young man in knickerbockers, who was good at football and used to lament the gentle birth that prevented his becoming a professional. The boys called him Gentleman Joe; but they were careful not to let Mr. Palmer hear them, for he had a punch and did not believe in cuddling the young. He used to jeer openly at his colleague, Mr. Spaull, who never played football, never did anything in the way of exercise except wrestle flirtatiously with the boys, while Mr. Palmer was bellowing up and down the field of play and charging his pupils with additional vigour to counteract the feebleness of Mr. Spaull. Poor Mr. Spaull, he was ordained about three years after Mark came to Slowbridge, and a week later he was run over by a brewer's dray and killed.